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dint of his intimidating seniority he blocked the bill from even being debated. As the first U.S. congressman from west of the Mississippi River to serve as House Speaker, Henderson was mistrustful of federal interference with the free enterprise system. Cranky for a midwesterner, Henderson, whose obstinacy could quickly turn to fury, had worried that Roosevelt had gone too far in pushing natural resource preservation in his First Annual Message to Congress. But at heart Henderson—who had been a valorous colonel in the Civil War and had lost a leg in 1863—was supportive of Roosevelt’s militarism.20 With a little arm-twisting by the new president, Henderson, bristling all the way, reluctantly capitulated. After all, in the context of picking and choosing fights Crater Lake hardly seemed worth crossing swords with the Roosevelt administration.

It didn’t hurt that Roosevelt had backup support for the Crater Lake bill from Congressman John Lacey—also from Iowa—who worked mightily on getting Henderson to change his mind. Lacey had visited Oregon in 1887. He was immediately drawn to the Cascades, and he understood that the Pacific Northwest forests were the greatest in the world. Places like Mount Hood and Crater Lake, he knew at once, should be saved for posterity. The slow, sad death of the great trees as a result of wildfires sickened him. “The whole country was covered by a pall of smoke from the burning forests,” Lacey recalled to the Chicago Tribune. “This was more wicked than the destruction of our forests on the Atlantic only because the great woods of the Pacific are finer, and for the further reason that they are our last.”21

Double-teamed by Roosevelt and Lacey, Henderson acquiesced and did an about-face, and the Senate passed HR 4393 on May 9. “You give me more thanks than my small share in getting the Crater Lake bill passed deserves, but I am sincerely glad it has got along so far,” Pinchot wrote to Steel on May 15. “There is no doubt, in my judgment, that the President will sign it.”22

Although Pinchot wouldn’t lead the U.S. Forest Service for three more years, the impressive power he exerted in creating Crater Lake National Park was a prelude of grand conservation achievements to come. Not only did the utilitarian Pinchot enter the preservationist domain with Crater Lake, but he solidified his alliance with Steel. Mountaineers in arms, both men loathed the reckless way the General Land Office (GLO) of the U.S. Department of the Interior was dealing with the unexplored Cascade Mountains. The saving of Crater Lake was a marker in the conservationists’ struggle in the Pacific Northwest, an early indicator that the Roosevelt administration was going to play hardball against the shameful unregulated timbering. Just as important, Pinchot had found a “world wonder” for his boss to establish as America’s sixth national park, one which wasn’t mired in too much controversy. The word “wonder,” in fact, during the first two decades of the twentieth century, was the term conservationists used in public discourse to save wilderness sites. A mere forest or lake might seem commonplace, but a “wonder” might bring much needed tourist dollars into local towns. And it worked! Using the U.S. Geological Survey as their base, the tag team of Pinchot and Steel tried to insert the words “deepest” and “wonder” into any public conversation about Crater Lake.

When President Roosevelt signed the Crater Lake bill on May 22—setting aside 240 square miles—he was proud. America had its sixth national park, and its first in Oregon.* Crater Lake was saved for both “great beauty and scientific value.”23 Earlier that day Roosevelt had participated in a ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery honoring the soldiers killed in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines during the Spanish-American War; he was one of 500 veterans present.24 The signing of the bill saving Crater Lake took only five or ten minutes of his busy schedule that afternoon; it was incidental. Still, it was a rewarding few minutes. A sentimentalist at heart, Roosevelt now knew what