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By Root 3808 0

under way. Meanwhile, Roosevelt went on a tear to save western forestlands, catching the pro-development crowd unaware. (It should be noted, though, that Texas had no public lands on which he could declare anything.) If The Virginian ended in a shootout, so too would Roosevelt’s conservationist battle with western developers; and he planned on winning it. Between the creation of Crater Lake National Park (May 22, 1902) and that of Wind Cave National Park (January 9, 1903), just over seven months, Roosevelt built his conservationist tower strong and tall. His administration established thirteen new national forests. (However, he also reduced the 1.1 million acres of the White River in Colorado by 61,000 acres in 1902; today it’s 2.3 million acres.)

Geographically Roosevelt’s forests ranged from the great boundary waters of Minnesota and Canada to the foothills of the lush, waterfall rich Arbuckles in Oklahoma. In New Mexico Roosevelt created Lincoln National Forest in honor of his presidential hero (this 1,103,828-acre reserve straddled four counties and became the birthplace of Smokey the Bear). Heading off the mining industry, Roosevelt declared the Little Belt Mountains of central Montana a national forest, though they were known to contain silver, gold, lead, and zinc. The lush timber forest and grassy meadows of the Little Belts, Roosevelt declared, were far more valuable to America’s long-term heritage than a cabal of speculators amassing personal fortunes from the public domain. The Little Belts had formed 70 million years ago; he wanted to keep them intact.

Perhaps the most extraordinary forest reserves President Roosevelt created in 1902 were the huge “experimental” ones in Nebraska. In April he declared Niobrara and Dismal River national forests. (The reserves became jointly known as Nebraska National Forest in 1907.) Within their perimeters were the longest “hand-planted” forests in the world. Starting in the 1890s Charles Edwin Bessey, a botanist at the University of Nebraska, working in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, began an innovative tree-planting project in the Nebraska Sand Hills. Because the Sand Hills were semiarid, receiving only about twenty inches of rain annually, the 20,000-square-mile area was terribly deforested. Brushfires were the most menacing threat. In 1901, Pinchot, wanting to assist Bessey’s vision of a forested Nebraska sand hills, sent a reconnaissance survey team to assess the possibility of planting trees.38

Roosevelt had great confidence in the Nebraska Sand Hills rehabilitation project. By creating the two forest reserves on deforested land—208,902 acres, to be exact—Roosevelt was hoping to launch a prototype pilot project that could soon be replicated in Kansas and Iowa. He saw both Dismal River and Niobrara as nurseries for Nebraska farmers who wanted trees for windbreaks and to protect their homes. No longer would sharp summer winds scorch their crops or brutal winter snowdrifts bury homes, as had happened at his North Dakota ranch. Trees would protect farmers from the elements and improve soil humus so that modern agriculture could thrive. Roosevelt also believed that trees in Dismal River and Niobrara would “ameliorate the dryness of the atmosphere,” thereby increasing rain.39

Roosevelt and Pinchot’s Nebraska project was, as the historian John Clark Hunt called it in the journal American Forests, “The Forest That Men Made.”40 Building the headquarters in Halsey, Nebraska, President Roosevelt had Forest Service employees plant 70,000 jack pine seedlings (from Minnesota) and 30,000 ponderosa pine seedlings (shipped from the Black Hills Forest Reserve by Seth Bullock). Many trial-and-error experiments commenced. Overcoming prairie fires was extremely difficult. Eventually the workers discovered that native red cedar grew more effectively than pine. From a political perspective the Nebraska project was proof positive that federal forestry efforts were aimed at enhancing western living, not destroying states’ rights.41 Decades later, when America was in the