The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [296]
Still, T.R. received a lot of criticism from Nebraskan farmers and stockmen who thought of his forest reserves as socialism—the U.S. government taking lands away from the public domain. Eventually, Roosevelt was forced to reduce his Sand Hills reserves by 2 percent.42 “Some of the Nebraska Congressmen are uneasy about the growth of the forest reserves in Nebraska,” Roosevelt wrote to Pinchot in 1906. “I call your attention to the enclosed account of an interview with [Sylvester] Rush, who was special district attorney at Omaha, who was so active in securing the prosecution of the cattlemen for illegal farming. The article tends to show that some of the cattlemen who have been most prominent in illegal action are pushing this reserve scheme. Of course this does not alter the fact that these reserves are good things where no harm to the homesteader or agricultural settler results; but it also shows that we should be exceedingly careful about going too far with them. Such a course would tend to promote a revulsion.”43
Besides undertaking the forestry experiment in Nebraska, Roosevelt also preserved millions of acres of Alaskan forestland in 1902. Even though he still hadn’t managed to visit Alaska, he had carefully read Merriam’s “Harriman Alaskan Expedition Report of 1899.” (And he knew that Burroughs and Muir were busying themselves writing memoirs of their Alaskan trip.) Well aware that the Alexander Archipelago—a 300-hundred-mile-long group of pristine islands off the southeastern coast of Alaska, named after a former head of a Russian fur trading company—was an incubator for thousands of seabirds, seals, walruses, and whales, Roosevelt declared all 1,110 islands a national forest on August 20, 1902. When he was asked how seal and bird rookeries could possibly be a forest reserve, Roosevelt pointed out that the islands were located in a temperate rain forest zone. Roosevelt saw this new Alaska reserve as a preemptive strike against Great Britain, whose sea hunters were constantly killing seals in American waters. “We have taken forward steps in learning that wild beasts and birds are by right not the property merely of the people alive to-day,” Roosevelt said, “but the property of the unborn generations, whose belongings we have no right to squander.”44
Originally conceived by George T. Emmons, a former naval lieutenant who hunted and fished in Alaska regularly, the Alexander Archipelago National Forest Reserve was Rooseveltian conservationism writ large—very large. It was slightly over 4.5 million acres. In 1893 Emmons had overseen the U.S. Navy’s Alaska exhibit at the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago.45 At the time Emmons was considered America’s expert on the coastal Alaskan art of the Tlingit and Haida. In 1900, it’s safe to say, nobody else, intellectually, knew the islands, inlets, and waterways of southern Alaska with the nautical precision of George Emmons. Although his primary home was Princeton, New Jersey, Emmons spent his summers in Alaska as an “anthropologist without portfolio.” All of America’s major museums collected Alaskan art from him.46
An amateur cetacean biologist also, Emmons wrote a fact-filled report, “The Woodlands of Alaska” (promoting the Alexander Archipelago), and sent it to Roosevelt. Emmon’s geological knowledge was based on personal exploration—always a plus with Roosevelt. What impressed Roosevelt so much about Emmons was his scholarly, coolheaded analysis of Alaskan wildlife. His report, for example, admitted that much of Alaska wasn’t suited to be a forest reserve. But the forests of southeastern Alaska—the Alexander Archipelago—were a must, if only to protect wildlife. These largely coniferous woodlands were part of a continuous forest which ran through Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. Because it rained so often, forest fires were rare. These islands were built for the ages. Whetting Roosevelt’s conservationist appetite,