The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [297]
Sounding a lot like Pinchot, Emmons told Roosevelt that he wasn’t a an idealist with regard to national forests; limited logging would have to take place on the islands of the Alexander Archipelago. Emmons explained how the Roosevelt administration could work around such inconveniences as fishing camps, sawmills, and canneries. Recognizing that Sitka, for example, was inhabited by territorial citizens (white), Emmons didn’t rock the boat. He did, however, recommend that the very thinly populated islands of Prince of Wales, Kuiu, Kupreanof, and Chichagof (and hundreds of smaller islets) become federal assets. Although Tlingit and Haida lived on these islands, they weren’t considered real citizens in 1902. Unbending about saving the archipelago, Emmons chose forestry over Indian rights as his primary concern.48
Another reason President Roosevelt embraced the plan outlined in Emmons’s “Woodlands of Alaska” was a boundary dispute between the United States and Canada over a strip of southeastern Alaska. The object of controversy was known as a “Panhandle” along the Alaska-Yukon border. Ever since the discovery of gold along Bonanza Creek in 1896 the United States had denied Canada direct access to the Klondike from the Pacific Ocean. By 1902 the dispute between the nations was enflamed. “[The] claim of the Canadians for access to deep water along any part of the Canadian coast,” Roosevelt angrily pronounced, “is just exactly as indefensible as if they should now suddenly claim the island of Nantucket.”49
Roosevelt had long harbored an expansionist desire to incorporate all of Canada into the United States, though of course he never acted on it. Clearly, in 1902, with Canada a great democratic nation, this wasn’t going to happen. Nevertheless, Roosevelt didn’t want to have Canadians timbering or fishing in Alaskan waters. The United States, Roosevelt insisted, had legal authority over an unbroken littoral going from the Alaskan Territory to the southernmost part of the Panhandle. In 1901 Roosevelt had ceded about 600 square miles of land to Canada—but now, in 1903, he wasn’t going to compromise with regard to the Panhandle. Roosevelt, in fact, belying his reputation as an expansionist, is the only U.S. president ever to shrink the size of American territory. Getting Great Britain to side with the United States in a dispute, an international tribunal voted in favor of the Roosevelt administration in 1902. But the U.S. federal government’s seizure of the Alexander Archipelago as a forest reserve was a proactive measure aimed at protecting Alaskan waters from Canadians.
Deeply impressed by Emmons—after all, they shared a love of U.S. naval history and conservation—Roosevelt sent him on an official mission to Alaska in 1902 to iron out a land dispute with Britain over the Alaskan-Canadian border. The sheer professionalism of Emmons on this mission impressed the president mightily. Owing to Emmons’s advocacy and diplomacy, on August 20 Roosevelt created the Alexander Archipelago Forest Reserve by a presidential proclamation. “The areas included in the reserve were exactly as George Emmons had proposed them,” the historian David E. Conrad noted in an important article in Pacific Historical Review, “and his dream of a national forest in Alaska was an accomplished feat.”50
The Alexander Archipelago Forest Reserve was just one of thirteen reserves President Roosevelt created in 1902—all aimed at also protecting big game. These new federal forestlands totaled 14,276,476 acres. In coming years many of these forest reserves would be increased in acreage, often undergoing many boundary changes before being finalized and renamed. By the end of 1902, however, the reserves broke down as follows:
Acres
San Isabel, Colorado
77,980
Santa Rita, Arizona