The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [316]
Meanwhile, in preparation for seeing the Pacific Northwest and California forestlands for the first time, Roosevelt dashed off a note to Frederick Weyerhaeuser, the “lumber king,” known for his entrepreneurial acumen and zealous, ruinous de-timbering. Weyerhaeuser, who slurred his Edwardian w’s into Bismarckian v’s when speaking English, had emigrated from Germany at the age of eighteen to work as a day laborer in Erie, Pennsylvania. To him, America was the land of promises where the bold prevailed. He learned the lumber business from the ground up. He acquired his first sawmill in Rock Island, Illinois, in 1857, and began building a timber empire in the heavily forested Pacific Northwest. Determined to amass a fortune, he clear-cut every tree in sight without the slightest concern over deforestation. Obviously, he had never read Man and Nature. In his blinkered outlook, money mattered more than anything else in life. Where others saw a redwood tree or an old-growth hemlock, Weyerhaeuser saw boards and planks and, behind them, dollar signs.
In early 1903, Congressman Lacey had mentioned to Roosevelt that Weyerhaeuser was starting to come around, that he was becoming a forest reserve advocate of sorts, and that he was an untapped potential arborist. Intrigued, Roosevelt wanted to initiate a dialogue with Weyerhaeuser on the ticklish issue of reduced logging, and on the conservationist ethics of Southern Lumber Company: planting a tree for every one chopped down. “Could you come down here sometime next week so I can see you with Mr. Gifford Pinchot?” Roosevelt wrote to Weyerhaeuser on March 5. “I should like to talk over some forestry matters with a practical lumberman. I earnestly desire that the movement for the preservation of the forests shall come from the lumbermen themselves.”4
When Roosevelt wrote to John Burroughs about his forthcoming Great Loop trip that March, however, the letter was devoid cougar hunting in Yellowstone, or courting timber barons from Minnesota. Instead, Roosevelt said he wanted to “see,” in liberal measure, the elk herds and mountain goats. And he was eager to see the geysers in winter. This was slightly disingenuous of Roosevelt, and further evidence of how skittish the fiasco of the Mississippi bear hunt had made him. Somewhat defensively, however, Roosevelt raised the specter of hunting in his long letter to Burroughs. The novelist Charles Dudley Warner, best remembered for coining the term “gilded age” in a novel of that title cowritten with Mark Twain, had also written an American outdoors classic in the 1870s: The Hunter of the Deer and Other Essays. Because Warner—a longtime columnist for Harper’s Magazine and first President of the National Institute of Arts and Letters—had died in 1900, many of his earlier literary efforts were being reissued in his memory. When Burroughs told Roosevelt how excellent the Warner hunting essays were, the president unctuously doused his enthusiasm. “I think you praise overmuch for its fidelity to life Charles Dudley Warner’s admirable little tract on deer hunting,” Roosevelt wrote. “[It] was an excellent little tract against summer hunting and the killing of does when the fawns are young. It is not an argument against hunting generally, for as Nature is organized, to remove all checks to