The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [319]
The following day the Times announced that John Burroughs had officially accepted the president’s offer to accompany him to Yellowstone. What intrigued Burroughs most about Roosevelt was that he envinced “radical Americanism” while being a “thoroughgoing naturalist”—nobody else was doing that.18 Because Oom John wouldn’t have tolerated a cougar hunt (it was supposed), the president quashed the idea altogether; he would instead act as naturalist in chief. Yellowstone’s superintendent, Major Pitcher, issued a stern statement declaring that the president’s gun would be sealed by the U.S. Army when he entered the park, just as with every other citizen.19 In 1903 the U.S. Army, not the Department of the Interior, ran Yellowstone. “I do not know when the trip will be,” Roosevelt said, “but I think it will be just as soon as the Senate adjourns. It is doubtful whether there will be any hunting.” 20
Word that President Roosevelt was headed to Yellowstone with the famous naturalist Burroughs drew a sharp backlash from the pro-timber crowd. Governor DeForest Richards of Wyoming denounced Roosevelt as a crazy forest reserve elitist, claiming that his state would work to undermine the president at the coming national Republican convention. (Richards, however, died a few weeks later of acute kidney disease.21) Westerners associated with the railroad industry never forgave Roosevelt for his conservation activism in the 1890s when the Boone and Crockett Club campaigned to make the park off-limits to commercial exploitation. But Senator Clarence Clark of Wyoming quickly came to Roosevelt’s defense: the colonel who had led a charge up San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American War would be welcome at Yellowstone anytime, night or day. “The people of Wyoming have the most implicit confidence, not only in President Roosevelt personally, but in the wisdom of his Administration,” Clark said. “They believe that he knows them, and has a personal interest in the welfare of the State.” 22
Roosevelt and Burroughs together at Yellowstone National Park.
T.R. and Burroughs near geyser. (Courtesy of Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library)
Even before Roosevelt’s train left Washington, the newspapers were abuzz with gossip about his working vacation. In Washington state a silly tug-of-war developed over whether the president would speak in Seattle or Tacoma.23 By contrast, the machinists’ union in Kansas City asked that Roosevelt not come near their town, as he had done nothing in the White House to help their cause. A group of Texans lamented that Roosevelt was skipping Forth Worth and Amarillo on his way to the Grand Canyon. While Roosevelt was in Arizona, fifty Rough Riders planned to present him with a live black bear, captured in Mexico.24 The stockmen of the Front Range of the Rockies announced that when Roosevelt’s train arrived in Hugo, Colorado, he would be greeted by 200 cowboys in full range regalia shouting “Bully!”25 Administrators at Yosemite National Park planned to shoot fireworks into the night sky on the president’s arrival.26 Bored reporters took the time to calculate the impressive figures for Roosevelt’s trip: sixty-six days, 14,000 miles, averaging 212 miles a day. He would deliver more than 260 stump speeches and five major addresses. Roosevelt’s party would cross every mainland mountain range between the Poconos and the San Gabriels. “With the exception of a fortnight in the Yellowstone region and a few days in the Yosemite,” the New York Times noted, “he will be pretty steadily in motion.”27
As departure day neared, Roosevelt acted like a schoolchild anticipating summer vacation. Elated about visiting twenty-five states and showing Oom John the incomparable geysers of Yellowstone, Roosevelt was the happiest he had been in years, in truly high spirits. “I am overjoyed that you can go,” Roosevelt