The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [324]
Both John Burroughs and I agree that it is very lamentable that you will not produce a really big book. John Burroughs gives me permission to quote him. He says—I entirely agree with him—that you are in danger of taking your place among those men of great natural power and enormous industry, who collect innumerable facts but are somehow never able to do the work of generalization and condensation—that is, to build a structure out of the heap of bricks. It is an awful thing to generalize hastily, and not to pay proper heed to the need of accumulating masses of material. But where one meets a genuine master in his profession—and such I esteem you—it is a loss to the world if he fails to put his discoveries in durable, in abiding, form. This is exactly what I fear will be the case with you. To publish quantities of little pamphlets is merely to take rank with the thousands of small and industrious German specialists. You have it in your power to write the great monumental work on the mammals of North America, including their life histories. If you put it off too long, you will never do it. And if you wait until you are sure you have exhausted the resources of trinomial nomenclature on very obscure shrew or fieldmouse from Florida to Oregon, you will also have to postpone your work indefinitely; for I firmly believe that after you and I are dead there will still be ample opportunity for industrious collectors to secure “new forms” and “probably valid species” from almost any region which it is thought worth while minutely to investigate. But the labors of ten thousand such would not equal one production of a book by you on the lines I have indicated.47
IV
Roosevelt’s visit to Yellowstone culminated on April 24, when he laid the cornerstone for a basaltic stone railroad archway near the Northern Pacific Railroad depot at Gardiner, Montana. Architecturally similar in style to the Old Faithful and Canyon hotels, the Roosevelt Arch, as it became known, was twenty feet wide and thirty feet high. It looked as if it belonged on the Champs-Elysées in Paris. Carved above the keystone was a phrase Roosevelt fancied: “For the Benefit and Enjoyment of the People.” Smaller plaques read “Yellowstone National Park” and “Created by Act of Congress March 1, 1872.” Approximately 3,500 people were on hand for the dedication, inducing a group of local Masons, who presented him with a Montana gold nugget mounted on a plaque.48 In the cornerstone, the Masons also deposited their grand lodge papers, some local newspapers, a handful of rare coins, photos, a King James Bible, and a brief history of Yellowstone.49
“The Yellowstone Park,” Roosevelt said in his dedication, “is something unique in this world, as far as I know. Nowhere else in any civilized country is there to be found such a tract of veritable wonderland, made accessible to all visitors, where at the same time not only the scenery of the wilderness, but the wild creatures of the Park are scrupulously preserved as they are here, the only change being that these same wild creatures have been so carefully protected as to show literally astounding tameness.”50
With John Burroughs and Major Pitcher sitting behind him on the platform, Roosevelt offered his own impromptu reflections on the American West, and thanked locals for his tremendous “two-week holiday” in Yellowstone. In what the historian Aubrey L. Haines described as a “rambling speech,” Roosevelt talked about buffalo breeding, forest protection, water conservation, and