The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [326]
With this letter Roosevelt reentered the controversy over “nature fakers” yet again (even though Grinnell never leaked the letter to the press). Yellowstone, in general, had energized Roosevelt with regard to his responsibilities as a naturalist. Wandering with Oom John in the park had been good for his soul. On the way to Nebraska, Roosevelt retreated from the miasma of smoke in the dining car to ruminate about possibly breeding Impeyan pheasants to release in the Great Plains states.56
Meanwhile, Roosevelt enjoyed seeing the picture-postcard farms as his train rolled through counties that were almost larger than Rhode Island. Somewhere along a handsome open stretch of South Dakota the president once again met up with Seth Bullock, and the two rode around the Black Hills Forest Reserve and attended a cowboy show in Edgemont together. Eating at chuck wagons, talking to farmers about irrigation and tree farming, and petting a tamed buffalo, Roosevelt was certainly in his element. “The President unites in himself powers and qualities that rarely go together,” Burroughs wrote of Roosevelt after the Yellowstone trip. “Thus, he has both physical and moral courage in a degree rare in history. He can stand calm and unflinching in the path of a charging grizzly, and he can confront with equal coolness and determination the predaceous corporations and money powers of the country. He unites the qualities of the man of action with those of the scholar and writer—another very rare combination. He unites the instincts and accomplishments of the best breeding and culture with the broadest democratic sympathies and affiliations. He is as happy with a frontiersman like Seth Bullock as with a fellow Harvard man, and Seth Bullock is happy, too.”57
When President Roosevelt reached Omaha, 50,000 people were waiting to greet him in the swirling dust. Half a dozen horseless carriages were parked nearby, along with thousands of horses at hitching posts. People were scrunched together as if penned up in the Omaha stockyards, and there was an electric current in the air. According to the Omaha Bee, merchants in the midtown district and farmers in Douglas County were thrilled by the chance to glimpse a president in the flesh. All they usually got in Omaha was William Jennings Bryan. The overhanging eaves and second-story porches of Queen Anne homes on Wirt Street had been decorated with red-white-and-blue bunting. The Cudahy Packing Company was also gussied up for the president, just in case he made a spontaneous inspection tour. But the ravages of deforestation were evident in this clattering railroad town: there was little greenery growing around the clapboard houses, and birds were in short supply. Construction and cattle seemed to matter most in Omaha.
Roosevelt challenged Nebraskans to start planting more trees and protect the original “scanty forests” of their state. He was proud that his executive orders of 1902, creating the Dismal River Forest Reserve and the Niobrara Forest Reserve, had already proved to be successful. Under Roosevelt’s executive orders, 70,000 jack pine seedlings from Minnesota and 30,000 ponderosa seedlings from the Black Hills had been planted that spring in Nebraska. Forest reserves in Nebraska were “good things,” as Roosevelt wrote to Pinchot, as long as “the homesteader or agricultural settler” wasn’t harmed.58 Certainly, prairie fires and the semiarid environment were a problem, but Roosevelt insisted that his treeless forest reserves would soon have an abundance of trees. He was right. In 1947, Pinchot, then near death, revisited the Nebraska National Forest (as the two sites were now collectively called) and declared it “one of the great successful tree-planting projects in the world.”59 That April Roosevelt attempted