The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [328]
Compared with the wild graces of Yellowstone, visiting bustling Saint Louis seemed onerous to Roosevelt. He had to endure a Marine Band performance, photos with a cavalry regiment from Oklahoma, a visit to Saint Louis University to discuss Catholic issues, and a private meeting with Secretary of the Interior Hitchcock that took the form of a stroll along the Mississippi River levee. Hitchcock was going after Senator John Hipple Mitchell of Oregon for using political influence to enrich clients with sweetheart land deals. Even though Mitchell was a Republican, T.R. considered him a forest despoiler and wanted him busted for corruption. Hitchcock was happy to oblige.
Too often, environmental historians have given short shrift to Hitchcock’s extraordinary work exposing land fraud in the West from 1899 to 1907. Under his watchful eye 1,021 timber depredators were indicted and 126 were convicted. More importantly, Hitchcock, following President Roosevelt’s direct order, unearthed collusion, espionage, forgery, bribery, and record falsification in the General Land Office. Hitchcock busted judges, governors, senators, and business tycoons. At issue was the integrity of the Homestead Act, Desert Land Act, and Timber and Stone Act. Hitchcock saw his job as protecting the public domain. To accomplish this, he set up dragnet operations in every state or territory that had public lands, to catch looters. Acting so boldly as an anticorruption reformer, however, had a downside; in August, unsubstantiated charges were leveled at Hitchcock for complicity in a land fraud case in Indian Territory.64 Roosevelt knew the charges were bogus. He was frustrated that Hitchcock had let requests for forest reserves pile up on his desk, unattended to, yet Roosevelt knew that for all his bureaucratic slowness Hitchcock was a man of integrity. “There seemed to be no limit,” the reporter Henry S. Brown wrote in a glowing profile of Secretary Hitchcock in Outlook, “to the rapacity of the land sharks.”65
From Saint Louis, the president journeyed west again on the Missouri Central, to Kansas City and Topeka. Joining him all the way to California was Columbia University’s president, Nicholas Murray Butler. Roosevelt’s train—complete with barbershop, parlor, kitchen, sleeping compartments, and baggage chambers—was an ornate house on wheels.66 Again huge crowds—often numbering about 20,000—gathered to hear him speak in city after city. As if he were running for president—and, in essence, he was—Roosevelt kissed babies (though he denied doing this), shook thousands of hands, tossed a football, and took photographs with local police departments. Everything about Kansas appealed to Roosevelt: wide-open spaces, clean air, well-maintained farms, sturdy silos, wheat and sunflower fields, an abundance of deer and game birds, a McGuffey Reader in every schoolhouse, and God’s grace at every supper table. On May 3, Roosevelt arrived on the Pacific Coast Special in the village of Sharon Springs (located on the west edge of Kansas at the border with Colorado). Because it was a Sunday the president followed a parade of kids to a Methodist church (where a Presbyterian minister from