The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [334]
Such rapturous talk about California continued as Roosevelt headed north along the Pacific coast with the powerful Transverse and Santa Lucia ranges looming on the eastward side of the tracks. Ventura. Montecito. Santa Barbara. San Luis Obispo. To promote the Santa Inez and Pile Mountain forest reserves, Roosevelt asked that the U.S. government rangers serve as his special guard. This was a smart, visual way to help locals understand that rangers were akin to the police. According to the New York Times Roosevelt was in his “best spirits” ever, enthralled by the Pacific blue and bleached skies, the wildlife-thick Channel Islands, the pock-marked Franciscan missions dating from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the flocks of gulls. And for once, reporters didn’t have to hurry up and wait. They could bank on Roosevelt’s punctuality. Perhaps because Roosevelt was praising Catholics while he was in California, the Vatican announced that a special goodwill letter was on its way to the White House from Pope Leo XIII.87
By the time Roosevelt arrived in Santa Clara County, most Californians were eager to impress him. Already he had become close to the locals. His almost magical personal charm had worked wonders. Californians in effect crowned him king of the sequoias. With U.S. Army forest rangers at his side he toured the gorgeous seaside sites around Santa Cruz and Monterey Bay. There were shifting seascapes, coastal pines, crashing waves, expansive ocean views, hulking rocks, dizzying cliffs, and grass-covered headlands ornamented with purple and yellow wildflowers. Seeing the Pacific Ocean in all its glory buoyed Roosevelt; it allowed him to believe that all his pro-western expansionist views since childhood had been spot-on. Could anybody imagine America without California? With a burst of nationalistic enthusiasm, Roosevelt proclaimed that every seal rock or lone cypress he saw was a U.S. treasure. The groves of sequoias, in particular, filled him with unmitigated joy. No photograph, he said, could possibly do them justice. “You have a wonderful State,” Roosevelt proclaimed on May 11. “I am glad to see your big trees and to see that they are being preserved. They should be, as they are the heritage of the ages. They should be left unmarred for our children and our children’s children, and so on down the ages.”88
Accompanying Roosevelt on this leg of the California tour was Columbia University’s president Nicholas Murray Butler, whose unobtrusive intelligence the president enjoyed. (Butler didn’t seem to mind that Roosevelt, on May 14, received an honorary law doctorate from a rival of Columbia, University of California–Berkeley.89) Following an alfresco luncheon in Santa Cruz with naval reservists, Roosevelt, as he would do again in the coming days, threw away his planned remarks and spoke spontaneously about the ethical imperative of saving sequoias and redwoods. They seemed rarer to Roosevelt than a centaur, a hippogriff, or a winged donkey. “This is my first glimpse of the big trees. I desire to pay tribute to the associations, private owners, and State for preserving these trees.”90
However, Roosevelt believed that the redwoods’ protectors—well-meaning conservationist citizens all—had demeaned the lordly trees by hammering placards on them such as “Big Pete,” “Old Fremont,” or “Uncle John.” The sight of these advertisements fretted and annoyed Roosevelt. Even though he posed in front of one bearing such a sign—“Giant”—he thought