The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [335]
Then Roosevelt requested that he be given private time alone in a redwood grove for reverie. After all, he was in one of God’s great cathedrals, and he wanted to wander in solitude, listening only to the song sparrows and orange-crowned warblers in absolute allegiance with enchanted nature. Truly he was in a state of astonishment, looking upward as the elfin light beamed in between the sequoias. The trees had a dwarfing effect; a single redwood weighed about 3,000 tons. To Roosevelt they were priceless when standing tall and irrecoverable if fallen. As the president disappeared deeper into the forest his personal secretary, William Loeb, led a spontaneous community effort to remove all the commercialized signs that had desecrated the trees. When he returned from his hike, Roosevelt accepted the honor of having a redwood named after him. There was, however, a nonnegotiable condition: no sign reading “Roosevelt Tree” would ever be posted. He couldn’t stomach such an insult in his name. Everybody agreed to the terms, and that vaguely comforted the president. Still, he warned that thirsty timber jackals would someday come after the sequoias with industrial saws. Californians, he believed, had a patriotic obligation to defend them.
Following a conservation speech in San Jose, Roosevelt asked that more redwoods be added to the itinerary. He simply couldn’t see enough of these ancient sentinels. Each tree—some had a diameter of thirty feet—had its own wondrous personality. The redwoods dwarfed all the trees of the Catskills and the Adirondacks. While he was touring the Santa Cruz mountains, especially those near Boulder Creek and Felton, he started calling the redwoods “giants.” During the coming days he would meet fruit growers, ranchers, fishermen, and a woman from Watsonville who had thirty-four children. He spoke at Stanford University and in affluent Burlingame (commonly called “City of the Trees”). But all he could really talk about was the utter majesty of the Sequoia sempervirens, which John Steinbeck would later call “ambassadors from another time.” (Or, as Burroughs was fond of saying, they were “living joys, something to love.”92) It sickened Roosevelt to think that redwood raiders were clear-cutting these old-growth trees for house decks and unnecessary porches (redwood was a prized luxury wood because it didn’t rot). In a speech on May 13 at Stanford University, where the president of the university, David Starr Jordan, introduced him, Roosevelt gave a long address about Congress saving the wilderness heritage. The coastal hills and groves of California, Roosevelt said, needed increased permanent preservation by the federal government.
When Roosevelt arrived in San Francisco for a three-day visit, more than 200,000 people lined the streets to see him. They admired his courage on the battlefield, his reforming spirit, his pluck, his humor, and his ambition, and they were impressed by his national celebrity. San Francisco also held a parade in his honor, but the main event was a dedication of a monument to Admiral Dewey at Union Square. For this dedication, sleeping mats had been unrolled on the sidewalks so that women wouldn’t get their dresses dirty. Everyone waited for the president’s triumphant wave of the fist—a gesture he had adopted since his days of boxing at Harvard. The entire Bay Area seemed aroused by the event. Civil War veterans offered snappy