The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [345]
In Oregon the president’s train headed to the downtown Portland depot, where 20,000 people had come to witness the laying of a cornerstone for a Lewis and Clark Memorial. For hours Roosevelt put his forefinger to the brim of his Stetson instead of shaking all those hands. As always, he was courtly to the women. Roosevelt was able to see the Columbia and Willamette rivers and Mount Hood, but he never made it to Crater Lake, which was too far off the rail line. William Gladstone Steel—called the father of Oregon’s first national park—was in the audience for the ceremony at the Lewis and Clark Memorial but was apparently not formally introduced to the president.138
In Portland, Roosevelt did meet with the wildlife photographer William L. Finley, the William Dutcher of the Pacific Northwest. It was probably refreshing for Roosevelt to use Linnaean binomials in speaking with Finley; neither Muir nor Burroughs often used these terms, because they seemed pretentious.139 According to Finley, while Roosevelt had been in the West more than 120 tons of killed wild ducks had been shipped to San Francisco from Oregon; they were a popular dish in the city’s booming restaurants. Finley desperately wanted to enact an Oregon model bird law to halt such slaughter. With admirable persistence he was keeping vigilant watch over Oregon’s bird population, protecting even old dead stumps because flickers used them as homes.140 Plume hunting was as horrific in Oregon as in Florida—maybe worse. Millions of Oregon’s birds were being slaughtered for this purpose, from Portland to the Klamath Basin.
As a boy growing up in Oregon, Finley had collected bird skins and practiced taxidermy. But in 1899 he became an Auduboner, enamored of the Cascades and intruigued by the mysteries of flight. Then the Pacific Ocean beckoned him. His life mission was now to photograph Oregon’s terns, puffins, grebes, and enormous winged pelicans, partly as a form of public relations (to help put the milliners out of business) and partly as an artistic endeavor. Encouraged by the fact that Steele had gotten his Crater Lake National Park from Roosevelt and Pinchot in 1902, Finley, with some advice from Frank M. Chapman, formed a chapter of the National Association of Audubon Societies in Oregon. And along with the photographer Herman Bohlman, Finley began playing the role of “Chapman with Kodak” along the Oregon coast near Tillamook Bay. They had been inspired, in part, by Chapman’s revolutionary Bird Studies with Camera. Finley’s images are now considered pioneering wildlife photography gems; they inspired National Geographic to improve its approach to capturing birds up close, even hatching. Finley was part of the first generation to abandon “shoot-skin-record” ornithology in favor of the camera.
William Finley and Herman Bohlman climbing Three Arch Rock. Together they photographed birds all along the Oregon coast and Klamath Basin.
Finley and Bohlman. (Courtesy of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)
There is no transcription of Roosevelt and Finley’s meeting in Portland. Supposedly, Finley showed the president photographic images of Tillamook Bay’s bird life (eventually included in his American Birds, published in 1907). The genius of Finley (with assistance from Bohlman) was that he’d climb any trees, even wobbly Douglas firs or tilted cedars, to photograph the nests of western tanagers and common bushtits. He was always searching for nature’s fair light. Clean-shaven, elegantly slender, with a wild exaltation in his eyes, Finley became perhaps the best ornithologist the Pacific Northwest ever produced. He used ladders, lanterns, ropes, grapnels, rafts, glass plates, tripods, dories, and canoes as the tools of his trade, and no part of nature was off limits to his ingenuity. When camping on the beach, Finley explained, he “reached a sort of amphibian state.”141
Since the creation of Pelican