The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [355]
On July 23, 1907, Roosevelt put aside another 5.4 million acres of Alaska as the Chugach National Forest. After the Tongass, it was the second-largest national forest in America. Concerned about the wildlife in the eastern Kenai Peninsula, Prince William Sound, and Copper River delta, Roosevelt was starting to envision Alaska as one vast wilderness refuge. It would become a place for urban dwellers to replenish their spirits. Meanwhile, to protect the Chugach and the Tongass from despoilers Roosevelt approved of ranger boats to patrol the 10,000 miles of gorgeous coast, which would soon become popular with cruise lines. As Roosevelt envisioned them, these patrol boats would be something like traveling ranger stations. In Roosevelt’s Alaskan parks the motorboat had replaced the saddle and pack horses. As one early ranger in the Tongass declared, “The Alaskan ranger is just as proud of his boat as the Bedouin horseman is of his steed, and the ranger boats in Alaska are the most distinctive craft sailing the waters.”34 In 1908 the Roosevelt administration had a sixty-four-foot, seventy-five-horsepower yacht designed in Seattle to use for Forest Service duty.
Ever since his 1903 trip to California, where he saw the splendor of fogbound San Francisco Bay with the Farallon Islands rising out of the blue Pacific, the president had grown even more interested in all things Japanese. In California in 1904 there was a lot of xenophobia and anti-Japanese sentiment, and Roosevelt hoped to curb its ugliest manifestations by talking publicly about Japan’s virtues; that is, he hoped to ease the cultural clash. Tension was extremely high between Japan and Russia throughout the election year, over territory in Asia. On February 1 the Russian czar had said, at a dinner in the Winter Palace, “There will be no war” but a week later Japanese troops landed at Chemulpo in Korea. Japan then torpedoed the Russian fleet at Port Arthur, stunning the Russian authorities. Privately, the president liked seeing Tokyo exhibit its naval power, which was a sign of national greatness. Although, wisely, on February 11 he declared U.S. neutrality with regard to the Russo-Japanese War, he immediately started working the back channels of diplomacy, hoping to arrange for a cease-fire between the two warring countries.
An old friend of Roosevelt’s from Harvard, Kentaro Kaneko, was in the United States in early 1904, and the president feted him. To Roosevelt, Kentaro had an irresisible combination of “fine national loyalty” and “Samurai spirit.”35 Roosevelt believed the United States had much to learn from Japan, especially how to properly manage city slums; but that the Japanese, for their part, needed to find “the proper way of treating womanhood.” The Japanese island of Hokkaido had also become a hot topic for naturalist discussions at the White House. Photographs of steaming mountain peaks, active volcanoes, and beech forests that captured the Japanese “garden spirit” enthralled the president. On hikes in Rock Creek Park, often with Pinchot at his side, Roosevelt, while rock climbing, would go on and on about samurai literature he had just read. That spring influenced by Japanese rice-paper drawings on display in Washington, Roosevelt began writing about flowers of the Potomac River basin—the locust trees with white blossoms and honeysuckles moving conspicuously around the south portico. He admired the way the Japanese brought nature into everything they did, filling vases with chrysanthemum flowers and growing miniature bonsai trees in offices. Although he was not a specialist on Asia, he knew something about Japanese folk ways, and he understood that Japanese artists considered humans part of nature; they cultivated the high art of thriving in harmony with animal life. Oddly, Roosevelt encouraged Russian expansion in Asia, hoping that Tokyo wouldn’t “lump” Americans