The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [356]
From the White House, the president kept watch on the Japanese fishermen and plumers who were slaughtering wildlife around the Midway atoll. In 1859, Captain Nick Brooks had claimed the guano island of Midway for the United States. There was a marketplace demand for bird fertilizers in California, and at Midway the excrement was readily available for scooping up by the boat load. All was peaceful at Midway until President Roosevelt learned in 1903 that Japanese seafarers were killing the albatross which bred on the island. Immediately, Roosevelt dispatched twenty-one Marines to Midway to protect the albatross from slaughter.37
III
In March 1904 Pinchot had presented Roosevelt with a report which claimed that the western states and territories with the most public land were “progressing rapidly in population and wealth.” In other words, the larger the forest reserves, the more prosperity for a state or territory. The report recommended that the Timber and Stone Act and the Desert Land Act be repealed, only to prove that land was indeed being irrigated. But as a trade-off the administration called for many new forest reserves. “From 1902 to 1905, over 26 million acres were added to the national forests, and many of the reserves contained good grazing and agricultural land,” the historian Donald J. Pisani wrote in Water, Land, Law in the West: The Limits of Public Policy, 1850–1920. “No westerner could be sure where the process would end. Because they threatened to limit access to the public domain, both repeal of the land laws and reservation were perceived as threats to economic opportunity.”38
On April 30, 1904, President Roosevelt officially opened the Saint Louis World’s Fair that commemorated the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase (the ribbon-cutting had been delayed for a year owing to construction difficulties at the fairground). A decade earlier at Chicago’s World Fair, Roosevelt had been an attraction himself, greeting guests at the Boone and Crockett Club’s log cabin, and extolling the virtues of western expansion. Now, in Saint Louis, pushing a golden button to open the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition, he visited some of the nearly 150 miles of exhibits, including a stuffed Roosevelt elk. This fair popularized the hot dog, ice cream cones, iced tea, and sweet rolls. The world’s largest pipe organ thundered out songs that Roosevelt heard enthusiastically, including the triumphalist “Hymn of the West,” which was sung in his honor.39
Although Roosevelt did not overly admire Thomas Jefferson, considering him vastly overrated, he nevertheless sang Jefferson’s praises at the fair. If Jefferson had done nothing else, Roosevelt believed, acquiring the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon had been enough to ensure his greatness. The whole continent, from coast to coast, was in Jefferson’s debt. This was the same theme he had touched on the previous year when he visited Saint Louis as part of his Great Loop tour. And now, with all eyes on Missouri, that May the Olympic Games opened in Saint Louis. The United States won eighty out of 100 gold medals, though it should be noted the a separate competition was held for “uncivilized tribes” (that is, dark-skinned people).
While all these distractions were going on in Saint Louis, Roosevelt, on June 3, created his third national park: Sully’s Hill, on the south shore of Devils Lake in North Dakota, named after the Indian fighter General Alfred Sully—whose fierce battles with the Sioux peoples Roosevelt knew well. The 780-acre parcel along Devils Lake was a densely forested haven for such migratory waterfowl as wood ducks, Canada geese, American white pelicans, mallards, hooded mergansers, and dozens of other species.40
Because Sully’s Hill National Park was transferred to the National Wildlife Refuge System in 1914 (it is managed today by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service), it has been largely ignored by historians of American conservation. Its remote site and the fact that it’s named after a general