The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [363]
Never before had Roosevelt written in this way to ask for funds from a rich and powerful man. But Pinchot’s ideas of a revolution in forestry were so vital for America that he was willing to approach Carnegie, who was widely celebrated by 1904 for embracing a wide array of educational advancement schemes. Carnegie libraries were springing up on Main Streets all across America. Unfortunately for Roosevelt, however, Carnegie had little or no interest in a tree museum. To his mind, it smacked of a boondoggle. Courteously, the old man rejected the appeal, but he did help Roosevelt promote bird rehabilitation projects in Florida. (Roosevelt thanked him for this in An Autobiography.) Still, the idea of a tree museum continued to intrigue Roosevelt and Pinchot. Making a return visit to the Saint Louis World’s Fair with Edith, the president studied all the buildings with an eye for fine architectural touches, imagining how best to create a forestry museum that would attract visitors by offering modern exhibits. Predictably though, his favorite state-sponsored attraction at the fair was the North Dakota exhibit, which had his “Maltese cross cabin” on display. Roosevelt had succeeded in being the Pike, Carson, Boone, and Crockett of his time in the popular imagination—quite an accomplishment for a Manhattanite of the Knickerbocker aristocracy who had been sickly as a child.
What a thrill it was for President Roosevelt to see his Maltese cabin at the North Dakota display at the fair! Although it was just an ordinary log cabin, it had been carefully dismantled, shipped to Saint Louis, and then reconstructed to look exactly as it did from 1883 to 1886. Two pairs of Sunday trousers, an old straw hat, and high hunting boots once belonging to Roosevelt were put on display. Tourists came to study the ranch brand burned onto one of the logs. Capitalizing on Roosevelt’s famous Badlands hunts, expertly hammered onto the side of the cabin were perfectly mounted speciments of the deer, elk, eagle, fox, and owl. Besides his own frontier house, a childhood cabin of Lincoln and a dwelling constructed by Grant before the Civil War had also been erected as attractions at the fair; this was exactly the Republican presidential company Roosevelt liked to keep.60
During the four-month wait between his reelection in November 1904 and the inaugural ceremony in March 1905, Roosevelt, who reaffirmed his belief in the Monroe Doctrine in tough words, also stayed busy with conservation. President Charles William Eliot of Harvard University, for example, had published John Gilley, Maine Farmer and Fisherman for the Christmas season, and Roosevelt promoted it enthusiastically. Gilley was in the rough-hewn American tradition, like Seth Green, Paul Kroegel, and William Sprinkle—so Eliot had produced the very type Roosevelt wanted to hire to defend forests, wildlife, natural wonders, scenic vistas, and waterways.61
Roosevelt also meditated, that holiday season, on deer and wolves. Predictably, he had an explicit desire to hunt bear on the outskirts of Yellowstone now that its bear population was increasing. When a discussion turned to national parks Roosevelt, drawing on his 1903 trip with Burroughs, objected fiercely to ever allowing “sheepmen, cattlemen, or any other transgressors” into them.62 Meanwhile,