The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [364]
New animals were continually being added to the Roosevelt family menagerie, and to lull his children to sleep at night the president would read them The Deerslayer out loud. An expansive renovation was also under way at Sagamore Hill: Grant La Farge was helping the president redesign the house to look like a Kenyan hunting lodge.63 And Roosevelt began strategizing about how best to save the Alaskan seal rookeries from British and Japanese fur hunters in the Bering Sea. Every time he read of entire seal colonies being slaughtered, pain struck his heart. The secretary of state, John Hay, was doing his best to get Britain to forgo seal hunting within a sixty-mile radius of the Pribilof Islands and to shorten the hunt seasons. Unfortunately, Hay’s negotiations weren’t going well.64 Roosevelt began haranguing the specially formed Bering Sea Tribunal to ban “seal killing” during the spring breeding season. How could Great Britain consider itself a civilized country, Roosevelt fumed, when Britons slaughtered “nursing mother seals on the high sea?”65
One of President Roosevelt’s first significant postelection acts was to transfer the federal forest reserves from the Interior Department to the Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Forestry on February 1, 1905. This had been Gifford Pinchot’s dream since 1898. On March 3, with Inauguration Day approaching, the Bureau of Forestry was renamed the Forest Service. Roosevelt had two major reasons for going along with Pinchot’s transfer plan: the GLO was filled with pro-business appointees who knew nothing about scientific forestry, and the centralization of the GLO caused long delays in issuing grazing, mining, and lumbering permits to regional reserve users.66
Unlike his boss, Roosevelt, Pinchot was interested in forest administration rather than wildlife protection per se. Wise use of timber resources was his objective. Pinchot, in fact, was extremely hesitant to regulate game animals on the forest reserves (which were yet again renamed National Forests in 1907) for fear of infringing on states’ rights and giving western critics such as Senator Mitchell of Oregon reasons to disband the reserves by congressional legislation. This utilitarian attitude regarding forests made Pinchot the bane of Roosevelt’s friends who favored wildlife protection, such as Muir, Burroughs, Hornaday, and Finley. According to Pinchot’s “The Use Book”—rules and regulations for rangers to follow—the Forest Service offices would “cooperate with game wardens of the State or Territory in which they serve.” A couple of years later Pinchot made this perfectly clear by means of a provision in the Agricultural Appropriations Act of 1907: “hereafter officials of the Forest Service shall, in all ways that are practicable, aid in the enforcement of the laws of the States or Territories with regard to…the protection of fish and game.”67 Yet Roosevelt didn’t believe only in Pinchot’s notion that national forests were to be mainly conserved, not preserved. For Roosevelt, always interested in animals, the forests were also “cradles of wildlife.”68
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As Inauguration Day, March 4, neared, Roosevelt received the best gift imaginable from sixty-seven-year-old John Hay (still serving as secretary of state), short of saving Alaska’s seals or naming yet another elk after him. Hay, who was seriously ill, presented Roosevelt with his precious Lincoln hair-ring. The connotations of this gentlemanly gift brought Roosevelt to tears, especially since Hay had sometimes belittled him. Hay, who was a friend of Roosevelt’s father, had also been Lincoln’s loyal personal assistant. When Lincoln was shot at Ford’s Theatre by John Wilkes Booth and was brought across the street to the