The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [369]
Oklahoma! Everything loose or lost in America seemed to have tumbled into the territories as if through a giant chute. The population included reservation Indians, felons, paupers, drunkards, dirt farmers, fortune seekers, gamblers, and losers of every stripe. The smart pre–Civil War pioneers, those who were not seeking instant wealth, stayed on a network of trails and kept heading west. No pause. No rest in Tulsa, Oklahoma City, or Elk City. Just onward toward Amarillo by twilight and across the great desert lands to the shimmering Pacific Ocean. Others simply followed the Cimarron River, driving longhorns up to Kansas, where Christian settlements had taken hold. But only a rather optionless breed of humanity stayed in Oklahoma for very long.
Because people ventured to the Twin Territories to exploit resources or simply pass through, the basic tenets of conservationism were largely anathema to residents. In 1878, the last buffalo herd was reported to have been obliterated in Oklahoma—all the big game was rapidly disappearing from the Great Plains. Railroad expansion helped end the “golden age” of big game hunting in Oklahoma.6 There were, however, plenty of smaller animals and birds. And Oklahoma still had vast natural beauty. The Cross-Timbers region was a great forestland that stretched from southeast Kansas to northern Texas, dividing the western plains from southeastern forests. In general, the Plains Indians lived to the west and the Five Civilized Tribes to the east. Seldom did the two meet. Wintering waterfowl, nesting wood ducks, and neotropical migratory songbirds all lived in the spurs of the Oklahoma mountains.
There was something still peculiarly western about the Twin Territories, for this hard-living region was unsettled. Oklahoma City, for example, was erected virtually overnight between 1889 and 1895, because of the cheap land. When President McKinley’s “great land lottery” was announced in July 1901—Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache reservation land was being given away—homesteaders came pouring into the region by railroad and on horseback. Luckily for posterity, a conservation easement was attached to the lottery. Coinciding with the homesteading act President McKinley—at Vice President Roosevelt’s urging—saved 59,019 mountainous acres to create the Wichita Forest Reserve (administered by the Department of the Interior’s Forestry Division of the General Land Office). Fortunately, fragments of the Cross Timbers survived at the Wichita Forest Reserve (eighty-nine square miles, considered sacred by Native Americans, just outside Lawton–Fort Sill.) The entire Wichita mountain range covered a 1,500-square-mile region that extended into Caddo, Comanche, Kiowa, Jackson, Greer, and Tillman counties.
So, onward to the pure air of Oklahoma! Roosevelt craved a long stay on the prairie before the Twin Territories became one state. His mere presence in any Indian-Oklahoma territorial hamlet would guarantee it a mention in the history books. Roosevelt wanted to inspect the Wichita mountains landscape, first inhabited by Paleo-Indians more than 10,000 years ago. He would be scouting for an ideal buffalo pasture. The buffalo at the Bronx Zoo, he believed, were ready to return to their home range in Oklahoma, where Coronado first saw these animals in the sixteenth century.7 According to Charles “Buffalo” Jones, whom Roosevelt appointed as game warden of Yellowstone, the bison then living in Mammoth Valley had become such a popular attraction at the national park that railroad companies were promoting them to tourists. One advertisement exclaimed: “BISON once roamed the country now traversed by the Northern Pacific. The remnant of these Noble Beasts is now found in Yellowstone Park reached directly only by this line.”8
During the Christmas season of 1904 Roosevelt spent an evening with the naturalist Ernest H. Baynes of New Hampshire, an animal trainer who went everywhere, befriended everyone, and noticed everything. Concerning buffalo, he liked to express original zoological ideas—often sounding brilliant—and then brag about