The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [385]
When Roosevelt arrived in Colorado Springs following a speech in Clayton, New Mexico, with plans to climb Pikes Peak, reporters were still covering his every move. Love him or hate him, Roosevelt made good copy. Once again he used hunting as his hook, arousing a burst of regional western pride. For three weeks he would dwell with the blood of bears, boots in the stirrup, stubble on his face. For Roosevelt the Rockies were always the Alps without handrails, and he promoted them as such. Not since Andrew Jackson had America had a president who was such a celebrity. Wherever Roosevelt went now, he would wave a bandanna to express solidarity with the crowds. But speaking in front of 10,000 people gathered at the Santa Fe station in Colorado Springs, Roosevelt pleaded with both well-wishers and the press to allow him uninterrupted privacy in the wild. “One thing you cannot do on a hunt, and that is to carry a brass band,” Roosevelt said. “You cannot combine hunting bears with your Fourth of July celebrations. I am going to beg the people of Colorado to treat me on this hunt just as well as the people of Oklahoma treated me on the wolf hunt.”71
Roosevelt shelved world affairs and domestic policy while in the Rockies, preferring a wintry saddle blanket to wire reports, and only one major news item seized his attention. The celebrated U.S. Senator from Connecticut, Orville H. Platt (not to be confused with Thomas Platt of New York), had died at age seventy-seven. The last time Roosevelt had seen his Republican friend—best known in history for the Platt Amendment of 1901, which offered Cuba self-determination after the Spanish-American War—Platt’s face was alarmingly drawn and gaunt, and a rattling cough had somehow caused his complexion to lose its luster: his skin was sepia-tinted. When Platt had tried to laugh, there was only a faint sound, and Roosevelt had known he wasn’t long for this world. “It is difficult to say what I think of Senator Platt without seeming to use extravagant expression,” Roosevelt had said of Platt at a dinner earlier that year. “I do not know a man in public life who is more loved and honored, or who has done more substantial and disinterested service to the country. It makes me feel really proud, as an American, to have such a man occupying such a place in the councils of the Nation.”72
Deeply saddened, Roosevelt wanted to create a living memorial for Platt. In the Wichitas, he had heard about a system of freshwater and mineral springs south of Oklahoma City, less than two hours north of Dallas.73 In 1902 the Chickasaw and Choctaw had ceded the best 640 acres of these freshwater springs to the Roosevelt administration. As at Hot Springs National Park (in Hot Springs, Arkansas), the gateway town of Sulphur, Oklahoma—otherwise a nothingville—had built hotels, hoping to attract tourists to the curative waters. The community, however, had a problem with sinking wells and hoped the federal government would someday come to the rescue.74
Roosevelt now decided that the so-called Seven Springs area would make a terrific national park. He refused to wait until Oklahoma became a state, with large acreage carved out for Indian reservations, and there was little political disadvantage to naming the springs after Platt, even though the senator had never visited south-central Oklahoma (he had been a member of a committee on Indian Affairs, however). On June 29, 1906, Roosevelt (through a special act of Congress) declared the Seven Springs area Platt