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By Root 3948 0

But still he surrounded himself with birds and animals that scurried all around in his homes—macaws squawking, dogs barking, cats jumping on papers, turtles wandering about. His tolerance of animal behavior and his intolerance of human behavior were like night and day. There may have been an inner struggle between his childlike obsession with disappearing into the freedom of the wild—responsibility be damned—and his compulsion to be biologically precise about every songbird, tree, grass blade, and insect antenna. The masculine side of his nature wanted to hunt big mammals while his feminine side wanted to nurture small songbirds. He believed that studying all wildlife had helped sharpen and attune his senses. “Roosevelt loved animals, both wild and domestic,” the historian Edward Wagenknecht observed. “Even on the hunting field they were individuals to him. He always hated to shoot a cow, always took care not to frighten a doe away from her babies.”12

Among the early-twentieth-century conservationists, only John Muir had the temerity to stand up to Roosevelt—at Yosemite in 1903, Muir had challenged Roosevelt to reform his boyish hunting ways. And how was Muir rewarded for his candor? At first, well: Mount Shasta, Mariposa Grove, and Yosemite Valley were all saved by the federal government. But over time Roosevelt repaid Muir’s casual insult by saying that Muir didn’t know birds and then by siding with Pinchot on turning Hetch Hetchy into a man-made reservoir. There were consequences for challenging Roosevelt—and these might involve policy. The sycophant got farther with Roosevelt than the challenger. Nevertheless, Roosevelt continued to admire Muir for rallying to nature’s defense. In this regard Muir was embraced by the president as a “radical” in the best sense of the word. Here was the difference, in Roosevelt’s mind: the strikers in Goldfield, Nevada, wanted more for themselves whereas groups like the Sierra Club of California were fighting for national betterment. And there was in Muir’s carriage, Roosevelt thought, the radiance of Yosemite itself, which the president truly honored.

That spring, just as Roosevelt was ready to expand the boundaries of Yosemite National Park, a disaster rocked California: at daybreak on April 18, an earthquake destroyed San Francisco. Within a few minutes the streets around Union Square and Chinatown filled with mounds of debris. Three hundred thousand people were left homeless. Gas mains had snapped, and storefronts went up in flames. Boats capsized at Fishermen’s Wharf. Broken glass from apartment windows rained down like hail. Beautiful hotels like the Winchester and the St. Francis were wrecked. Merchants shouted in disbelief. People walked about dazed, with fretful eyes, scared that at any minute the entire city would sink into the Pacific Ocean. A human flow out of the Bay Area commenced, under the U.S. Army’s leadership. The Chinese had considered 1906 the year of the Fire Horse—a time of mass confusion—and this proved to be prophetic. “The entire event which was to destroy an American City and leave an indelible imprint on the mind of the entire nation,” the historian Simon Winchester wrote in A Crack in the Edge of the World, “had lasted for just over two and a half minutes.”13

Reports of the earthquake aroused Roosevelt’s martial temperament. This was no middle-size quake like the one in 1868. Unfortunately, he was 2,500 miles away in New York and was unable to order naval action. Shaking an impotent fist at the ground was all he could at first do. Reports of buckling aftershocks came over the telegraph directly into his office in downtown Oyster Bay. Then the telegraph shut off. At best, communication with northern California was hit-and-miss. Telephones weren’t working at all in the Bay Area—everything was broken in the stricken city. More than 3,400 people died throughout northern California. 14 Roosevelt issued a national condolence: “I share with all our people the horror felt at the catastrophe that has befallen San Francisco, and the most earnest sympathy with your