The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [411]
Realizing that the United States was holding a weak hand, the State Department had Assistant Solicitor William C. Dennis draft a memorandum reflecting Roosevelt’s views on the imbroglio; it was submitted on September 10, 1907. “The circumstances of a pelagic seal raid in a wild country like Alaska, carried on by armed raiders and accompanied by a brutal and cruel slaughter of the seal herd, put a severe strain on the common-law doctrine defining the rights of misdemeanants,” Dennis wrote. “It has not been so long since Kipling could say ‘There is never a law of God or man runs north of Fifty-three,’ and it may well be that the methods of those heroic days are still sometimes morally justifiable irrespective of the provisions of the penal code.” 45
Tokyo was furious over Dennis’s memorandum. It had about as much legal validity as the hanging of a horse thief in The Virginian. Did Roosevelt really think that Japan would accept Kipling as a defense? Dennis was unable to explain convincingly that the president loved seals and that Roosevelt had found the butchering of an Alaskan herd worthy of vigilante action. Worried that the incident might escalate to war, Secretary of State Elihu Root wisely stepped into the fray. The best strategy was to cool down temperatures on both sides. Root, working closely with the Department of the Navy, came up with a different defense of American sailors to present to Ambassador Baron Kogoro Takahira: the poachers were “burglars” and burglary was a felony under Alaskan law. If this premise was accepted by Tokyo, then the killing of the five Japanese during their commission of a crime was justifiable. Wasn’t it? Reluctantly, in May 1908, the Japanese government accepted this argument, and the diplomatic crisis ended.
As a conservationist Roosevelt had prided himself on his stewardship of the whole land. This included Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. With his literary imagination Roosevelt could hear the waters slapping against ancestral rocks—the sound seemed to travel all the way from the Bering Sea to the corridors of power in Washington, D.C.. He could imagine the baby seals Kipling had written about in The Jungle Book, the Aleuts killing only what they would eat, and the Japanese poachers believing they could ignore international boundaries. Growing up in Manhattan after the Civil War, T.R. had enriched his naturalist studies by acquiring a seal skull. Now, as president, he had threatened to send battleships to preserve these friendly mammals’ Alaskan rookeries.
VII
There was great joy in preservationist circles on June 29, 1906, when President Roosevelt signed Mesa Verde National Park into existence. Credit for the park should probably have gone to the skilled ancestral Pueblo masons who had built the cliff dwellings 700 to 1,600 years earlier. But Roosevelt instead lavished praise on Congressman John F. Lacey, Edgar Lee Hewett, John Wetherill, and others. The motto for saving these enchanting cliff dwellings—rock villages in protected alcoves of the southwestern Colorado canyon walls—was “leaving the past in place.” Once the Pueblo tribes of Mesa Verde had migrated south to the Rio Grande region in 1300, the Ute tried to live in the Mesa Verde (Spanish for “green table”) cliffs. Much as the Comanche helped bring the buffalo back to Oklahoma, the Ute played a crucial role in protecting the cliff dwellings from pillagers over the decades. From the hundreds of dwellings of Mesa Verde that survived erosion and