The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [427]
Convinced that the future of America was imperiled, Fulton kept up his dogged pursuit of Roosevelt. That spring Roosevelt had told Everybody’s Magazine that westerners who didn’t understand subspecies of deer and elks weren’t good stewards. The president’s attitude was plain as day: timber companies were bandits, and westerners incapable of biologically identifying moles were nature fakers. What rubbish! To Fulton, the president was as crazy as a loon—and dangerous. But Roosevelt later patted himself on the back for being a political fox. “When the friends of the special interests in the Senate got their amendment through and woke up, they discovered that sixteen million acres of timberland had been saved for the people by putting them in the National Forests before the land grabbers could get at them,” Roosevelt bragged in An Autobiography. “The opponents of the Forest Service turned handsprings in their wrath; and dire were their threats against the Executive; but the threats could not be carried out, and were really only a tribute to the efficiency of our action.”11
The combination of the Antiquities Act, the new natural forests, and the debate over nature fakers put Roosevelt in a mood for sparring. He was now forty-nine, and there was about him the cockiness of a gambler who has been winning and is itching for more action. Unleashing Garfield on the corporations was his latest sport. Another favored sport was lambasting faux naturalists untutored in Darwinian biology. “You will be pleased to know that I finally proved unable to contain myself, and gave an interview or statement, to a very good fellow, in which I sailed into Long and Jack London and one or two others of the more preposterous writers of ‘unnatural’ history,” Roosevelt wrote to Burroughs. “I know that as President I ought not to do this; but I was having an awful time toward the end of the session and I felt I simply had to permit myself some diversion.”12
The seemingly arbitrary forest reserve designations of March 1907 stung the Western politicians the most. As the Congressional Record noted, even as late as World War I the mention of what Roosevelt had done “still brought forth the wrath from certain quarters.”13 In 1907 the Walla Walla Weekly accused Roosevelt of putting the small logging operations out of business in Washington state with his mania for national forests. As this argument went, rich corporations like the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company already owned millions of acres. They weren’t adversely affected by T.R.’s conservationism; the little guys were. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer sarcastically wondered why T.R. didn’t just declare the entire state a national forest. Some people in Seattle and Tacoma argued that Roosevelt’s obsession with land fraud made him believe, mistakenly, that national forests were a “panacea.” Governor Albert Mead of Washington declared that “Gifford Pinchot, the United States forester, has done more to retard the growth and development of the Northwest than any other man.”
Roosevelt scoffed at such criticism as juvenile. There was more to the Pacific Northwest and northern California than fresh-cut boards. The Pacific slope was more wonderful than any place in Europe. The mere thought of Mount Shasta and Mount Olympus made Roosevelt ache, and intensified his love of the United States. America’s three West Coast states taken together were larger than any European country. California alone was bigger than Great Britain or Italy. American mammal life also far exceeded that in spent-out Europe. In Oregon, for example, the bears ate both clams and berries and slept in primeval forests and on rock-strewn beaches. Roosevelt called the soil of the San Joaquin Valley the prerequisite for its becoming a God-ordained garden. And the forestlands of these three states, he was convinced, were the finest in the world. “There is nothing quite like the Coast, either in America or anywhere else,” Roosevelt would write. “Nature is different from what it is