The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [451]
The outcome was well worth the wait. On June 28, 1906, Congress had enacted the Game and Bird Preserves Protection Act (Refuge Trespass Act) to provide “regulatory authority” to managed uses on reservations administered by the Biological Survey. The act made it a misdemeanor to disrupt birds or their eggs on federal wildlife reservations.23 The syndicates were being shut down.
The naturalist Dallas Lore Sharp, in a marvelous manifesto advocating wildlife refuges—Sanctuary! Sanctuary!—wrote about Finley and Bohlman rowing out to the fifteen-acre Three Arch Rocks to study the strange birdlife there. Sharp also brought Roosevelt into the narrative, explaining how the combination of these three bird lovers saved Three Arch Rocks for posterity:
Swinging their dory they were practiced now from her rocky davits, they launched her empty on a topping wave, loaded in their precious freight, and, pulling safely off, headed for shore, making a solemn promise to old bull sea-lion, and to the flippered herds sprawling along the ledges, and to the flying flocks that filled the air. But none of the multitude heard it above their own raucous screaming, and none of them knew. They did not know how that vow took one of the boys across the States to the other ocean shore. They did not see the pictures of their rainy, sea-washed home spread in high excitement over a table in the White House, nor watch an eager man, all teeth and eyes and pounding fists, whanging about and bellowing: “Bully! Bully!” just like an old bull sea-lion. But Finley did. They did not see him study the pictures and vow, “We’ll make a sanctuary out of Three-Arch Rocks.” But Finley did.24
Besides Three Arch Rocks, Finley also fought to save the diversity of wildlife along the Washington state coastline. At Flattery Rocks alone—more than 800 islands, seal rocks, and reefs—special interests were wreaking environmental havoc. The feather and egg mongers were destroying the fourteen species of seabirds that bred along the Flattery Rocks, including fork-tailed storm petrels, double-crested cormorants, black oystercatchers, pigeon guillemots, Cassin’s auklets, and tufted puffins. With the Game and Bird Preserves Protection Act on the books, Roosevelt wanted to do something spectacular to save the Washington state rookeries.25 In 1853 Berthold Seemann—“Naturalist of the Expedition” on board the British explorer Captain Henry Kellett’s ship—had written admiringly about Flattery Rocks in Narrative of the Voyage of H.M.S. Herald; Roosevelt had made this classic volume a treasured part of his home library.26 Now, Finley offered visuals to match that exploration text.
Enthralled by Finley’s wildlife photographs, Roosevelt worried that before long oil derricks would deface Washington’s rugged coastline. And recognizing that the Flattery Rocks system—as well as Copalis Rock and the Quillayute Needles—had been created as a by-product of the Olympic Mountains, he asked Dr. Merriam at the Biological Survey to find a way to preserve these wonders before the population of Tacoma and Seattle and commercial extractors swarmed the coast. Purple starfish, lumpish seals, thrashing whales, crowds of murres, crags, caverns—Roosevelt wanted the biological integrity of these Washington islands preserved unmarred in its entirety. Few oceanic islands in North America, save for those in