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’s disdain for crocodilians of any kind and his utter revulsion regarding their biological traits became obvious. Traveling down dark rivers he would contemptuously shoot at these creatures as if they were rats on a garbage heap. What disgusted Roosevelt most about crocodilians was their insatiable appetite and bizarre digestive system. Abandoning any pretense of objective Darwinian analysis, Roosevelt deemed them evil monsters that destroyed ecosystems (crocodilians, especially alligators, actually protected egrets by feeding on their predators, such as raccoons and snakes). Knifing open a shot Nile crocodile in Africa, for example, Roosevelt was nauseated by the varied contents of its stomach. “The ugly, formidable brute had in its belly sticks, stones, the claws of a cheetah, the hoofs of an impalla, and the big bones of an eland, together with the shell plates of one of the large river-turtles.” 72

That Roosevelt had little use for swamps in general becomes clear from his response to a ridiculous scheme for draining the Everglades as part of a program by the U.S. Reclamation Service. Despite all his good work for “citizen bird” in the southern latitudes, Roosevelt almost made a serious blunder in the Everglades: he directed the Reclamation Service to investigate the possibility of draining them. “Turn-of-the-century conservationists stopped the annihilation of the birds of the Everglades,” the reporter Michael Grunwald of Time wrote in The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise. “But they had no problem whatsoever with the drainage of the Everglades.” 73 Just as Roosevelt allowed Hetch Hetchy in Yosemite to be flooded for the sake of San Francisco’s water supply, he wanted the Everglades drained so Miami could grow southward into affordable housing villages—a forerunner of suburbia.

The initiator of the Everglades scheme was Dr. John Gifford of Coconut Grove, the first American to earn a doctorate in forestry. As editor of the magazine Conservation, Gifford vigorously promoted the wise use of natural resources. Gifford insisted that conservationism meant “reclamation of swamplands and the irrigation of deserts.” In 1901 he wrote the important Practical Forestry, which made it clear that swamps tangled with palmetto didn’t impress Gifford like birch, oak, and elm. Yet, ironically, Florida—as Gifford’s narratives The Everglades of Florida (1911) and Billy Bowlegs and the Seminole War (1925) attest—was his lifelong passion as a conservationist.74 As the chief promoter of saving Puerto Rico’s Luquillo National Forest, Gifford was all for preserving vast patches of jungles for eco-tourists to use. He was also an advocate for “citizen bird.” Eventually, he became a professor of tropical forestry at the University of Miami, where he promoted various uses for the cypress, maple, and pine. Gifford’s articles regularly appeared in the magazine Tropics. Unlike Henry Flagler, who was involved in railroads, hotels, and real estate in Florida, Gifford considered that some of wild Florida had to remain. But the Everglades? A 200-square-mile alligator swamp? To Gifford, the Everglades were a putrid wasteland. So he concocted plan after plan to drain the great swamp. After all, Washington, D.C. had been a straggling village until its swampland was drained; now it had theaters and museums and was the finest capital in the western hemisphere.75 Gifford’s most improbable scheme entailed importing sacks full of cajeput (melaleuca) seeds from Australia. He hoped that these water-absorbing trees would thrive and dry up the Everglades.76

Roosevelt himself never became engaged in these drainage schemes, but his Forest Service under Gifford Pinchot did. Pinchot considered draining the Everglades by planting Australian melaleuca trees a noble idea. When John Gifford quit Conservation, his replacement, Thomas Will, was even more of an advocate for drainage. As a former president of Kansas State Agricultural College, Will envisioned citrus groves and housing developments instead of little blue herons and alligators. With