The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [464]
Three days after the Ocala National Forest was created, Roosevelt created another national forest, in the Panhandle. Established on November 27, 1908, the Choctawhatchee National Forest was a flatland full of longleaf and pine trees. It looked almost like a tree nursery or an arboretum. Turpentine workers and small-time fisherfolk lived in the Choctawhatchee—the Roosevelt administration didn’t mind them. Cattlemen were another story. They were burning down the pinelands to create grazing areas—a practice T.R. deemed reprehensible. American and European tourists were heading to Miami and Palm Beach in droves, and many people thought the Panhandle worthless. But Florida was a big state with over 1,200 miles of tidal shoreline.79 Just going from Key West to Pensacola—near where the Choctawhatchee National Forest was formed—was a 1,000-mile journey. If Ditmars had spent a day there, he’d have given up counting reptiles; the number of lizards and tree frogs were in the millions. While south Florida was becoming a center for land-promotion schemes and nightclubs, the Panhandle, still fairly rural in 1908, was considered Florida’s best-kept secret. An outdoorsman could collect specimens in the Panhandle waterways and pinelands without many distractions.
Because the South was anti–federal government, the mere fact that the Roosevelt administration had created the Choctawhatchee National Forest there was notable. The forest reserve had about 467,000 acres and was situated on the extreme western arm of Florida and Choctawhatchee Bay, Santa Rosa Sound, and East Bay. It went from the Gulf of Mexico to about twenty miles into the Panhandle’s interior. The longleaf and pines and the dense undergrowth of blackjack and turkey oak made the forest tract commercially valuable. The Choctawhatchee National Forest was President Roosevelt’s last great conservation initiative in Florida. It wasn’t far from where John Quincy Adams had preserved his tree farm for the U.S. Navy in 1828.
VI
Just eleven days after Pine Island, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 943 (September 26, 1908), creating the Matlacha Pass Federal Bird Reservation. Originally, he protected three teardrop-shaped Matlacha Pass islands overflowing with mangrove vegetation—red, black, and white. Later, when he visited the area, he commented on the Florida figs and pawpaws.80 There was also a lot of buttonwood. Sea grape grew wild on the Matlacha Pass islands, as did strangler fig and gumbo-limbo. So many unusual plants grew at Matlacha Pass, in fact, that a pharmaceutical company dispatched botanists to Florida looking for possible cures. On any given day a visitor to Matlacha Pass circa 1908 could see birds nesting, eastern indigo snakes hunting for mice, and American crocodiles sunning in mudflats. There were numerous hummingbirds—a species whose metabolism and oxygen consumption always fascinated Roosevelt. (Hummers have been clocked at 200 wing-beats a second.81) But it was the West Indian manatee of Matlacha Pass that impelled Roosevelt toward bold preservation measures.82 On the same day Matlacha Pass was saved, he created yet another federal bird reservation for seabirds near Sarasota. This was Palma Sola, an island on an isolated lake where plants sprang up and grew at an astonishing rate.
Not far from T.R.’s federal bird reservations at Pine Island, Matlacha Pass, and Palma Sola was Island Bay, an intricate complex of mangrove keys including some that were unnamed. When T.R. signed Executive Order 958 on October 23, 1908, creating Island Bay (including the refuge islands