The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [471]
Also, Finley succeeded in getting 81,619 acres of the Klamath basin preserved inside the Bureau of Reclamation’s reservoir. Eventually Roosevelt created many of these “overlay” refuges in the West—seventeen were established on February 25, 1909, alone, by Executive Order 1032. Some environmental historians think that these “overlay” bird reservations within reservoirs were largely a waste of time. Finley, they claim, was hoodwinked by Pinchot and those around Pinchot.
When in 1911 Governor Oswald West of Oregon, a Democrat, selected Finley to become the state’s first Fish and Game Commissioner, Roosevelt celebrated. It was a victory for “citizen bird.” But besides women’s suffrage and prison reform, wildlife protection was one of the issues dearest to West’s heart. With unflinching determination, he insisted on public access to Oregon’s beaches.111 “In Governor West of Oregon, I found a man more intelligently alive to the beauty of nature and of harmless wild life, more eagerly desirous to avoid the wanton and brutal defacement and destruction of wild nature, and more keenly appreciative of how much this natural beauty should mean to civilized mankind, than almost any other man I have ever met holding high political position,” Roosevelt wrote in Outlook. “He had put at the head of the commission created to express these feelings in action, a naturalist of note, Mr. Finley.”112
Praise from a former president is always a good thing for a writer. But Finley felt especially blessed when Roosevelt commended West’s environmentalist ethos in rhapsodic terms: “He desired to preserve for all time our natural resources, the woods, the water, the soil, which a selfish and shortsighted greed seeks to exploit in such fashion as to ruin them and thereby to leave our children and our children’s children heirs only to an exhausted and impoverished inheritance; he desired also to preserve, for sheer love of their beauty and interest, the wild creatures of woodland and mountain, of marsh and lake and seacoast.”113
In the years after Roosevelt and Finley’s initial collaboration of 1903 to 1909, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service decided to pay tribute to these conservationists. In 1964, 5,325 acres of the Willamette Valley were saved as the William L. Finley National Wildlife Refuge. Here was one of the best spots to see Canada geese, mallards, northern pintails, and great blue herons. A botanist could study broad-leafed pondweed, water plantain, American slough grass, and Engelmann’s spike rush in the refuge. Anybody who wants to experience the Willamette valley ecosystem before Portland’s sprawl reaches it can today wander around the white oak savanna in all its primordial splendor. And in the the refuge (which is near Corvallis, Oregon), among bottomland ash forest and native prairie, is a herd of Roosevelt elk—a truly fitting tribute to the two naturalists’ work together.
And who had the idea for this refuge? Ding Darling. He was intent on having the Willamette Valley refuge, deep in the foothills of the coast range, named for Finley and populated with Roosevelt elk. The story of Finley and Roosevelt’s collaboration now lives on in the Oregon landscape, thanks to Darling’s foresight. As for Governor Oswald West, there is a spectacular Oregon state park—situated on the Pacific Ocean between Hug Point and Nehalem Bay—named to honor his crusade for public access to beaches and for bird sanctuaries.
The Malheur National Refuge—spanning a forty-mile area in the southeastern corner of Oregon—celebrated its centennial on April 4, 2008, by brewing a micro beer manufactured by Rogue and called Great Egret