The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [479]
When Roosevelt established Jewel Cave National Monument on February 7, 1908—his thirteenth designation thus far under the Antiquities Act—he knew there could potentially be decades of legal problems.30 But Roosevelt was apparently untroubled by the possible consequences. There was no restraining him. As far as he was concerned, the 1,280-acre Jewel Cave Monument was a national treasure. If only the Michauds weren’t such self-interested money-grubbers, they would have understood that such a unique natural wonder belonged to all Americans. Furthermore, the Michauds had to stop making additional openings to Jewel Cave, because they were desecrating the site. This was tough medicine for a couple of presumably lucky prospectors, who thought they had stumbled on a fortune. But as Roosevelt saw it, if soldiers gave their lives for the democracy, surely land could be deeded to the federal government for the sake of science. With federal lawyers breathing down their necks, the Michaud brothers sold their claim to the U.S. government for $500.31
To Roosevelt’s way of thinking, the notion that a little knot of men in the Black Hills saw Jewel Cave as a source of profit was depressing to contemplate. The labyrinth of chambers and tunnels belonged to the U.S. government: end of story. Conservation was, above all else, a moral issue to Roosevelt—a cause he believed he shared most intimately with men like John Muir and Seth Bullock, who were uninfected by the greed of New York and Chicago. By contrast, the South Dakota miners seemed to Roosevelt rather like lowly English sparrows—deemed a pestilential invasive species by the Biological Survey and thus deserving neither understanding nor accommodation.32 Well, if sparrows they were, then the president would deal with the Michauds, and all those like them, in his typically expedient fashion. “Is there any kind of air gun which you would recommend which I could use for killing English sparrows around my Long Island place?” Roosevelt wrote to Dr. C. Hart Merriam. “I would like to do as little damage as possible to our [other] birds, and so I suppose the less noise I make the better.” 33
Ridding Sagamore Hill of English sparrows wasn’t the only hunting Roosevelt had in mind that spring. While last-minute legal maneuvering was taking place in the Department of the Interior to establish Natural Bridges in Utah and Wheeler in Colorado as national monuments, Roosevelt began planning a post-presidential safari to British East Africa. His romantic notion was that he would leave civilization in favor of the roar of the lion and the pleasant odor of buffalo. Roosevelt was going to invite two celebrated trophy hunters whom he highly admired—R. J. Cunninghame and Frederick Courtney Selous (both of whom collected big game specimens for the British Museum)—to join him. Selous would later dedicate his African Nature: Notes and Reminiscences (1908) to Roosevelt. Roosevelt also struck up a lively correspondence with the British hunter-explorer Lieutenant Colonel John Henry Patterson, about possibly seeing the great African fauna and flora, rhinoceros, gnu, water buffalo, and giant eland. Roosevelt actually looked forward, he wrote, to being served up as “food for ticks, horseflies, and jiggers.”34
A veteran of the Boer War, the well-bred Patterson had written an adventure saga, The Man-Eaters of Tsavo, in 1907. (Decades later, it was made into