The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [489]
On June 23, 1908, as if rubbing salt into the wounds of westerners opposed to the Antiquities Act, Roosevelt designated thousands of acres of the Grand Canyon as a game preserve. Not a single oil well, ore mine, or asbestos vein was permitted. The Executive Order was clear. As the critics put it, Roosevelt’s idea of commercial activity in the territories involved tens of thousands of deer and elk frolicking about, so that future members of the Boone and Crockett Club could shoot them. This criticism was patently unfair. Without the Roosevelt Dam along the Salt River, settlements never could have prospered in Arizona’s central valleys. It was an engineering wonder, rising 220 feet out of a canyon gorge. Phoenix grew into a metropolis because of Roosevelt’s large-scale irrigation projects. And Roosevelt had encouraged copper-mining towns like Jerome, Globe, and Bisbee to prosper. As for deer and elk, Arizona needed to think of them as game resources, which enriched human civilization in numerous ways.
The National Governors’ Conference had bolstered Roosevelt’s resolve to create new forest and game reserves and enlarge old ones. Roosevelt had taken the tone of the governors and, in general, liked what he had heard. Taken as a whole they seemed to understand that conservation of natural resources was the issue of the era. For every grumbler like Governor Norris, there were three other governors who supported increased federal forestlands. The philosopher Edmund Burke once wrote about the “wisdom of ancestors.” The activists at the governors’ conference deserved this accolade. They articulated a visionary conservationist agenda for America in the twentieth century. At least the issues of forestry were no longer hidden from public view. At Pine Knot, a worried Burroughs had told Roosevelt that Taft, whom Roosevelt had chosen as his successor, was too “weak” to sustain such Roosevelt innovations as the wildlife refuge system. According to Burroughs, Roosevelt dismissed his warnings at the time. He had made the choice because he believed that Taft, then his secretary of war, would faithfully uphold Rooseveltian values, and he was confident that he had chosen wisely.67
But Roosevelt wasn’t leaving anything to chance. While America was consumed with the election of 1908—Taft versus Bryan—that June the president prepared a massive preservationist initiative, scheduled for announcement on July 1. The forestry movement would be forced down his opponents’ throats. Even more than his own birthday, Roosevelt loved the first of July. On that day in 1898, he had won glory in the Battle of San Juan Hill in Santiago, Cuba, leading the two famous charges against the Spanish army. Roosevelt had led the first charge, up Kettle Hill (on horseback). The second and more famous of the two, up San Juan Hill proper, he had led on foot. It was his “crowded hour,” as he famously phrased it. In addition, other important historical events that resonated with Roosevelt had happened on July 1. In 1858, the year he was born, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace had offered joint papers on evolution to the Linnaean Society on July 1; these had been a thunderclap of scientific progress whose reverberations can still be felt. As every American schoolchild of Roosevelt’s generation knew, July 1, 1873, was when the Battle of Gettysburg began, with the Union and Confederate forces colliding as Robert E. Lee desperately consolidated his forces.
So on July 1, 1908, in the last full year of his presidency, Roosevelt began a grand expansion of federal forestlands