The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [49]
But something else exciting was occurring in western photography that elated the young Roosevelt. Photographs started to appear in periodicals celebrating the explorers of the late 1860s and 1870s. There was Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer standing over his first hunted grizzly bear (taken by Wild Illingworth), and Major John Wesley Powell on horseback talking to an Apache guide (courtesy of Jack Hillers). Like many other teenage boys, Roosevelt swooned over these photographic images of the frontier, as he had over Audubon’s birds and Catlin’s Indians. The Cascades and the Bitterroots had now been opened up to him as stunning visual experiences. Certainly many of these post–Civil War explorers—Custer and Powell leap first to mind—used photography as self-advertisements for their loftiest exploits. Young Theodore, however, saw them through rose-tinted glasses, in a blur of romance, as explorers braver than brave.
At the end of the Civil War new geographical revelations were appearing almost daily in the public press, along with pictures, because the U.S. Congress was eager to inventory the mineral wealth west of the Mississippi River.34 The U.S. government held title to more than 1.2 billion acres—mostly west of Kansas City—but had surveyed only about one-sixth of this land. In March 1867 Congress approved sweeping geological studies of the western lands by the General Land Office and Corps of Engineers. Suddenly, engineers educated at West Point were the new trailblazers in the Rocky Mountains and beyond. Every square yard of foothills, badlands, thin forests, or drainage ditches would be mapped. On March 3, 1879, Congress created the U.S. Geological Survey to inventory the national domain acreage that President Jefferson had acquired from the Louisiana Purchase, and much more.35
With so much mineral-rich land open for the taking, speculators were scheming to grab stakes, mine gold, discover oil, dig coal, control wheat markets, fish out rivers, and clear-cut virgin forests. This entrepreneurial fever also provided a commercial opening for trained civil engineers, geologists, and biologists (to a limited degree). Railroad workers and miners were greatly in demand, as were cartographers and surveyors. Clarence King, first director of the U.S. Geological Survey, noted that 1867 marked a pivotal point when “science ceased to be dragged in the dust of rapid exploration and took a commanding position in the professional work of the country.”36
The historian William H. Goetzmann, in his Pulitzer Prize–winning Exploration and Empire, broke down the nineteenth-century exploration of the American West into three distinct phases: (1) the Lewis and Clark era (1803 to 1840), when the desire was to gather practical information and discover likely trade routes; (2) the manifest destiny years (1840 to 1865), when families (and railroad companies) headed west looking for fertile land, natural resources, and big bonanzas; and (3) the post–Civil War “frontier laboratory” phase (1860 to 1900), when botanists, paleontologists, ethnographers, and engineers sought scientific information. This third period was the time of the “Great Surveys,” when a wave of scientists headed west for reconnaissance and inventories. “It was also a time for sober second thoughts as to the proper nature, purpose, and future directions of Western Settlement,” Goetzmann wrote. “Incipient conservation and planning in the national interest became in vogue, signifying the way that