The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [50]
When Roosevelt was growing up, the federal government did show tiny signs of a burgeoning new awareness that protecting wildlife and animals mattered. On June 30, 1864, for example, when Roosevelt was only five years old, in what is widely considered the initial federal intervention on behalf of wildlife resources, Congress transferred the Yosemite Valley from the public domain to the state of California. Even though Sacramento would eventually return the Yosemite Valley to the U.S. government, in 1906, an important precedent was established, for in the transfer agreement California agreed to “provide against the wanton destruction of fish and game found within said park, and against their capture or destruction for the purposes of merchandise or profit.”38
A timeless hero to Roosevelt was President Ulysses S. Grant, particularly for his strategic skill in securing a Union victory in the Civil War. Just as T.R. turned fourteen in 1872, and was taking an interest in the American West, President Grant signed the bill creating, at least on paper, Yellowstone National Park. Enthralled by stories of grizzly bears, time-clock geysers, petrified logs, and massive elk herds—all of which appeared in his favorite boys’ magazine Our Young Folks—Roosevelt vowed to visit the new national park someday. Two great interests—General Grant and American wildlife—had come together in the Yellowstone story. Unfortunately, President Grant didn’t fully comprehend the thuggishness of western poachers. The 2.2-million-acre park had no uniformed police force (wardens) to enforce the law, and wildlife was killed there indiscriminately until 1894, when the Yellowstone Park Protection Act clamped down on the criminals.39
Accounts of Alaska’s brute beauty were also extremely popular as Roosevelt was coming of age. Virtually no important biologists had inventoried this American acquisition. Back in 1867, Secretary of State William Seward had acquired more than 650,000 square miles of Alaska from Russia for a song—$7.2 million (less than 2 cents an acre).40 Antiexpansionists called the purchase “Seward’s Folly” and considered it a frozen wasteland not worth a trillionth of a dollar, but other Americans cheered it. Determined to prevent both the Russians and the Japanese from killing what were now American seals in the Bering Sea rookeries, President Grant set aside the Pribilof Islands to protect them in 1869; this measure was approved by Congress the following year.
Living on the five tiny Pribilof Islands—only two of which, Saint Paul and Saint George, were habitable by humans—were the finest seal herds in the world, tens of thousands of bulls with harems swimming in the frigid fogbound waters and coming onto rocky beaches. The Pribilof Islands were, in essence, cities of seals. But Russian, American, and Japanese vessels were slaughtering these mammals in the Bering Sea at a rapid rate. To these hunters and harpooners, the Pribilofs were a killing ground. Rudyard Kipling included in his second Jungle Book the short story “The White Seal,” about fierce battles between nations over seal fur from the Bering Sea. Now that the United States owned these islands—considered the most lucrative rookeries of fur mammals anywhere—President Grant wanted to make sure he could protect the hundreds of thousands of fur seals.41
Like Grant, President Benjamin Harrison also cast an eye on Alaska. By means of an Executive Order on March 30, 1891, he created the Afognak Island Forest and Fish Culture Reserve to protect another part of Alaska’s “bays and rocks and territorial waters, including among others the sea lion and sea otter islands.”42 (The island is today part of Katmai National Monument, the second-largest area in the National Park System.43) A side effect of Harrison