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biggest new national forests that season, in terms of acreage, were in the Alaska Territory. Since his creation, on August 20, 1902, of the Alexander Archipelago Forest Reserve, Roosevelt had steadily added Alaskan land to the federal government’s holdings. On September 10, 1907, he had created the Tongass National Forest, an immense area in southeastern Alaska with huge strands of western red cedar, Sitka spruce, and western hemlock. The reserve also included thousands of islands and salmon-rich streams. On July 1, 1908, Roosevelt merged the Alexander Archipelago with Tongass to create what is today Tongass National Forest, a monstrous eco-zone of snowcapped peaks, blue glaciers, clear streams, muskeg, forests, and fjords. More than 17 million acres of pristine Alaska was preserved between the two forests, making Tongass National Forest the largest reserve in the United States. The diversity of salmon alone made the Tongass the crown jewel of the USDA’s forest reserves. King (chinook); coho (silver); pink (humpback); sockeye (red); and chum (dog) salmon flourished in these icy waters, as nowhere else on earth except Canada. And where there were salmon, grizzly bears and polar bears came in huge numbers.

The creation of Tongass National Forest was a tremendous presidential accomplishment. But as Roosevelt’s days in the White House waned during early 1909, he yearned to do even more to both protect and develop the “last frontier.” To Roosevelt the “spell of Alaska” wasn’t gold mining but the rain forests and wildlife breeding areas saved for posterity. Anybody who shot a northern spotted owl, for example, should be arrested. But Roosevelt always wanted smart community development. After all, it was the Roosevelt administration that in 1905 had pushed an act through Congress calling for a first-class road system to be laid out in Alaska.49 The act was an example of how the U.S. government—not railroad titans or oil companies—could help Alaska develop. The enemy in Alaska, as Roosevelt saw it, was huge companies that bought up land tracts to mine, log, or drill. Roosevelt thought the U.S. government instead of the private sector should build and operate a short-line railway to connect Controller Bay with Alaska’s great coalfields.50 And Roosevelt wanted federal protection of sea otters and stringent government regulations on fur seal hunters and fisheries.

The promotion of the Elkins Act of 1903, the creation of the Bureau of Corporations, and the bills regulating railroad rates all showed Roosevelt’s desire to enhance executive powers. Roosevelt believed that because Seward had purchased Alaska in 1867 with federal funds, the U.S. government should dictate how the territory was developed. “Roosevelt’s belief in the benevolent power of executive action found particularly vivid expressions in his mature conservation program,” Joshua David Hawley wrote in Theodore Roosevelt: Preacher of Righteousness; this statement is especially true regarding U.S. territories like Alaska. “The ruinous overharvesting of the country’s timberlands, severe water shortages in the arid West, the rapid deterioration of the famed open ranges, and the more gradual but steady disappearance of suitable wildlife habitats nationwide—all these developments convinced Roosevelt as president that the United States needed a rational, unified policy to manage the nation’s natural resources. As in the field of economic regulation, Roosevelt concluded here as well that, when it came to conservation policy, Congress was not up to the task.”51

Roosevelt had received an advance copy of Major-General A. W. Greely’s Handbook of Alaska: Its Resources, Products, and Attractions, published later in the spring of 1909. It had a moose as its frontispiece and was filled with photographs shot by members of Roosevelt’s administration in the Coast and Geologic Survey, the Geological Survey, the Bureau of Fisheries, and the Biological Survey. At the end there was a handsome pull-out map of Alaska. With his stumpy forefinger Roosevelt would trace down the Porcupine River’s