The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [510]
“The man of the West throughout the successive stages of Western growth has always been one of the two or three most typical figures,” Roosevelt wrote, “indeed I am tempted to say the most typical figure in American life; and no man can really understand our country, and appreciate what it really is and what it promises, unless he has the fullest and closest sympathy with the ideals and aspirations of the West.”55
How earnestly Roosevelt still believed that the American character was connected to the restorative power of outdoors life was evident in recommendations he gave the U.S. Army War College before stepping down as president. Having learned that the army’s regulations for field service were being modernized, he inserted himself into the internal debate over the revisions. Even though the forerunners of jeeps were being introduced to the army, Roosevelt stood by the symbolic power of horses. Fixing cars was fine, and mechanical skills were always helpful, but all army servicemen, Roosevelt believed, needed to be skilled climbers and equestrians. “We must not allow packing to become a lost art in the army,” Roosevelt wrote in a report. “The old timers in the Rocky Mountains are passing away and we must look to the army to keep up the knowledge of this essential and invaluable service art.”56
One American range that Roosevelt was itching to explore in February 1909 was Washington’s fog-shrouded Olympic Mountains. Before he headed to Africa, Roosevelt saved Mount Olympus (7,980 feet in elevation) as a national monument. Ever since Merriam had named the huge elk in the Olympic range Cervus roosevelti, the president had hungrily read whatever he could about the region. As Time would later note, geologists were unsure exactly how snow-mantled Mount Olympus had been formed. Folklore in Washington state claimed that Paul Bunyan had journeyed to Puget Sound to milk an orca to cure Babe (his devoted blue ox) of a life-threatening illness. When Bunyan thought Babe was going to perish, he dug a huge grave, and the dirt pile became Mount Olympus.57 The very fact that such a folktale survived in the Pacific Northwest was a sure sign that wilderness still existed in the Cascades circa 1909—and the same would be true of the later legend of Bigfoot. Somehow it was fitting that on March 3, Paul Bunyan, Babe, Bigfoot, the giant elk, and Theodore Roosevelt became linked in the Cascades folklore with the creation of Mount Olympus National Monument. Furthermore, Professor Daniel G. Elliot, a co-author of The Deer Family, had been promoting national monument status for Mount Olympus for over two years.
Since the successful reintroduction of bison on the Wichitas and Flathead reserves, Roosevelt had tried to create the National Elk Reserve in the Olympics. However, Congress had prevented him from saving remnant bands as part of Olympic Elk National Park. Roosevelt was furious at being stymied. His Grand Canyon National Game Reserve was a model of proper wildlife reserve management. So, Roosevelt circumvented Congress on March 3, declaring Mount Olympus and 615,000 acres of lush valley, spectacular mountains, fish-filled streams, and old-growth forests off-limits to any kind of hunting, timbering, or extraction.58 Quite literally, Mount Olympus was North America’s most amazing temperate rain forest. In Proclamation No. 869 creating the national monument, Roosevelt described the ecosystem as follows: “the slopes of Mount Olympus and the adjacent summits of the Olympic Mountains…embrace…numerous glaciers, and…the summer range and breeding