The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [511]
Corporations in Seattle and Tacoma erupted in protest over Mount Olympus National Monument. As with the Grand Canyon, the dissenters said, T.R. was abusing the intent of the Antiquities Act. The onetime mayor of Seattle, Richard A. Ballinger, a reformer and low-key conservationist, thought Mount Olympus should be timbered. Comical remarks circulated in newsrooms that Roosevelt was leaving the White House to dwell on Mount Olympus with his buddies Jupiter and Apollo and his supersize species of Irish elk. The New York Times eventually defended Roosevelt’s new national monument, addressing the humorists by concluding, “Mr. Roosevelt is always right here on earth. If he were on Olympus there would be no room there for Jupiter or Apollo.”60
What a wondrous, moss-draped world the Mount Olympus rain forest was! For a lover of big game, seeing a 700-pound Roosevelt elk browsing in the lush primeval forest constituted an experience unequaled in North America. Mount Olympus, with glaciers descending its rugged slope, was to this national monument what Old Faithful was to Yellowstone. The northern spotted owl, a threatened species, could be found easily on Mount Olympus by just hiking the trails. Three sui generis Olympic species—the Olympic marmot, Olympic snow mole, and Olympic torrent salamander—weren’t found anywhere else in the world. For sheer picturesque beauty, Soleduck Falls, swollen from frequent rains and melting snows, was also in a class of its own. Sometimes naturalists described Olympic as three parks in one—dramatic glacier-capped mountains, miles of wild Pacific coast, and a temperate rain forest. Mount Olympus also had the largest Alaskan cedar and Douglas firs in America.
When Woodrow Wilson became president in 1913, he deemed Roosevelt’s Proclamation No. 869 excessive and downsized Mount Olympus National Monument from 615,000 to 300,000 acres. Roosevelt was furious. When he died in 1919, a movement was under way to return the ecosystem to its original 615,000 acres. But presidents Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover were unwilling to do it, wanting to secure the “timber vote” of the Olympic Peninsula. At last, in 1938 Franklin D. Roosevelt, by presidential proclamation, returned his cousin’s acreage to the monument. And he changed Mount Olympus’s designation to Olympic National Park. In 1958 about seventy miles of rugged Washington coastline was added to the park by President Dwight Eisenhower. Joining the Roosevelt elk in federal protection were whales, dolphins, sea lions, and sea otters. The entire Olympic Peninsula, with the surf slapping hard on the offshore rocks, was Bar Harbor and then some. Four valleys facing the ocean—the Queets, the Quinault, the Hoh, and the Bogachiel—produced endless botanical surprises for visitors. Juncos flit about the grasses and woodpeckers excavate old logs. Deer are everywhere. The tide pools full of invertebrates of countless shapes, sizes, colors, and textures at Olympic National Park could have kept Charles Darwin busy for 100 years.61
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During his last days in the White House, Roosevelt thought a lot about Charles Darwin. His knowledge of the great naturalist had matured since he drew men as storks when he was a teenager in Dresden. In preparation for his African expedition Roosevelt had On the Origin of Species wrapped in a waterproof cover to avoid damaging it on safari. It was part of what he called his “pigskin library” of favorite titles. On February 25, just two days before he created his federal bird reservations, Roosevelt had reflected on Darwin. “I think the trouble about Darwinism is that people confound it with evolution,” Roosevelt wrote to James Joseph Walsh, a professor of physiological psychology who had just dedicated his book Catholic Churchmen in Science to President Roosevelt. “I suspect that all scientific students now accept evolution, just as they accept the theory of gravitation, or the general astronomical scheme of solar system and the