CHAPTER NINETEEN

PASSPORTS TO THE PARKS: YELLOWSTONE, THE GRAND CANYON, AND YOSEMITE

I

While Pelican Island was being saved as a federal bird reservation in the first months of 1903, President Roosevelt was making last-minute adjustments for a visit to Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, and Yosemite. The Great Loop tour, as it was called, would be the longest, most elaborate cross-country journey ever taken by a president of the United States. The trek served as an appealing way to present his conservation polices to all regions before the 1904 presidential election. Emphasizing America’s natural wonders, the adventure crystallized Roosevelt’s already potent belief that the Far West, in all its wildness and rawness, was the least exhausted part of the country. At that time, Yellowstone was interested in promoting popular animals such as elks and bears, while applying a policy of predator control to cougars, wolves, and coyotes. Eager to sneak in some cougar hunting around Yellowstone on the western odyssey, Roosevelt corresponded intensely with the superintendent, Major John Pitcher, about having the proper hunting dogs available for him upon arrival and securing a special U.S. government permit. Wary of repeating the disastrous press coverage of the Mississippi bear hunt, which had been mitigated only by the grace of a cartoonist named Berryman, Roosevelt emphasized that no detail of the itinerary be left to chance. “I am still wholly at sea [as] to whether I can take that trip or not,” Roosevelt wrote to Pitcher. “Secretary Root is afraid that a false impression might get out if I killed anything, as of course would be the case, strictly under park regulations and though it was only a mountain lion—that is, an animal of the kind you are endeavoring to thin out.”¹

With unaccustomed suspiciousness, the president surreptitiously asked the secretary of the interior, Hitchcock, to quietly smuggle into Yellowstone three hunting dogs from John Goff’s kennel in Colorado. Plotting eight to ten days of clandestine cougar hunting, Roosevelt wrote to Pitcher that if word leaked out, if the reporters discovered his intentions, then he would have to content himself by studying “the game and going about on horseback, or if I get into trim, perhaps snowshoes.”² If Roosevelt had his way, however, at least a few of the troublesome mountain lions wouldn’t get within sniffing distance of an elk or antelope. Meanwhile, the competitive Charles “Buffalo” Jones, who had a bounty hunter mind-set and did not want his role as an exterminator of predators to be co-opted by an-out-of-stater like Goff, imported into Yellowstone two lots of six cougar hounds from Aledo, Texas.³ As a maxim of the T.R. era went, never pass up a chance to hunt or box or romp with the president, because these activities fostered a lifelong bond.

Meanwhile, in preparation for seeing the Pacific Northwest and California forestlands for the first time, Roosevelt dashed off a note to Frederick Weyerhaeuser, the “lumber king,” known for his entrepreneurial acumen and zealous, ruinous de-timbering. Weyerhaeuser, who slurred his Edwardian w’s into Bismarckian v’s when speaking English, had emigrated from Germany at the age of eighteen to work as a day laborer in Erie, Pennsylvania. To him, America was the land of promises where the bold prevailed. He learned the lumber business from the ground up. He acquired his first sawmill in Rock Island, Illinois, in 1857, and began building a timber empire in the heavily forested Pacific Northwest. Determined to amass a fortune, he clear-cut every tree in sight without the slightest concern over deforestation. Obviously, he had never read Man and Nature. In his blinkered outlook, money mattered more than anything else in life. Where others saw a redwood tree or an old-growth hemlock, Weyerhaeuser saw boards and planks and, behind them, dollar signs.

In early 1903, Congressman Lacey had mentioned to Roosevelt that Weyerhaeuser was starting to come around, that he was becoming a forest reserve advocate of sorts, and that he was an untapped potential arborist. Intrigued, Roosevelt wanted to initiate a dialogue with Weyerhaeuser on the ticklish issue of reduced logging, and on the conservationist ethics of Southern Lumber Company: planting a tree for every one chopped down. “Could you come down here sometime next week so I can see you with Mr. Gifford Pinchot?” Roosevelt wrote to Weyerhaeuser on March 5. “I should like to talk over some forestry matters with a practical lumberman. I earnestly desire that the movement for the preservation of the forests shall come from the lumbermen themselves.”⁴

When Roosevelt wrote to John Burroughs about his forthcoming Great Loop trip that March, however, the letter was devoid cougar hunting in Yellowstone, or courting timber barons from Minnesota. Instead, Roosevelt said he wanted to “see,” in liberal measure, the elk herds and mountain goats. And he was eager to see the geysers in winter. This was slightly disingenuous of Roosevelt, and further evidence of how skittish the fiasco of the Mississippi bear hunt had made him. Somewhat defensively, however, Roosevelt raised the specter of hunting in his long letter to Burroughs. The novelist Charles Dudley Warner, best remembered for coining the term “gilded age” in a novel of that title cowritten with Mark Twain, had also written an American outdoors classic in the 1870s: The Hunter of the Deer and Other Essays. Because Warner—a longtime columnist for Harper’s Magazine and first President of the National Institute of Arts and Letters—had died in 1900, many of his earlier literary efforts were being reissued in his memory. When Burroughs told Roosevelt how excellent the Warner hunting essays were, the president unctuously doused his enthusiasm. “I think you praise overmuch for its fidelity to life Charles Dudley Warner’s admirable little tract on deer hunting,” Roosevelt wrote. “[It] was an excellent little tract against summer hunting and the killing of does when the fawns are young. It is not an argument against hunting generally, for as Nature is organized, to remove all checks to the multiplication of a species merely means that every multiplication itself in a few years operates as a most disastrous check by producing an epidemic of disease or starvation.”⁵

What triggered Roosevelt’s letter was a hard-hitting article that Burroughs had recently written in the Atlantic Monthly, “Real and Sham Natural History.” Twenty years before, Burroughs had pleaded in Scribner’s Monthly that poets stop depicting wildlife falsely; they should instead follow the romantic Whitman’s fine naturalist example.⁶ Now the usually mild-mannered Burroughs lit into Ernest Thompson Seton for completely fabricating bizarre species behaviors in Wild Animals I Have Known: Seton had claimed that foxes contemplated suicide, and that deer had sensitive humanlike feelings. What perturbed Burroughs was that Seton advertised his encounters with animals as nonfiction. This purported zoology book wasn’t natural history but fable. “There are no stories of animal intelligence and cunning on record that match his,” Burroughs wrote. “Such dogs, wolves, foxes, rabbits, mustangs, crows, as he has known, it is safe to say, no other person in the world has ever known.”⁷

Roosevelt, on reading this article, hurled himself into the fray. On the Executive Mansion’s letterhead, Roosevelt wrote Seton a punishing note, haranguing him and challenging him to cough up his facts for the Biological Survey.⁸ “Burroughs and the people at large don’t know how many facts you have back of your stories,” Roosevelt wrote to Seton. “You must publish your facts.”⁹ Seton, wanting no part of the “bully-boy” Roosevelt (at least in public), wisely stayed mute. Burroughs actually began to feel some pity for Seton, whose ego was shattered and whose literary reputation was taking a pummeling. And Seton, to his credit, took Burroughs and Roosevelt’s charges to heart; he later published the scrupulously accurate Life Histories of Northern Animals andLives of Game Animals. Both are fine, highly readable zoological contributions to the American naturalist canon.¹⁰ Eventually, after bumping into Seton at an ostentatious literary party hosted by Andrew Carnegie, Burroughs decided he liked Seton. “He behaved finely and asked to sit next to me at dinner,” Burroughs wrote to his son. “He quite won my heart.”¹¹

Another of Burroughs’s “nature fakers” was Reverend William Long, who had an advanced degree in divinity from Heidelberg University in Germany. Long, who believed in the power of pets to heal the tormented soul, was a popular pastor at First Congressional Church in Stamford, Connecticut, and the author of some celebrated children’s books, including Ways of Wood Folk and Fowls in the Air. A zealous anti-Darwinist, he held that animals’ knowledge was based on parental training within each species. Picking apart Long’s false descriptions about how robins feed their young, Burroughs called the pastor a deliberate liar. And robins were the least of it. Long also claimed to have seen a woodcock mend its broken leg by making a clay and grass cast for itself. “Why should anyone palm off such stuff on an unsuspecting public as veritable natural history?” Burroughs asked in the Atlantic Monthly. “When a man, writing or speaking of his own experience, says without qualification that he has seen a thing, we are expected to take him at his word.”¹²

Long came to his own defense that May in the North American Review, arguing that wildlife observation was inexact and diverse enough that no one man—not even le grand John Burroughs—had the status to say what was true or false with such arrogant definitiveness. Roosevelt was incensed beyond words by this rejoinder. He wanted to go to war, publicly, with both Seton and Long. He wrote to Burroughs a defense of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Books, which were labeled correctly as fiction. And he launched into an academic discussion with Burroughs that included his views on domestic dogs first introduced to a Pacific Island; differences between the Falkland and the artic fox; polar bears versus black bears; and Lewis and Clark meeting grizzlies. Roosevelt wanted to convey his support for his friend Oom John in this controversy. He ended the letter by asking Burroughs to accompany him to Yellowstone in April. “I would see,” the president wrote, “that you endured neither fatigue or hardship.” ¹³

Even though the idea of killing cougars to protect elks had a certain merit, it was a biologically naive practice, and a backward view of the predators’ role in the ecological order. Furthermore, Roosevelt was right to be concerned about damaging his reputation by hunting anything in Yellowstone. He himself viewed hunting as a pastime of great natural and spiritual value, but an increasing number of Americans saw it as a violent vacation. Moreover, the notion of the commander in chief as exterminator in chief at Yellowstone wasn’t going to play well with the president’s newfound “teddy bear” constituency.¹⁴ Realizing that the cougars weren’t a dire threat, Roosevelt decided that “the elk were evidently too numerous for the feed,” and the cougars were not “doing any damage.”¹⁵ Suddenly, Roosevelt’s philosophy became that the cougars in Yellowstone should be left alone. They were, after all, part of the natural balance. Most likely, Roosevelt had known all along that cougars weren’t a real problem in Yellowstone; he had just wanted to hunt them for fun. To his credit, when this rationalization broke down, Roosevelt was intellectually honest enough not to hunt the cougars.

Nevertheless, it was becoming painfully obvious to the naturalist community—especially to those like Muir and Underwood, who respected Roosevelt’s Harvard training and his knowledge of species traits and coloration—that the president had a blood lust. For all of his promotion of Kodaks, Roosevelt preferred shooting a rifle to clicking a camera. And the president never really disputed this characterization, though he grew tired of continually having to explain himself to animal-rights types such as William Dean Howells and Mark Twain.

Roosevelt, however, had little difficulty in justifying his seemingly paradoxical attitude toward wildlife. Yes, he revered the mountain lion, yet he thrilled to see one treed by his dogs. Roosevelt reconciled his own proclivities by drawing no distinctions between himself and any other forest predator. Nonhunters could indulge in the fantasy that they existed outside the biotic community, as either passive observers or omniscient masters. And yet, most of them ate meat. Hunters shattered this conceit by participating directly in ecological cycles of life and death. The act of hunting forced a re-reckoning of the relationship between the human and natural worlds, and in that sense it was more intellectually honest than all the bleatings of its vociferous critics. Nevertheless, Roosevelt’s penchant for the chase was troublesome to his friends in the preservationist community, and has made him a frustrating and somewhat equivocal figure in much of modern environmental history.¹⁶

II

On March 15 the New York Times announced President Roosevelt’s Great Loop tour, with a hint that he might hunt in Montana or Wyoming. From Washington D.C., Roosevelt would travel to Chicago, Milwaukee, La Crosse, Madison, Minneapolis, Saint Paul, Sioux Falls, Yankton, Mitchell, and Aberdeen before reaching the town of Edgeley in his beloved North Dakota. In Fargo, he planned to deliver a major address on American policy toward the Philippines; it was a gift to his favorite state. On April 7 he would greet well-wishers in Jamestown, Bismarck, Mandan, and then Medora. With Burroughs at his side, he would then take the “Roosevelt Special”—six opulently appointed railway cars provided by the Pennsylvania Railroad—to the northern entrance of Yellowstone, where his party would camp from April 8 to 24. From Wyoming, he would backtrack to Saint Louis to dedicate the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Grounds in commemoration of the bicentennial of Jefferson’s acquisition from France. He would then head to the Grand Canyon and Los Angeles and Yosemite to be with Muir. Next he would make campaign-like appearances in a string of major cities along the Pacific Coast before finally returning to the White House. The conductor for the trip would be Roosevelt’s friend William H. Johnson, who had taken him to Mississippi in 1902.¹⁷

The following day the Times announced that John Burroughs had officially accepted the president’s offer to accompany him to Yellowstone. What intrigued Burroughs most about Roosevelt was that he envinced “radical Americanism” while being a “thoroughgoing naturalist”—nobody else was doing that.¹⁸ Because Oom John wouldn’t have tolerated a cougar hunt (it was supposed), the president quashed the idea altogether; he would instead act as naturalist in chief. Yellowstone’s superintendent, Major Pitcher, issued a stern statement declaring that the president’s gun would be sealed by the U.S. Army when he entered the park, just as with every other citizen.¹⁹ In 1903 the U.S. Army, not the Department of the Interior, ran Yellowstone. “I do not know when the trip will be,” Roosevelt said, “but I think it will be just as soon as the Senate adjourns. It is doubtful whether there will be any hunting.” ²⁰

Word that President Roosevelt was headed to Yellowstone with the famous naturalist Burroughs drew a sharp backlash from the pro-timber crowd. Governor DeForest Richards of Wyoming denounced Roosevelt as a crazy forest reserve elitist, claiming that his state would work to undermine the president at the coming national Republican convention. (Richards, however, died a few weeks later of acute kidney disease.²¹) Westerners associated with the railroad industry never forgave Roosevelt for his conservation activism in the 1890s when the Boone and Crockett Club campaigned to make the park off-limits to commercial exploitation. But Senator Clarence Clark of Wyoming quickly came to Roosevelt’s defense: the colonel who had led a charge up San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American War would be welcome at Yellowstone anytime, night or day. “The people of Wyoming have the most implicit confidence, not only in President Roosevelt personally, but in the wisdom of his Administration,” Clark said. “They believe that he knows them, and has a personal interest in the welfare of the State.” ²²

Roosevelt and Burroughs together at Yellowstone National Park.

T.R. and Burroughs near geyser. (Courtesy of Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library)

Even before Roosevelt’s train left Washington, the newspapers were abuzz with gossip about his working vacation. In Washington state a silly tug-of-war developed over whether the president would speak in Seattle or Tacoma.²³ By contrast, the machinists’ union in Kansas City asked that Roosevelt not come near their town, as he had done nothing in the White House to help their cause. A group of Texans lamented that Roosevelt was skipping Forth Worth and Amarillo on his way to the Grand Canyon. While Roosevelt was in Arizona, fifty Rough Riders planned to present him with a live black bear, captured in Mexico.²⁴ The stockmen of the Front Range of the Rockies announced that when Roosevelt’s train arrived in Hugo, Colorado, he would be greeted by 200 cowboys in full range regalia shouting “Bully!”²⁵ Administrators at Yosemite National Park planned to shoot fireworks into the night sky on the president’s arrival.²⁶ Bored reporters took the time to calculate the impressive figures for Roosevelt’s trip: sixty-six days, 14,000 miles, averaging 212 miles a day. He would deliver more than 260 stump speeches and five major addresses. Roosevelt’s party would cross every mainland mountain range between the Poconos and the San Gabriels. “With the exception of a fortnight in the Yellowstone region and a few days in the Yosemite,” the New York Times noted, “he will be pretty steadily in motion.”²⁷

As departure day neared, Roosevelt acted like a schoolchild anticipating summer vacation. Elated about visiting twenty-five states and showing Oom John the incomparable geysers of Yellowstone, Roosevelt was the happiest he had been in years, in truly high spirits. “I am overjoyed that you can go,” Roosevelt wrote to Burroughs. “When I get to Yosemite I shall spend four days with John Muir. Much though I shall enjoy that, I shall enjoy far more spending the two weeks in the Yellowstone with you. I doubt if there is anywhere else in the world such a stretch of wild country in which the native wild animals have become so tame, and I look forward to being with you when we see the elk, antelope, and mountain sheep at close quarters. Bring pretty warm clothes, but that is all. Everything else will be provided in the park.”²⁸

III

Uninterested in lobbying Roosevelt for anything, Burroughs had accepted the president’s offer as a chance to better educate himself about Yellowstone and Rocky Mountain wildlife. “I had known the President several years before he became famous, and we had had some correspondence on subjects of natural history,” Burroughs wrote. “His interest in such themes is always very fresh and keen, and the main motive of his visit to the Park at this time was to see and study in its semi-domesticated condition the great game which he had so often hunted during his ranch days; and he was kind enough to think it would be an additional pleasure to see it with a nature-lover like myself. For my own part, I knew nothing about big game, but I knew there was no man in the country with whom I should so like to see it as Roosevelt.” ²⁹

On April 1 the president’s train left Union Station with Burroughs on board, and headed for Pennsylvania’s famous Horseshoe Curve—near Altoona—in the heart of the Allegheny Mountains. Just before his departure, Roosevelt had written to Dr. Merriam of the Bureau of Biological Survey asking for up-to-date information about the Shoshones, Sioux, Hopi, Apache, and other western tribes. Roosevelt said he would be most grateful if Merriam could put together a box of books, articles, and reports on Native Americans. The esteemed biologist quickly complied with the president’s request. Knowing that Merriam was an Indian rights activist, Roosevelt hoped to educate himself about the shabby conditions on the reservations. “In cases where you can do so without interfering with your biological survey work, I should be glad to have you secure for me reliable information concerning the present condition, necessities, and treatment by Government agents of such Reservation and non-Reservation Indians as you may meet,” Roosevelt wrote. “Show this to any Government officials as your warrant for inquiry; I shall expect them to give you all possible facilities to find out the facts deemed of interest to me.”³⁰

In essence Roosevelt seemed to be offering a quid pro quo to Merriam: Roosevelt’s chief biologist would provide him with pertinent information on Native Americans while he, in turn, sent status reports back to Washington, D.C., on the Yellowstone cougars, elks, and buffalo. The reports would contain no skins or claws, however: the president would not be exercising his powder finger. As Burroughs confirmed in his 1905 book Camping and Tramping with Roosevelt, the president refrained from hunting in or around Yellowstone, taking only field observations and photographs. That didn’t protect Burroughs from being teased by his friends. “The other night I met at dinner that fine old John Burroughs,” the novelist and editor William Dean Howells wrote to C. E. Norton that April, “whom I congratulated on his going out to Yellowstone to hold bears for the president to kill.” ³¹

Burroughs consistently defended Roosevelt as a naturalist first and a hunter second. “Some of our newspapers reported that the President intended to hunt in the Park,” Burroughs wrote. “A woman in Vermont wrote me, to protest against the hunting, and hoped I would teach the President to love the animals as much as I did—as if he did not love them much more, because his love is founded upon knowledge, and because they had been a part of his life. She did not know that I was then cherishing the secret hope that I might be allowed to shoot a cougar or bobcat; but this fun did not come to me. The President said, ‘I will not fire a gun in the Park; then I shall have no explanations to make.’ Yet once I did hear him say in the wilderness, ‘I feel as if I ought to keep the camp in meat. I always have.’ I regretted that he could not do so on this occasion.”³²

Chicago was a highly successful first stop for President Roosevelt on his way to Yellowstone. More than 6,000 people crammed into a downtown Chicago auditorium that had only 5,000 seats. The Halley’s comet known affectionately as Teddy Roosevelt had arrived in the flesh and the Marconi wire was tap-tap-tapping to the world about his visit. Roosevelt passionately defended American hegemony in the Caribbean and an expanded navy, thunderous applause greeting his words.³³ To Roosevelt the Monroe Doctrine wasn’t mere diplomatic ornamentation—it was enforceable policy. He received an honorary doctorate of laws from the University of Chicago, which was rapidly becoming one of the best schools in America.³⁴ Afterward, Roosevelt met with a cheerful group of its students, who sang a specially composed “Dooleyized” song. One verse went:

There is a sturdy gent who is known on every hand:

His smile is like a burst of sun upon a rainy land.

He’ll bluff the Kaiser, shoot a bear, or storm a Spanish fort.

Then sigh for something else to do and write a book on sport.³⁵

Roosevelt’s “sport” on this Great Loop tour was conservation, not hunting. Among the primary concerns on the first leg were the devastated buffalo herds. Soon, the Bronx Zoo would have a herd to return to the prairies, and the president was shopping for a proper geographical spot. Carefully, Roosevelt inquired about the remnant herd living in Yellowstone. Working closely with Congressman Lacey, Roosevelt was eventually able to appropriate $15,000 to help manage the Yellowstone herd; the improved management included shelter buildings. With Buffalo Jones updating him on bison grazing strategies, the president grew excited about the prospect of reintroducing his Bronx Zoo herd to an experimental range in Oklahoma. If the reintroduction worked, it might be possible to create bison ranges in Kansas, Nebraska, Montana, South Dakota, and Montana.

While Roosevelt appreciated Buffalo Jones’s firsthand knowledge of bison, he believed Jones’s report on elks “was all wrong.” Jones was a self-serving old reprobate whose opinions on Yellowstone’s wildlife were usually far off base.³⁶ Accordingly, a determined Roosevelt tried to hand-count every elk in Yellowstone. He wanted near exact numbers. His “very careful” estimate was that there were more than 15,000 elks (a figure much higher than what Buffalo Jones was claiming). As for cougars, Roosevelt—after careful study—determined that they were actually providing a service in the park, keeping the elk herds thinned down to ideal numbers. “The cougar are their only enemies,” Roosevelt noted, “and in many places these big cats, which are quite numerous, are at this season living purely on elk, killing yearlings and an occasional cow; this does no damage; but around the hot springs the cougar are killing deer, antelope and sheep, and in this neighborhood they should certainly be exterminated.”³⁷

In coming years Roosevelt would modify his harsh views about predator control in Yellowstone and elsewhere. He began seeing cougars and other predators as assets to the park’s natural balance. When word got back to the White House in 1906 that Buffalo Jones planned to hunt sixty-five cougars in Yellowstone, Roosevelt surprised Jones by nixing the idea. “I do not think anymore cougar (mountain lions) should be killed in the park,” Roosevelt wrote to the superintendent. “Game is abundant. We want to profit by what has happened in the English preserves, where it proved bad for the grouse itself to kill off all the peregrine falcons and all the other birds of prey. It may be advisable, in case the ranks of the deer and antelope right around the Springs should be too heavily killed out, to kill some of the cougar there, but in the rest of the park I certainly would not kill any of them. On the contrary, they ought to be left alone.”³⁸ Before leaving the White House, in 1908, Roosevelt banned the killing of cougars in Yellowstone.³⁹(This didn’t stop him, however, from encouraging his sons and nephew to hunt cougars around the Grand Canyon when he was an ex-president in 1913.)

During the two spring weeks President Roosevelt was in Yellowstone, and the sheets of ice in the tree-lined rivers were cracking, he wrote a series of long reports to Merriam on how the springtime wildlife was faring. After hiking footpaths, Roosevelt made detailed zoological descriptions of antelope near Gardiner, Montana, and bighorn sheep in Yellowstone Canyon, Wyoming. As if trying to out-naturalist even Burroughs, Roosevelt made Audubonist studies of golden eagles and water ouzels. And while Roosevelt’s gun may have been locked up by the U.S. Army, nothing prevented him from collecting a meadow vole for the Biological Survey. These tiny rodents were among the world’s most fertile mammals; females were capable of producing three to ten pups every three weeks. Roosevelt, using his hat as a net, scooped one up and skinned it. Unfortunately, his arsenic can was back at Sagamore Hill. “I send you a small tribute, in the shape of a skin with the attached skull, of a microtus [pennsylvania], a male, taken out of the lower geyser basin, National Park, Wyoming, April 8, 1903,” the president wrote to Merriam. “Its length, head and body, was 4.5 inches, tail to tip, 1.3 inches, of which .2 were the final hairs. The hind foot was .7 of an inch. I had nothing to put on the skin but salt.”⁴⁰

While Roosevelt was studying birds and animals (and even evidence of insects), Burroughs was analyzing Homo sapiens Roosevelti. Since leaving Union Station in the District of Columbia, and all through the Midwest, while Roosevelt was giving stirring speeches in Illinois, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and North Dakota, a watchful Burroughs was keeping copious notes. What amazed Burroughs most was how cordial Roosevelt was to everybody he met, offering good fellowship, firmly shaking people’s hands as if he were a next-door neighbor handing out free Farmer’s Almanacs. His hail-fellow-well-met routine was paying dividends. The trip seemed less like a presidential tour than a triumphant homecoming for a native son. “He gave himself very freely and heartily to the people wherever he went,” Burroughs noted. “He could easily match their Western cordiality and good-fellowship.” ⁴¹

It seemed that Roosevelt treated the citizens of North Dakota especially warmly. Every old ranch foreman in the state was offered red-carpet hospitality. Roosevelt truly admired these rural folks. North Dakotans never complained about working long hours or giving a neighbor free help. And the unbounded hills and plains hadn’t been spoiled by industrialization. Somehow the children of North Dakota seemed purer than children back east, whose heads were filled with false ideas of what constituted success in America. To Burroughs, in fact, it seemed as if Roosevelt were from North Dakota, as if the yeomen planting crops and the village merchants selling wares were somehow his kinfolk.

As his constant companion, with time to while away, Roosevelt regaled Burroughs with stories about western characters he loved, including Hell-Roaring Bill Jones and Hash-Knife Joe. At Saint Paul, Seth Bullock joined the Roosevelt party for a few days of travel. Once they reached Yellowstone, Roosevelt borrowed a sure-footed gray Third Cavalry stallion while Burroughs, hampered by arthritis, rode in a carriage (or ambulance, as he jokingly called it) pulled by two mules. Burroughs had a wild ride because the team got spooked and took off running. Off they went to Mammoth Hot Springs, which Burroughs later described as “the devil’s frying pan.” Roosevelt sported khaki pants, puttees, a black jacket, and a tan Stetson hat. Burroughs still wore his dark suit—a fashionista from the Whitman catalog of refined dishevelment. Shedding the Secret Service and newspapermen, they explored caves, spied songbirds, inspected pinecones, and studied topographical aberrations. “He craved once more to be alone with nature,” Burroughs wrote, “he was evidently hungry for the wild and the aboriginal.”⁴²

Burroughs understood that America had a lot of weather-vane politicians, but Roosevelt, particularly when it came to conservation, wasn’t one of them. He understood that natural resource management was the imperative! He understood why species needed to be saved, if only for aesthetic purposes! And nobody Burroughs had ever met knew more about birds. “Surely,” Burroughs wrote, “this man is the rarest kind of a sportsman.” When it came to conservation, Burroughs understood that Roosevelt was “the most vital man on the continent, if not on the planet, today.”⁴³

One of the oddest aspects of Roosevelt’s trip to Yellowstone was the vigorously enforced ban against journalists. The president wanted sixteen days off from work to study the abundant wildlife without being pestered by reporters. Both Roosevelt and Burroughs wanting to be like old antelopes, straying from the herd of humans. Their headquarters were at Major Pitcher’s house, but several U.S. Army camps were also set up deep in the wilderness (but not too far from established roads) so Roosevelt and Burroughs could commune with the outdoors without signs of irritating civilization. Only matters of utmost national importance would be conveyed to Roosevelt through his personal secretary William Loeb, Jr. (whose railway car, Elysian, the “rolling White House,” had been unhitched in Cinnabar, Montana). Burroughs was suffering from a head cold, coughing and sneezing, but he gamely trooped onward into the wild with Roosevelt, sleeping in the springtime snow a few miles from Major Pitcher’s house.

On April 11, the Times, in a mistaken rush to judgment, ran a bogus story under the headline “President Kills Lion in Yellowstone Park” (presumably, he had killed it with his pistol).⁴⁴ Because cougars weren’t protected in Yellowstone, the Timesconcluded that the president hadn’t violated any regulations; he had merely blasted a feline varmint. But the entire story was fabricated: a scoop-hungry reporter had used an unreliable source. When he heard of it, President Roosevelt was livid, because he had worked so hard to avoid giving the impression that he was hunting in Yellowstone. Instead, with Burroughs at his side, Roosevelt had hoped to emphasize his preservationist side. But he could hardly go after the New York Times. It was his hometown newspaper, and it had long promoted his political and literary careers. In an article titled “President on the Move,” the Times clarified the earlier story, explaining that Buffalo Jones—the apparent source—had offered to go cougar hunting with Roosevelt but the president had “declined the offer.” ⁴⁵

Nearly every day thereafter, the Times, covering Roosevelt as best it could from Cinnabar, Montana, would assure readers that the president had “shot no game.” By not hunting, Roosevelt was showing that he was a reformed sportsman, that nature could be enjoyed for its own sake. In fact, all Roosevelt and Burroughs hunted for in Yellowstone were voles for the Biological Survey. They also explored the Yellowstone and Lamar rivers; analyzed the shaped balconies and terraces of porcelain-like travertine at Mammoth Hot Springs in the northwest corner; camped near Old Tower Fall Soldiers Station; pondered the great assemblage of petrified wood; rode sleighs to the Upper Geyser Basin; and even tried skiing around the Norris Hotel. What surprised Burroughs was the bizarre erosion to be studied in this patch of Wyoming: aeolian, biological, fluvial, lateral, and sheet were just some of the conditions. You needed a geological textbook to decipher the cycles of erosion, and to differentiate between piping (badlands erosion) and residual boulder (weathered in place). It was a little too much, so he turned to flowers. “I even saw a wild flower,” Burroughs wrote, “an early buttercup, not an inch high—in bloom. This seems to be the earliest wild flower in the Rockies. It is the only fragrant buttercup I know.” ⁴⁶

Spending so much time hiking together, the two naturalists talked about Merriam, who, for all of his God-given talent, had yet to produce a first-rate American zoological book. But Roosevelt believed that gossip was a black art, akin to blasphemy. If one talked badly about friends behind their back, then one had an obligation to tell them to their face. That was the honor code, he believed, of a “real” man. Therefore Roosevelt’s letter to Merriam on April 22 can best be classified as tough love, and a long-deferred goad, putting his thirty-year friendship with the biologist on the line:

Both John Burroughs and I agree that it is very lamentable that you will not produce a really big book. John Burroughs gives me permission to quote him. He says—I entirely agree with him—that you are in danger of taking your place among those men of great natural power and enormous industry, who collect innumerable facts but are somehow never able to do the work of generalization and condensation—that is, to build a structure out of the heap of bricks. It is an awful thing to generalize hastily, and not to pay proper heed to the need of accumulating masses of material. But where one meets a genuine master in his profession—and such I esteem you—it is a loss to the world if he fails to put his discoveries in durable, in abiding, form. This is exactly what I fear will be the case with you. To publish quantities of little pamphlets is merely to take rank with the thousands of small and industrious German specialists. You have it in your power to write the great monumental work on the mammals of North America, including their life histories. If you put it off too long, you will never do it. And if you wait until you are sure you have exhausted the resources of trinomial nomenclature on very obscure shrew or fieldmouse from Florida to Oregon, you will also have to postpone your work indefinitely; for I firmly believe that after you and I are dead there will still be ample opportunity for industrious collectors to secure “new forms” and “probably valid species” from almost any region which it is thought worth while minutely to investigate. But the labors of ten thousand such would not equal one production of a book by you on the lines I have indicated.⁴⁷

IV

Roosevelt’s visit to Yellowstone culminated on April 24, when he laid the cornerstone for a basaltic stone railroad archway near the Northern Pacific Railroad depot at Gardiner, Montana. Architecturally similar in style to the Old Faithful and Canyon hotels, the Roosevelt Arch, as it became known, was twenty feet wide and thirty feet high. It looked as if it belonged on the Champs-Elysées in Paris. Carved above the keystone was a phrase Roosevelt fancied: “For the Benefit and Enjoyment of the People.” Smaller plaques read “Yellowstone National Park” and “Created by Act of Congress March 1, 1872.” Approximately 3,500 people were on hand for the dedication, inducing a group of local Masons, who presented him with a Montana gold nugget mounted on a plaque.⁴⁸ In the cornerstone, the Masons also deposited their grand lodge papers, some local newspapers, a handful of rare coins, photos, a King James Bible, and a brief history of Yellowstone.⁴⁹

“The Yellowstone Park,” Roosevelt said in his dedication, “is something unique in this world, as far as I know. Nowhere else in any civilized country is there to be found such a tract of veritable wonderland, made accessible to all visitors, where at the same time not only the scenery of the wilderness, but the wild creatures of the Park are scrupulously preserved as they are here, the only change being that these same wild creatures have been so carefully protected as to show literally astounding tameness.”⁵⁰

With John Burroughs and Major Pitcher sitting behind him on the platform, Roosevelt offered his own impromptu reflections on the American West, and thanked locals for his tremendous “two-week holiday” in Yellowstone. In what the historian Aubrey L. Haines described as a “rambling speech,” Roosevelt talked about buffalo breeding, forest protection, water conservation, and the geological sites that made Yellowstone unique. With a palpable sense of urgency, he warned coming generations to protect Yellowstone from the scars of ore pits and mine tailings—also, forest fires had to be prevented, or fought when they did occur. Flattering the crowd, Roosevelt conveyed his full confidence in their stewardship of a glorious natural setting straight from the hands of God. He praised Montanans, Idahoans, and Wyomingites for their wise protectionist ethics. “I like the country,” Roosevelt said in a crowd-pleasing line reported in the Times. “But above all I like the men and women.”⁵¹

A few weeks later, Forest and Stream magazine published Roosevelt’s speech in its entirety. In his talk, Roosevelt had driven home the point that national parks were “essential democracy” at work. America’s treasures, like Yellowstone, had to be safeguarded from vandals and exploiters. Here was a place for city dwellers to restore themselves. The president lamented that Europeans were flocking to see Yellowstone more excitedly than Americans. He said that the United States needed to become “awake to its beauties.” And he praised the successes of the wildlife protection movement in the park.

“Here all the wild creatures of the old days are being preserved,” he said, “and their overflow into the surrounding country, means that the people of the surrounding country, so long as they see that the laws are observed by all, will be able to insure to themselves and to their children and to their children’s children, much of the old-time pleasure of the hardy life of the wilderness and of the hunter of the wilderness.”⁵²

It was a bittersweet occasion for Roosevelt when, bound for Saint Louis, he had to say good-bye to Montana and part company with Oom John (who was going to Spokane for a prearranged lecture) at the Gardiner arch on April 25.⁵³ Their wonderful times together in the open air were over. As a parting gesture, Roosevelt rallied to Burroughs’s defense against a cheap shot at him in the latest issue of Forest and Stream. Either in a fit of jealous pique for having been excluded from the Yellowstone trip or, more likely, simply as a result of editorial misjudgment, George Bird Grinnell had run a cruel, devastating personal attack on Burroughs in the magazine. Angrily, Roosevelt responded that Burroughs was a true man, a saint of the woods, a human being of breathtaking sincerity and a naturalist of unparalleled skills. Whitman had once said that Burroughs was “in a sense almost a miracle.” For weeks, Roosevelt and Burroughs had observed deer, elk, wild geese, wild mice, chickadees, and red squirrels. Together they had laughed at the jargoning Canadian jays (or camp robbers, as Burroughs called them) in the mornings and watched the sun set over the Yellowstone River gorges at dusk. They had inhaled the fragrance of scattered pines and had been silenced for hours by the beauty of secluded valleys. Now, in Grinnell’s magazine, in an article written by someone in New Hampshire who wrote under the name “Hermit,” slammed Burroughs—of all people—as a bad naturalist.^*54

Burroughs, who was averse to conflict, assured Roosevelt that the attack didn’t matter; a single day’s news of other matters would erase it from people’s memory. The president was not so easily mollified, however. He wrote Grinnell a long letter defending Burroughs and lambasting the magazine for allowing the “Sage of Slabsides” to be ridiculed. The letter was postmarked Gardiner, Montana, and immediately fast-mailed to New York. Its reception marked the beginning of a serious rift in Roosevelt’s personal relationship with Grinnell. This was a risk that Roosevelt was evidently ready to take. “I have just seen the long letter by ‘Hermit’ in the Forest and Stream attacking John Burroughs, and incidentally furnishing the most ample reason for utter distrust of Hermit’s truthfulness in narrating or else his power of accurate observation,” Roosevelt wrote. “I will say frankly that I am surprised that a paper of the standing of the Forest and Stream should publish such an article, especially unsigned…. It is thoroughly discreditable of Hermit not to have attached his real name, and when the Forest and Stream permits the article to be published without the name it of course, in the eyes of the public, itself becomes responsible for the attack on Mr. Burroughs.”⁵⁵

With this letter Roosevelt reentered the controversy over “nature fakers” yet again (even though Grinnell never leaked the letter to the press). Yellowstone, in general, had energized Roosevelt with regard to his responsibilities as a naturalist. Wandering with Oom John in the park had been good for his soul. On the way to Nebraska, Roosevelt retreated from the miasma of smoke in the dining car to ruminate about possibly breeding Impeyan pheasants to release in the Great Plains states.⁵⁶

Meanwhile, Roosevelt enjoyed seeing the picture-postcard farms as his train rolled through counties that were almost larger than Rhode Island. Somewhere along a handsome open stretch of South Dakota the president once again met up with Seth Bullock, and the two rode around the Black Hills Forest Reserve and attended a cowboy show in Edgemont together. Eating at chuck wagons, talking to farmers about irrigation and tree farming, and petting a tamed buffalo, Roosevelt was certainly in his element. “The President unites in himself powers and qualities that rarely go together,” Burroughs wrote of Roosevelt after the Yellowstone trip. “Thus, he has both physical and moral courage in a degree rare in history. He can stand calm and unflinching in the path of a charging grizzly, and he can confront with equal coolness and determination the predaceous corporations and money powers of the country. He unites the qualities of the man of action with those of the scholar and writer—another very rare combination. He unites the instincts and accomplishments of the best breeding and culture with the broadest democratic sympathies and affiliations. He is as happy with a frontiersman like Seth Bullock as with a fellow Harvard man, and Seth Bullock is happy, too.”⁵⁷

When President Roosevelt reached Omaha, 50,000 people were waiting to greet him in the swirling dust. Half a dozen horseless carriages were parked nearby, along with thousands of horses at hitching posts. People were scrunched together as if penned up in the Omaha stockyards, and there was an electric current in the air. According to the Omaha Bee, merchants in the midtown district and farmers in Douglas County were thrilled by the chance to glimpse a president in the flesh. All they usually got in Omaha was William Jennings Bryan. The overhanging eaves and second-story porches of Queen Anne homes on Wirt Street had been decorated with red-white-and-blue bunting. The Cudahy Packing Company was also gussied up for the president, just in case he made a spontaneous inspection tour. But the ravages of deforestation were evident in this clattering railroad town: there was little greenery growing around the clapboard houses, and birds were in short supply. Construction and cattle seemed to matter most in Omaha.

Roosevelt challenged Nebraskans to start planting more trees and protect the original “scanty forests” of their state. He was proud that his executive orders of 1902, creating the Dismal River Forest Reserve and the Niobrara Forest Reserve, had already proved to be successful. Under Roosevelt’s executive orders, 70,000 jack pine seedlings from Minnesota and 30,000 ponderosa seedlings from the Black Hills had been planted that spring in Nebraska. Forest reserves in Nebraska were “good things,” as Roosevelt wrote to Pinchot, as long as “the homesteader or agricultural settler” wasn’t harmed.⁵⁸ Certainly, prairie fires and the semiarid environment were a problem, but Roosevelt insisted that his treeless forest reserves would soon have an abundance of trees. He was right. In 1947, Pinchot, then near death, revisited the Nebraska National Forest (as the two sites were now collectively called) and declared it “one of the great successful tree-planting projects in the world.”⁵⁹ That April Roosevelt attempted to explain the virtues of modern forestry to farmers. You might say he urged young Nebraskans to start playing Johnny Appleseed instead of Buffalo Bill. Then, it was back to the express train.

President Roosevelt enjoyed stocking his train compartment with only the essentials: toiletries, clean clothes, and a collection of John Burroughs’s books. His life was usually so full of clutter that he seemed to relish the enforced sparseness of train travel; his hectic world was reduced to the bare necessities. Known to tip generously, Roosevelt usually had a couple of porters in attendance outside his compartment, ready to fulfill his every wish. He spent many of his travel hours gazing from his open window. Often, the hamlets he saw resembled what we would recognize as Hollywood back-lot sets or exhibits in Dust Bowl museums. Whenever the train stopped at a depot, admirers swarmed the platform. Roosevelt never rejected a handshake, proud that his star was undimmed. A stenographer sometimes came into his compartment so that he could dictate a rambling letter to an ally or a foe. He did this often. The only time Roosevelt became rude was when he learned that a presidential missive of his hadn’t been delivered speedily. He reacted immediately to communication, and mail delays often triggered a presidential tantrum. One can imagine the joy with which Roosevelt would have used the Internet; his letters about his trips were like high-spirited blogs full of in-the-moment musings.

As a favor to John F. Lacey, his favorite congressman, Roosevelt ordered his Union Pacific train to make a stop in Oskaloosa, Iowa—Lacey’s hometown—on April 28. The previous year, Lacey had been reelected to Congress for the seventh time. Nobody in Washington, not even Roosevelt, had a longer, more distinguished career on behalf of wildlife protection than Lacey. Every aspect of Lacey’s career held special meaning to Roosevelt. He and Lacey walked around Oskaloosa together, with the congressman pointing out the sights; and Roosevelt christened a new YMCA building by giving a ten-minute speech in front of a hastily assembled crowd of 30,000.⁶⁰ Lacey had urged Roosevelt to save the forestlands of Colorado, and he was now similarly animated about saving prehistoric ruins in New Mexico and Alaskan forest reserves. In terms of his personality, Lacey was what’s known in the Midwest as a “plain John”: nothing about his disposition spoke of a will to power or of narcissism. Yet Oskaloosans knew he was fiercely committed to conservation. As a boy, Lacey had played along the meandering streams of southeastern Iowa; his experiences might have come straight from James Whitcomb Riley’s idyllic poem “The Old Swimmin’ Hole.” But owing to deforestation, coal mining, and oil-natural gas drilling these old streams were virtually dead, except for the occasional plump catfish and thick pockets of minnows. This environmental degradation sickened Lacey. “The trees had been felled and the springs had gone dry,” he complained. “The streams were gravelly beds, as dry as Sahara, except for a few hours after a big rain had converted them into muddy torrents.”⁶¹

Hugging Lacey good-bye, Roosevelt headed to Keokuk, in the most southeastern part of Iowa. There he was met by the brother of William Hornaday, Calvin, who lived in that Mississippi River town. As a husbandry expert, Hornaday told the president about a new type of steel-link fence being manufactured by the Page Wire Fence Companion of Adrian, Michigan. The new wire had enough holding capability for bison. Immediately Roosevelt had the fencing acquired for both the New York Zoological Society and the National Zoological Park.⁶²

Although the main event at Keokuk was Roosevelt’s pushing a big button to reopen John C. Hubinger’s factory (known for making starch), the president’s oratory near the tomb of the Sauk chief Keokuk in Rand Park generated the most lasting memory. Roosevelt liked everything about the town of Keokuk, at the confluence of the Mississippi and Des Moines rivers.

From there it was on to the greatest American confluence city—Saint Louis—where the Mississippi and Missouri rivers met. There, Roosevelt greeted former president Grover Cleveland. Together they participated in the dedication ceremonies at the World’s Fair, including a celebration honoring Thomas Jefferson. Roosevelt had little patience for Jeffersonian antifederalism, but he and Jefferson had at least one thing in common: acquiring large tracts of land. By 1909 Roosevelt had preserved more than 234 million acres of America—an area half the size of the Louisiana Purchase. Roosevelt never got the chance he hoped for to visit the American Bottoms around Cahokia, Illinois, where Jim Bridger used to camp. In Saint Louis, instead of preaching the gospel of conservation, Roosevelt concentrated on local road improvement. His worry was that farmers were becoming isolated from the city. “Roads,” Roosevelt said, “tell the greatness of a nation.”⁶³

Compared with the wild graces of Yellowstone, visiting bustling Saint Louis seemed onerous to Roosevelt. He had to endure a Marine Band performance, photos with a cavalry regiment from Oklahoma, a visit to Saint Louis University to discuss Catholic issues, and a private meeting with Secretary of the Interior Hitchcock that took the form of a stroll along the Mississippi River levee. Hitchcock was going after Senator John Hipple Mitchell of Oregon for using political influence to enrich clients with sweetheart land deals. Even though Mitchell was a Republican, T.R. considered him a forest despoiler and wanted him busted for corruption. Hitchcock was happy to oblige.

Too often, environmental historians have given short shrift to Hitchcock’s extraordinary work exposing land fraud in the West from 1899 to 1907. Under his watchful eye 1,021 timber depredators were indicted and 126 were convicted. More importantly, Hitchcock, following President Roosevelt’s direct order, unearthed collusion, espionage, forgery, bribery, and record falsification in the General Land Office. Hitchcock busted judges, governors, senators, and business tycoons. At issue was the integrity of the Homestead Act, Desert Land Act, and Timber and Stone Act. Hitchcock saw his job as protecting the public domain. To accomplish this, he set up dragnet operations in every state or territory that had public lands, to catch looters. Acting so boldly as an anticorruption reformer, however, had a downside; in August, unsubstantiated charges were leveled at Hitchcock for complicity in a land fraud case in Indian Territory.⁶⁴ Roosevelt knew the charges were bogus. He was frustrated that Hitchcock had let requests for forest reserves pile up on his desk, unattended to, yet Roosevelt knew that for all his bureaucratic slowness Hitchcock was a man of integrity. “There seemed to be no limit,” the reporter Henry S. Brown wrote in a glowing profile of Secretary Hitchcock inOutlook, “to the rapacity of the land sharks.”⁶⁵

From Saint Louis, the president journeyed west again on the Missouri Central, to Kansas City and Topeka. Joining him all the way to California was Columbia University’s president, Nicholas Murray Butler. Roosevelt’s train—complete with barbershop, parlor, kitchen, sleeping compartments, and baggage chambers—was an ornate house on wheels.⁶⁶ Again huge crowds—often numbering about 20,000—gathered to hear him speak in city after city. As if he were running for president—and, in essence, he was—Roosevelt kissed babies (though he denied doing this), shook thousands of hands, tossed a football, and took photographs with local police departments. Everything about Kansas appealed to Roosevelt: wide-open spaces, clean air, well-maintained farms, sturdy silos, wheat and sunflower fields, an abundance of deer and game birds, a McGuffey Reader in every schoolhouse, and God’s grace at every supper table. On May 3, Roosevelt arrived on the Pacific Coast Special in the village of Sharon Springs (located on the west edge of Kansas at the border with Colorado). Because it was a Sunday the president followed a parade of kids to a Methodist church (where a Presbyterian minister from Kansas City preached). The stern loneliness of the Book of Job always held Roosevelt’s attention in church; but this preacher dwelled on the more philosophical Ecclesiastes, and the president was bored. Roosevelt played peekaboo with two giggling little girls sitting across the aisle. Eventually the girls were summoned into Roosevelt’s pew so that the three of them could sing “Amazing Grace” from the same hymnbook.

After the service, Roosevelt went horseback riding along Eagle Tail Creek, accompanied by Kansas’s two U.S. senators: Joseph Burton and Chester Long, both Republicans. When he was back in Sharon Springs, ready to board the train for Colorado, a little girl suddenly appeared with a two-week-old badger. Her brother Josiah had trapped it alive, and she wanted President Roosevelt to raise it as a White House pet.⁶⁷ To the surprise of the attending dignitaries, Roosevelt roared in delight, saying he would add Josiah (as he named it) to the growing White House menagerie. During the coming weeks, Roosevelt would hand-feed Josiah from a baby bottle.⁶⁸

With its grayish coat, flattened appearance, heavy body, and short tail, Josiah became a favorite of Roosevelt’s. At train depots the president would show the cute badger to schoolchildren, pointing out the conspicuous white stripe running down its back. Knowing that badgers were carnivorous, Roosevelt fed Josiah the best meat he could find, although for some reason it was rejecting the meat in favor of starches. “I have collected a variety of treasures, which I shall have to try to divide up equally among you children,” Roosevelt wrote home. “One treasure, by the way, is a very small badger, which I named Josiah, and he is called Josh for short. He is very cunning and I hold him in my arms and pet him. I hope he will grow up friendly—that is if the poor little fellow lives to grow up at all…. We feed him milk and potatoes.”⁶⁹

In Denver, Roosevelt met with cowboys and delivered speeches on irrigation laws and good citizenship.⁷⁰ Mayor Robert R. Wright, Jr., proclaimed the day of the presidential visit, May 4, a citywide holiday.⁷¹ A magnificent gold brooch was given to T.R. depicting the Rocky Mountains—he wore it on his winter coat for the rest of the trip. In Denver, he also connected with a former Rough Rider, swapping stories about Cuba. In his Yellowstone journal Burroughs noted how astounding it was that so many Rough Riders wrote to the president about their personal woes. Most were from the territories—Oklahoma, Arizona, and New Mexico. Roosevelt was their spiritual counselor and adviser. One Rough Rider, Burroughs recalled, wrote to the president: “Dear Colonel—I am in trouble. I shot a lady in the eye, but I did not intent to hit the lady; I was shooting at my wife.”⁷² What surprised Burroughs was that the president had such time for this nonsense.

After winning the hearts and minds of Denver, Roosevelt was off to the New Mexico Territory, where statehood was still pending. When Roosevelt had attended the Rough Riders’ first reunion in 1899 in Las Vegas, New Mexico, he hadn’t had time to visit the Old Spanish mission town of Santa Fe, which was off the beaten path. Originally, Santa Fe was meant to be a booming railroad stop on the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe line, but the civil engineers instead chose Lamy, to its south. Now, after finally seeing the fascinating San Miguel chapel (oldest edifice in the United States), Loreto chapel, and La Fonda on the Santa Fe Plaza, Roosevelt better understood why the archaeologist Edgar Lee Hewett (then age thirty-nine) wanted these sixteenth-century structures saved for posterity. Furthermore, to Roosevelt’s mind New Mexico was the pocket where many other prehistoric treasures were kept. Hewett was pushing for the timeworn ruins of the Pajarita plateau, in particular, to become a national park. Congressman Lacey had visited the Pajarito in 1902, with Hewett as guide. Forging a formidable league, Lacey and Hewett reported to Roosevelt that the pot hunters and artifact vandals had to be put out of business. Hewett started working on a special report offering ideas on how to stop the desecration of these New Mexican sites once and for all.

Although he was in Santa Fe for only three or four hours, Roosevelt made it a point to visit the New Mexico Historical Society’s museum, probably with the idea of writing another volume of The Winning of the West, about Kit Carson, during his postpresidential years. Santa Fe intrigued Roosevelt because it had been permanently settled in 1610, before either the founding of Jamestown or the Pilgrims’ landing in Plymouth. Roosevelt knew he would have to move quickly to save New Mexico’s earth-toned adobe buildings. That safeguard task would indeed become a priority following the 1904 election. Wearing a white Stetson, he was playing Pat Garrett in the land of Billy the Kid. Speaking to some 10,000 people in front of the territorial capitol, Roosevelt proclaimed the benefits of “forest preservation.” Having huge reserves, he said, would be a prerequisite to New Mexican statehood.⁷³

In the old town of Albuquerque Roosevelt, with Governor Miguel Otero at his side, inquired about the various southwest Indian ruins in the territory that Congressman Lacey had been pestering him to preserve, such as Chaco Canyon and the Gila Cliff Dwellings. The tireless Hewett, in a series of fine articles, had proposed establishing national cultural history parks in the Southwest. Hewett warned that vandals were looting pottery and old cooking utensils from the sites, sometimes using dynamite to blow holes in archaic dwellings. Without federal protection soon, there would be nothing left of these antiquities and their sites. In Utah, reports were coming out about petroglyphs 4,000 years old.⁷⁴ Hewett, whose nickname in archaeological circles was “El Torro,” had legions of friends—and enemies. Roosevelt was squarely in the camp of his friends. Even though Hewett was disliked by governors, ranchers, and landowners in New Mexico, Roosevelt saw him as a territorial treasure in his own right. All of Roosevelt’s communication with Hewett was through Lacey. Generally speaking, Roosevelt supported saving all the prehistoric ruins in the Southwest as quickly as possible.

New Mexico’s current motto, “Land of Enchantment,” is not its first. An earlier motto was “The Land of Sunshine,” which Roosevelt found appealing and true.⁷⁵ The mild, dry weather of New Mexico served as a balm. Little girls dressed in wedding-dress white made sweet appeals to Roosevelt for New Mexico’s statehood, singing patriotic ballads for his pleasure. All the president could do was beam. He gave a spectacular speech in the Old Town followed by luminaries at sunset around the plaza casting everything in a golden glow.

Then, leaving Albuquerque at dusk, the Pacific Coast Special headed for the Grand Canyon. A quick stopover was made in the Painted Desert during the early morning. Roosevelt had time for nothing more than a few inhales and a surveyor-like scan of the flatness. Congressman Lacey had been telling Roosevelt about the Petrified Forest of Arizona and the president now got a feel for the topography under the entrancing moonlight. (A few years later Muir would come to the Petrified Forest to study fossils and draw up a map for upholding the area as a national park.) Arriving in Flagstaff at nine o’clock on the morning of May 6, waking up to the light of the sun, Roosevelt felt well rested. Surrounding him were Merriam’s San Francisco Peaks (where Merriam, as head of the Biological Survey, had first discovered this stratification of life zone in 1898). In Flagstaff, the world was full of geological possibilities. Roosevelt had clearly left the hysteria of national politics back in Washington, D.C., 1,900 miles away. He felt isolated and happy. Glory to the West! Glory to John Wesley Powell! Glory to the Arizona Territory! Glory to the Grand Canyon, which at long last he was going to see! Roosevelt was in a glorious frame of mind.

Roosevelt standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon with Governor Brodie of the Arizona Territory.

T.R. standing at the Grand Canyon. (Courtesy of the National Park Service)

V

The president’s arrival at the Grand Canyon (or the Big Ditch, as locals called it) on the morning of May 6 would, in retrospect, become one of the greatest days in environmental history. The Grand Canyon seemed as if it had been born of a cataclysm, with no eyewitnesses or reliable records. Amaranth in color, with a weird purple-orange glow, it also seemed cosmic, full of yearnings and teachings. In A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open Roosevelt called the Grand Canyon “the most wonderful scenery in the world.” He also declared that “to all else that is strange and beautiful in nature the Canyon stands as Karnak and Baalbec, seen by moonlight, stand to all other ruined temples and palaces of the bygone ages.” ⁷⁶

Many Rough Riders were there that May to stand and gaze at the canyon with him. David Warford was among them.⁷⁷ It is not hyperbole to say that Roosevelt’s jaw dropped in disbelief. The geologist Clarence Dutton—whose Tertiary History of the Grand Cañon District Roosevelt had recently read—called this dynamic chasm of the earth’s surface “a great innovation in modern ideas of scenery,” adding that “its full appreciation is a special culture, requiring time, patience, and long familiarity for its consummation.”⁷⁸ Roosevelt now understood what Dutton meant. He had long suspected that the Grand Canyon was the premier natural wonder in America, and now his hunch had been confirmed. He was dying to learn more of its geological secrets. Staring over the ledge of the Grand Canyon made the heart stop at the immensity of it all.

What disturbed Roosevelt, however, was that the Arizona territory was debating whether to preserve the canyon or mine it for zinc, copper, asbestos, etc. Preservation in this case was so obvious that even engaging in debate seemed almost criminal. To Roosevelt, the Grand Canyon was beyond debate by the locals: it must become the exclusive property of the United States to be saved for future generations. Roosevelt immediately resolved to make it a national park following the 1904 election. Thereafter, only horse trails would be allowed. “In a few places the forest is dense,” Roosevelt wrote, “[but] in most places it is sufficiently open to allow a mountain-horse to twist in and out among the tree trunks at a smart canter.”⁷⁹

Roosevelt’s attitude toward the Grand Canyon was uncompromising: he flat-out refused to let corporate avarice or citizens’ ineptitude desecrate the greatest American treasure. He’d go through all the proper motions of getting Congress to designate the Grand Canyon a national park, and if it refused, an executive order would prevail. Roosevelt vowed to make sure that Arizona’s developers never drilled an inch of the Grand Canyon. He hoped his presidential visit would start a widespread grassroots movement to preserve it all—every damn acre in the 1,904 square miles—for perpetuity. Public education in Arizona had to be initiated at once. Too many Arizonans simply looked at the Grand Canyon, Roosevelt scolded, instead of living within its geological essence. The Rough Riders who greeted Roosevelt—by and large the most popular public figures in Arizona—were his first line of preservationist defense. They would ride over any ridge for their beloved colonel. Now, in a public forum, Roosevelt suddenly found himself asking them to crusade with him again, this time on behalf of preserving the magnificent Grand Canyon, which developers denigrated as useless, like Death Valley.

“I want to ask you to do one thing in connection with it,” Roosevelt, at the rim, urged the crowd of Arizonans. “In your own interest and the interest of all the country keep this great wonder of nature as it now is. I hope you won’t have a building of any kind to mar the grandeur and sublimity of the cañon. You cannot improve upon it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it. Keep it for your children and your children’s children and all who come after you as one of the great sights for Americans to see.”⁸⁰

This speech, for which all the leading Arizonan politicians were in the audience, marked the beginning of Roosevelt’s ceaseless determination to save the canyon from destruction. Overawed by its immensity, enjoying even the ground squirrels running across the naked rock, Roosevelt was in rapture. There is something about the Grand Canyon’s power that makes one consider immortality. It was grander than all the music Roosevelt had heard; it was finer than all the Transcendental poetry he had read. John Burroughs had written in Locusts and Wild Honey about the gospel of the ledge, which was nothing less than “eternity” Roosevelt now understood what Oom John had meant.⁸¹ To Roosevelt’s mind this ledge was a no-growth zone. If Roosevelt had done nothing else as president, his advocacy on behalf of preserving the canyon might well have put him in the top ranks of American presidents. Middle Granite Gorge, the Redwall Cliffs of Havasu Falls, Kaibab Plateau, Marble Canyon, Mount Trumball—all topographically part of what would become the Grand Canyon National Park—became treasured places that miners or loggers would never lay to waste, thanks to Roosevelt’s strenuous advocacy. Even industrial activity anywhere near the Grand Canyon wasn’t acceptable to Roosevelt. If Carlyle was correct in saying that all history is forged by the deeds of great men, then Roosevelt earned his place in the American pantheon by simply refusing to let commercial interests desecrate the Grand Canyon.

Clearly, to Roosevelt the Grand Canyon was more than a weather-worn chasm or scarred ledge cutting deep into a mountainous region. It was one the world’s most spectacular examples of the power of erosion. Time was on display at the canyon as nowhere else. At the comfortable El Tovar Hotel on the South Rim, Roosevelt—seeing the Grand Canyon as a symbol of unifying nationalism after the Civil War—told a reporter for the New York Sun that it was one of the “great sights every American should see.”⁸²Once again, the president sounded like a Baedeker guide to the West. Instead of considering the canyon as just a singular natural wonder (like Crater Lake or Wind Cave), he saw it as an irreplaceable part of the Colorado Plateau landscape, which covered approximately 13,000 square miles in northern Arizona, western Colorado, northwestern New Mexico, and eastern Utah. At meetings of the Boone and Crockett Club he used to insist that Yellowstone was the finest geological site in America, but now he knew better. Taken as a whole, the Colorado Plateau included the Grand Canyon, Zion Canyon, Bryce Canyon, Glen Canyon, Rainbow Bridge, the Canyonlands, Capitol Reef, Arches, Four Corners, Mesa Verde, Petrified Forest, the Painted Desert, San Francisco Peaks, Oak Great Canyon, and dozens of other sedimentary attractions. What a stunning terrain! What a watershed! Although Roosevelt had extensive experiences in the Dakota Badlands moonscape, the Colorado Plateau was beyond anything he’d ever fathomed.⁸³

The plant life around the Grand Canyon also greatly interested Roosevelt, despite his weakness in the realm of southwestern botany. He could identify only 100 or so of the 1,500 species of plants found around the canyon’s rim. He could, however, name most of the 300 types of birds that inhabited the area. The sharp-skinned hawk flying above the South Rim he knew would be headed to Central America come fall, and the broad-tailed hummingbirds that whirred about the Hotel Tovar had arrived because the persimmons had started to bloom. The Townsend’s solitaires and Clark’s nutcrackers simply did not migrate: they changed elevations as the weather changed.⁸⁴ He didn’t have to be William Rand or Andrew McNally to know that the abrasive Colorado River didn’t start or end in the Grand Canyon. But an impressive 277 twisting miles of the Colorado coursed through the Grand Canyon; it was considered the most exhilarating whitewater run in the American West. Peering down at the immense canyon floor, Roosevelt understood that a working naturalist would try to comprehend the ecosystem from the bottom up. Unfortunately, as a president on the run, he didn’t have the time for a careful scientific approach. But the Grand Canyon was the vortex of America’s four great deserts—Great Basin, Sonoran, Mojave, and Chihuahuan—and this explained why dozens of cactus species, all amazingly adaptable, many still without names, appeared all around him on the rim. And he vowed to return to the Grand Canyon with his sons.

Insisting on seeing the sun set from the Grand Canyon’s north rim, the warm sky ablaze with ragged bands of orange, pink, and purple, Roosevelt leaned over the ledge to soak in the drama. His train didn’t leave for Barstow until six o’clock that evening, when the dusk would have thickened. Night comes to northern Arizona fast, as if someone were blowing out a candle. Back at the White House twenty-eight days later, he kicked himself for not having allowed two or three free days to explore the canyon. At the very least, he wished Oom John had been at his side during his unforgettable afternoon there. They could have philosophized about ledges. What was becoming clear from the looping 14,000-mile railroad journey was that the beauty of the American West—the real West—once again had Roosevelt spellbound. From the Grand Canyon onward to Los Angeles, all of Roosevelt’s speeches promoted, with intense vitality, the holy trinity of irrigation, forestry, and preservation.

VI

Roosevelt was immediately mesmerized by the high, dry light and yellowish shadows of southern California’s deserts, mountains, valleys, forests, and ocean. No wonder so many people were seeking out its charms. Aridity was a problem for California, so the more forest reserves the state had, the better off it would be. After Roosevelt crossed the Mojave, his pulse quickened as his train approached the San Bernardino Valley. A skirting of timber could be seen in all directions. In his speeches, he became blunt and outspoken about keeping paradise intact. Wherever Roosevelt went in southern California that May, his popularity with children was unprecedented for a politician—they adored him. Too young to remember Lincoln or the generals of the Grand Army of the Republic, boys aged five to fifteen had adopted President Roosevelt as their generation’s George Washington. They knew nothing of Yorktown or Chancellorsville but everything about the gallantry at Kettle Hill. They were in awe of their top-hatted hero, who shouted “Dee-lighted” and “Bully!” from platforms with a theatrical roar, as if he were giving the Rough Riders the order to “Charrrge!”

Riverside. Pomona. Claremont. Pasadena. Los Angeles. Strangers came up to Roosevelt offering their goodwill. Carrying himself straight as a ramrod, the president enjoyed being a moral exemplar—he was the heir of Lincoln and Emerson with a dash of Boone for good measure. Someday historians, he knew, would tell hundreds of stories about his frenetic time in southern California, so he leaned into his own character even more extravagantly than usual. In city after city he was greeted like an American immortal, never to be laid low. On soapbox after soapbox he whipped up Californian onlookers with fine Bryanesque oratory. They could almost burn calories just watching his body language. No American president had ever expressed America’s identity in such a flamboyant, kinetic way. Whether he was lunching at the Westminster Hotel or participating in the annual Fiesta de las Flores, Roosevelt was in love with southern California, particularly the San Gabriel Mountains, which spilled in all directions. Somehow the sky over the 165,000 square miles of California seemed to dance differently from the sky in the east, Roosevelt thought, showcasing shades of blue, purple, red, and gray he’d never known before in his brief acquaintance with Texas, New Mexico, or Arizona.⁸⁵

“I am glad, indeed, to have the chance to visit this wonderful and beautiful State,” he told a crowd of 10,000 in front of the Hotel Casa Loma in Redlands. “But for the country itself, though I had been told so much of its beauty and its wonders, I had never realized or could not realize in advance all I have seen. Coming down over the mountain, I was impressed with the thought more and more of what can be done with the wise use of water and forests of this State. The people have grown to realize that it is indispensable to the future of the country to conserve, properly to use, the water and preserve the great mountain forests…. I think our citizens are realizing more and more that we want to perpetuate the things both of use and beauty. Beauty surely has its place, and you want to make this State more than it even now is—the garden spot of the continent.”⁸⁶

Such rapturous talk about California continued as Roosevelt headed north along the Pacific coast with the powerful Transverse and Santa Lucia ranges looming on the eastward side of the tracks. Ventura. Montecito. Santa Barbara. San Luis Obispo. To promote the Santa Inez and Pile Mountain forest reserves, Roosevelt asked that the U.S. government rangers serve as his special guard. This was a smart, visual way to help locals understand that rangers were akin to the police. According to the New York TimesRoosevelt was in his “best spirits” ever, enthralled by the Pacific blue and bleached skies, the wildlife-thick Channel Islands, the pock-marked Franciscan missions dating from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the flocks of gulls. And for once, reporters didn’t have to hurry up and wait. They could bank on Roosevelt’s punctuality. Perhaps because Roosevelt was praising Catholics while he was in California, the Vatican announced that a special goodwill letter was on its way to the White House from Pope Leo XIII.⁸⁷

By the time Roosevelt arrived in Santa Clara County, most Californians were eager to impress him. Already he had become close to the locals. His almost magical personal charm had worked wonders. Californians in effect crowned him king of the sequoias. With U.S. Army forest rangers at his side he toured the gorgeous seaside sites around Santa Cruz and Monterey Bay. There were shifting seascapes, coastal pines, crashing waves, expansive ocean views, hulking rocks, dizzying cliffs, and grass-covered headlands ornamented with purple and yellow wildflowers. Seeing the Pacific Ocean in all its glory buoyed Roosevelt; it allowed him to believe that all his pro-western expansionist views since childhood had been spot-on. Could anybody imagine America without California? With a burst of nationalistic enthusiasm, Roosevelt proclaimed that every seal rock or lone cypress he saw was a U.S. treasure. The groves of sequoias, in particular, filled him with unmitigated joy. No photograph, he said, could possibly do them justice. “You have a wonderful State,” Roosevelt proclaimed on May 11. “I am glad to see your big trees and to see that they are being preserved. They should be, as they are the heritage of the ages. They should be left unmarred for our children and our children’s children, and so on down the ages.”⁸⁸

Accompanying Roosevelt on this leg of the California tour was Columbia University’s president Nicholas Murray Butler, whose unobtrusive intelligence the president enjoyed. (Butler didn’t seem to mind that Roosevelt, on May 14, received an honorary law doctorate from a rival of Columbia, University of California–Berkeley.⁸⁹) Following an alfresco luncheon in Santa Cruz with naval reservists, Roosevelt, as he would do again in the coming days, threw away his planned remarks and spoke spontaneously about the ethical imperative of saving sequoias and redwoods. They seemed rarer to Roosevelt than a centaur, a hippogriff, or a winged donkey. “This is my first glimpse of the big trees. I desire to pay tribute to the associations, private owners, and State for preserving these trees.”⁹⁰

However, Roosevelt believed that the redwoods’ protectors—well-meaning conservationist citizens all—had demeaned the lordly trees by hammering placards on them such as “Big Pete,” “Old Fremont,” or “Uncle John.” The sight of these advertisements fretted and annoyed Roosevelt. Even though he posed in front of one bearing such a sign—“Giant”—he thought the practice tasteless. “Let me preach to you a moment,” Roosevelt said. “All of us desire to see nature preserved. Above all, the trees should not be marred by placing cards of names on them. People who do that should be sternly discouraged. The cards give an air of ridicule to the solemn and majestic giants. They should be taken down. I ask you to keep all cards off the trees, or any kind of signs that will mar them. See to it that the trees are preserved: that the gift is kept unmarred. You can never replace a tree. Oh, I am pleased to be here among these wonderful redwoods. I thank you for giving me this enjoyment. Preserve and keep what nature has done.”⁹¹

Then Roosevelt requested that he be given private time alone in a redwood grove for reverie. After all, he was in one of God’s great cathedrals, and he wanted to wander in solitude, listening only to the song sparrows and orange-crowned warblers in absolute allegiance with enchanted nature. Truly he was in a state of astonishment, looking upward as the elfin light beamed in between the sequoias. The trees had a dwarfing effect; a single redwood weighed about 3,000 tons. To Roosevelt they were priceless when standing tall and irrecoverable if fallen. As the president disappeared deeper into the forest his personal secretary, William Loeb, led a spontaneous community effort to remove all the commercialized signs that had desecrated the trees. When he returned from his hike, Roosevelt accepted the honor of having a redwood named after him. There was, however, a nonnegotiable condition: no sign reading “Roosevelt Tree” would ever be posted. He couldn’t stomach such an insult in his name. Everybody agreed to the terms, and that vaguely comforted the president. Still, he warned that thirsty timber jackals would someday come after the sequoias with industrial saws. Californians, he believed, had a patriotic obligation to defend them.

Following a conservation speech in San Jose, Roosevelt asked that more redwoods be added to the itinerary. He simply couldn’t see enough of these ancient sentinels. Each tree—some had a diameter of thirty feet—had its own wondrous personality. The redwoods dwarfed all the trees of the Catskills and the Adirondacks. While he was touring the Santa Cruz mountains, especially those near Boulder Creek and Felton, he started calling the redwoods “giants.” During the coming days he would meet fruit growers, ranchers, fishermen, and a woman from Watsonville who had thirty-four children. He spoke at Stanford University and in affluent Burlingame (commonly called “City of the Trees”). But all he could really talk about was the utter majesty of the Sequoia sempervirens, which John Steinbeck would later call “ambassadors from another time.” (Or, as Burroughs was fond of saying, they were “living joys, something to love.”⁹²) It sickened Roosevelt to think that redwood raiders were clear-cutting these old-growth trees for house decks and unnecessary porches (redwood was a prized luxury wood because it didn’t rot). In a speech on May 13 at Stanford University, where the president of the university, David Starr Jordan, introduced him, Roosevelt gave a long address about Congress saving the wilderness heritage. The coastal hills and groves of California, Roosevelt said, needed increased permanent preservation by the federal government.

When Roosevelt arrived in San Francisco for a three-day visit, more than 200,000 people lined the streets to see him. They admired his courage on the battlefield, his reforming spirit, his pluck, his humor, and his ambition, and they were impressed by his national celebrity. San Francisco also held a parade in his honor, but the main event was a dedication of a monument to Admiral Dewey at Union Square. For this dedication, sleeping mats had been unrolled on the sidewalks so that women wouldn’t get their dresses dirty. Everyone waited for the president’s triumphant wave of the fist—a gesture he had adopted since his days of boxing at Harvard. The entire Bay Area seemed aroused by the event. Civil War veterans offered snappy salutes to Roosevelt as if he were the head of an old soldiers’ home—a position far more impressive to them than the presidency. In the most pugnacious speech of his western trip, delivered from a hastily constructed platform at the Mechanics’ Pavilion, Roosevelt declared that America’s destiny was on the Pacific Ocean. “Before I saw the Pacific slope I was an expansionist,” he said, “and after having seen it I fail to understand how—any man confident of his country’s greatness and glad that his country should challenge with proud confidence our mighty future—can be anything but an expansionist. In the century that is opening the commerce and the progress of the Pacific will be factors of incalculable moment in the history of the world.”⁹³

And the Californians cheered: the oyster pirates from Oakland, the grape growers of Napa Valley, the lumbermen from Marin County, the ragtag orphans from North Beach, the horse breeders from the San Joaquin Valley, the naval officers stationed at the Presidio, the old-time rustics from Point de Reyes, the fishermen from Sausalito, the dandies from Nob Hill, the restaurateurs from Chinatown, the academics from Berkeley, the avocado growers from Fallbrook, the raisin pickers from Fresno, the eggheads from Menlo Park, the flower merchants from Ventura, the old-time miners from the Sierras, and the buffalo soldiers providing backup Secret Service duty, in addition to every state bureaucrat and politician able to walk. A few Rough Riders had ventured north from Arizona—using their veterans’ pensions for train fare—hoping to rekindle remembrance of and pride in the Spanish-American War. And nature helped Roosevelt out. The May inrush of Pacific breeze stimulated the rally like a tonic. Newspapers tried to capture the collective energy of the throng, which hummed with the force of a bass organ pipe from Union Square all the way down to Fisherman’s Wharf.

That May 13 in San Francisco marked the apogee of Roosevelt’s eventful days as president. All his nationalistic notions, it seemed, were pulled together into a credible narrative for the United States. To Roosevelt the main thrust of American history was western expansionism. The wars with Indians, redcoats, Mexicans, and Spaniards had been worth it. With the building of the Panama Canal the United States would have a two-ocean navy. With Hawaii and the Philippines the nation had steppingstone ports for the fabled China trade. America wasn’t going to be denied its economic empire. And California, he believed, was the gold star of empire. Of course, national politics was full of drum-beating American expansionists, imperialists, and proponents of manifest destiny. What was unique about President Roosevelt was his righteous insistence that Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, the redwoods, Mount Olympus, the Painted Desert and so on were the rightful trophies of expansionism. As a conquering conservationist-preservationist he wanted them all saved. At a banquet at Cliff House, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Roosevelt vowed that the aboriginal American spirit toward the wilderness had to flourish in the twentieth century. Nature was the great replenisher for the American people. His spirit deeply inspired by the beauty of the West, Roosevelt was a rare instance of constructive hyper-Americanism, since his message was that your state has something far more valuable than gold: green forests, sour green glades, box canyons, high plateaus, granitescapes, and lookouts around every bend. When it came to nature preservation, Roosevelt gushed a positively progressive effect onto the collective American psyche.

It’s been said by modern environmentalists that Roosevelt had a conflict of loyalties in the West between pro-growth policies like the Reclamation Act and pro-preservation policies like saving the redwoods. This is true. Basically, he wanted to have it both ways. Starting with Roosevelt Dam on the Salt River near Phoenix, Arizona, virtually every major waterway in the West was altered by environmentally destructive engineering projects that T.R. OK’d. Roosevelt saw himself as the master preservationist but also beamed as a master builder. Save the Grand Canyon while building the Roosevelt Dam—that was his conservationist policy. To Roosevelt, conservation could be another form of conquest; development and protection working in harmony for an Edenic civilization. When push came to shove, economic growth often took precedence over his preservationism. He made his decisions case by case. Conservation as big business was regularly given precedence over conservation as protection—but there were many exceptions. Over the decades, this has made him something of a bogeyman to the Sierra Club types. Following President Dwight Eisenhower’s speech about the industrial-military complex in 1961, for example, Roosevelt’s Reclamation Service was denounced by anti-war enviromentalists like Dave Brower and Wallace Stesner as scientific capitalism run amok. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, historians lacerated Roosevelt for his imperialistic views, which they equated with the policies that had led to Vietnam. And, unlike John Wesley Powell, a generation of enviromental historians led by Donald Worster complained, Roosevelt liked big dams—big everything, including a big intrusive federal government.

But the anti-Roosevelt critics went too far. President Lyndon Johnson’s entire “New Conservationism” of the 1960s was purposefully modeled on ideals T.R. had first propounded. And modern environmentalists were aware that Roosevelt had also likedbignational forests: in 1908, for example, he created the Tongass National Forest, which stretched over 500 miles from north to south in Alaska and included more than 11,000 miles of rugged coastline (a figure equal to nearly 50 percent of the entire coastline of the lower forty-eight.) ⁹⁴ As Roosevelt’s attitude toward the redwoods showed during this California trip, he was emotionally a forest preservationist while politically a utilitarian conservationist. It was the right combination for his times. But never for a moment did Roosevelt purposely seek to abuse the American West in any way. But such sincerity had its limits: Roosevelt lacked self-awareness regarding his very real contradiction, his insistence on bigness wrought on the western landscape. Yet, always, he wanted to create model cities surrounded by greenbelts of wilderness. He was a promoter of sustainability before the concept came into vogue during the Clinton era of the 1990s.

Journalists throughout California commented on how hard Roosevelt was working during his two-week statewide tour to inject conservation into the political bloodstream. The Los Angeles Times wrote of his “strenuosity,” and the Oakland Tribunecalled him a “drayhorse working every hour.”⁹⁵ And although she was not involved in policy, the first lady did participate in tree (or at least shrubbery) preservation in the East. Edith Roosevelt was making news by objecting publicly when remodelers at the White House wanted to remove more than seventy bushes from the terrace. She had grown fond of the shrubbery and wanted it to stay put. Even when she was told that the bushes would be carefully removed and replanted in New Jersey, she insisted that they be left unmarred and unmoved.

VII

After shaking so many hands, Roosevelt needed an outdoor adventure in the Sierras. Shortly after midnight on May 15 he left San Francisco for Yosemite Valley with an honorary doctorate from the University of California–Berkeley in hand. Accompanying him was his delegation, which included the Sierra Club’s president, John Muir; Governor George C. Pardee of California; and Benjamin Wheeler, president of the University of California–Berkeley. The party enjoyed the scenic mountain ramparts en route, and then Roosevelt’s train stopped at Raymond, the railroad depot closest to Yosemite. Three previous U.S. presidents had visited Yosemite—James Garfield in 1875, Ulysses S. Grant in 1879, and Rutherford B. Hayes in 1885—but not while in office, so Roosevelt’s visitwas a first. And instead of coming to the national park merely as a political gesture, Roosevelt planned to study Yosemite as a naturalist—hence Muir’s presence at his side. “Of course of all the people in the world,” Roosevelt said, “[Muir] was the one with whom it was best worth while thus to see the Yosemite.” ⁹⁶

Roosevelt and Muir, taking a buggy, headed straight for the “big tree” section—Mariposa Grove, where some of the oldest redwoods in California grew. A photograph was snapped of them driving through the rather touristy Wawona Tunnel Tree (a towering sequoia that fell in 1969). Mariposa Grove wasn’t yet officially part of Yosemite National Park in 1903 but Roosevelt hoped it might soon be. As the New York Times reported, Roosevelt and Muir arrived in Mariposa Grove on a bright, perfectly clear day, had lunch, and then wandered off together. Walking around the huge circumferences of the redwoods with Muir, staring upward more than 250 feet to see the top branches, Roosevelt was in his element.⁹⁷ While studying the famous “Grizzly Giant,” the president blurted out, intensely, that this was “the greatest forest site” he had ever seen.⁹⁸ The naturalist Henry Fairfield Osborn had said of Muir that he “wrote about trees as no one else in the whole history of trees, chiefly because he loved them as he loved men and women.”⁹⁹ Now Roosevelt understood what Muir had been so rhapsodical about over many years. “There are the big trees, Mr. Roosevelt,” Muir excitedly said. “Mr. Muir,” Roosevelt said with a smile, “it is good to be with you.” ¹⁰⁰

Muir had an ethereal quality and his erudition was simultaneously bold and profound. Roosevelt immediately admired him. Muir’s eyes were deep blue, his hair was ginger-reddish, and his attitude was life-affirming. While Roosevelt thought in terms of Americanism in nature, Muir thought about the planet in peril. He had even once titled a journal: “John Muir, Earth-planet, Universe.” Having read all of Muir’s works, and realizing that the great naturalist had spent thirty years studying the trees, rocks, canyons, falls, and glaciers of Yosemite, Roosevelt felt like a student arriving at an academy. Furthermore, Merriam had advised Roosevelt to camp with his friend Muir; he predicted it would be one of the memorable moments of his life.¹⁰¹

Because no authoritative account was ever written of Roosevelt and Muir’s trip of 1903, it has been pieced together by varied sources over the years. Together, Roosevelt and Muir did explore the park for three days and two nights. Even though Roosevelt was officially booked at the Glacier Point Hotel, he instead camped with Muir in the great outdoors. They would drink in the fresh air, survey the ridgelines, and listen to each other’s voice echoing out over the Yosemity Valley. The U.S. Army oversaw the park and was extremely accommodating of Roosevelt’s needs. But Roosevelt wanted lots of privacy. Waving a captain and thirty cavalrymen away with a “God bless you,” Roosevelt made it clear that he wanted to be alone with Muir among the thickset trees and trailside brush. Only the guides Charlie Leidig and Archie Leanor and the U.S. Army climber Jacker Alder were allowed to untie the saddlehorn rope to be part of the presidential entourage when a hike was in order.¹⁰²

The president treated Muir as his absolute equal throughout the Yosemite adventure. Roosevelt and Muir were both mavericks and shared a strong, rare bond: appreciation of nature. “[Muir] was emphatically a good citizen,” Roosevelt noted. “Not only are his books delightful, not only is he the author to whom all men turn when they think of the Sierras and northern glaciers, and the giant trees of the California slope, but he was also—what few nature lovers are—a man able to influence contemporary thought and action on the subjects to which he had devoted his life. He was a great factor in influencing the thought of California and the thought of the entire country so as to secure the preservation of those great natural phenomena—wonderful canyons, giant trees, slopes of flower-spangled hillsides—which make California a veritable Garden of the Lord.”¹⁰³

Leaving Mariposa Grove, the Roosevelt party headed to Yosemite’s south entrance by carriage, through a handsome glen. As he got out of the carriage, Roosevelt asked for his valise—he didn’t like being separated from his personal belongings. When told that the Yosemite Park Commission had brought his baggage to a banquet lunch, he grew enraged. “Get it!,” he shouted. According to Muir the two words, barked with an authoritarian air, were like bullets being fired.¹⁰⁴ Although reporters sometimes portrayed Muir as a misanthrope, he made friends quickly. There was never a moment of awkwardness with Roosevelt. Really, the only strange thing about Muir was that he had never once shaved in his life.¹⁰⁵

On May 15 Roosevelt and Muir mounted horses and trotted off into the vast sequoia lands near the Sunset Tree. The strength and beauty of Yosemite were undeniable. Somehow, there was a summery fragrance in the air even though there was snow. Roosevelt praised the cinnamon-colored sequoias’ enduring beauty. Roosevelt recalled in An Autobiography, “The majestic trunks, beautiful in color and in symmetry, rose round us like the pillars of a mightier cathedral than ever was conceived even by the fervor of the Middle Ages. Hermit thrushes sang beautifully in the evening, and again, with a burst of wonderful music, at dawn.”¹⁰⁶ That evening they built a campfire; continually feeding it wood, they talked until the fire drew down to coals. It was the most famous campfire ever in the annals of the conservation movement. Over the popping and crackling logs Roosevelt and Muir talked about forest good and slept soundly without a tent.

At sunrise on May 16 Roosevelt and Muir decided to forgo the day’s official itinerary and ride horseback by themselves through the melting snow along an old Indian trail to Glacier Point. There is a marvelous photograph of Roosevelt and Muir standing on a ledgerock overlooking the valley, a respectable 3,200 feet high, with Yosemite Falls thundering at their backs. On close inspection, patches of diminishing snow are noticeable on the thawed ground. Roosevelt looks ready to draw a weapon; Muir is seemingly relaxed, hands behind his back. Over the decades this photograph has become an icon promoting American national parks, for the Sierra Club and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service alike. It has been reproduced on book jackets and in magazines. According to historian Donald Worster of the University of Kansas, Roosevelt and Muir had good reason to look so satisfied in each other’s august company. “They have just agreed that ownership of the much-abused valley below should revert to the federal government and become part of Yosemite Park,” he notes in an analysis of the photograph. “Politically, they have forged a formidable alliance on behalf of nature.”¹⁰⁷

Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir at Mariposa Grove in California.

T.R. and Muir at Mariposa Grove. β (Courtesy of the National Park Service)

Through a blinding snowstorm, Roosevelt and Muir footslogged to Sentinel Dome, a few miles from Glacier Point Hotel. Five feet of snow already lay on the ground. A little base camp was chosen sheltered from the frost heave and glaze ice.¹⁰⁸ Muir built a marvelous bonfire that second evening and made a bed of ferns and cedar boughs. “Watch this,” Muir said. Grabbing a flaming branch from the campfire he lit a dead pine tree on a ledge. With a roar, as if a squirt of gasoline had been administered, the flame shot up the dead branches. Suddenly Muir did a Scottish jig around the pine torch. Such ritualistic acts were right up Roosevelt’s alley. Leaping to his feet he hopped around the flaming tree, shouting “Hurrah!” over and over again into the night sky. “That’s a candle,” Roosevelt told Muir, “it took 500 years to make. Hurrah for Yosemite! Mr. Muir.”¹⁰⁹

Muir was born in Dunbar, Scotland, on April 21, 1838. When he was eleven his family emigrated from Glasgow to Marquette County, Wisconsin. Throughout his adolescence he toiled on his father’s farm and tinkered with clocks, barometers, hydrometers, and table saws. When he was eighteen he almost died from “choke damp” while digging a well. During the Civil War he enrolled at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he invented a study desk that retrieved a book, held it stationary for hours, then automatically replaced it with a different volume. It was a weird contraption, but it indicates how enthusiastic a bibliophile Muir was. With eagerness and diligence Muir read about Henry David Thoreau’s rejection of bourgeois society and Robert Burns’s revolutionary democracy. The sage Ralph Waldo Emerson, as an old man, encountered Muir and deemed him “one of my men,” a true-blue Transcendentalist.¹¹⁰

Over time botany became Muir’s passion. In 1863 he took his first botanical tramp along the Wisconsin River to the upper Mississippi River. Hunting for plants liberated him from religious orthodoxy and family commitments. He drifted to Ontario, Canada, working for a long spell at a sawmill and a broom and rake factory. In Ontario he discovered the rare orchid Calypso borealis (this led to his first published article in the Boston Recorder). Odd jobs became Muir’s specialty: they were his way to finance his botanical tramps. In 1867, however, a factory accident made Muir temporarily blind. When his vision returned, he made a vow to himself: he would dedicate his life to nature (“the University of the Wilderness,” as he called it). Off he went on a 1,000-mile walk to the Gulf of Mexico and Florida (with South America his eventual destination). When a bout of fever prevented him from tramping south of the Tropic of Cancer, he contemplated the relationship between man and nature in new and profound ways while his temperature soared to over 100 degrees. Like Roosevelt, Muir concluded that all species have an inherent value and a right to exist. Not until 1911, however, would Muir fulfill his dream of exploring the Amazon of Brazil and the mountains of Chile.

Muir’s arrival to San Francisco in 1868 forever changed his life. From April to June, he hiked around Yosemite. Walled in by the Sierra range, Muir was captivated by the enduring rocks, slow-moving glaciers, and ancient redwoods, which Yosemite offered up in astonishing numbers. There was a grace to Yosemite which defied language; it was a terrestrial manifestation of the Almighty. There was no denominational snobbishness and no chosen people in nature; there was just one big sky. “His studies in the Sierra, earnestly as they were pursued, were only secondary—his rapt admiration of the dawn and the alpenglow, of majestic trees that wave and pray, of rejoicing waters, and the sacred, history-bearing rocks, of night and the stars on lonely mountain tops,” Clara Barrus wrote in an article for The Craftsman, “reveal the soul of the mystic.”¹¹¹

From 1869 on, Muir’s almost wanderlust life was framed by holy Yosemite: making his first ascent of Cathedral Peak; taking Ralph Waldo Emerson to see the great falls; publishing his first article in California on glaciers; and articulating the wilderness protection ethos in Century magazine. In between there were all sorts of fine outdoor adventures ranging from climbing Mount Shasta (14,400 feet) to floating 200 miles down the Sacramento River. But somehow he always came back to holy Yosemite. Muir’s discoveries in Alaska, his promotion of U.S. national parks like General Grant and Sequoia, and his creation of the Sierra Club in 1892 brought him much celebrity back east. He became wild California personified to the New York literary set. When Muir published his first book in 1894—The Mountains of California—he became widely known as the “sage of the Sierras,” the West Coast counterpart of John Burroughs. Before long he was writing so much high-quality prose that the term “Muirian” came into academic use.¹¹²

From the outset, there was much Roosevelt admired about Muir. Although Muir sometimes played the misanthrope, he had a shrewd political instinct. Memories of Yosemite seemed to gush out of Muir once back in the San Francisco Bay area. “Ordinarily, the man who loves the woods and the mountains, the trees, the flowers, and the wild things, has in him some indefinable quality of charm which appeals even to those sons of civilization who care for little outside of paved streets and brick walls,” Roosevelt wrote. “John Muir was a fine illustration of this rule…. His was a dauntless soul, and also one brimming over with friendliness and kindliness.”¹¹³

Not only did Muir write as naturalist with the authority of someone like Thoreau or Burroughs; he also joined the U.S. Forestry Commission, offering practical advice on land management. He could play the wonk when necessary. Muir’s articles inHarper’s Weekly and Atlantic Monthly galvanized popular support for protecting forests. Although history always associates Muir with Yosemite, he was also largely responsible for Mount Rainer’s becoming a national park in 1899. So when Roosevelt arrived in Muir’s backyard, Yosemite National Park, in 1903 the sixty-five-year-old Muir was celebrated worldwide as a wise man. That year alone, and the next, Muir traveled to London, Paris, Berlin, Russia, Finland, Korea, Japan, China, India, Egypt, Ceylon, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Hawaii. Roosevelt had purposefully come to Yosemite before Muir left on his intercontinental tour. The president wanted to pay homage to Muir (and to exploit their high-profile rapport for the history books).

The general goodwill between Roosevelt and Muir that spring was exemplary. Both men had gone after the “malefactors of great wealth” in the West for raping the natural landscape. Muir was thrilled that President Roosevelt—through Secretary of the Interior Hitchcock—was punishing those who abused their power at the GLO (and even forcing the commissioner Binger Hermann to resign in disgrace for covering up the Halsinger Report regarding land fraud in Arizona). Directing Hitchcock to investigate illegal land grabbers such as John A. Benson and Frederick A. Hyde (two lawyers in San Francisco whom Muir deeply distrusted), President Roosevelt waged “historic warfare” against dishonest California cooper syndicates, real estate speculators, thieves at the land office, and lumber companies. Under Roosevelt’s influence the county indicted Binger Hermann, Senator Mitchell of Oregon, and Benson and Hyde. In other words, besides their insatiable love for the outdoors, Roosevelt and Muir shared enemies lists.¹¹⁴

Roosevelt and Muir in Yosemite National Park.

T.R. and Muir at Yosemite National Park. (Courtesy of the Sierra Club)

The great three-night Yosemite campout of Roosevelt and Muir almost didn’t happen, owing to conflicting schedules. As noted Muir had planned to travel around the world promoting national parks with his conservationist friend Charles S. Sargent that May. But Roosevelt, upon hearing of this, sent Muir a coaxing personal letter. “I do not want anyone with me but you,” he wrote, “and I want to drop politics absolutely for four days and just be out in the open with you.”¹¹⁵ Realizing that such private time with the president discussing vulnerable Yosemite would be invaluable to the preservationist movement, Muir wiggled out of his other commitment. “I might be able to do some good in talking freely around the campfire,” Muir told Sargent apologetically.¹¹⁶

As difficult decisions go, Muir was right to postpone his globe-trotting to spend this time with Roosevelt. Roosevelt and Muir, in the temple of Yosemite, vowed to let their biographies be intertwined for the sake of the conservation movement they were both leading, each in his own way. In effect, the Sierra Club joined forces with the Boone and Crockett Club—hikers and hunters forged an alliance on behalf of California’s preservation. Always a biosphere activist, Muir talked nonstop with Roosevelt about the Sierra Club’s ambition to get the Yosemite Valley incorporated into the surrounding park. And his stories of reckless timber depredations were ideal for arousing Roosevelt to shout down the “swine”—his new favorite word. Muir proved masterful at riling Roosevelt up. “I stuffed him pretty well regarding the timber thieves,” Muir later bragged to a friend, “and the destructive work of the lumbermen, and other spoilers of the forests.” As for Roosevelt, he admired Muir’s dedication to California’s beauty. Muir, he knew, was a hero and a live wire when it came to preserving Yosemite; Muir spoke directly and from the heart at all times. At one point, by the campfire, Roosevelt began telling his yarns about big game hunting. Muir, however, was bored and was singularly unimpressed. “Mr. Roosevelt,” he asked, “when are you going to get beyond the boyishness of killing things…. Are you not getting far enough along to leave that off?” After a moment’s pause Roosevelt, in a softer voice than usual, replied, “Muir, I guess you are right.”¹¹⁷ (But while Roosevelt did start promoting the camera instead of the rifle, he never gave up the sport of shooting big game.)

Because Muir was the California mountain man, Roosevelt embraced him as a fellow advocate of the strenuous life. Muir’s philosophical concept of God as being found in nature likewise earned Roosevelt’s approval. They were joined at the hip in both regards. But Roosevelt was truly at odds with Muir over sport hunting. When Muir, for example, received a solicitation to support a society called the Sons of Daniel Boone (which was like the Boy Scouts), he demurred. Young Americans, Muir wrote, needed to mature away from “natural hunting blood-loving savagery into natural sympathy with all our fellow mortals—plants and animals as well as men.” And this wasn’t an isolated antihunting statement. Muir’s correspondence after 1903 is laden with criticisms of “the murder business of hunting,” and with demands that the “rights of animals” be enforced as ethical standards. This was a far cry from Roosevelt’s and Burroughs’s belief that sportsmanlike hunting and fishing provided “ideal training for manhood” and would in the end “save the nation” from effeminacy.¹¹⁸

Hunting wasn’t the only intellectual division between Roosevelt and Muir. Roosevelt liked Gifford Pinchot too much for Muir’s comfort. Ever since the dispute in Portland Muir saw Pinchot as—for the most part—a deadly enemy. Muir didn’t recognize the Pinchot who helped save wonders like Crater Lake or Wind Cave; he saw only a featureless scoundrel who had once said that forests were a factory for trees.¹¹⁹ And soon to come was Muir’s tragic disagreement with Pinchot over Hetch Hetchy—the glacial valley filled by the Tuolumne River in 1923 with the construction of the O’Shaughnessy Dam. Why didn’t Roosevelt use an executive order to save Hetch Hetchy? Still, some historians have mistakenly downplayed Roosevelt and Muir’s mutual admiration society. There was a very real tenderness between them. Ever since Muir formed the Sierra Club in 1892, Roosevelt had kept a close eye on his courageous actions; Roosevelt was, in fact, a New York cheerleader for Muir. While Roosevelt always saw Ulysses S. Grant as the “father of the national parks,” he knew that Muir was California’s watchdog. In particular Roosevelt’s famous essay “Wilderness Reserves” echoes Muir’s 1901 book, Our National Parks. However, Roosevelt was disappointed that unlike Burroughs, Muir simply didn’t know his birds; he was focused on “the trees and the flowers and the cliffs.”¹²⁰

Because Roosevelt considered himself “many-sided” he unhesitatingly and admiringly accepted Muir’s self-description as a Californian “poetico-trampo-geologist-bot. and ornith-natural, etc!—etc!—etc!”¹²¹ By 2009 the John Muir National Historic Site had created a Web site featuring dozens of “Muirisms” arranged alphabetically. Whether you looked under “Age” or “Rough It” or “Water Ouzel,” all of these pearls of wisdom could have been written by Roosevelt; their viewpoints on nature were that closely shared. With great enthusiasm, Roosevelt read Muir, savoring lines like: “Any glimpse into the life of an animal quickens our own and makes it so much the larger and better every way.”¹²² And Muir wrote to his wife that Roosevelt was “so interesting,” overflowing with “hearty & manly” companionship.¹²³ “Camping with the president was a remarkable experience,” Muir told Merriam. “I fairly fell in love with him.”¹²⁴

Oh, what a grand time Roosevelt and Muir had together in Yosemite for those three memorable days. They hiked to and camped in many of the most beautiful spots in Yosemite, including Bridal Veil Falls, where they had a fantastic view of El Capitan and Ribbon Falls gushing down from the valley’s north rim. Religious metaphors filled Roosevelt’s writings about Yosemite, with Muir serving as his Old Testament guide through the wilderness. (Except that Muir’s god wasn’t the god of ancient Israel.) For starters, there didn’t seem to be a sickly face within 100 miles of the park; such human healthiness always appealed to Roosevelt. Even though Yosemite was a national park, bear traps were still laid on the floor of Yosemite Valley; Roosevelt wanted the “setters” arrested. Only hunting bears with rifle or knife was a sport; there should be no steel traps in a national park.¹²⁵

Although Roosevelt changed clothes a few times, he is remembered as wearing jodhpurs with puttees, a thick sweater, a Stetson hat, and around his neck a soiled bandanna. Muir wore an oversize coat and loose-fitting trousers, looking rather like a hobo who had been cleaned up for a photo. Both men later boasted that they were alone in the Sierras, but Leidig and Lenord were constantly with them. There were also two packers and three mules.

Housed in the Yosemite National Park Archive is a detailed report of Roosevelt and Muir’s visit of 1903, written by Charlie Leidig, one of the trail guides. It gives a revelatory insider’s look at the trip. Leidig, for example, claimed that Roosevelt was annoyed when Muir wanted to stick a twig in one of the president’s buttonholes. He also noted that “some difficulty was encountered because both men wanted to do all the talking.” According to Leidig the president snored loudly, mimicked birds exactly, ate huge amounts of steak-fried chicken, and disdained crowds. Roosevelt’s primary order was to “outskirt and keep away from civilization.” ¹²⁶ Highlights, according to Leidig, included seeing the sonorous Bridal Veil Falls, or Pohono (“puffing wind”), as the Indians called them.¹²⁷

Roosevelt complained that the botanist and ornithologist Muir was much more interested in the trees than in the deer families they encountered along the primitive trail.¹²⁸ Muir explained to Roosevelt on the third day, May 17, that he had an ulterior motive, an agenda item—saving Mount Shasta along the California-Oregon border and enlarging Yosemite National Park to include Mariposa Grove at the Yosemite Valley. Roosevelt was all ears, enjoying himself in the timeless hills and valleys of Yosemite. Always intent on self-mythologizing, Roosevelt had created a “lost in the wild” scenario for himself. It made for good copy. There was something very romantic, indeed, about the president of the United States sleeping outside in a snowstorm, high in the Sierras, with the weather-worn John Muir as a companion. At sunrise Roosevelt and Muir hiked into Yosemite Valley, camping within range of the spray from Bridal Veil Falls. “John Muir talked even better than he wrote,” Roosevelt found out in Yosemite. “His greatest influence was always upon those who were brought into personal contact with him.”¹²⁹

Back at the Sentinel Hotel, still pumped up with adrenaline, Roosevelt was unbelievably buoyant. He portrayed himself as a surviving backwoodsman, trapped by the harsh winter, eating dusty bread. “We were in a snowstorm last night, and it was just what I wanted,” he said. “This is the one day of my life and one that I will always remember with pleasure. Just think of where I was last night. Up there!” President Benjamin Wheeler of the University of California–Berkeley hosted a dinner for Roosevelt at the Sentinel Hotel in the park. Instead of speechifying, Roosevelt recounted his exploits with Muir on Glacier Point “amid the pines and the silver firs in Sierrian solitude, in a snowstorm, too, and without a tent.” Again he declared, “I passed one of the most pleasant nights of my life. It was so reviving to be so close to nature in this magnificent forest of yours.”

Muir had been a wise, shrewd host. His desired effect had been to galvanize President Roosevelt to save more of wild California from human destruction. The camping in Yosemite clearly worked. Back in Washington, D.C., Roosevelt urged Congress to bring as many California redwoods as possible into the national park system. He wanted both the Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Grove to be part of the Yosemite National Park (at the time, they weren’t). Immediately after leaving Yosemite, while he was in Sacramento, Roosevelt fired off a telegram to Secretary of the Interior Hitchcock. “I should like to have an extension of the forest reserves to include the California forests throughout the Mount Shasta region and its extensions. Will you not consult Pinchot about this and have the orders prepared?”¹³⁰

No sooner had Roosevelt sent the order saving the Mount Shasta region than he wrote Muir a thank-you letter; he was already missing Muir’s companionship and merry blue eyes. They had achieved a feeling of brotherhood. “I trust I need not tell you, my dear sir, how happy were the days in Yellowstone I owed to you, and how greatly I appreciated them,” he wrote. “I shall never forget our three camps; the first in the solemn temple of the giant sequoias; the next in the snowstorm among the silver firs near the brink of the cliff; and the third on the floor of the Yosemite, in the open valley, fronting the stupendous rocky mass of El Capitan, with the falls thundering in the distance on either hand.”¹³¹ Attached to this letter was his telegram to Hitchcock.

In Sacramento, still full of his Yosemite experience, Roosevelt also spoke publicly on behalf of the Muirian vision of California. Some Californians had demonized Muir as a “fanatic” or “cold-hearted crusader who cared too much for nature and too little for humans”—but Roosevelt was now a defender of the Sierra Club.¹³² “Lying out at night under the giant sequoias had been like lying in a temple built by no hand of man, a temple grander than any human architect could by any possibility build, and I hope for the preservation of the groves of giant trees simply because it would be a shame to our civilization to let them disappear,” he said. “They are monuments in themselves…. In California I am impressed by how great the State is, but I am even more impressed by the immensely greater greatness that lies in the future, and I ask that your marvelous natural resources be handed on unimpaired to your posterity. We are not building this country of ours for a day. It is to last through the ages.”¹³³

VIII

Sacramento wasn’t a very impressive city after Yosemite. It was all dull buildings and mud holes, surrounded by impressive trees. As scheduled, Roosevelt delivered a few speeches in a high clear voice. In Sacramento, at the state capitol, men were wearing wingtips instead of buckskin boots. On leaving Sacramento Roosevelt headed straight to Mount Shasta—known as the “glorious sentinel of the Northern Gateway to California’s flowery glades”—which was shrouded in clouds.¹³⁴ Rising upward like a mysterious fortress of oneness overlooking the surrounding Klamath Basin terrain, lonely Mount Shasta was seemingly unconnected to any range.¹³⁵ The beat poets Jack Kerouac, Lew Welch, and Gary Snyder would later describe Shasta, in cloud and sunshine, as if it were an embodiment of Zen, or California’s Fuji. The memory of Shasta stuck in Roosevelt’s mind for years to come. The artist Harry Cassie Best, hearing of the president’s adulation of Shasta, presented Roosevelt with a realist painting of the snow-clad monarch bathed in eloquent pinks, subdued oranges, and rose-misted purples. The talented Best was able to depict reflected light in the British tradition of J. M. W. Turner. “I appreciate very much your painting, the ‘Afterglow on Mount Shasta,’” Roosevelt wrote to Best, “and shall give it a place of honor in my home. I consider the evening twilight on Mt. Shasta one of the grandest sights I have ever witnessed.”¹³⁶ With President Roosevelt’s help many of Best’s paintings of California ended up hanging at the Cosmos Club.¹³⁷

In Oregon the president’s train headed to the downtown Portland depot, where 20,000 people had come to witness the laying of a cornerstone for a Lewis and Clark Memorial. For hours Roosevelt put his forefinger to the brim of his Stetson instead of shaking all those hands. As always, he was courtly to the women. Roosevelt was able to see the Columbia and Willamette rivers and Mount Hood, but he never made it to Crater Lake, which was too far off the rail line. William Gladstone Steel—called the father of Oregon’s first national park—was in the audience for the ceremony at the Lewis and Clark Memorial but was apparently not formally introduced to the president.¹³⁸

In Portland, Roosevelt did meet with the wildlife photographer William L. Finley, the William Dutcher of the Pacific Northwest. It was probably refreshing for Roosevelt to use Linnaean binomials in speaking with Finley; neither Muir nor Burroughs often used these terms, because they seemed pretentious.¹³⁹ According to Finley, while Roosevelt had been in the West more than 120 tons of killed wild ducks had been shipped to San Francisco from Oregon; they were a popular dish in the city’s booming restaurants. Finley desperately wanted to enact an Oregon model bird law to halt such slaughter. With admirable persistence he was keeping vigilant watch over Oregon’s bird population, protecting even old dead stumps because flickers used them as homes.¹⁴⁰Plume hunting was as horrific in Oregon as in Florida—maybe worse. Millions of Oregon’s birds were being slaughtered for this purpose, from Portland to the Klamath Basin.

As a boy growing up in Oregon, Finley had collected bird skins and practiced taxidermy. But in 1899 he became an Auduboner, enamored of the Cascades and intruigued by the mysteries of flight. Then the Pacific Ocean beckoned him. His life mission was now to photograph Oregon’s terns, puffins, grebes, and enormous winged pelicans, partly as a form of public relations (to help put the milliners out of business) and partly as an artistic endeavor. Encouraged by the fact that Steele had gotten his Crater Lake National Park from Roosevelt and Pinchot in 1902, Finley, with some advice from Frank M. Chapman, formed a chapter of the National Association of Audubon Societies in Oregon. And along with the photographer Herman Bohlman, Finley began playing the role of “Chapman with Kodak” along the Oregon coast near Tillamook Bay. They had been inspired, in part, by Chapman’s revolutionary Bird Studies with Camera. Finley’s images are now considered pioneering wildlife photography gems; they inspired National Geographic to improve its approach to capturing birds up close, even hatching. Finley was part of the first generation to abandon “shoot-skin-record” ornithology in favor of the camera.

William Finley and Herman Bohlman climbing Three Arch Rock. Together they photographed birds all along the Oregon coast and Klamath Basin.

Finley and Bohlman. (Courtesy of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)

There is no transcription of Roosevelt and Finley’s meeting in Portland. Supposedly, Finley showed the president photographic images of Tillamook Bay’s bird life (eventually included in his American Birds, published in 1907). The genius of Finley (with assistance from Bohlman) was that he’d climb any trees, even wobbly Douglas firs or tilted cedars, to photograph the nests of western tanagers and common bushtits. He was always searching for nature’s fair light. Clean-shaven, elegantly slender, with a wild exaltation in his eyes, Finley became perhaps the best ornithologist the Pacific Northwest ever produced. He used ladders, lanterns, ropes, grapnels, rafts, glass plates, tripods, dories, and canoes as the tools of his trade, and no part of nature was off limits to his ingenuity. When camping on the beach, Finley explained, he “reached a sort of amphibian state.”¹⁴¹

Since the creation of Pelican Island in Florida as a federal bird reservation in March 1903, West Coast ornithologists writing for The Condor began telling Roosevelt about Pacific Ocean “bird rocks” that should become refuges. Finley was no different. He wanted Three Arch Rocks—three huge, surf-hammered rocks (plus six smaller ones) half a mile offshore from the town of Oceanside, Oregon—to become the first national wild-life refuge on the Pacific Coast.¹⁴² The three principal rocks had arches carved by the wind and waves, making for a dramatic oceanic landmark. Besides their inherent tourist appeal, the rocks were home to Oregon’s largest nesting colony of seabirds, and Finley had tried to scientifically document all the varied avian activity there in 1901. As Finley’s photographs showed, there were 200,000 nesting common murres on Three Arch Rocks, making this the largest species colony south of Alaska Bay. Pigeon guillemots, rhinoceros auklets, and glaucous-winged and western gulls also came to the rocks. Unfortunately, so too did San Francisco restaurateurs, who raided Three Arch Rocks. In addition, this site was the only breeding ground for Steller sea lions on Oregon’s coast.¹⁴³

Finley and Bohlman wanted immediate federal bird reservation status for Three Arch Rocks. By documenting the Oregon Coast in peril these wildlife photographers rendered a great service to the country. Three Arch Rocks eventually became an iconic site: decades later American Airlines used as its primary travel image a gorgeous color photograph of the arches, reproducing the picture on check-in screens and in flight magazines.

Pressed for time in Portland, Roosevelt graciously invited Finley to the White House to make a formal presentation of wildlife sites in Oregon and Washington that needed preserving in the near future. Just as Roosevelt had a weak spot for white and brown pelicans, he also had a joyful infatuation with tufted puffins, cute-looking alcids that congregated in large numbers—between 2,000 and 4,000 at a time—on Three Arch Rocks.

By the time Roosevelt left Portland, Finley knew he had a new ally. In the coming years Finley, in collaboration with Bohlman, developed more than 50,000 still nature photographs of the Pacific Coast.¹⁴⁴ And in the summer of 1903, inspired by Roosevelt’s policies, Finley and Bohlman literally lived on Three Arch Rocks, determined to capture bird life on film and eventually bring the images to the White House. Fate had done Oregon an immense favor by bringing Finley and Roosevelt together. Meeting Roosevelt transformed Finley from a wildlife photographer to a wilderness warrior. Just a few weeks after meeting T.R. in Portland, Finley went after the operators of the tugboat Vosberg, which used to dock in Tillamook Bay, taking passengers on Sunday shooting sprees along the bird rocks. It was slaughter simply for recreation. “The beaches at Oceanside were littered with dead birds,” Finley told the Oregon Audubon Society, “following the Sunday carnage.”¹⁴⁵

Armed with the “model bird law,” Finley was able to put the Vosberg out of business. Furthermore, Finley, using his Rooseveltian alliance with AOU’s William Dutcher to Oregon’s benefit, arranged for two wardens to be hired with Thayer Fund money in the Klamath Basin. On being elected president of the Oregon Audubon Society in 1906, Finley bought a patrol boat to police the Klamath Basin wetlands against milliners. His commitment to “citizen bird” was total. In a public relations stunt aimed at exposing feather hunting as immoral, Finley tore a plumed hat off a prostitute in Portland, causing bedlam on the street, which local newspapers reported in vivid detail.¹⁴⁶ It was free publicity for the Audubon movement. And Finley also assisted the Roosevelt administration in going after the crooked Senator John Hipple Mitchell’s illegal coastal land deals.^*147

From Oregon Roosevelt headed to Seattle, using the Hotel Washington as his operational base to inventory everything about the town. Shipbuilding and Pacific trade were the themes that dominated Roosevelt’s speeches in Seattle. To his chagrin, he never got a chance to see a Roosevelt elk grazing in the Olympic rain forests. He did smell the raw fir boards for sale along the wharf. Not surprisingly, given his adroitness as a politician, Roosevelt met with the who’s who of greater Seattle. No debutante failed to receive a presidential bow. With such a crowded itinerary Roosevelt simply didn’t have the time to experience the moss-grown snags of Puget Sound County. In general, he hadn’t given himself enough time to explore Washington state. Heading back to Washington, D.C., from Seattle on the “Roosevelt Special,” the president was in a sulky mood over this fact. With no appointments to keep, the pace of travel seemed sluglike. Even though Loeb had run a pretty good rolling White House, there was a backlog of bureaucratic work that needed the president’s immediate attention. Wall Street financiers were sowing the seed of monopolies, and Roosevelt knew he had to be a regulator of the economy for the sake of the people. He had been spending time with high-caliber men like Burroughs, Pitcher, Muir, Bullock, Lacey, Young, and Finley, and now his heart shriveled when he had to grapple with dry-lipped New York types whose life purpose was making money.

Roosevelt gave hurried conservation-infused speeches in towns like Walla Walla, Washington, and Helena, Montana, as the Roosevelt Special went eastward. Neither community had many buildings from the nineteenth century, and Roosevelt’s speeches were stale re-runs. He was starting to feel like an itinerant carny at a medicine show. The flame, spark, and glory of the Great Loop tour were over. The hour for paperwork had returned. No more acting like a child or savage in the wild. On the upside, Roosevelt was eager to get back to Edith and his six children. Nineteen-year-old Alice had just gone to Puerto Rico on a goodwill trip, and her father was as proud as a peacock. “You were of real service down there because you made those people feel like you liked them,” he wrote, “and took an interest in them, and your presence was accepted as a great compliment.”

Although Roosevelt was “pretty well tired” from the western trip, he wanted to tell stories about all the natural wonders he had explored. Draw your chair up, and Roosevelt would gladly tell a antecdote about Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, or Yosemite. Furthermore, he had taken a real liking to Josiah, keeping the little badger as his constant companion on the train. He knew his children would love the cute little critter. “So far he is very good tempered and waddles around everywhere like a little bear submitting with perfect equanimity to being picked up,” he continued to Alice, “and spending much of his time in worrying the ends of anybody’s trousers.”¹⁴⁸

When Roosevelt arrived at the White House his wife was surprised to see him looking so healthy and fit. He was also immaculately groomed. If anything, all that travel seemed to have invigorated him. He was full of incredible stories about the Wyoming Rockies, Nebraska tree nurseries, the whitecapped Colorado River, towering California sequoias, comical Oregon puffins, and the unforgettable gentleness of John Muir in the snow. He was gripped by a hunger for the golden West, which defied description for those who hadn’t experienced it. Encounters with bears, fawns, raccoons, and so on had suddenly become well-honed campfire-like yarns at the White House. Heartland citizens had handed animals to Roosevelt as gifts—over a dozen of them—and most were being shipped off to zoos by Loeb. But Roosevelt hadn’t come home empty-handed. Josiah—just starting to cut its teeth—was the president’s new companion, having been nursed on a bottle all the way from Kansas. With great ceremony, Roosevelt presented the badger to his seven-year-old son Archie as a gift. The family had grown by one.

It seems that every decade some writer, anxious for quick money, publishes a book on White House pets. One star attraction in this lightweight pulp fare is Josiah. (Another is Calvin Coolidge’s pet pygmy hippopotamus, Billy.¹⁴⁹) If anything spoke of eccentricity, keeping a badger at the White House did. As a species, badgers have some undesirable traits: they are unpredictable, frequently carry parasites, have sharp claws, and vomit often in captivity. Sometimes Roosevelt, full of glee, allowed Josiah free rein in both the White House and Sagamore Hill. Over time, Josiah became exhibit A of Roosevelt’s over-the-top anthropomorphic enthusiasms. “Josiah, the young badger, is hailed with the wildest enthusiasm by the children, and has passed an affectionate but passionate day with us,” the president wrote to a friend that June. “Fortunately his temper seems proof.”¹⁵⁰

Now, with the western trek finished, Roosevelt was ready to make the badger instead of the teddy bear his political symbol. After all, 1904 was an election year and the president wanted to rip the Bryan Democrats and the big-business Republicans to shreds for—among many other things—not understanding the imperatives of preservation, which had become synonymous with the type of progressivism known as Rooseveltian conservationism. The Great Loop journey had convinced Roosevelt not only that his conservationist agenda was on track in the West, but that it needed to be amplified for the ages. And his friendships with Muir, Burroughs, and Finley—key allies—had been enhanced.