The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (105 page)

Among the early-twentieth-century conservationists, only John Muir had the temerity to stand up to Roosevelt—at Yosemite in 1903, Muir had challenged Roosevelt to reform his boyish hunting ways. And how was Muir rewarded for his candor? At first,
well
: Mount Shasta, Mariposa Grove, and Yosemite Valley were all saved by the federal government. But over time Roosevelt repaid Muir’s casual insult by saying that Muir didn’t know birds and then by siding with Pinchot on turning Hetch Hetchy into a man-made reservoir. There were consequences for challenging Roosevelt—and these might involve policy. The sycophant got farther with Roosevelt than the challenger. Nevertheless, Roosevelt continued to admire Muir for rallying to nature’s defense. In this regard Muir was embraced by the president as a “radical” in the best sense of the word. Here was the difference, in Roosevelt’s mind: the strikers in Goldfield, Nevada, wanted more for
themselves
whereas groups like the Sierra Club of California were fighting for
national betterment
. And there was in Muir’s carriage, Roosevelt thought, the radiance of Yosemite itself, which the president truly honored.

That spring, just as Roosevelt was ready to expand the boundaries of Yosemite National Park, a disaster rocked California: at daybreak on April 18, an earthquake destroyed San Francisco. Within a few minutes the streets around Union Square and Chinatown filled with mounds of debris. Three hundred thousand people were left homeless. Gas mains had snapped, and storefronts went up in flames. Boats capsized at Fishermen’s Wharf. Broken glass from apartment windows rained down like hail. Beautiful hotels like the Winchester and the St. Francis were wrecked. Merchants shouted in disbelief. People walked about dazed, with fretful eyes, scared that at any minute the entire city would sink into the Pacific Ocean. A human flow out of the Bay Area commenced, under the U.S. Army’s leadership. The Chinese had considered 1906 the year of the Fire Horse—a time of mass confusion—and this proved to be prophetic. “The entire event which was to destroy an American City and leave an indelible imprint on the mind of the entire nation,” the historian Simon Winchester wrote in
A Crack in the Edge of the World
, “had lasted for just over two and a half minutes.”
¹³

Reports of the earthquake aroused Roosevelt’s martial temperament. This was no middle-size quake like the one in 1868. Unfortunately, he was 2,500 miles away in New York and was unable to order naval action. Shaking an impotent fist at the ground was all he could at first do. Reports of buckling aftershocks came over the telegraph directly into his office in downtown Oyster Bay. Then the telegraph shut off. At best, communication with northern California was hit-and-miss. Telephones weren’t working at all in the Bay Area—everything was broken in the stricken city. More than 3,400 people died throughout northern California.
¹⁴
Roosevelt issued a national condolence: “I share with all our people the horror felt at the catastrophe that has befallen San Francisco, and the most earnest sympathy with your citizens. If there is anything that the Federal Government can do to aid you it will be done.”
¹⁵

Many San Franciscans were in a condition of panic. Social dislocation and even mayhem took over. The San Andreas Fault from northwest of San Juan Bautista to the “triple junction” at Cape Mendocino had ruptured the ground, cracking it open like an eggshell. From above, it looked like a zigzagging chain down the spine of California in the cracked earth. Towns anywhere near the fault line suffered severe damage. Geologists were confounded by the violent power of the vibrating earth. Survivors said that that the experience was like walking on a trampoline or falling into a tar pit. Although the event is known to history as the San Francisco
earthquake, virtually all towns in northern California suffered extensive damage, and the outlook for a quick recovery was bleak.

Americans had known that California was an earthquake zone but the state’s residents had long played ostrich, pretending that their homes weren’t actually built along a fault line. Now, terrorized shouts of “Fire! Fire! Fire!” were heard along the same streets where Roosevelt had paraded on his Great Loop tour of 1903. Then, Roosevelt had proclaimed San Francisco the shining white Acropolis of the glorious west coast, the juggernaut of manifest destiny. Now everything was covered with smoke clouds, and the air was poisonous. People contended for jugs of water, worried about dehydration. Soot-blinded horses frantically neighed and frothed in front of brownstones that had toppled into heaps of rubble. Triage stations were set up in fields. After a while, however, an eerie calm blanketed the city, a collective numbness, as people grew weary of trying to put the fires out.
The New York Times
said that the exact scope of the disaster in terms of terror and damage “will never be known.”
¹⁶

Statistics came pouring into the White House about the devastation in California. The quake was felt for about 375,000 square miles from Coos Bay, Oregon, to Los Angeles and well into Nevada’s Great Basin. More than 28,000 buildings had been destroyed. Following Roosevelt’s direct order, the army and navy quelled public unrest and effectively evacuated residents to safety. The armed forces also provided food and shelter for the homeless. The USS
Preble
was anchored offshore from San Francisco to provide humanitarian relief. At the request of Mayor Eugene Schmitz, martial law was imposed, with orders to shoot looters. The USS
Chicago
evacuated 20,000 people by sea (numerically a world record until Dunkirk during World War II).

On April 22, Roosevelt announced that relief efforts were to be overseen by the Red Cross. Congress had appropriated $2.5 million in aid. Determined to show the world that the United States could handle its own problems, Roosevelt declined foreign aid of any kind (relief money nevertheless trickled in from abroad). When the San Francisco mint was raided by looters, federal troops unloaded their guns, killing more than thirty people. But mostly the recovery efforts went well. More than 1,500 tons of provisions were expertly delivered daily to fifty-two food distribution centers. Exuding optimism, Roosevelt claimed that within the decade San Francisco would be rebuilt. And so it was.

III

Besides grappling with this situation, Roosevelt devoted a lot of energy to Niagara Falls. Since 1904 the State Department had been negotiating with Canada, by means of an International Waterways Commission, to protect the integrity of the falls. With Great Britain brokering the bilateral negotiation, a regulated equitable division of water power between the two countries was obtained. But Roosevelt wanted Canada to agree to protecting the “aesthetic value of the falls.”
¹⁷
Roosevelt became obsessive about creating an international park between Canada and New York. Not to do so, he said, was sacrilegious. Eventually, in June 1906, a bill passed Congress authorizing the secretary of war to supervise the preservation of the falls. Although there are no documents to prove it, Roosevelt
seemed
to be threatening Canada, by implying that if the Canadians didn’t cooperate properly with the War Department, the United States would seize control of Niagara Falls and run it as an American national park.

That spring, Roosevelt also resumed regular contact with the prolific artist Frederic Remington, who had illustrated Roosevelt’s
Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail
. Remington’s sketchbooks of heavy-duty paper had themselves become American heirlooms. A few of Remington’s illustrations from
Ranch Life
—“An Agency Policeman,” “Making a Tenderfoot Dance” and “Cowboy Fun”—had grown in popularity since the 1890s.

And in October 1902 Remington published a novel that the president adored:
John Ermine of Yellowstone
(about a Caucasian boy who is raised by Crow Indians and becomes a scout in the U.S. Army). The
New York Times
said that this novel was reminiscent of Wister’s
The Virginian
. Remington’s characters included Sitting Bull, Crooked Bear, and the White Weasel. What stood out for Roosevelt was Remington’s brilliant description of life among the Crow as they roamed in the western prairies. Remington also did a fine job of illustrating
John Ermine of Yellowstone
, thirty drawings in all.
¹⁸
In one drawing, the well-cut John Ermine looks a lot like the blond, blue-eyed George Armstrong Custer before the Battle of Little Bighorn. Conceived as an epic western,
John Ermine of Yellowstone
was an oddly complex tale of an intermixing of European American and Native American strains. The lead character, Ermine, is torn between both cultures, incapable of fully assimilating into either. The novel got solid reviews; one reviewer said that Remington had captured the imperishable quiet of Wyoming’s forestlands.

“My dear Remington,” Roosevelt wrote to Remington on February
20, 1906. “It may be true that no white man ever understood an Indian, but at any rate you convey the impression of understanding him! I have done what I very rarely do—that is read a serial story—and I have followed every installment of
The Way of an Indian
as it came out.”
¹⁹
Flattered by Roosevelt’s praise of him in the parlors of Washington, D.C., as the Karl Bodner or George Catlin of their generation, Remington made Roosevelt a small wax bronze titled
Paleolithic Man
as an appreciation. It depicted, Remington wrote, a Darwinian representation of a “human figure bordering on an ape, squatting and holding a clam in right hand and a club in left.” Remington had created the sculpture at a makeshift studio on Cedar Island in the Chippewa Bay archipelago in the Thousand Islands area, along a scenic stretch of the Saint Lawrence River in New York. Suffering from health problems caused by overeating, Remington, who had become a quirky
odd duck
, was hiding from the world. Jokingly, Remington added in his note that the bronze was modeled after “the original inhabitant of the original Oyster Bay—whenever that was—.”
²⁰

Oh, boy! Did Roosevelt ever fancy that piece of Remingtonia! Hurrah for Darwinian art! Whatever tension and mistrust had developed between Roosevelt and Remington in the 1890s had vanished. Although Roosevelt never purchased a Remington, he had amassed a fine collection of items, which had been bestowed on him as gifts. Even though fanciful artists like Maxfield Parrish were now the rage, Roosevelt stood steadfastly by Remington, whose struggle with obesity had taken on tragic dimensions. (At over 350 pounds he weighed more than Secretary of War William Howard Taft, and his weight was obviously affecting the functioning of his vital organs.) The
Paleolithic Man
statue thrilled Roosevelt. “We hail the coming of the original native oyster,” he wrote to Remington. “Mrs. Roosevelt is as much pleased as I am with it. I think it is very appropriate, for undoubtedly Paleolithic man feasted on oysters long before he got to the point of hunting the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros.”
²¹

Throughout the spring of 1906 Roosevelt corresponded with John Burroughs, sharing the excitement of spying all the springtime birds around the White House. Oom John was busy raising a few vegetables while writing essays about rural neighbors, salt breezes, and maple syrup. All the features of farm life in the Catskills (and the universe at large) were Burroughs’s bailiwick. Of course, the two naturalists chatted about birds. “That warbler I wrote you about yesterday was the Cape May warbler,” Roosevelt told Oom John. “As soon as I got hold of an ornithological book I identified it. I do not think I ever saw one before, for it is rather a rare
bird—at least on Long Island, where most of my bird knowledge was picked up. It was a male, in the brilliant spring plumage; and the orange-brown cheeks, the brilliant yellow sides of the neck just behind the cheeks, and the brilliant yellow under parts with thick blade streaks on the breast, made the bird unmistakable. It was in a little pine, and I examined it very closely with the glasses but could not see much of its back. Have you found it a common bird?”
²²

There was a warmth and kindness to Roosevelt in spring 1906 that had been missing since the hurly-burly of becoming president. He seemed proud that talented outdoorsmen like Burroughs, Wister, Remington, Chapman, and Merriam were his
real
friends—not those New York money changers deformed by “swinish greed” and by “vulgarity and vice and vacuity and extravagance”
²³
; or, for that matter, those Chicago meatpackers whose astonishing workplace uncleanliness Roosevelt called “revolting.”
²⁴
Writing to the editor of the
Saturday Evening Post
, Roosevelt, as if taking stock of his friends, boasted that his “intimate” fellows were “men I met in the mountains and backwoods and on ranches and the plains.” He meant Bat Masterson, Will Sewall, Joe and Sylvane Ferris, Seth Bullock, John Willis, Jack Abernathy. If you had a biographical history in the West—the old West—Roosevelt was sympathetic.

Echoing Grinnell, Roosevelt insisted that Native American tribes had to be treated fairly under his administration. Sometimes Roosevelt acted as if America had been better off before Wounded Knee, when the Indians still rode freely in the Great Plains. There was something in the president of
John Ermine of Yellowstone
. Roosevelt worked with Inspector James McLaughlin of the U.S. Indian Service to negotiate more than forty tribal agreements on behalf of his administration. Native Americans were opposed to land allotments, but the federal government was allotting land anyway. Roosevelt worked to keep fraud out of the system.
*
And, almost miraculously, the planned reintroduction of buffalo at Wichita Forest and Game Preserve in southwestern Oklahoma scheduled for 1907 was welcomed by both cowboys and Indians.

Roosevelt also continued to encourage his naturalist friends to write
big
popular zoology. For example, he sent Henry Bryant Bigelow, a junior staff member at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology (who had written about caribou and wolves), a glowing note of endorsement, urging
him to try composing gorgeous zoological prose like
On the Origin of Species or Birds of America
. “We need that the greatest scientific book shall be one which scientific laymen can read, understand, and appreciate,” Roosevelt wrote. “The greatest scientific book will be a part of literature; as Darwin and Lucetius are.”
²⁵