The Big Burn by Timothy Egan Page A

of his presidency. In the new century, he wanted Americans to look with fresh eyes at the natural world. For people who saw the woods in purely utilitarian terms, he offered this: "There is nothing more practical in the end than the preservation of beauty," he said in an address at Stanford. "I feel most emphatically that we should not turn into shingles a tree which was old when the first Egyptian conquerors penetrated to the valley of the Euphrates."
    To Clark, Heyburn, and many others, these assertions were laughable. They dismissed Roosevelt's crusade as nonsense. Roosevelt's task was to persuade people not just to cherish their natural heritage, but to understand that it was their right in a democracy to own it—every citizen holding a stake. In an era of free-for-all capitalism, it was revolutionary to insist, as he did, that the "rights of the public to the national resources outweigh private rights." Gifford Pinchot may have penned that line for his boss. Roosevelt liked it enough that he repeated it throughout his presidency. "The forest reserves should be set apart forever for the use and benefit of our people as a whole and not sacrificed to the shortsighted greed of a few," Roosevelt said in his first annual message to Congress. Some small ranchers and family-run logging outfits that were muscled out of good grazing land and forests by the big syndicates also wanted a green sheriff in the people's woods. But high-minded talk of preserving land for future generations and common folk was not something rattling around saloons in the West or town halls on the Great Plains. It was an argument made by two Ivy League patricians against a clique of self-made titans with an oversize sense of entitlement.
    What Teddy and Pinchot had first spoken of on that winter night in Albany of 1899 had blossomed in the White House. Ideas take on their own trajectory, but they die without people to carry them into the corridors of power. Following his words with action, Roosevelt created the nation's first wildlife refuge, Pelican Island in Florida. His executive power, he discovered, while not on par with that of creation, certainly could do the opposite—keep species from going out of existence. "Is there any law that will prevent me from declaring Pelican Island a federal bird reservation?" he asked. "Very well, then I do so declare it." And with that, one of the signature birds of the Southeast had its nesting home written onto the map. Roosevelt used executive decrees to add considerably to the forest reserve system, building in huge initial chunks on what Grover Cleveland had started in the last months of his presidency.
    Following Pinchot's lead, Roosevelt became close to John Muir, whose charisma and love of a good fight matched the feistiness of the president. Muir saw wilderness as a tonic for a frenzied era, a place to escape the "stupefying effects of the vice of over-industry and the deadly apathy of luxury," as he wrote in an influential book. "Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wilderness is a necessity and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life."
    In that sentiment, he and Roosevelt were one. During the same spring 1903 trip that took him to Montana, Roosevelt met up with Muir in California. They fled from the clamoring press on a four-day trek through Yosemite—the president having taken the naturalist's advice to heart by going to Muir's favorite fountain of life. It was a proven Muir lobbying tactic: he had escorted one of the most influential editors of the day, the urbane urban dweller Robert Underwood Johnson, on a similar camping trip to the Sierra in 1899. The editor promptly became a crusader, joining voices that led to the federal government's creation of Yosemite National Park one
year later—a move that finally