gave it special status well beyond what Lincoln had provided a generation earlier. Roosevelt and Muir slept under the stars, high above the valley, waking one morning to four inches of fresh spring snow. Muir was fearless. In all his wandering, he had fallen only once, down a steep slope in the Sierra, knocked unconscious. When he came to, he blamed the stumble on a recent trip to the cityâtoo much time among the nerve-shaken and overcivilized had thrown off his mountain stride, he explained.
Roosevelt professed to genuinely love the older man's company, a carryover from schoolboy days, happiest when he was trying to interpret the natural world with a brilliant mentor. With Muir, he delighted in pointing out birds during the day, and watching the sparks of a campfire rise to the heavens at night. Muir, in turn, was mesmerized by a president, twenty-five years younger than he, whose thoughts mirrored his own. He told reporters he fell for Roosevelt, this "interested, hearty and manly" leader. And he also fed Teddy's rage over plunderers of public land. "I stuffed him pretty well regarding the timber thieves," Muir said.
Roosevelt needed no prodding to remind him of his biggest failure to date. "Forests and foresters had nothing to do with each other," he lamented, echoing Pinchot's almost daily complaint. Without a corps of rangers, the land went unprotected and the decrees that set it aside were largely meaningless. Outside the reserves, the bulk of the public domain remained open for the taking by the copper kings, timber barons, and railroad magnates who dominated the economy and controlled much of Congress. The railroads alone had nine of the eleven stocks listed on the precursor to the Dow Jones average. Their 240,000 miles of roads were destiny in iron, determining what towns would flourish or fail, what ports would grow or languish as backwaters, what products would ship cheaply or face high costs. In the West, the railroad's subsidiaries and contractors cut indiscriminately in the reserves, converting whole forests into miles of underground wooden ribs for mines and aboveground ties for transportation.
The titans were accustomed to getting land for free. The Northern Pacific Railroad, now controlled by James J. Hill and J. P. Morgan, had been given more than 40 million acres by the government as an incentive to build a transcontinental route not long after the Civil War. The Northern Pacific's main competitor, the Union Pacific, controlled by E. H. Harriman, was given 11.4 million acres as a lure to build its line. Between them, the two railroads were handed a piece of the United States nearly equal in size to all of New England. But it was not enough. They sold off much of the land to ranchers, speculators, and city builders, and then took their timber at will from the reserves.
These western landlords swapped properties the way European dukes divided the spoils of a medieval war. The stocky Hill, known as the Empire Builder, was at the peak of his powers and his bluster. "Give me enough Swedes and whiskey and I'll build a railroad through hell," he boasted. He lived in a St. Paul mansion, next door to Frederick Weyerhaeuser, whose German-American family had clipped the choicest white pine from the upper Midwest. One day Hill made a proposition to his neighbor: Hill's railroad would sell 900,000 acres of prime western forestland to Weyerhaeuser for $7 an acre. Weyerhaeuser countered: How about $5? They settled on $6 for one of the largest land sales in the country. Weyerhaeuser paid about a dime per tree, on average, for lush forests around Mount Rainier, Mount St. Helens, and elsewhere. Weyerhaeuser then gobbled up other forests in Idaho to create Potlatch, a 400-square-mile timber empire that would own everything within its bordersâtowns, people, roads, forests, water, landâthe western feudal ideal. Potlatch built the world's biggest sawmill, ready to cut all that Idaho white pine into dimension
Roosevelt professed to genuinely love the older man's company, a carryover from schoolboy days, happiest when he was trying to interpret the natural world with a brilliant mentor. With Muir, he delighted in pointing out birds during the day, and watching the sparks of a campfire rise to the heavens at night. Muir, in turn, was mesmerized by a president, twenty-five years younger than he, whose thoughts mirrored his own. He told reporters he fell for Roosevelt, this "interested, hearty and manly" leader. And he also fed Teddy's rage over plunderers of public land. "I stuffed him pretty well regarding the timber thieves," Muir said.
Roosevelt needed no prodding to remind him of his biggest failure to date. "Forests and foresters had nothing to do with each other," he lamented, echoing Pinchot's almost daily complaint. Without a corps of rangers, the land went unprotected and the decrees that set it aside were largely meaningless. Outside the reserves, the bulk of the public domain remained open for the taking by the copper kings, timber barons, and railroad magnates who dominated the economy and controlled much of Congress. The railroads alone had nine of the eleven stocks listed on the precursor to the Dow Jones average. Their 240,000 miles of roads were destiny in iron, determining what towns would flourish or fail, what ports would grow or languish as backwaters, what products would ship cheaply or face high costs. In the West, the railroad's subsidiaries and contractors cut indiscriminately in the reserves, converting whole forests into miles of underground wooden ribs for mines and aboveground ties for transportation.
The titans were accustomed to getting land for free. The Northern Pacific Railroad, now controlled by James J. Hill and J. P. Morgan, had been given more than 40 million acres by the government as an incentive to build a transcontinental route not long after the Civil War. The Northern Pacific's main competitor, the Union Pacific, controlled by E. H. Harriman, was given 11.4 million acres as a lure to build its line. Between them, the two railroads were handed a piece of the United States nearly equal in size to all of New England. But it was not enough. They sold off much of the land to ranchers, speculators, and city builders, and then took their timber at will from the reserves.
These western landlords swapped properties the way European dukes divided the spoils of a medieval war. The stocky Hill, known as the Empire Builder, was at the peak of his powers and his bluster. "Give me enough Swedes and whiskey and I'll build a railroad through hell," he boasted. He lived in a St. Paul mansion, next door to Frederick Weyerhaeuser, whose German-American family had clipped the choicest white pine from the upper Midwest. One day Hill made a proposition to his neighbor: Hill's railroad would sell 900,000 acres of prime western forestland to Weyerhaeuser for $7 an acre. Weyerhaeuser countered: How about $5? They settled on $6 for one of the largest land sales in the country. Weyerhaeuser paid about a dime per tree, on average, for lush forests around Mount Rainier, Mount St. Helens, and elsewhere. Weyerhaeuser then gobbled up other forests in Idaho to create Potlatch, a 400-square-mile timber empire that would own everything within its bordersâtowns, people, roads, forests, water, landâthe western feudal ideal. Potlatch built the world's biggest sawmill, ready to cut all that Idaho white pine into dimension
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