 | Addresses and presidential messages of Theodore Roosevelt, 1902-1904 |  |
XXXII
AT THE TABERNACLE, SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH,
MAY 29, 1903
Mr. Governor, Mr. Mayor, Senator Kearns, and you, my
fellow-Americans:
I am particularly glad to have the chance to speak to
you here in this city, in Utah, this morning, because you
have exemplified a doctrine which it seems to me all-essential
for our people ever to keep fresh in their minds
—the fact that though natural resources can do a good
deal, though the law can do a good deal, the fundamental
requisite in building up prosperity and civilization is
the requisite of individual character in the individual man
or woman. Here in this State the pioneers and those
who came after them took not the land that would ordinarily
be chosen as land that would yield return with little
effort. You took a territory which at the outset was
called after the desert, and you literally—not figuratively
—you literally made the wilderness blossom as the rose.
The fundamental element in building up Utah has been
the work of the citizens of Utah. And you did it because
your people entered in to possess the land and to
leave it after them to their children arid their children's
children. You here whom I am addressing and your predecessors
did not come in to exploit the land and then go
somewhere else. You came in, as the Governor has said,
as home makers, to make homes for yourselves and those
who should come after you; and that is the only way in
built up. You have built up this great community because
you came here with the purpose of making this
your abiding home, and of leaving to your children not
an impoverished, but an enriched heritage; and I ask that
all our people from one ocean to the other, but especially
the people of the arid and the semi-arid regions, the people
of the great plains, the people of the mountains,
approach the problem of taking care of the physical
resources of the country in the spirit which has made
Utah what it is. You have developed your metal wealth
wonderfully; and your growth is not a boom growth—it
is a thoroughly healthy, normal growth. During the past
decade the population has doubled and the wealth quadrupled;
and labor is employed at as high a compensation
as is paid elsewhere in the world. Although you are not
essentially a mining State, in the last year you marketed
thirty millions worth of ore; and again you showed your
good sense in the way you handled it; for you paid five
millions in dividends and you invested the balance in
labor and surplus. The effort to make a big showing in
dividends is not always healthy for the future. Here
you have shown your wonderful capacity to develop
the earth so as to make both irrigated agriculture
and stock-raising in all its forms two great industries.
When you deal with a mine you take the ore out of
the earth and take it away, and in the end exhaust the
mine. The time may be very long in coming before
it is exhausted, or it may be a short time; but in any
event, mining means the exhaustion of the mine. But
that is exactly what agriculture does not and must not
mean.
So far from agriculture properly exhausting the land,
it is always the sign of a vicious system of agriculture if
the land is rendered poorer by it. The direct contrary
should be the fact. After the farmer has had the farm
a better farm than it was when he had it.
In these regions, in the Rocky Mountain regions, it is
especially incumbent upon us to treat the question of the
natural pasturage, the question of the forests, and the
question of the use of the waters, all from the one standpoint—the
standpoint of the far-seeing statesman, of the
far-seeing citizen, who wishes to preserve and not to
exhaust the resources of the country, who wishes to see
those resources come into the hands not of a few men of
great wealth, least of all into the hands of a few men who
will speculate in them; but be distributed among many
men, each of whom intends to make his home in the
land.
This whole so-called arid and semi-arid region is by
nature the stock range of the nation. One of the questions
which are rising to confront us is how this range
may be made to produce the greatest number and best
quality of horses, cattle, and sheep, not only this year,
not only next year, but for this generation and the next
generation. The old system of grazing the ranges so
closely as to injure the whole crop of grass was a serious
detriment to the development of the West, a serious
detriment to the development of our people. The ranges
must be treated as a great invested capital; and that old
system tended to dissipate and partially to destroy that
capital. That is something that we cannot as a nation of
home makers permit. The wise man, the wise industry,
the wise nation, maintains such capital unimpaired and
tries to increase it; and more and more the range lands
will be used in conjunction with the small irrigable areas
which they include; so that the industry can take on a
more stable character than ever before. It is impossible
permanently, although it may be advisable for the time
being, to move stock in a body from summer to winter
ranges across country which can be made into homesteads,
actual settlers, in the long run it will only be possible to
move the stock through hundreds of miles of dusty lanes
where they cannot graze, where they cannot live. Our
aim must be steadily to help develop the settler, the man
who lives in the land and is growing up with it and raising
his children to own it after him. More and more
hereafter the stock owners will have the necessity forced
upon them of providing green summer pasturage within
the limits of their own ranges; and so the question of
irrigation is well-nigh as important to the stockmen as to
the agriculturist proper.
In the same way our mountain forests must be preserved
from the harm done by over-grazing. Let all the
grazing be done in them that can be done without injury
to them, but do not let the mountain forests be despoiled
by the man who will over-graze them and destroy them
for the sake of three years' use, and then go somewhere
else, and leave by so much diminished the heritage of
those who remain permanently in the land. I believe
that already the movement has begun which will make in
the long run the stock-raisers, of whom I have been one
myself, whose business I know, and with whom I feel
the heartiest sympathy—through the enlightenment of
their own self-interest—become the heartiest defenders
and the chief beneficiaries of the wise and moderate use
of forest ranges, both within and without the forest reserves.
It is and it must be the definite policy of this
Government to consider the good of all its citizens—
stockmen, lumbermen, irrigators, and all others—in dealing
with the forest reserves; and for that reason I most
earnestly desire in every way to bring about the heartiest
co-operation between the men who are doing the actual
business of stock-raising, the actual business of irrigated
agriculture, the actual business of lumbering—the closest
and most intimate relations, the heartiest co-operation
through the Department of Agriculture. Of course I do
not have to say to any audience of intelligent people that
nothing is such an enemy to the stock industry as persistent
over-grazing. We shall have not far hence to raise
the problem of the best method of making use of the
public range. Our people have not as yet settled in their
own minds what is that best method. In some way there
will have to be formed such regulation as shall without
undue restriction prevent the needless over-grazing, while
keeping the public lands open to settlement through
homestead entry. Such a policy would of course be of
the most far-reaching benefit to the whole range industry.
It is the same in dealing with our forest reserves. Almost
every industry depends in some more or less vital
way upon the preservation of the forests; and while citizens
die, the Government and the Nation do not die, and
we are bound in dealing with the forests to exercise the
foresight necessary to use them now, but to use them in
such a way as will also keep them for those who are to
come after us.
The first great object of the forest reserves is of course
the first great object of the whole land policy of the
United States,—the creation of homes, the favoring of
the home-maker. That is why we wish to provide for the
home-makers of the present and the future the steady
and continuous supply of timber, grass, and, above all,
of water. That is the object of the forest reserves, and
that is why I bespeak your cordial co-operation in their
preservation. Remember you must realize, what I
thoroughly realize, that however wise a policy may be it
can be enforced only if the people of the States believe
in it. We can enforce the provisions of the forest-reserve
law or of any other law only so far as the best
sentiment of the community or the State will permit
that enforcement. Therefore it lies primarily not with
see that such policies are supported as will redound to the
benefit of the home-makers and therefore the sure and
steady building up of the State as a whole.
One word as to the greatest question with which our
people as a whole have to deal in the matter of internal
development to-day—the question of irrigation. Not
of recent years has any more important law been put
upon the statute books of the Federal Government than
the law a year ago providing for the first time that the
National Government should interest itself in aiding and
building up a system of irrigated agriculture in the Rocky
Mountains and plains States. Here the Government
had to a large degree to sit at the feet of Gamaliel in the
person of Utah; for what you had done and learned was
of literally incalculable benefit to those engaged in framing
and getting through the national irrigation law. Irrigation
was first practised on a large scale in this State.
The necessity of the pioneers here led to the development
of irrigation to a degree absolutely unknown before on
this continent. In no respect is the wisdom of the early
pioneers made more evident than in the sedulous care
they took to provide for small farms, carefully tilled by
those who lived on and benefited from them; and hence
it comes about that the average amount of land required
to support a family in Utah is smaller than in any other
part of the United States. We all know that when you
once get irrigation applied rain is a very poor substitute
for it. The Federal Government must co-operate with
Utah and Utah people for a further extension of the irrigated
area. Many of the simpler problems of obtaining
and applying water have already been solved and so well
solved that, as I have said, some of the most important
provisions of the Federal act, such as the control of the
irrigating works by the communities they serve, such
as making the water appurtenant to the land and not a
upon the experience of Utah. Of course the control of
the larger streams which flow through more than one
State must come under the Federal Government. Many
of the great tracts which will ultimately so enlarge the
cultivated area of Utah, which will ultimately so increase
its population and wealth, are surrounded with intricate
complications because of the high development which
irrigation has already reached in this State. Necessarily
the Federal officers charged with the execution of the
law must proceed with great caution so as not to disturb
present vested rights; but, subject to that, they will go
forward as fast as they can. They realize, and all men
who have actually done irrigating here will realize, that
no man is more timid than the practical irrigator regarding
any change in the water distribution. He wants to
look well before he leaps. He has learned from bitter
experience what damage can come from well-meant
changes hastily made. The Government can do a good
deal; the Government will do a good deal; but your experience
here in Utah has shown that the greatest results
which are accomplishing most spring directly from the
sturdy courage, the self-denial, the willingness with iron
resolution to endure the risk and the suffering of the
pioneers; for they were the men who sought and found a
livelihood in what was once a desert, and they must be
protected in the legitimate fruits of their toil.
One of the tasks that the Government must do here in
Utah is to build reservoirs for the storage of the flood
waters, to undertake works too great to be undertaken
by private capital. Great as the task is, and great as its
benefits will become, the Government must do still more.
Beside the storage of the water there must be protection
of the watersheds; and that is why I ask you to help the
National Government protect the watersheds by protecting
the forests upon them.
| Addresses and presidential messages of Theodore Roosevelt, 1902-1904 | |