Veterans Defend Boundary Waters

July 8, 2019 4:48 pm

Veterans Defend Boundary Waters From Sulfide Ore Copper Mining

By David Lien MN Backcountry Hunters & Anglers – Jul 5, 2019, from the Herald Review

Spanish-American War veteran and Medal of Honor recipient, Theodore Roosevelt, traveled west to Minnesota during 1880. Teddy and his brother Elliott hunted birds on the edge of the northern Great Plains and almost surely wondered what lay further north in Minnesota’s vast northeastern Arrowhead Region.

Nearly 30 years later, on Feb. 15, 1909, President Theodore Roosevelt decided that some of the wild forests, wetlands and waterways in northeastern Minnesota should be added to America’s protected public lands. He signed Presidential Proclamation No. 848 establishing the 3.9 million-acre Superior National Forest. Today the heart of the national forest is the 1.1 million-acre Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW), one of the world’s 50 greatest destinations according to National Geographic.

During his presidency (1901-1909), TR regularly denounced the “empire builders,” who were concerned only with amassing personal profits and in the process destroying the common heritage. Roosevelt said, “I do not intend that our natural resources shall be exploited by the few against the interests of the many.”

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