American Canopy

by Eric Rutkow

  The legislative leadership in Albany, many of whom did not share the concerns of New York City businessmen, took up the issue once more but moved cautiously. They failed to authorize any funds to buy lands, but did withdraw the approximately seven hundred thousand acres’ worth of state holdings within the Adirondacks from future sale—most of this territory had reverted to the state through tax sales after commercial operators stripped the land of all the useful timber and abandoned it. The legislature also authorized another committee, this time tasked with outlining a policy of state control of the withdrawn forests.

  This new group was placed under the leadership of Charles Sprague Sargent, perhaps the nation’s most respected voice on all tree-related issues. Born in 1841, Sargent had attended Harvard and served in the Union army before developing an interest in horticulture during his late twenties. In 1873 his alma mater appointed him the first director of its recently completed Arnold Arboretum (which had been designed by Frederick Law Olmsted). Under Sargent’s half century of leadership, the arboretum would blossom into the national center for the study of trees. The industrious Sargent, however, extended his reach far beyond its confines. In 1880, for example, he took charge of the U.S. Census’s new section on forests. This culminated in his 1884 Report on the Forests of North America, a masterful study of 412 tree species that quickly became a standard reference work—the report also emphasized the need to conserve the nation’s timber resources; Sargent, like many, had read and been influenced by Man and Nature.

  The Sargent committee issued a lengthy report on the Adirondacks in January 1885. It confirmed much of the analysis from the earlier 1873 report, particularly the need to preserve the forests for their role in regulating rivers. However, to many people’s surprise, the committee opposed the state purchase of land on practical grounds: “There is nothing in the past management of its wild land by the State to justify their increase by purchase at this time. Little attention has ever been paid to the care of these lands.” The report instead advocated both the creation of a new, powerful forestry commission to actively manage the land and the modification of existing tax laws to discourage the rapid destruction of property. Only through these measures, it argued, would the actual risk of forest fire be reduced and the trees spared from the timber thieves, lumbermen, and railroads. Attached to the report, the Sargent commission included three draft bills addressing these proposals.

  Sargent’s suggested legislation, however, seemed to please no one. Legislators chafed at the creation of a new, semiautonomous state Forest Commission, which would have been the first of its kind in the nation. People living in and around the Adirondack zone opposed any effort to ramp up regulatory activity—the report likely won few admirers when it stated, “it is an open boast that the population live almost entirely upon the products of State lands.” The anxious business community in New York City disagreed with the report’s central conclusion against the state’s purchase of lands and further objected to aspects of the proposed bills that allowed for controlled logging.

  With Sargent’s legislation foundering in Albany and the need for Adirondack management growing more urgent as tax-delinquent lands continued to revert to the state, the secretary of the New York Board of Trade and Transportation, Frank Gardner, stepped in to break the logjam. He called for a conference in New York City at which all the major players could hammer out a resolution. Attendees included Jesup, Sargent, and the two friendly legislators who had sponsored the Sargent bills. No one kept minutes of this gathering, but when it concluded there was a new draft bill that everyone approved.

  In May 1885, Governor David B. Hill signed this new measure into law. It designated as a “Forest Preserve” all lands that the state owned or acquired within the Adirondack and Catskill regions (while this act combined the two areas, subsequent legislation treated them separately). The heart of the act was Section 8: “The lands now or hereafter constituting the forest preserve shall be forever kept as wild forest lands. They shall not be sold, nor shall they be leased or taken by any corporation, public or private.” This language marked the first time—other than Lincoln’s 1864 protection of the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias—that a government, at the state or federal level, took concrete measures to protect forests from the threats of commercial life. In addition to Section 8, the act introduced penalties for the intentional burning of public land; required railroads to manage, cut, and remove flammable materials and outfit their locomotives with spark arresters; and, most notably, created a three-member Forest Commission to oversee fire-management activities.

  While the act represented a decisive victory—the largest in a thirteen-year struggle to protect the state’s threatened tree resources—it was not without its limitations. The language of “forever wild” proved more plastic than the drafters likely intended. The newly appointed Forest Commission, which included a prominent lumberman among its three members, interpreted Section 8 to allow for managed timber cutting. Soon cutting rights were being sold to private companies and individuals, including, most controversially, the lumberman on the commission. Additionally, the act had failed to allocate funds either for the future purchase of lands or, more problematically, for the enforcement of its very provisions. The activity of timber thieves—and the fire threat they created—thus continued unabated. Even when government officials caught them, the consequences were insignificant. As one lumberman explained to the New York Times in 1889: “We are not responsible if the State fails to run strings around their lots. We can’t always tell which is State and which is our timber. So the Forester inquires what the market price is of logs we cut, and we pay him, and everybody is satisfied.”

  Newspapers and public-minded citizens railed against these injustices, pushing public sentiment toward even greater protection for the Adirondacks. A forest preserve no longer seemed sufficient; the Adirondack constituency was starting to call for the establishment of a state park, a clearly defined region in which the state could concentrate its holdings and more easily protect the trees. Governor Hill addressed these concerns on January 22, 1890, with a special message to the legislature that asked for further action. In response, state politicians finally allocated twenty-five thousand dollars to the Forest Commission and requested that it prepare a report addressing the proposed park idea. The resulting publication included a map of the Adirondack region encircled by two lines, an outer boundary in red denoting the Forest Preserve area and an inner boundary in blue marking the hypothetical dimensions of a park zone.

  Several private lobbying groups, frustrated by the legislature’s continually slow pace, drafted new bills themselves creating an Adirondack park. One of the leading organizations was the New York State Forestry Association, whose president was the redoubtable Jesup.

  The various draft bills that began to appear grappled with two main issues of contention. The first considered whether to allow timber activities within the proposed park. Hard-line park proponents, especially the downriver businessmen, wanted no lumbering activities whatsoever. Upstate voices countered that this would deprive local residents of jobs simply to ensure a pleasure ground for wealthy urbanites. The second provision concerned the possibility of the government exchanging public lands outside the park’s boundaries for private lands within. This seemed to be the only mechanism through which the government might consolidate its holdings to form a park without allocating monies; however, a version of an exchange system had been put in place in 1887 and was widely condemned, with many fearing that the lumber lobby pushed this solution as a way to upgrade their holdings at no cost. The New York Times warned that loggers “sought in every possible way” to exchange worthless tracts for “such of the State lands as lie along streams or lakes [and] which are extremely valuable.”

  A compromise piece of legislation began to work its way through the New York legislature. And in May 1892, Governor Roswell P. Flower signed the Adirondack Park Enabling Act, which declared that the region falling inside the
Forest Commission’s proposed Blue Line would be a state park. The total land area was 2,807,760 acres, of which 551,093 acres (roughly 860 square miles) already belonged to the state.

  While this new legislation formally created an Adirondack park, it failed to resolve the two main points of debate that went to the heart of what a state park was to be. The timber-cutting issue remained ambiguous—the act simply listed “a future timber supply” as one of three main purposes, along with recreation and watershed protection. And the legislature allocated no funds for future land purchases, leaving the suspect land exchange system as the only avenue toward further consolidation. On this point, the governor simply assured the many skeptics that “all revenues from the sale of the so-called ‘outside’ lands will be devoted to the purchase of new lands better adapted for the purposes of a forest preserve.”

  The new governor, however, quickly lost what credibility he had among the park’s proponents. The following year he signed another bill that authorized timber sales within the park. Ostensibly passed as a revenue-generating measure to cover maintenance fees, this new “cutting bill” enraged downstate groups like the Board of Trade and Transportation. Enormous wood-cutting operations were quickly projected, with some contracts entered into by the Forest Commission itself.

  Advocates of forest protection concluded that the park’s future was unsafe in the hands of the commission, the legislature, or the governor. As an article in Garden and Forest, a journal edited by Sargent, quipped: “It would seem that the time has already come when the Park ought to be preserved from its preservers.” Gardner, the secretary of the Board of Trade and Transportation, said, “I am convinced that the forests will never be made safe until they are put into the State Constitution.”

  It so happened that the following year was the state’s fourth Constitutional Convention (unlike the federal government, some states hold new constitutional conventions from time to time). Gardner’s offhand remark quickly became the subject of serious talks at the Board of Trade and Transportation. A committee began working on a draft amendment to fully protect the trees in the Adirondacks—the language was based on Section 8 of the 1885 law. The board, in advance of the formal convention, presented its amendment to the convention’s president, who said: “You have brought here the most important question before this assembly. In fact, it is the only question that warrants the existence of this convention.” Delegates revised the amendment’s language until settling upon the following:

  The lands of the State, now owned or hereafter acquired, constituting the forest preserve as fixed by law, shall be forever kept as wild forest lands. They shall not be leased, sold, or exchanged, or be taken by any corporations, public or private, nor shall the timber thereon be sold, removed, or destroyed.

  The amendment’s ultimate clause, absent from the earlier 1885 act, would ensure that no legislature or government agency could ever authorize timber sales.

  When the amendment reached the convention floor on September 13, 1894, it was approved by a unanimous vote of 122 to 0, the only amendment so honored (not only at the 1894 convention but in all previous ones as well). The general population voted it into the constitution two months later, and on January 1, 1895, the amendment finally went into effect, the culmination of a quarter century’s struggle for adequate protection of the state’s tree resources.

  Over the years the Adirondack park proved incredibly popular with the citizens of New York, and the constitutional amendment withstood countless challenges. The park’s dimensions have more than doubled, and state holdings have increased more than fivefold, to 2.7 million acres, an area over 50 percent larger than the state of Delaware. The Adirondacks now contain the largest protected forested zone, state or federal, in the continental United States.

  The movement to create the park also served as a template for many subsequent state and federal initiatives to create parks and forest reserves. But it was not the only such movement. Far to the west, a new voice appeared, focusing less on trees’ importance to the climate or economy, and more on their spiritual value to the nation.

  “God’s First Temples”

  IN THE SPRING OF 1871, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the transcendentalist minister from Concord, now sixty-eight years old and one of the country’s most famous individuals, headed to California for a speaking tour. Among his many stops was a visit to the legendary Yosemite Valley and the nearby Mariposa big trees. He arrived at the valley on May 5 and, shortly thereafter, received an admiring and enthusiastic letter from a little-known thirty-three-year-old who lived nearby, named John Muir. The missive pleaded for the Concord sage to take a break from his schedule and join Muir “in a month’s worship with Nature in the high temples of the great Sierra Crown beyond our holy Yosemite.”

  Emerson, intrigued by the letter and by accounts that some locals provided about Muir’s knowledge of the California wilderness, decided to pay him a visit. The following day he and a friend, James Bradley Thayer, traveled to the address provided. Upon arrival they were greeted with great eagerness by Muir, a thin man, shorter than average, but possessing the poise and strength of one tempered through toil and the trials of nature. Muir appeared to be, in many respects, the embodiment of self-reliance, that powerful, American creed that Emerson had first postulated in a famous essay years earlier. According to Thayer, Muir worked to impress Emerson by bringing out “a great many dried specimens of plants . . . and hundreds of his own graceful pencil-sketches of the mountain peaks and forest trees,” which he discussed “with enthusiastic interest.”

  The aged transcendentalist and the young naturalist forged a kinship around their love of nature. Emerson invited Muir to join him for a scheduled visit to the big trees and, once in the forests of the Sierra, Muir acted as his guide. Thayer explained that as they walked toward the Mariposa Grove, Muir “talked of the trees; and we grew learned.” The party spent a day admiring the sequoias—Emerson was even asked to name one, an honor rarely extended to visitors. As the group prepared to leave, Muir once again pleaded with Emerson to stay with him: “You are yourself a sequoia. . . . Stop and get acquainted with your big brethren.” But Emerson’s companions, fearful of the effects such an outing might have on his health, forbade him to accept Muir’s offer, and the two soon parted ways.

  After this legendary encounter, they continued to correspond until Emerson’s death the following year. Emerson even included Muir’s name on a list composed shortly before his passing titled “My Men”—it included only eighteen names in total, a veritable catalogue of nineteenth-century titans, including Henry David Thoreau and William Butler Ogden. According to many sources, Emerson went so far as to claim, “[Muir] is more wonderful than Thoreau.” No higher praise could the Concord minister have offered. It was as though Emerson had foreseen the role that Muir was about to play in reshaping America’s understanding of the wilderness and, consequently, its relationship to trees.

  John Muir was born in 1838 in Dunbar, Scotland, one of eight children in a strict Presbyterian family. As a boy, he was, in his own words, “fond of everything that was wild.” This innate curiosity, however, landed him in frequent trouble with his father, who felt that any activities distracting from Bible study were frivolous. Much of Muir’s childhood was thus spent studying scripture, and by eleven the bright child could recite from memory all of the New Testament and much of the Old Testament.

  In 1849, Muir’s family emigrated to the United States, settling in the wilderness near Portage, Wisconsin, about seventy miles northwest of Milwaukee. The years that followed were difficult ones as the family attempted, like so many new Americans, to carve a farm from the forest. Muir’s stern father compelled him to spend long days clearing trees and laboring in the fields, leaving little time for study, exploration, or a budding interest in mechanical invention. The indomitable teenager took to rising at 1:00 a.m., training himself to exist on five hours’ sleep. Of this predawn time, Muir wrote, “Fire was not allowed, so to escape the frost
I went down cellar, and there read some favorite book or marked out some invention that haunted me.” With little more than a pocketknife and wood, the gifted Muir created countless ingenious devices, including an “early-rising machine,” doubtless to assist him in maintaining his morning study regime. He eventually entered some of his contraptions in a state fair, and they earned him praise as a “genius” and encouragement to pursue further studies, something his father had strongly opposed.

  Muir finally left home at the age of twenty-two and spent the next seven years pursuing opportunities as they came, living a somewhat peripatetic lifestyle (not entirely dissimilar from the experience of a young Thoreau and Olmsted). He spent several semesters enrolled at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, but lack of funds compelled him to suspend his education—his college tenure did, however, introduce him to botany and geology, two lifelong passions. In 1864, fearful of getting drafted into the Union army, he trekked into Canada, spending several months on an unplanned tramp in the forests around Lake Huron and several more months working with his brother, another Civil War draft dodger, in a woodworking factory. Muir’s skill with mechanical equipment helped him to find factory work wherever he wandered, and by 1867 he had settled in Indianapolis, employed as a sawyer for a company that made wagon parts.