The American West

by Robert V Hine

  In truth, no clear line divided wilderness and civilization. The national parks mixed motivations. Tourists demanded the construction and maintenance of roads, trails, and buildings; park visitors required hotels, restaurants, campgrounds, and garbage dumps, water, sewage, and power systems. Moreover, the mandate to retain the parks’ “natural conditions” was interpreted to mean the cultivation of landscapes that conformed to the public’s notion of wilderness. Officials at Yellowstone worked hard to encourage what one park superintendent called “the type of animal the park was for.” To protect browsing herds of elk, moose, deer, and bighorn sheep, park managers went to war against wolves, mountain lions, and coyotes. To save the last bison herd from extinction, they created a ranch where the animals were fed park-grown hay. To improve fishing, they introduced brook and rainbow trout in the streams. And to protect this concocted “wilderness,” they suppressed forest fires, those very natural conflagrations that had shaped Yellowstone for eons.24

  While John Muir cultivated an eccentric image—letting his hair and beard go untrimmed, living in the woods, and dedicating himself totally to “nature”—he understood better than most the practical side of national parks. Without hesitation he assisted the efforts of the railroads to generate more tourist business. He worked with the Northern Pacific, lobbying for the creation of Mount Rainier and Glacier National Parks in 1899, and with the Southern Pacific in 1906 to convince California to cede Yosemite Valley back to federal jurisdiction. To monitor federal administration of the parks and counter new threats to his mountain sanctuaries, in 1892 he organized the Sierra Club—an organization that would “be able to do something for wildness and make the mountains glad”—and served as its president for the next twenty-two years. Muir was an idealist and a romantic. But he was also an environmental politician. His activism crisscrossed the frontiers of art, ideology, religion, and policy.25

  . . .

  The advocates of national parks offered them as healthy alternatives to rapacious capitalism. They were supposed to be “time-out” locales, sites where harried moderns could breathe freely and still their demons. Yellowstone and Yosemite stood for nature as Americans increasingly gathered in smog-choked cities. But rural landscapes could inspire modern nightmares as well. Clear-cut forests conjured visions of loss as well as extinct bison or sublime vistas. The indiscriminate felling of trees appeared thoughtless and poorly planned to some Americans. They advocated new policies to insure the perpetual use of natural resources. Management and efficiency were the watchwords of the conservationists. They did not worship the West’s trees and rivers, they wanted them put to better use.

  As early as the 1870s, government officials expressed concern over deforestation, especially in the cutover Great Lakes Region. But at that time—the heyday of expansion in the trans-Mississippi West—Congress was in no mood to restrict access to western resources. Instead, the American people got the Timber Cutting Act of 1878, a law that made it even easier for private citizens and companies to cut timber on federal land. The legislation amounted to what one disapproving congressman called a “license for timber thieves on the public domain.”26

  After 1878 loggers cut more lumber while scientists reconsidered the damage. Trees, they argued, belonged to a web of connections among living things, rooting an “ecology” of birds, soil, worms, fish, and streams that fell with them. An important contribution to this thinking was the book Man and Nature (1864), written by American diplomat and amateur scientist George Perkins Marsh. Deforestation concerned Marsh. He watched the trees go in his boyhood home in the Green Mountains of Vermont and then pondered the denuded Mediterranean hills of Turkey and Italy during his diplomatic assignments. Without forests to hold thin mountain soils, rains produced torrents that swept down hillsides, washed away topsoil, destroyed undergrowth, drove away wildlife, and flooded agricultural valleys. Deforestation and erosion, he implied, had contributed to the fall of Old World civilizations and might produce the same result in America. By the 1880s other Americans were repeating Marsh’s warnings. “We are following the course of nations which have gone before us,” admonished the author of a federal report of 1882. To stave off a future of deserts fit for biblical wanderings, Americans needed to rein in their frontier exuberance and keep their canopies intact. By the end of the decade, the American Forestry Association (founded in 1875) was calling for a moratorium on the sale of all public forest lands.27

  The forestry movement registered a mere peep compared to the roar of loggers’ saws. The timber industry rapidly moved the center of its operations from the Great Lakes states to the Pacific coast. By 1890 the easily accessible forests of Douglas fir, spruce, and redwood along the California, Oregon, and Washington coasts had already fallen, their ancient logs ripped into boards and shipped to San Francisco or Los Angeles for the booming home construction market. Loggers chugged into the mountainous backcountry on large tractors called “steam donkeys” to open hauling trails, clear-cutting huge patches of forest, and shipping out the harvest of logs on precarious narrow-gauge railroads. In regions too rugged or isolated for rails, they built mountain “splash dams,” where they dumped their logs and, when the ponds were full, blasted the dams with explosives, producing floods that washed the logs downstream to the sawmills. These practices blurred the line between industrial tactics and natural disasters.28

  Lumberjacks fell a giant spruce in Washington State. Photograph by C. Kinsey, c. 1900. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

  Responding to considerable public concern that the Northwest would suffer the same fate that had befallen the Great Lakes states, Congress undertook a complete revision of the nation’s land laws in 1891. They botched the job, repealing some programs, extending others, and in the end failing to address adequately the worries about deforestation. At the last minute, however, friends of forest reform slipped in an amendment—later known as the Forest Reserve Act—giving the president the authority to carve “forest reserves” from the public domain. The expectation seemed to be that this power would be used sparingly, but over the next decade Presidents Benjamin Harrison, Grover Cleveland, and William McKinley used it to withdraw more than forty-seven million forested acres. Preservationists hoped—and loggers feared—that these reserves would be closed forever to commercial exploitation. This is precisely what John Muir and the Sierra Club proposed. But following the advice offered by a special Forestry Commission, Congress in 1897 made it clear that the reserves were intended not for the preservation but rather the use of the forests. The Forest Management Act declared that the reserves should “furnish a continuous supply of timber for the use and necessities of citizens of the United States.” The executive branch was directed to establish regulations for the management of the reserves, auctioning to the highest bidder the right to harvest timber in them.29

  The legislation swung history and policy in the direction of the rambunctious leader of the commission, Gifford Pinchot. Born to a wealthy family, Pinchot traipsed through the woods from a young age. His classmates at Yale called him “tree mad.” After graduation he went to Germany and France to pursue advanced studies in forestry, then returned to spend several years as the forester at Biltmore, the huge Vanderbilt family estate in the North Carolina hills, where he restored cutover lands. This work got him appointed to the Forestry Commission, bringing him to the attention of President McKinley, who named him chief forester of the United States at the age of thirty-three. When Roosevelt became president in 1901, Pinchot quickly became his closest adviser on environmental policy. Both men were members of the Boone and Crockett Club and lovers of what Roosevelt called “the strenuous life.” They boxed and frequently sparred with each other. Both were iconoclasts willing to raise hackles in pursuit of their goals.

  “Conservation,” the name Roosevelt and Pinchot chose for their approach to the national domain, was an ideology for postfrontier America. “When the American settler felled the forests he felt there was ple
nty of forest left for the sons who came after him,” Roosevelt lectured. “The Kentuckian or the Ohioan felled the forest and expected his son to move west and fell other forests on the banks of the Mississippi.” The era of indiscriminate hacking had ended. The future required a dash of forethought and restraint. “The right of the individual,” Roosevelt argued, “to injure the future of us all for his own temporary and immediate profit” had to be checked by an activist federal state. Manly experts with the government would manage the West’s natural endowment.30

  The president encouraged Congress to establish several new national parks, and using his presidential power to declare national monuments, he set aside sixteen areas of unique national and historical value, including Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, the Olympic peninsula in Washington, and the Petrified Forest and Grand Canyon in Arizona. He founded fifty new wildlife preserves and refuges and sponsored legislation creating the Bureau of Fisheries and the Bureau of Biological Survey. He withdrew oil, coal, and phosphate lands from the public domain in order to forestall, at least temporarily, their engrossment by corporate monopolies. In 1905 Roosevelt engineered the transfer of the forest reserves (renamed “national forests”) from the Department of the Interior to Pinchot’s National Forest Service in the Agriculture Department. In his first directive, Pinchot laid out the “wise use” environmental perspective he shared with Roosevelt: “All the resources of forest reserves are for use, and this must be brought about in a thoroughly prompt and businesslike manner, under such restrictions only as will insure the permanence of these resources.” In postfrontier American forests, Pinchot’s “gospel of efficiency” shook the leaves alongside Muir’s transcendental exultations.31

  The concerns of the “utilizers” and the “preservationists” overlapped, but their solutions differed. Both opposed heedless exploitation of natural resources, and both believed that Americans had crossed a threshold into a new epoch of history with the end of the frontier. Pinchot once joined Muir on a tour of the western forests. “I took to him at once,” Pinchot remembered, finding his companion “a most fascinating talker.” But the two men squabbled over the federal policy of allowing sheep (“hooved locusts,” according to Muir) to graze on the public domain. For Muir, “the hope of the world” was “fresh, unblighted, unredeemed wilderness.” Preservationists sought to consume an ideal nature free of bleating ewes and rams or the rattle of steam donkeys and chainsaws. They preferred forests that rejuvenated tourists rather than produced two-by-fours. Pinchot disagreed, declaring that “wilderness is waste.” To survive in postfrontier America, the “water, wood, and forage of the reserves” needed to work “for the benefit of the home builder first of all.” The forests would supply the wherewithal to build the suburbs.32

  The truth is, neither Roosevelt nor Pinchot spent much time worrying about Muir. They were too busy putting their conservation programs into operation and fending off attacks from critics who wanted to dismantle federal authority over the forests. An alliance with large logging companies helped preserve the National Forest Service. By the early twentieth century these corporations had gained control of nearly 50 percent of the nation’s standing timber, and locking up an additional 35 percent in the national forests suited them just fine. It would stifle competition from smaller loggers. In exchange for federal acquiescence to timber corporation gigantism, Pinchot expected companies to manage the forests scientifically. The Weyerhaeuser Company—the world’s largest private owner of standing timber, holding resources equal to half the national forest system—instituted extensive reforestation programs. Corporate lumbermen, argues historian William Robbins, used the Forest Service “as a tool to achieve stability,” to avoid overproduction, glutted markets, and low prices in their industry. The cozy relationship between industry and government insured the measured exploitation of forests instead of their being gobbled in manic episodes of “cut and get out.”33

  President Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir at Glacier Point, Yosemite, 1903. Library of Congress.

  It was the small loggers—and there were a great many of them—who opposed federal regulation. “Czar Pinchot” constricted their opportunities with the creation of national forests and bureaucratic regulations. Although big logging companies had more land, small loggers possessed political clout, and in 1907 they won congressional repeal of the president’s authority to declare national forests by executive order. Before Roosevelt signed the legislation, however, he and Pinchot pored over maps of the West and selected more than 16 million acres of new forest reserves, sending independent loggers into a tizzy of these “midnight reserves” that increased the size of the national forests to more than 150 million acres. Roosevelt and Pinchot were not deterred. In 1908 they convened a White House conference of the nation’s governors, congressmen, Supreme Court justices, and leading scientists to consider the future needs of environmental policy, “the weightiest problem before the nation” in Roosevelt’s estimation.34

  Pinchot stayed on at the Forest Service when Roosevelt left office in 1909, but he found the administration of President William Howard Taft far less friendly to him or to conservation. Interior Secretary Richard Ballinger, a former mayor of Seattle, represented westerners irked by federal resource meddling and wanted to transfer national property to the states to facilitate private development, a policy antithetical to Pinchot’s plan of rational development under federal management. The two men tangled, and when Pinchot publicly accused Ballinger of a conflict of interest in 1910, Taft dismissed the chief forester. By the time he left office, Pinchot had built the Forest Service into a proud and formidable organization with fifteen hundred committed employees. The national forests and the bureaucracy that oversaw their rational dispersal to giant corporations were not going anywhere.

  . . .

  The forest ranger personified the Forest Service. A mounted authority figure, supervisor of the timber harvest, enforcer of regulations governing loggers and hunters, and battler of forest fires, the twentieth-century conservation woodsy bureaucrat applied a new twist to frontier persona with a long, troubled history. The word ranger roamed American English signifying initially seventeenth-century gamekeepers who targeted poachers on the crown’s domain. Rangers then acquired a military meaning as light infantry who “ranged” over the country, matching the guerrilla tactics of Indian fighters. Most famous in the history of the West, of course, were the Texas Rangers, the irregular force first organized during the Mexican War, later designated the official constabulary of the Lone Star State. The Forest Service tapped into these traditions by declaring its employees rangers and dressing them in khaki shirts and jodhpurs, knee-high riding boots, and flat brimmed Stetson “campaign” hats. The rangers epitomized postfrontier authority. They were swashbuckling paragons of the rising power of large organizations—the federal government and Weyerhaeuser—and the service industry. Rangers policed nature and assisted tourists. Over time, their image broadened and softened to include Edward Pulaski, a ranger who saved his crew from a raging forest conflagration by shuttling them into an abandoned mine and blocking the entrance with his water-doused body, as well as Ranger Rick, the raccoon cartoon character invented by the National Wildlife Federation to introduce suburban children to wild creatures and places. Rangers went from vessels of white supremacy—Roosevelt declared Ranger Pulaski as the preserver of “the virtues which beseem a masterful race”—to well-meaning public servants protecting picnic baskets from Yogi Bear.35

  In 1916 Congress created the National Park Service, and a force of park rangers in khaki replaced federal troops as the managers of the parks. The romance and goodwill the ranger persona generated for the agencies managing the nation’s parks and forests proved a valuable asset that some male bureaucrats fiercely guarded. Both agencies pushed their manliness, and until the 1970s the Forest Service had a policy against hiring women as forest rangers. It took a federal suit by female employees in 1981 to convince the agency to institute an affirmative action plan
to advance women up the ranks. The ranger identity, however, was surprisingly flexible from the start. The title, as historian Polly Welts Kaufman has shown, did not necessarily imply a man who ate nails and sprouted a luxurious growth of chest hair. In its very early years, the National Park Service employed women as rangers and no heads exploded from contradiction.

  Horace Albright, the first civilian superintendent at Yellowstone, hired at least ten women for his force of rangers. The first was Isabel Bassett, a nature aficionado with a degree in biology from Wellesley College who came to the park looking for work about the same time Albright assumed his duties in 1919. “I am to be a government ranger in Yellowstone Park,” she wrote excitedly in a letter home. “You never heard of a woman ranger? Well, neither have I.” Another of Albright’s early recruits was Marguerite Lindsley, the daughter of a former Yellowstone superintendent, born and raised in the park. She came home after earning an M.S. in biology and Albright hired her on the spot. No one knew the park better, or with more scientific understanding, something she amply demonstrated in the more than fifty articles on local flora and fauna she published in Nature Notes, the Park Service newsletter. Lindsley was also a character, displaying a Pulaski-level zeal for exercise and adventure. During the winter of 1925 she and a female companion made the complete 143-mile transit of the park on cross-country skis. And one summer she bought a secondhand Harley with a sidecar, and, disguised as men, she and her friend took a cross-country road trip, riding through “hail, sleet, mud, and washouts,” camping along the way.36