Naturalist Herma Albertson Baggley (second from left) poses in ranger uniform with coworkers at Yellowstone National Park, 1933. National Park Service History Collections.
When the chief inspector of the Interior Department came to Yellowstone in 1926, the number of female rangers Albright had hired shocked him. Nosing around, he found angry male rangers who complained about “posy pickers” and “tree huggers.” Albright defended his policy. “Women can do just as well or better than men.” He found that women did a much better job interacting with the public. Not a man on his force could give a lecture, “even if his life depended on it.” In spite of Albright’s defense, the inspector’s report caused a stir in Washington, D.C., and resulted in a director’s decree that the Park Service would no longer hire women as rangers. At almost the same moment, Sunset Magazine published an adoring profile of Marguerite Lindsley and her exploits entitled “She’s a Real Ranger.” Lindsley received dozens of letters from young women asking her for advice on becoming a ranger, and she was forced to write back with the news that for the foreseeable future “the ranger staff will be made up entirely of men.” The next year Lindsley resigned from the agency to marry another ranger.37
In 1929 Albright was elevated to the directorship of the National Park Service. He reversed the previous order and did his best from Washington to encourage his superintendents to adopt his open attitude about women. But Albright’s retirement in 1933 marked the end of this bold experiment. Within a few years the Park Service was looking back on the days of female rangers with considerable loathing. The employment of women, one official believed, had resulted in rangers being ridiculed as “pansy pickers and butterfly chasers.” Rangers, insisted another macho critic, needed to maintain their image as “the embodiment of Kit Carson, Buffalo Bill, Daniel Boone, the Texas Rangers, and General Pershing,” all men with the bark on.38
History, especially frontier history, can play havoc with entrenched ideologies. Male chauvinists held sway in the National Park and Forest Services until the 1970s, but their grip on the English language proved far weaker. Thanks to heroic pioneer women like Bassett and Lindsley and the development of national parks and forests as tourist destinations, Americans came to expect more from their rangers than Carson- or Boone-types could provide. They wanted accurate information and professional courtesy. The ability to shoot a bear (or a human being) ranked below hospitality and scientific knowledge in the skillsets of modern rangers. The frontier past is littered with enforcers outfitted in military garb, but the future would include rangers of a different sort, ones who assisted instead of assailed. The ranger icon endured because some women and men remodeled it into a kind helper—a public servant—and placed their version alongside men taking the law into their own hands.
. . .
By 1920 the forested area of the United States stabilized around 730 million acres, approximately 32 percent of the nation’s land, about where it has remained in the years since. Conservation helped prevent the much-feared “timber famine”; so did larger demographic shifts, especially Americans’ journey from a rural population to a primarily urban one. The country’s forests stabilized when fewer Americans desired cleared farmland. The proportion of land devoted to growing crops had risen 5 percent in 1850 to 20 percent in 1920, and at least half of this increase had come at the expense of forest clearing. By the second decade of the twentieth century, however, American agriculture was well into a mighty transformation characterized by the development of high-yield hybrid crops, the application of chemical fertilizers, and the introduction of labor-saving machinery. Farmers squeezed more crops and profit from less land. The demand for growing space withered. Consider just one aspect of this transformation, the shift from draft animals to internal-combustion engines. Before World War I more than a quarter of the nation’s cropland produced feed and fodder for mules and horses. By the end of World War II the replacement of livestock by tractors freed up all this land, 70 million acres, for growing marketable crops.39
Americans struggled with a bounty of agricultural products in the twentieth century, a quandary of too much. Postfrontier thinkers like Roosevelt and Pinchot were not wired to confront surplus crops and surplus farmers. Scarcity drove their opinions and politics. Nothing demonstrated this more clearly than another program of Theodore Roosevelt’s, the federal support for western irrigation, flood control, and hydraulic power that would fundamentally reshape the twentieth-century West. Interest in irrigating arid lands escalated in the last third of the nineteenth century, and by 1900 public and private projects were watering some eight million acres in the western states. Further development, however, would require massive dams, substantial reservoirs, and long-distance canals, capital investments beyond the means of most corporations, municipalities, or even states. “Great storage works are necessary,” Roosevelt declared in his first presidential message to Congress, but “their construction has been conclusively shown to be an undertaking too vast for private effort.” If Americans wanted their desert “wastes” to bloom, the feds would have to involve themselves.40
In the debate over federal legislation, few congressmen questioned the country’s need for more farmland. The winning arguments plowed over reason with antiquated visions of the yeoman republic. Federal support for irrigation would open new lands and “furnish homes for the homeless and farms for the farmless.” More farms would pacify urban conflicts and replant the country in the soil. The arguments ignored the world in which Americans were actually living, the one where farmers repeatedly abandoned their fields for cities. The federal government poured funds into dikes and ditches that collected runoff along with mistaken assumptions.41
In 1902 Congress passed the Reclamation Act, establishing a new agency in the Interior Department—the Bureau of Reclamation—to administer a massive federal effort in the states of the trans-Mississippi West. A curious term, “reclamation” implied that arid lands—the product of weather patterns and geologic processes—needed to be taken back from a nature that had gone astray. Western precipitation, or the lack thereof, took on a religious meaning. As one minister sermonized, “It is meet that God should be glad on the reclamation of the sinner.” God, the rhetoric suggested, intended the West to be suitable for agricultural development, and the Almighty had tasked Americans with the job of redeeming the place. As the preacher helped rescue the backslider, so the irrigator helped reform the land, bringing it into a state of grace.42
Irrigation came with ideological aspirations no capital development could meet. Reclamation schemes uplifted some rural westerners at the expense of others. Water projects often destroyed traditional ways of life that had served residents for generations. Elephant Butte Dam on the Rio Grande in central New Mexico created a system of modern reservoirs and canals that replaced the ancient complex of acequias (ditches) that had watered the land of hundreds of Hispanic subsistence farmers, forcing them to become agricultural laborers. Western water projects also ran roughshod over Indians. In 1908 the Supreme Court ruled that a reclamation project on the Milk River in Montana was illegally diverting a river that ran through the reservation of the Gros Ventre and Assiniboine tribes. Indians, the Court announced, retained an inviolable right to the waters of their homelands. Yet over the next half-century the Interior Department—the very agency entrusted with protecting Indian rights—approved dozens of projects that flooded reservation lands, dammed salmon runs, and drained reservation rivers but provided little or no benefit to reservation people.
Every human manipulation of critical natural resource comes with a cost. Why should reclamation be different? Some people win and others lose when economies develop. Perhaps, but reclamation produced few winners according to its own score sheet. The Reclamation Act included provisions restricting the use of irrigation water to residents (not absentee) farmers with plats of 160 or fewer acres. From the program’s beginning, however, bureaucrats found it inconvenient to enforce these limitations and generally ignored, wai
ved, or overrode them. Agribusiness, not the small farmer, was the big beneficiary of federal irrigation. The men and women laboring in reclaimed fields and orchards were not independent proprietors but migrant farmworkers. Moreover, reclamation projects meant to benefit rural residents were sometimes hijacked by urban interests, most famously when the city of Los Angeles commandeered the Owens River project that was supposed to benefit local farmers. Utilitarian ethics demanded that the few denizens of the Owens valley suffer for the many in Los Angeles. But reclamation was launched on ideals loftier than the greatest good for the greatest number. These projects were supposed to grow Edens overrun with happy yeomen and women, not factories in the fields or smoggy metropolises.
Frequently rivers were dammed and valleys flooded with little concern for the loss of ecosystems or natural wonders. The most infamous example was the Hetch Hetchy valley in Yosemite National Park, whose sharp glacial walls and meadow floor sent John Muir into rapture. “A grand landscape garden,” he declared it, “one of Nature’s rarest and most precious mountain temples.” Some two hundred miles to the west, San Francisco engineers in search of a dependable urban water supply fastened on Hetch Hetchy as the best place to impound city water. The case sorely tested the priorities of the Roosevelt administration. When the city first approached the federal government for approval in 1903, the immediate reaction was negative. The reservoir would besmirch the valley’s “wonderful natural conditions and marvelous scenic interest.” But Roosevelt soon decided that “domestic use, especially for a municipal water supply, is the highest use to which water and available storage basins can be put,” a decision that sent Muir into orbit. He attacked Roosevelt, Pinchot, and San Francisco politicians as “devotees of ravaging commercialism.” “Dam Hetch Hetchy!” he thundered. “As well dam for water-tanks the people’s cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man.” Roosevelt vacillated, passing the matter on to his successors when he left office. Finally, in 1913, the project won approval by the Wilson administration. It would be Muir’s last stand. He died a year later, deeply saddened by his defeat. “We may lose this particular fight,” he wrote shortly before his death, “but truth and right must prevail at last.” San Francisco got its water. Environmentalists inherited a cautionary tale.43
Hetch Hetchy valley, before and after damming. Wikimedia Commons.
During its first three decades, the Reclamation Bureau completed twenty-two western projects that watered some fourteen million acres of western land, on which were grown major portions of the nation’s fruits and vegetables, sugar beets, alfalfa, and cotton. Yet the very real success in increasing output was the program’s greatest weakness. Reclamation heaped more on the economy’s agricultural surplus. This was not immediately apparent. The industrial expansion of the early century and the extraordinary demand for foodstuffs during World War I kept farm prices high, encouraging large farmers to mechanize their production and irrigators to invest in expensive water distribution systems. But following the war, when demand shrank and farm prices dropped, not only did farmers have a tough time servicing the debts they had assumed to buy equipment but many irrigators found themselves unable to pay for construction costs and water fees. Individual farmers responded to lower prices the only way they knew how, by growing more in the hope of increasing their revenue. Western irrigators planted more sugar beets and alfalfa, wheat farmers plowed up millions of acres of raw prairie, and ranchers overstocked the range with cattle and sheep. Prices fell even further. By 1929 average farm income had declined to 64 percent of its level ten years before. American farmers hit bottom before the stock market crash sent the rest of the country into the Great Depression. By 1932 farm income was a fifth of its postwar high. What future was there in a program designed to increase the nation’s cropland when the nation could not market the crops it was already producing?
. . .
In the late 1920s Congress passed legislation empowering the federal government to purchase surplus crops to push up prices, but President Calvin Coolidge vetoed it and his successor, President Herbert Hoover, indicated that he would do the same. Franklin D. Roosevelt, elected president in 1932, finally confronted farm overproduction. In one of his first acts, Roosevelt signed the Agricultural Adjustment Act, passed by the New Deal Congress, authorizing the government to fix production quotas, purchase surplus crops at a guaranteed price (based on the “parity” between industrial and agricultural purchasing power during the boom years 1909 to 1914), and store those surplus commodities in government granaries for sale during years of crop failure. Western populists had argued for some of these reforms for decades, and the New Deal policies would remain the foundation for federal agricultural policy for the rest of the twentieth century. Indeed, today some American farmers are paid by the government not to plant certain crops. Gradually prices climbed back up. Yet primary beneficiaries of the reforms were large operators. Small producers continued to lose their farms at an alarming rate, and tenants and sharecroppers were tossed off their rented land because their plots became the ones landlords retired from production to receive their subsidies. “I let ’em all go,” a Texas farmer told a sociologist who inquired about his tenants. “I bought tractors on the money the government give me and got shet of my renters. . . . I did everything the government said—except keep my renters. The renters have been having it this way ever since the government come in. They’ve got their choice—California or WPA.” A displaced Oklahoma tenant described his family’s options more starkly: “move or starve.”44
The Great Depression enhanced a western migration well under way before the economy crashed. Americans began moving from rural Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, and Arkansas to California and other western Sun Belt states in the 1920s. During the Depression, the emigrants acquired national publicity to go along with the perambulations. John Steinbeck immortalized the “Okies” in his vivid period novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939). His Joad family captured the desperation and hopes of another of the epic migrations of western history, this time with the pioneers traveling by automobile rather than covered wagon. California seemed a new promised land. “By God, they’s grapes out there, just a-hangin’ over inta the road,” says Steinbeck’s Grandpa Joad. “I’m gonna pick me a wash tub full a grapes, an’ I’m gonna set in ’em, an’ scrooge aroun’, an’ let the juice run down my pants.” But instead of an agrarian dream the family finds an industrial nightmare, California’s factories in the field. Like the Joads, tens of thousands of “Okies” and “Arkies” found work as fruit and vegetable pickers, but even more joined an ever-increasing human flood into greater Los Angeles and other western urban centers.45
The states of the Pacific coast received more than 750,000 migrants during the 1930s. They came not only from Oklahoma and Arkansas but from Texas, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas, all areas where the agricultural crisis was compounded by the extraordinary environmental crisis known as the Dust Bowl. Drought gripped the entire nation during the 1930s, but had its most dramatic effects on the Great Plains. Huge dust storms began sweeping across the prairies in the early spring of 1932. The next year the dust rose so high that the jet stream sucked it up and deposited it like volcanic ash on Chicago, Washington, D.C., and even ships in the Atlantic. With each passing year the storms grew fiercer. The worst was 1935. The storms began in February and reached a terrible climax on April 14, “Black Sunday,” when a huge duster enveloped nearly the entire state of Kansas. It was “the greatest show since Pompeii was buried,” wrote newspaper editor William Allen White.46
What caused the Dust Bowl? Drought recurs naturally on the plains, and there had been small dust storms during the previous dry cycle in the late nineteenth century, but nothing in recorded history approached the ferocity of the Dust Bowl. The difference was the extent of the grassland lost since the 1890s, especially the excessive plowing and grazing of the 1920s that denuded millions of acres of their drought-tolerant native plants. Plains’
grasses evolved to survive recurrent droughts. Some drove roots deep into the soil and withstood dry spells by subsisting on the nutrients in these subterranean tangles. Steel plows driven by tractors removed the root systems, exposing the soil—some of the richest on earth—to erosion. Dry prairie winds scoured the unprotected humus, turning some twenty-four million acres into barren desert by 1938. Environmental scientist Georg Borgstrom ranked the Dust Bowl as one of the three worst ecological blunders in world history. But unlike the other two—the deforestation of China’s uplands in the third millennium B.C.E. and the erosion of Mediterranean hills by overgrazing sheep two thousand years ago—this disaster took only half a century to accomplish.
“Farmer and Sons Walking in the Face of a Dust Storm, Cimarron County, Oklahoma.” Photograph by Arthur Rothstein, 1936. Library of Congress.
The rural West faced an economic and ecological catastrophe. Franklin Roosevelt answered with reinvigorated conservation programs. “Long ago, I pledged myself to a policy of conservation,” FDR told a campaign crowd in 1932, and promised that he would “guard against the ravaging of our forests, the waste of our good earth and water supplies, the squandering of irreplaceable oil and mineral deposits, the preservation of our wildlife, and the protection of our streams.” He appointed Harold Ickes the secretary of the interior (or secretary of the West, as some called the position). A lifelong Republican, Ickes had entered politics in support of Teddy Roosevelt, FDR’s distant cousin. But frustrated with the foot-dragging of his party, he supported FDR in 1932. “We have reached the end of the pioneering period of ‘go ahead and take,’” Ickes declared upon assuming his duties at the Interior Department, “we are in the age of planning for the best of everything for all.” Ickes and Roosevelt moved on several fronts to repair the Great Plains. Thousands of young men in the Civilian Conservation Corps were set to work planting hundreds of millions of trees in “shelterbelts,” designed to provide windbreaks, slow soil erosion, and create habitat for wildlife. The Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 brought the public range lands under the regulation of a new agency, the Grazing Service (renamed the Bureau of Land Management in 1946), with the mandate of ending overgrazing. The Soil Conservation Service, established the following year, targeted seventy-five million acres of plains cropland that should be retired from production, and though Congress failed to provide funding sufficient to meet that goal, the administration returned more than eleven million acres to grass.47
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