Centennial Mini-Histories of the Forest Service

Eight years before the Organic Act of 1897 authorized the sale of timber on the forest reserves, Congress passed an act on February 16, 1889, referred to as the "Dead and Down" Act. This act allowed the President to permit American Indians to cut and sell "dead and down" timber (that is, dead and fallen trees) from tribal reservations.

These reservations were generally established by the U.S. Government in the mid-19th century through treaties with American Indian tribes, with the goal of "civilizing" Indian people, keeping the peace between Indians and non-Indians, and encouraging an agricultural economic base. By the end of the 1800's, an alternative economic model was developed for tribal communities in northern Wisconsin and western Washington that used income from natural resources, particularly timber.

The forestry policy of the Department of the Interior's Office of Indian Affairs (now the Bureau of Indian Affairs) evolved out of two sometimes conflicting goals: to provide economic stability for reservation Indians and to practice conservation forestry. In addition, all Federal agencies were concerned with protecting resources against timber trespass in the days before laws governing forest practices existed.

Timber growing on public lands—including Indian reservations—in the 19th century was cut illegally by settlers convinced that the Nation's natural resources were boundless, or at least that a new supply could be found over the next hill. The timber companies felt thwarted by the absence of legal ways to obtain timber or timberlands from the General Land Office of the Department of the Interior.

The Homestead Acts were used as pretexts for some to strip timber off a claim and then forfeit the "farm" back to the Government public domain. Even specific acts aimed an curbing theft by meeting public timber needs, such as the Free Timber Act of 1878, failed to stop the practice. There was one avenue at the time for legal access to Indian reservation timber: the Office of Indian Affairs did allow individual sales off reservation lands prior to 1889 but on a case-by-case basis.

Tribal members on reservations used their forests for lumber for local construction, often using treaty-mandated sawmills provided by the Government. "Indian agents" were supportive of these projects, believing them to foster "the habits of industry." The practice of supplying sawmills to reservations continued into the 20th century. However, internal reservation timber consumption was low, and Office of Indian Affairs agents promoted outside timber contracts to earn revenue for heavily timbered reservations even before 1889.

The Office of Indian Affairs, as a result of the 1889 "Dead and Down" Act began to manage tribal forests for future generations. In was not prepared for the duty, however, because of the absence of trained foresters, lack of defined forestry organization, and inadequate funding. The result was that individual Indian agents were talked into timber contracts that led to fraud on reservation forests. This was especially true in the Great Lakes region, the center of the nation's timber industry in the 1870's and 1880's. The dead and down restriction on reservation timber sales resulted in much deception. When loggers in Minnesota's Chippewa area began harvesting timber in December 1898 under General Land Office supervision, they found little dead and down timber. These loggers began to cut green trees and burned live trees to create "dead" timber. The contract specified 2.75 million board feet, but in actuality 17 million were cut.

To address the problem of regulating forestry on Indian reservations, the Office of Indian Affairs followed the practice of its parent agency, the Department of the Interior, in relying on USDA foresters. The Interior Department utilized these foresters for technical advice in managing forestry on Federal forest reserves from 1898 until 1905. Department of Agriculture foresters and the Office of Indian Affairs did not begin to cooperate officially until 1902, when the Morris Act was passed, expanding the 1889 act by providing for Department of Agriculture foresters to supervise logging on ceded Chippewa lands. USDA Bureau of Forestry Chief Gifford Pinchot envisioned that the 1902 Morris Act would allow "the first application of forestry to government-owned forests in America." (The first supervised timber cutting on a Federal forest reserve started in December 1899 on what is now the Black Hills National Forest, when cutting began on the Homestake Mining Company timber sale.) The reason for Pinchot's view was that the 1902 act gave the USDA Bureau of Forestry direct management over forest lands for the first time. In addition, the contract called for such new forestry practices as piling and burning slash. These timber sale contract requirements were so disliked by the area lumber companies that Pinchot mailed his local inspector, Eugene G. Bruce, a pistol. The dispute grew into a major political fight between those who favored private ownership for the ceded Chippewa lands and those who argued for State or Federal ownership. Conservationists in the State, including the Minnesota Federation of Women's Clubs, supported the Government foresters and Congress declared in 1902 these Chippewa lands the Minnesota Forest Reserve. This reserve, said to be the first created by Congress rather than the President, was later named the Chippewa National Forest.

That same year, Francis Ellington Leupp (1849-1918), commissioner of the Office of Indian Affairs, sought to further develop agency forestry programs and consulted with Pinchot on the merits of a cooperative agreement. President Theodore Roosevelt, in his quest for Government efficiency, promoted greater departmental cooperation, which helped foster such interdepartmental agreements during his administration (1901 to 1909). Thus, on January 22, 1908, Secretary of Agriculture James Wilson and Secretary of the Interior James R. Garfield signed the cooperative forestry agreement between the Forest Service and the Office of Indian Affairs. The plan placed the Forest Service in charge of Indian reservation forests subject to Interior Department overall reservation policy. A year later the agreement was terminated.

What forces led to the end of what had earlier been a successful partnership? The problems began with the differences in the goals of the foresters of the Forest Service and the Indian agents on the reservations. Forest Service foresters saw that the forests needed sound management, whereas the Indian agents saw timber as a source of employment. Disputes even arose over areas not covered in the cooperative agreement, such as District Forester Smith Riley's implementation of grazing rules on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Other sources of tension included reimbursement for firefighting work done by Forest Service personnel for the Office of Indian Affairs. The series of conflicts ended in 1909 when the Department of the Interior terminated the agreement.

Gifford Pinchot was irate an this loss of opportunity for the Forest Service to oversee forestry on Indian lands. In retrospect, however, the larger political war between the forces of former President Theodore Roosevelt and then President William Howard Taft (1857-1930) made the termination of the cooperative agreement inevitable. The conservative Taft favored a less restrictive (intrusive) management of natural resources than that practiced by Roosevelt's allied agency heads including Pinchot, who by then was in the vanguard of the conservation cause after the 1905 success of his campaign to transfer the Federal forest reserves from the Department of the Interior to the Department of Agriculture.

The 1910 General Indian Timber Act resulted in creation of a forestry division within the Office of Indian Affairs. Jay P. Kinney (1875-1975), a young lawyer and Cornell forestry student then working in the Patent Office, was named Chief Supervisor of Forests for the U.S. Indian Service. He organized a forestry force second only to the Forest Service in size to administer Indian reservation and allotment timberlands. Much allotment land was forested; many individual Indian owners often gained quick cash by encouraging clearcutting of their holdings. Of 1.5 million acres of allotted timberland in 1912, only 900,000 remained in individual ownership in 1925. Reflecting on his career, Kinney wrote in the Journal of Forestry (1930:1048) that fragmentation of forest holdings through individual allotments precluded large-scale long-term forest management. In may be that with hindsight the Indian Service's forestry program should have resisted reservation fragmentation of forestlands. The termination programs of the 1950's further led to shrinkage of Indian community forests. The Winema National Forest was established from terminated Klamath tribal lands in Oregon in 1961. The issue of community resource management versus individual ownership and management continues to face American Indian tribes and individuals as they seek both economic self-sufficiency and good natural resource stewardship.

Reference

Historical Research Associates (Newell, Alan; Claw, Richmond L.; Ellis, Richard N.). 1986. A forest in trust: three-quarters of a century of Indian forestry: 1910-1986. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Division of Forestry.