Centennial Mini-Histories of the Forest Service

Floods, fires, and Forest Service foresters all contributed to the passage of the Weeks Act of 1911, which marked the shift from public land disposal to expansion of the public land base by purchase, the origin of the Eastern national forests. The role played by floods, wildfires, and foresters goes back to the beginnings of the conservation movement and professional forestry in the United States. The importance of forests in watershed protection, for example, was an early subject of concern among those who argued for forest reserves.

The place of forests in moderating streamflow was unclear in the early stage of the forest conservation movement but gained enough credence that "securing favorable conditions of water flows" was defined as a primary function of the newly formed Federal forest reserves in the Forest Reserve Management Act of 1897. In may be that memory of the disastrous Johnstown Flood of 1889 made the consequences of watershed deforestation especially vivid to people in the East.

The importance of forests in flood protection was recognized by foresters—largely based in the USDA Forest Service—but not by the Army Corps of Engineers. The latter advocated flood control by use of dams and levees. Forest Service Chief Gifford Pinchot believed that the Corps' position undermined one of the key arguments for creating additional forest reserves and national forests. The over 150 million acres of forest reserves established by 1907 (when Congress limited the power of the President to declare reserves from the public domain) were mostly in the West. The issue of flood control was important because of the need to gain political support for purchase of lands in the East for national forests.

The task fell to the research sector of the Forest Service to counter the view that forests were unimportant to flood control. Russian immigrant Raphael Zon (1874-1956), who headed the research office in 1907, convinced Pinchot of the need for forest experiment stations. The first experiment station was established in 1908 an Fort Valley on the Coconino National Forest in Arizona. These stations were spartan local operations designed to serve the needs of the nearby national forest. One exception, however, was the Wagon Wheel Gap Watershed Study in Colorado, a cooperative project with the Weather Bureau to study the effect of timber removal on water yields. The study began in 1910 and its results helped ensure the passage of the Weeks Act of 1911.

A related Forest Service water research effort in the same period was that undertaken by another research pioneer, Carlos Bates, who had chosen a remote site near the Rio Grande National Forest in Colorado in 1909 for the Nation's first controlled experiments on forest—stream relations. Little was known of the hydrology of mountain watersheds until Bates' innovative research on how water moves through soil to sustain mountain streams in rainless periods.

Rain was important to irrigators in the arid West and to urban residents, who wanted pure drinking water, so watershed protection through creation of forest reserves was supported by both groups. It was recreationists in the East, however, who sought creation of additional Federal forests—along with supporters of the proposed White Mountain reserves (Maine and New Hampshire, now the White Mountain National Forest established in 1918) of New England working with the regional advocates of Appalachian reserves (who later managed to get a series of national parks for the area in the 1920's). Enlisted in the effort was Massachusetts Congressman John Weeks, who in 1906 made a motion in Congress to authorize Federal purchase of private lands for the purpose of forest reserves. The notion of spending public money on recreation sites did not appeal to the powerful Speaker of the House, Joseph G. Cannon (1836-1927), who declared in the debate against the proposal "not one cent for scenery."

In 1905, the American Forestry Association endorsed the proposal to establish eastern forests through Federal purchase, and the defeat of the bill by Congress led them and other advocates of reserves to shift the argument from nature preservation to utilitarian concerns over flood protection. In the meantime, a second reason for the shift of ownership of forest lands to the Government was the need for fire control. The lack of such efforts on the part of the private sector and even States made fire protection a national program of the Forest Service when in was created in 1905, because when scientific forestry began in North America its practitioners regarded fire protection to be a fundamental mission of the profession.

U.S. public opinion gradually moved closer to forester's views on the need for wildfire control of forested lands, with the massive Western fires of 1910 accelerating the trend. The fires in Idaho and Montana in that year burned over 3 million acres and killed over 80 firefighters. In was an this time that the legendary firefighter Edward Pulaski, a ranger in Idaho, saved the life of his crew by confining them to a mine shaft as fire raged over them. Pulaski is credited with inventing the combined ax and hoe used in firefighting that bears his name.

The 1910 fires cost the Forest Service a million dollars to combat, and uncontrolled wildfire became a public challenge of the leadership of Chief Henry S. Graves (who had replaced Pinchot after his politically motivated firing by President William H. Taft after Pinchot charged Secretary of the Interior Richard Achilles Ballinger (1858-1922) with mismanagement of public lands). Chief Graves acted by beginning a program of scientific research on fire control, the expense of firefighting alone making fire research important. Passage of the Weeks Act in 1911 added to the fire work of the agency, since Section 2 of the law authorized matching funds for State forest protection agencies that met government (Forest Service) standards. This was the first time that direct Federal funding of non-Federal programs of any type was allowed, and the action increased greatly the task of the recently formed (1908) State and Private Forestry branch because it was busy developing cooperative fire control programs. (Later, in 1915 under Chief Graves, the Research branch was created, forming the third major division of the agency along with the National Forest Administration branch).

Passage of the Weeks Act led to the Federal purchase of forest lands in the headwaters of navigable streams, thereby expanding the National Forest System east of the Great Plains, a region of scant public domain. By the end of Graves tenure as chief in 1920, more than 2 million acres had been purchased; by 1980 over 22 million acres had been added to the National Forest System.

Reference

West, Terry. 1991. "Research in the USDA Forest Service: a historians' view." Washington, DC: USDA Forest Service, History Unit. [Unpublished ms.]