A History of The United States Forest Service in Alaska

The Forest Service, the largest bureau within the U.S. Department of Agriculture, has occupied a central place in the historical development of natural resources administration in America. This is especially true in Alaska, where, in contrast to the older West, no significant utilization of forest resources preceded the bureau's establishment. On March 5, 1905, only one month after transferring control of a vast system of western forest reserves from the Department of the Interior to the Department of Agriculture, Congress created the Forest Service in its modern form. In the seventy-five years since those beginnings under Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, the Forest Service has grown and matured, not only in terms of forested lands administered but, especially since World War II, in the numbers and sophistication of its personnel and in the intensity of resource management. With this growth has come increasing controversy about the development and protection of the treasure-house of resources entrusted to it.

The characteristic esprit de corps of the Forest Service remains strong, but its policies are constantly challenged by special interest groups motivated by a range of economic and philosophical assumptions. The challenges often evolve into political campaigns in which the contending parties sometimes distort the facts of the past and the present to serve their particular needs and ambitions. The issues are often blurred by public servants themselves, whose goals always include obtaining the budgetary appropriations necessary to maintain current activities and provide for additional "good work." There are, of course, regional variations to this profile. In Alaska, the great land and resource issues of the past decade have drawn a level of public attention to the Forest Service that would have been scarcely imaginable in earlier times.

Public controversy prompts scholars to take stock from time to time—to examine the record of discrete units of our historical past, to measure them in the evolving context of larger themes, and to offer judgments that might yield better understanding of present and future concerns. Students of the Forest Service have gone about this stocktaking in various ways. John Ise in 1920, Jenks Cameron in 1928, and Darrell H. Smith in 1930 offered broadly similar interpretations of federal forestry that remain useful even if reflective of the times in which they were written. More encyclopedic in approach was Samuel T. Dana's Forest and Range Policy (1956), which is still widely used as a text and authoritative reference. Henry Clepper's Professional Forestry in America (1971) looked more broadly at the guild—also from an insider's viewpoint. Political scientist Herbert Kaufman offered insights into the operation of field personnel in The Forest Ranger: A Study of Administrative Behavior (1960), and law professor Glen O. Robinson evaluated recent issues in The Forest Service: A Study in Public Land Management (1975). The authoritative history, viewing its subject principally from "the tip of the administrative triangle," is Harold K. Steen's The U.S. Forest Service: A History (1976). The serious student must examine all of these books to ascertain the subject's scope—only then to discover that there are many additional scholarly works that contribute detail through the study of biography, organizational functions, programs, special projects, and issues.

Although the Forest Service has been a decentralized bureau almost from its inception, there are surprisingly few studies of its regional and local units. With a few notable exceptions, professional historians have passed up opportunities to examine the Forest Service in the context of its various operational settings. One exception is Charles S. Peterson's Look to the Mountains: Southeastern Utah and the La Sal National Forest (1975). There are also some histories of national forests by scholars recently produced as contracted "cultural resource overviews." More typical efforts, usually old-timers' colorful reminiscences brought together by Forest Service staff, are symbolized by Early Days in the Forest Service (4 vols., 1944-1976), which are stories out of Region 1 in Missoula, Montana, and Men Who Matched the Mountains: The Forest Service in the Southwest (1972), by Edwin A. Tucker and George Fitzpatrick. These are rich in nostalgia and narration but short on interpretation. The activities of several regional forest and range experiment stations and subsidiary laboratories have been chronicled, but a general scholarly study of research in the Forest Service is badly needed.

The only book-length scholarly study of a Forest Service administrative region is Lawrence Rakestraw's History of Forest Conservation in the Pacific Northwest, 1891-1913, a 1955 doctoral dissertation published in facsimile edition by Arno Press in 1979. Focusing on a limited time period in the timber-rich states of Oregon and Washington, Rakestraw's study established a model that finds fruition in his present work.

In relating the history of the Forest Service in Alaska, Rakestraw provides an outline of evolving forest policy nationwide as a context for detailed illustration of the pioneering initiatives and workaday tasks of forest officers on America's last frontier. Alaska's first federal forest, the Afognak Forest and Fish Culture Reserve, was established in 1892 from the efforts of scientists concerned with the conservation of fisheries. The Alexander Archipelago Forest Reserve was proclaimed in 1902 and enlarged five years later to become the Tongass National Forest. It is today the largest of the more than 150 national forests. Also established in 1907 was the Chugach National Forest, which absorbed the Afognak and covered vast regions of south-central Alaska before being reduced at the insistence of opponents.

The central figure of nearly all forestry activity in Alaska from 1903 to 1911 was William A. Langille, an Oregonian who combined romantic adventure with hard-headed management in Forest Service duties performed across endless reaches of timber, swamp, stone, and ice. Langille got help from a small corps of rangers who adapted to Alaskan conditions by learning the use of boats and dog teams (instead of pack mules and saddle horses), enforcing regulations among handloggers, Natives, and other local users of forests (there were few genuine "lumber barons"), and patiently awaiting national recognition and development of Alaska's boundless resources.

During the administrations of his successors—supervisors and regional foresters like William Weigle (1911-1919), Charles Flory (1919-1937), and B. Frank Heintzleman (1937-1953)—national attention finally came, sometimes in an overwhelming rush, and put an end to much of the romance and boyish innocence of the territory. Intensive utilization of forest resources, particularly in the form of a pulp and paper industry promoted by Heintzleman (who later served as governor of Alaska), only began to be realized when such developments as statehood introduced new claimants to resources, and a burgeoning environmental movement erected obstacles to the easy disposition of lands and timber.

Preservationist groups zealously sought to "save" the last of America's wilderness, often without fair regard to the welfare of Alaska's residents. Through publicity campaigns, political lobbying, and court actions, they interposed constraints on the ambitions of resource managers and developers. In the process they besmirched the reputation of an agency that itself had taken many initiatives to preserve scenery, protect wildlife and fisheries, and provide recreational facilities for swelling numbers of residents and visitors. Despite the Forest Service's historic stewardship and its unfailing efforts to assure the "greatest good of the greatest number," it never quite caught up with the environmental pulse, at least in terms of public perceptions. The turbulent issues of the 1970s, ranging widely over the disposition of Alaska's lands and natural resources, have been fought out largely in the "lower 48," often to the consternation and frustration of those who make their livelihoods in the forty-ninth state.

In the pages that follow, Lawrence Rakestraw traces all the issues and the men and forces be hind them. His view of nearly eight decades of Forest Service work in Alaska presupposes that the general welfare is best served by a cooperationist approach between the managers and users of natural resources. Whatever their ultimate judgment of Rakestraw's vision of the past, present, and future, all readers will find his treatment of the subject to be original, thoroughly documented, and carefully considered.

Ronald J. Fahl
Forest History Society