Men Who Matched the Mountains: The Forest Service in the Southwest

There have been no lady Rangers in the Forest Service. But many a Ranger's wife filled in for her husband to handle routine matters when he was on patrol and to help with his accumulation of paper work.

The earliest Supervisors had Ranger-clerks, who were paid the munificent sum of $60 a month, but these were men who, presumably, could also be sent out in the field.

The lady who broke the sex barrier in the Forest offices was probably Frances M. Elliott, way back in 1903, when the Forests were still under the General Land Office. Frank R. Stewart, Supervisor of the Prescott Forest Reserve, buried under an avalanche of paper work that day in March, 1903, decided to take a bold step. He would hire a girl as clerk and stenographer to help him catch up with the more than 140 mining claims on hand to be processed, and the reports on 15 to 20 timber sales, awaiting action.

Stewart sat down at his desk and wrote a letter to the Commissioner of the General Land Office asking for the appointment of Miss Elliott as clerk-stenographer at $25.00 a month.

". . . I should by all means have at least six Rangers but with five good men on the range and a clerk in the office I can keep up with the work, and I would prefer the appointment of a clerk at $25.00 a month to that of an additional Ranger at $60 a month," Stewart wrote, and went on to discuss the very great amount of record keeping.

He ended his letter by saying he had "no application blank for clerks but I enclose one of our regular forms of application for a position in the Forest Reserve Service."

Some years later a girl clerk at the Alamo-Lincoln National Forest office took the Ranger examination and passed it, according to O. Fred Arthur, former supervisor of the Cibola.

In 1917, Miss Anita Kellogg went to work for the Forest Service when Charles Jennings was Supervisor. In 1920, she took the Ranger examination and the Civil Service Commission notified her on January 24, 1921 that she had passed the examination. Supervisor Andrews of the Santa Fe National Forest offered her a job, but the Regional Office (then called the District Office) would not approve the appointment because she was "an unattached female." A few months later she transferred to the Coronado, and the next year while serving as chief clerk she was made a special deputy fiscal agent to pay off the firefighters on the Coronado and on a Class C fire on the Mogollon Mountains in the Gila Forest. Fred Winn, Supervisor of the Gila, objected to the assignment because she was still "an unattached female."

That summer she received a letter of commendation from District Forester Frank Pooler* for work on the fire as an "unattached female"—and also a promotion in pay from $1200 to $1400. She married the next year and, no longer unattached, she resigned from the Forest Service in 1924. A few years ago Anita Kellogg Blanchfield, former lady Ranger and "unattached female," was reported living in Mountain View, California.**

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*Frank C. W. Pooler had a distinguished career in the Forest Service. He went to work at $60 a month when the Forests were still under the General Land Office. He became Regional Forester in 1920 and served in that office until his retirement in 1945. During his years with the Forest Service he achieved a national reputation as a pioneer in the field of conservation. He died in 1960 at the age of 78.

**Mrs Blanchfield died in 1972.

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As the paper work increased in the Regional Office and in the Supervisors' offices throughout Region 3, the number of young ladies employed kept pace with the growth of the Forest Service. In the field, the Rangers still handled their own diaries, "bed sheet" reports, application forms, correspondence, etc.

When Edward G. Miller was assigned to the Datil National Forest in 1914, he went down to Magdalena to look over the set up. Bert Goddard was the Supervisor. The office staff consisted of Bass Wales and the girl who later became Mrs. Goddard. Years later when Sam Servis was a Ranger on the Datil and was reminiscing with Cole Railston at his ranch, Railston told him that when Bert Goddard died, Mrs. Goddard could just as well have taken over and would have made a good Supervisor.

In the early years of the Forest Service, the Supervisor's Office for the Tonto National Forest was located in one of the Reclamation Service buildings at Roosevelt Dam. A. O. Waha once said that "Supervisor W. J. Reed was the sickest man I had ever seen working. He was suffering intensely from an acute form of asthma." Reed was also fortunate in that he had an efficient wife. Waha said: "His wife, who had an appointment as clerk in his office, was a wonderful help."

Reed and his wife moved to sea level the following year, and he was succeeded by Roscoe Willson. The clerical staff increased to two girl clerks, and Willson remembers the Forest Service built a house for them. But when Willson first went to Nogales in 1907 as Supervisor of the "Sneeze-Cough" group, he was alone for awhile.

Willson once recalled that a temporary Ranger who preceded him had rented a building for an office "and he had correspondence and what records there were scattered all around on the floor." Willson got permission to hire a part-time clerk—a man.

Later the Forest Service established what Fred Miller called the "statutory rule." "That meant," he explained, "that there were so many Forest Supervisors, so many Assistant Forest Supervisors, so many Rangers, etc. Along about 1923 on this Forest (the Carson) there was a Supervisor, an Assistant Supervisor, a technical assistant, and two girls—that was the staff."

Ray Kallus, of Alamogordo, who spent his years in the Forest Service in administrative work, recalls that even in the 1930's "everybody had lousy offices." He and Wayla Ellis went to a Tonto National Forest Ranger District one time to make an audit and began to work over the cardboard file boxes. "Ellis pulled open the bottom drawer of one of those file cases, and there was the nicest rat's nest you ever saw in your life."

Kallus went to the Coconino National Forest in 1938 and was there during the war years. "We had a lot of things during the war," Kallus said, "I know that Ethel, who is now Ethel Sutton—she married Gordon Sutton—and I constituted the clerical force most of the time."

The early Rangers did not pay strict attention to following all the rules regarding paperwork and reports, and this had serious consequences for one Ranger, as Kallus recalled.

"In 1934 I was sent to the Sitgreaves, as an assistant to Nicholson," Kallus said. "Nicholson had been a Ranger on the Mormon Lake District. One of the tragedies of the Forest Service is that while he and somebody else were trying to install a telephone pole—they had a jim-pole rigged up and were trying to get this big pole down in the hole—all at once the pole slipped and hit Nicholson in the side and knocked a kidney loose. He was physically unable after that to continue the work of a Ranger, so they made him principal clerk of the Sitgreaves. He later died from that injury. But like so many early Forest men, he didn't pay much attention to following the rules. He completely ignored the compensation law and failed to make a report of this accident. After he died, his widow was completely unable to get anything from that accident. I made up my mind at that time that I would never let an injury be neglected where a man and his family might suffer because of my not reporting it."

Kallus said there were other such cases. There was, for instance, the time when a Ranger on the Flagstaff District was out on Lake Mary and lightning struck him. His widow received no compensation.

In contrast, Kallus said that while he was on the Coconino, a man named Skoulson became ill with pneumonia and died. The fiscal agent in Albuquerque was asked if an injury report should be made. The answer was no, but "we went ahead and made the report anyway. Lloyd Dahl went out and spent three days in the field. He interviewed ranchers and CCC foremen and enrollees and everybody he could contact. He came in with a complete resume in statements of what happened and how this man got pneumonia. (We sent it on to the fiscal agent and he sent it on to the Compensation Commission, and the Commission made the allowance and Mrs. Skoulson received $120 a month compensation."

When Kallus went to the Sitgreaves as assistant clerk it was the year that cost accounting was instituted by the Forest Service.

"None of the administrative assistants, or whatever they were called, knew anything about cost keeping," Kallus said. "There I was, a new man in the Forest Service, and I didn't know anything about it either! About the time one of the reports was due, Nicholson took off on an extended vacation and he says, 'Ray, I want you to make out this report.' I got on it and nearly went nuts trying to figure out cost accounting. I studied and studied it, and I couldn't get it. I'd read the books over and over and over. Finally, after a month of just the hardest kind of studying, the thing kind of opened up, unfolded and was clear to me. So I made out the reports on the Sitgreaves.

"I had to work about 24 hours a day to learn the doggone thing. They were having trouble at different places. On the Tusayan and the Kaibab, they consolidated that year, and Hugh Putnam was up there—Hugh had just come down from Utah—and he had his hands full without trying to learn how to make a cost account report. He had two of them to make, one for the Tusayan and one for the Kaibab. So Albert Morris (Regional Fiscal Agent) called the Sitgreaves and told them to send me up there to make those reports. Walter Mann was Supervisor on the Kaibab. So I made the reports. By that time Leo Anderson, the administrative assistant on the Tonto, was having trouble; he was having more than he could do with all the new CCC camps, and the ERA and different programs. He hadn't even looked at the book.

So Albert Morris called the Kaibab and said, 'Send Kallus down to make this report.' And so I made out the Tonto report. There were troubles on other Forests, so they sent me in to the Regional Office to make out the Regional report, and while in there I had to re-make several of the other Forests' reports. It wasn't that I was smarter than anybody else, it just happened that I had to concentrate on that one subject.

"This cost-keeping was quite a problem. Nobody knew it, and nobody wanted to learn it. The thing theoretically was fine, and would have been OK except the New Deal brought in such terrific conditions as to nullify the good work of the Forest Service, in that you would depreciate roads and all investments against operating accounts."

The cost accounting procedures were later dropped.

Kallus recalled the concise report that Ranger Harold Linn sent to Coconino Supervisor Edward Miller regarding trail building. Miller had given Linn an allotment of $200 to build a trail on the Beaver Creek District. Several months went by and nothing had been done, and no money spent. Supervisor Miller sent a stiff letter to Linn asking why he didn't go ahead and spend that money and build the trail.

Linn wrote his report on the bottom of the letter: "It snowed all around, and I couldn't help it."

Kallus was telling about a time around 1937 when the Forest Service people were involved in a number of accidents in the Phoenix area. They involved paper work and legal work. One of them was the death of an old postman in Phoenix, who was hit by a transient camp truck while riding a bicycle.

"It was in the red light district of town," Kallus recounted. "The Regional Office was getting real tired of all these people getting killed in Forest Service accidents. They sent Judge French down. French says to this truck driver, 'What were you doing in that part of town? You had no business in that part of town where the man was killed. What were you doing there?'

"Well, his story was the doggondest thing you ever heard of. We had been giving credit cards for drivers of government cars. We kept no records of these cards. This fellow had a credit card. He went down there and got 10 gallons of gasoline and got a rebate of one cent a gallon. That enabled him to get a glass of beer. That was the reason he was in that part of town, and that is how this old man happened to be killed.

"After that we started being pretty careful with the credit cards. As you look how careful the Forest Service is now in the matter of credit, the inattention that all of us gave to credit then must have been criminal."

Kallus said the payment of gasoline bills was about the biggest job the Supervisor's Office had. It took a clerk a whole day to make out a voucher for one Forest, checking tickets prorating appropriations, showing account numbers. Kallus made up a mimeographed form and supplied the gasoline company with the invoice form. "That was the first invoice that any oil company ever gave the Forest Service."

As Kallus commented, today for such a suggestion he probably "would have got a $10 award under the present awards program."

Walter L. Graves, Chief of Operations of Region 3 who retired in 1972, started with the Forest Service in the CCC camp days, went up through the ranks, and got into administrative management in the 1950's. During a stint in Washington, Graves headed the workload measurement program.

Discussing this program, Graves said that Earl Loveridge, who got his start in the Forest Service on the Carson Forest, was the "father" of workload measurements.

"Earl Loveridge did a tremendous amount of work," Graves said, "some of which was very good—and some was proven to be not so good. Some of the theories and practices he initiated are still in operation. Probably one of the worst fiascos I can recall in my career in the Forest Service was what was known as the old 26A, which was put into operation while I was at Pecos. This was a large atlas-sized form on which the Ranger and his assistant were required to first plan all of their work for the month, down to 15-minute intervals and, secondly, to account for everything they did, down to 15-minute intervals. As can well be imagined, this became so cumbersome that in a very few months it was dropped completely. But as I recall, it took me about two days every month to make this out for the Ranger and myself at the beginning of the month, and about a day and a half at the end of the month, to record all of our accomplishments. Our diaries had to be in such detail that it took an exceptional amount of time merely to keep the diary, because we did have to account for our time down to 15-minute intervals.

"After this was dropped, several different methods were tried. One of the major ones was the old Region 3 Green book which was, in effect, an annual plan of work, in which all of the jobs that are ordinarily done on a Ranger District were listed in a book, with space at the side for planning the amount of time that the Ranger was going to put in on each job. Now this was then segregated by months of the year and was used by the Ranger as a tool for planning his monthly work. It worked reasonably well, but was still quite cumbersome.

"During the time that I was in Washington, although this was not in my branch, the uniform work planning system was started, and has been in operation since, and appears to be one of the best systems that we have come up with as far as work planning is concerned. The workload measurement is tied in with work planning certainly. I think that the method of workload measurement that we used until just recently was not too sound, primarily because no one in the field was able to take the workload as published in the manual and re-compute the workload on a Ranger District and arrive at anywhere near the answer that was listed in the tabulation in the manual for that particular District. This was primarily due to some factors that were introduced at the Washington level that the field knew nothing about. This was one of the major complaints of people in the field. I think the present system is good. We have all the information that is necessary to re-compute the workload any time we wish, and update it and keep it current to any extent that we feel necessary."

The daily diary that was so important a part of the paper work operation of the Rangers in the past has been eliminated, but Graves believes that present methods of reporting are more satisfactory.

"The diary itself was largely a repetition of monthly work plans," Graves said, "and frequently was inaccurate and in many instances was rather meaningless. I think the present periodic or monthly work plan, with provision for recording accomplishments of jobs that were done, is all that is necessary. And it certainly reduces the amount of time necessary to maintain a diary. I for one am happy to see the Forest Service finally eliminate diaries."

Just to keep up with the great volume of rules, regulations, laws, interpretations is no mean task in itself for men in the field and in the offices. When the Forest Service was headed by Gifford Pinchot in the early days of its existence, he developed a Use Book in 1906 that consisted of less than 100 pages of rules, regulations, and instructions to Rangers. By 1908, the Use Book had grown to a volume of 341 pages. From this bulky single Use Book, the collection of laws, regulations, and rules has grown to a whole bookshelf of 28 volumes! And in addition, there are 78 handbooks of interpretations and instructions on every conceivable subject or problem that might confront a Ranger.