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

Public Relations was a rather neglected activity with the Service in its early years except as a byproduct of the Ranger's normal contacts with grazing associations and other organizations or individuals.

When Ward Shepard was in the Regional Office back around World War I days, he started a program of public relations. Then when Edward Ancona went to the Regional Office after World War I to become office manager, he handled what little public relations was accomplished. The first actual public relations division was set up in 1922 with Joseph C. Kircher, assistant district forester, in charge.

In 1924, John D. Jones was transferred from the Lands Division to the Public Relations Division. George H. Cook, who has been a Ranger at Tijeras from 1918 to 1920, before moving into the Regional Office, became Jones' assistant.

"He was my assistant for a long time," Jones recalled. "He was the one that originated the motion picture trips around the country. He was running that before I took over. He had a little generator and one projector.

"Our main job was to try to keep the public informed of what the Forest Service objective was, and why we were doing certain things. For instance, the stockmen were still undecided as to whether range management was of any value. They figured they'd been in the business all their lives and they knew more about it than we did. Our job was to convince them that we had made studies and knew how much of the grass could be harvested. I found that most of the old-timers had the idea that grass and water were indestructible, that the ground-water supply—you could pump it forever. It just replaced itself. And that the grass would replace itself, there'd never be any shortage. We finally convinced them through our studies that you could harvest bunchgrass about 40 percent of the volume and your range would stay in good shape forever, and you could harvest up to about 60 per cent of the grama grasses. It took a long time to convince those people of that."

The Public Relations Division had a traveling exhibit with motion picture projector which was called the Showboat. George Russell, who had been a Ranger on the Datil and Lincoln Forests, had taken over the Showboat in the late 20's.

"There was an interesting incident that came up in connection with George Russell," Jones recalled. "I had heard that he was a good shot. We went over to Pinyon, and there was a group there that had been kind of troublesome. They didn't like the Forest Service. George said, 'If anything happens over here tonight while we're showing the picture, you turn out the lights and I'll do the rest.'

"I didn't know what he meant, but on the way home that night, up Weed Canyon on the way to the Ranger Station we were in this old Dodge truck rockin' along the road. A little skunk dropped out in the road ahead of us. George, hanging onto the wheel with one hand reached for his pistol with the other and killed that skunk—shooting him in the head. "I didn't think too much of it, but we went a little further and a second skunk came out. That time I held the wheel for him, and he did it again. Then I knew what he meant when he had said, 'I'll take care of 'em if you'll turn the lights off.'

"George was a surprising character. He was such a mild looking fellow, you'd have thought that he was a preacher or something.

"There was another interesting incident on George: We used to have a lot of trouble at the Ranger station at Monticello in the San Mateos. There were a couple of Rangers driven out of there. There were some people who were kind of troublesome down there in those days in that isolated village. So they sent George down. The first time he came into the village, as he rode in there were a bunch of boys—kids—playing out on the hill, just above town. There was a can dump nearby, George turned to one of the bigger boys and said, 'You want to see some shootin'? And the boys said, 'Oh, sure.'

"George told one of them to pick up a can and throw it in the air about 60 feet. George put two bullets through it before it hit the ground! He never had a bad word said to him all the time he was Ranger there. He was extra good on propaganda. He knew just how to deal with people."

Jones said that one of the big problems of those days was erosion.

"I think I did the first original work on erosion in the Region," he recounted. "I developed a lecture on that. It dawned on me, the problem on erosion, when I was making a saddle-horse trip in California. I rode up a long valley east of Salinas, up to the San Bernito Forest, and I followed a little draw that had been a valley stream, and I noticed that it was cut out. I followed it for I guess 20 miles that day before I found any settlement. Then at the head of the valley there was a nice little farm, and there was no erosion beyond that. It stopped, and there was water. Well, I knew something was wrong. Then when I came down on the railroad from Portland I noticed when we came over the Stony Creek Wash that the railroad had been built up over a hump, and all that rock and gravel had come down from the Coast Range there. Well, those things began to percolate in my mind and I began thinking about it. When I came here from Montana where we had no erosion problems, my first trip was down on the Tonto and Coronado and, with the amount of grass they had there I couldn't see why a self-respecting cow would spend her time looking for it. I even suggested that they close the whole Tonto Basin to grazing, because its principal purpose then was irrigation, and the erosion was terriffic.

"So I developed my lecture on that. I gave it to some of the Indian pueblos. The Indian Service requested that I make a trip over to the Navajo Reservation, so J. S. Nave and I made that trip and I gave this talk. At Fort Defiance, old Chee Dodge was then chief, and he liked it so well that he had me give it three times and he interpreted it for me.

"Before that I used to attend the meetings at the State College when they'd have their meeting in the winter. I was put on the program by Dr. Kent down there one morning, and I decided to give my erosion talk. Well, Dr. Kent got off on something and he took up quite a bit of my time, so I had to crowd mine in. I didn't have time to show the pictures that I had. At noon he picked me up and took me to Kiwanis for dinner, and he said that was the best talk made at this convention. He said 'You folks have got a big problem.' I said, 'You've got a bigger problem.' He looked at me kind of surprised and said, 'What's that?' I said, 'The State of New Mexico owns 12 million acres, and your Land Office is nothing but an accounting office; they are doing nothing to protect the land. There's no limit on the number of stock that you can put on a unit,' and I quoted a couple of instances that I knew about. He says, 'By golly, you're right. I'm going to do something about it.' So he called in his range men that he had there and they set out a little experiment station right there at the college farm. I told him that he could see ours on the Jornada right nearby, and get a lot of information from that.

"Later, when we started the program of the CCC's putting in these check-dams, I went down and looked over the one at Silver City and the work on that watershed there. Fortunately, the Forest Service had fenced that area two years before, and a year after they'd put in those little check-dams the old spring on the farm up there started running. It had been dry for several years. So that showed that the water had all been running down the wash through town.

"Fleming took over that work and he came in the office here one day and talked to me about it. I told him the only problem in solving erosion on the rangelands was a reduction in grazing, that all a check-dam did was stop the erosion until the dam filled up and then it ran over and it was worse than it was before, that unless you had enough grass by the time the dam filled up that you didn't need it, your work was all wasted. He still thought the check-dams were the stuff. He was flying to a range meeting up at Fort Collins cross-country. I told him, 'When you're going over, look at this Galisteo area there and you'll see those fingers just coming in all over, every one of them building an arroyo, and draining water out of the country that should be feeding the grass.'

"He looked at me kind of skeptical; I knew he didn't believe it. So when he came back he came up to the office and he looked pretty near all out of breath and he said, 'You're dead right! that's the problem.' So I worked on that. I think that was probably the most important thing I did in the public relations field at that time.

"In 1922 when I first started, Nels Field—he was from Magdalena—was with the State Land Commission. I went into his office and I said, 'Nels, you grew up, didn't you, down near Magdalena? Was the Rio Salado and the Rio Puerco a big wash then like they are now?" He said, "Well, no, there wasn't anything. As a boy I used to drive our sheep and follow the wagon up the Puerco. You could drive the full length of it. Now, by golly, it's 30 feet deep banks there." I said, "Well, there were little groves of trees, you remember. There at those groves, if you dug a little hole there'd be a little seep and you'd water your sheep?" He said "Yes." I said, "You'd take them out on the west side one day, bring them home at night. And the next day you'd take them out on the other side and you'd bring them home, and you'd stay there all summer. By the end of the summer there wasn't any grass there. And then the slope was like a tin roof and the water would all slide in and it'd start cutting."

"He said 'Heck, how did you know that?' I said, 'All you have to do is look at the country and you can see.' Then he said the floods would come down and gouge out holes, skip a ways and dig another hole and every year the holes would get bigger, and pretty soon the whole thing would sluff off. So I had that as evidence from an actual man. He didn't know what was happening, but he knew it had happened because he saw it.

"I sent a memo in to the investigator's committee; I imagine it's lost in the files, in which I made a statement that I had read all of the engineering publications in Arizona and New Mexico that I could get hold of on flooding and erosion and that I yet had never found a single person who had thought about what was causing it. All they were thinking about was putting some kind of structures in the way of dams to stop it. But the reason they were having these floods, never occurred to them; that the land had been overgrazed!"

Discussing Forest Service operations, Paul Roberts, who spent 40 years in the Service, said he felt that "tremendous progress has been made, and is being made."

"I think one of the great things has been the public opinion concerning conservation," Roberts said. "I had always thought that the Forest Service was not a very good public relations organization. They never seemed to be able to put the story across too well, someway. But I think we must be doing that now. I think such things as 4H clubs and the other various agricultural activities among youths, so that a greater number of the younger generation who are going to college and studying husbandry and management—all this is contributing to what is almost a tremendous movement for the conservation of natural resources."

Gifford Pinchot, the "father" of the Forest Service, was a strong believer in aggressive public relations. For years after he left the Forest Service, he was a lecturer on forest policy at the Yale School of Forestry.

"Find out in advance what the public will stand for," Pinchot lectured students. "If it is right, and they won't stand for it, postpone action and educate them.

"Public support of acts affecting the public rights is absolutely required. Use the press first, last and all the time if you want to reach the public."

The Region 3 office in recent years has been a staunch advocate of taking the public into its confidence and has developed a highly effective public relations division. In 1937, it became the Information and Education Division, and the head of the division held status as Assistant Regional Forester.

Following John D. Jones' tenure the late Rex King became head of the Division in 1935 and remained in that position until 1950. King was a quiet, hard-working forester, who had been Supervisor of the Crook National Forest from 1923 to 1935, and a dedicated forester. After his retirement the I&E Division became part of Watershed Management and something of an orphan activity.

J. Morgan Smith was transferred from the Washington office to Region 3 in 1958 to assume charge of the I&E activities, and in 1961 a separate Division was created, with Smith in charge.

The importance of the I&E activities is stressed by Regional Forester William D. Hurst in his foreword to the current Multiple Use Management Guide:

"Forest Service program accomplishment and coordination hinges strongly upon an effective I&E program to gain the necessary public support and understanding of multiple use management. Full information relative to the needs and desires of local communities and Forest users groups must be understood and considered in the overall development of responsive coordination measures. Without full public cooperation, multiple use management cannot succeed."

Morgan Smith believes that the most important phase of his job is what he calls "preventive public relations." This is the development of I&E action plans in advance of undertaking projects or activities involving the public, rather than trying to explain them afterwards. Morgan Smith is a great believer in Gifford Pinchot's advice to educate the public by taking them into your confidence in advance rather than try to undo damage "after the fact."

The I&E Division is a many-faceted operation, and to carry out directions of the Multiple Use Management Guide the Division engages in a variety of activities running the gamut of public information activities such as booklets, maps, motion pictures, and talks to service clubs, conservation, farm and livestock organizations and other groups. An important phase of its work is relating public needs and desires to the activities of other divisions of the Forest Service, which may be of assistance in furthering policies of the Service. In a sense, every employee of the Forest Service is engaged in I&E work and the I&E Division of the Regional Office makes periodic inspections of the Forests within the Region to determine the effectiveness of the local public relations "climate."

In a recent inspection report, the I&E inspectors (the Chief of the I&E Division and his assistant) noted that they are "convinced that the Supervisor and his personnel are cognizant of the fact that there is an I&E aspect to practically everything we do. Several Multiple Use Impact surveys reviewed recommended that special I&E Plans of Action would have to be carried out before certain projects could be undertaken. This is solid 'PR.'"

In an inspection report, the I&E inspectors called attention to "broadcast burning of slash and debris" along a section of state highway, in which a considerable number of trees were scorched:

"This unsightly condition did not seem to bother local Forest officers, but to the inspectors, it looked extremely bad."

Reviewing the report, Regional Forester William D. Hurst noted that, "With all the emphasis the Forest Service is placing on natural beauty, we cannot live with a practice that leaves an unsightly condition in a Travel Influence Zone. We cannot tolerate a scorched appearance even for a year, if indeed the needles will fall off this season."

In another Forest, to preserve natural beauty a landscape architect prepared plans for a juniper eradication program so that all junipers were not merely eradicated, but rather done so in a pleasing appearance plan, which left some junipers for appearance sake and some as an "escape" route for wildlife which might graze in the open areas.

Such I&E activities are out of the ordinary but certainly effective public relations tools in the Forest Service's continuing campaign to keep the support of the public in its varied activities.

The I&E Division is diligent in "selling" its own Forest Service personnel on doing effective public relations work in the local communities.

A good example of its inspections to determine how well I&E policies are carried out is one last year on the Apache National Forest, the first on that Forest in several years. This was a seven-day inspection visit by the chief of the Division, J. Morgan Smith, and his assistant, George Worley. A full week was devoted to a variety of activities, which included visits to the Supervisor's headquarters and to Ranger Stations, a trip into the Blue Range Primitive Area, an inspection trip into the Mt. Baldy Primitive Area with the Regional Forester and Apache Forest personnel, interviews with prominent business men, state officials, permittees, conservation organization members, and attendance at a campground dedication.

From this inspection came a list of 21 recommendations, noting what is already being done from an I&E standpoint and suggestions for further strengthening the public relations image of the Apache National Forest.

A few of the recommendations will indicate the extent of the I&E inspection activity:

"Overall, the 'public relations climate' of the Apache is favorable.

"The dedication of the Rolfe C. Hoyer Campground* and Memorial on June 22 provided the inspectors with an exceptionally good opportunity to talk with local people and a large number of state conservation organizations' representatives from the Phoenix area. The turnout of about 300 people for this event is testimony to the regard which most Arizonans have for Forest Service personnel and the Apache."

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*The new campground was named for a former Ranger, Rolfe C. Hoyer, who had served on the Coconino, the Lincoln and on the Apache Forest, and who gave his life fighting the Slaughter fire on May 19, 1967. He was recreation and lands staff officer for the Apache National Forest at the time of his death. At the dedication Fred Greenwald of the Arizona Conservation Council gave a talk in which he related the debt he personally owed to Rolfe Hoyer. Greenwald had experienced a massive heart attack while in the Blue Range Primitive Area a few years ago and it took Hoyer three days to get him out.

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"The Forest's relationship with stockmen appears to be satisfactory. However (an attorney) was critical of the Forest Service because it had not done enough for the county in providing developed recreation facilities. . . .

"Outside of Greenlee County, there appears to be a general public support in the Springerville and Phoenix Area for reclassification of the Blue Range Primitive Area. Even in Greenlee County there are some supporters for reclassification. (Stockmen in the Clifton area and Greenlee County Supervisors were reported opposed to reclassification.)

"Some criticism was encountered about lack of adequate cleanup on a timber sale in the Bull Canyon area. There is a growing public insistence that there must be adequate cleanup after timber is harvested.

"Forest personnel's participation in community activities is outstanding and special mention should be made of the fact that two forest officers are president-elect respectively of the Rotary and Lions Clubs in Springerville."

There were numerous other comments and recommendations regarding the "public relations climate" of the Apache National Forest, but in general the inspection report was so favorable that Regional Forester Hurst wrote the Supervisor, H. L. Cox complimenting him on the "fine I&E work being accomplished under your leadership."