A History of the Six Rivers National Forest... Commemorating the First 50 Years

The Custodial, Resource Management, and Ecosystem Management Phases:

Historians often divide Forest Service administrative history—after its transfer from the Department of Interior to the Department of Agriculture—into three, broad periods: "custodial" from 1905 until about 1933, "resource management" from about 1934 through the 1960s, and modern, which some speculate will be called the "ecosystem management" period. As a player in Forest Service administrative history, the Six Rivers—non-existent as a single entity until 1947—virtually bypassed the custodial phase. Instead, its history spans the beginnings and development of the resource management period and its evolvement into an ecosystem management model. Though the Six Rivers' history reflects the past 50 years of the Forest Service as an agency, it has also led or lagged as an agent of change in land and resource management.

The Focus of this History and Its Documentation:

The Six Rivers is young, and this history focuses on the few years before its formal creation in 1947 through the mid-1960s. By zeroing-in on this short but crucial wedge of the Six Rivers' history, there was a preponderance of documentation regarding timber management with much less documentary evidence for other functional areas. It appeared that the more direct a function's tie to timber management, the more replete the documentary record. Therefore, functions such as engineering—whose traditional work was largely to develop the forest's transportation system, which, in turn, was largely dictated by timber access—had comparatively more records than functions such as range, recreation, heritage resources, or fish and wildlife. Though this imbalance was at times frustrating, it probably accurately reflects the nature of the Six Rivers' mission emphasis during its first 50 years: the push to fulfill the promise envisioned by its creation.

The Forest Service and the American West:

To better understand the forces that helped forge the Six Rivers National Forest, it is necessary to know something about the institutional history of the United States Forest Service. Moreover, the early history of the US Forest Service is closely intertwined with the history of the American West. Until the 1891 Forest Reserve Act that allowed for creation of national forest reserves, public land policy had been entirely geared to facilitating the transfer of public domain into private hands through such provisions as the Preemption, Homestead, and the Timber and Stone Acts. Though the Forest Reserve Act provided the legal mechanism for some public domain lands to remain public, until the 1911 Weeks Act, the only eligible lands were in the West. [1]

The Forest Reserve Act was passed and the first, public, forest reserves were created in 1891 when public outrage over depletion of forests in the east and midwest was at a crescendo. Gifford Pinchot, the first Chief of the Forest Service, was a veritable engine behind this outcry and the movement to save the nation from "timber famine" and to rescue public lands from private avarice. He held an undoubted conviction that forestry and scientific management could avert disaster in the West and reclaim wasted lands elsewhere—the depth of his belief accounted for his zeal and doggedness and for the shape of early Forest Service policy and institutional culture.

Broadly characterized, the history of the Forest Service from its inception in 1905 through the early 1920s was a time during which the infant agency took aim at monopolies and purely profit-driven enterprises that sought to hoard public land and its resources. The agency's credo of "wise use" underscored that it had no quarrel with use... even with rather intensive use. Instead, its hostility was toward despoliation of public lands where the long range "public good" was either a missing factor or an unessential by-product of the equation. Each influencing the other, the young Forest Service eventually worked closely with many of its early nemeses: the "denudatics" in the timber industry, the "monied monopolies" behind massive water and hydroelectric projects, and the cattle and sheep "barons" who grazed their stock on public lands. During the course of these epithetic, protracted and tortuous negotiations, the Forest Service re-shaped its policies and practices and in so doing, indirectly—through regulation—re-shaped the face of the landscape under its stewardship.

Eventually, and a harbinger of the second broad period of Forest Service history, Pinchot and his immediate successors became convinced that regulated monopolies could better serve the public and the land than laissez faire. For example, in the arena of hydroelectric development, Pinchot came to believe that regulated monopolies—especially those created by municipalities, were better for the land and for customers than forcing a situation where hundreds of hydroelectric developments—all using their own generation and transmission systems—had the end result of spoiling the resources he was bound to protect and of costing the consumer more in electrical costs. Where economies of scale could translate to less overall abrasive land use and to public benefit in the form of lower costs, the Forest Service tended to side with monopolies; particularly if the monopoly was a municipality and structured its project to serve a variety of publicly "beneficial" uses, such as power, irrigation, flood control, flow control for desirable fishes, domestic water, and the like (Conners 1989: passim).

If we look at timber management during the first period of Forest Service history, the young agency's efforts were aimed at assiduously guarding against wanton trespass on public timberlands by private lumber men. Agency officials dutifully cruised potential timber sales to assure that the public was properly reimbursed for the timber harvested from its land; they publicly solicited for bids on timber sales to assure that no one got special treatment; and, in order to protect resource values over the long term, they inserted resource protection clauses in timber sale contracts that potential buyers often considered onerous and overboard. But despite these precautions and preoccupations, a new paradigm emerged as a response to the reality that large timber companies had carved-out specific zones of influence. The Forest Service's philosophy reconfigured to accommodate a view that large timber companies operating on public lands could serve a public benefit while, simultaneously, pleasing their stockholders. The second broad period of Forest Service history, then, was characterized by a pattern of the agency preparing its larger timber sales in locations where there was only one, feasible prospective bidder. So, while some called it "recognizing the realities of big business," others saw the Forest Service as catering to the whims of special interests.

Today, the Forest Service appears to be emerging into a third period of its history; a time characterized by discontent with the guiding principals and solutions offered by the first two periods and by a struggle to mold a new operative ethic that integrates contemporary social, political, scientific, and economic ideas. Historian Patricia Limerick noted that this third period tends toward devaluing extractive uses and resource comodification and seeks a "greater loyalty to nature and to a distant posterity." Though the third historic period characteristics are most commonly identified with the liberal side of the political spectrum, both the left and right sides scoff at the first era's notion of government technocrats who form, implement, and monitor land use decisions free from special business and/or political interests. The faith in bureaucrats to efficiently and effectively manage the national forests in the public interest deflated during the latter part of the second period. Indeed, the tangle of population pressures, resource scarcities, the degraded quality of basic resources (such as air, water, and soil), and the sheer complexity of ecosystem relationships make the bare questions of "what is in the public interest" and "what is best for the land" confounding puzzlers.

Hopes For This History. . . A Sense of the Forest Service, the Six Rivers National Forest, and Ourselves:

This work is rich in quotes. As often as appropriate, I wanted people from the past to speak in their own voices. I hope that this history is a step toward documenting the Six Rivers National Forest's heritage and that we—employees and other interested publics—gain a sense of this agency and ourselves as constantly changing... as both reflections and as active agents in the history of our own time. My hope is that this history will be sound, readable, and thought-provoking; that it will spark further interest and study, and that it will help those interested in this young national forest to better understand its roots and to better guide its future.

Pam Conners, Historian
US Forest Service, Six Rivers National Forest
September 1997