History of the Fremont National Forest

Shortly after her retirement from nearly forty years' service with the Fremont National Forest, Melva Bach went back to work, beginning the enormous task of compiling an exquisitely detailed history of the Forest. For the next nine years, she would keep "pecking away" on her manuscript, gathering materials from files at the Supervisor's Office, and contacting former Fremont personnel now dispersed throughout the country.

Bach's experience on the Fremont provided her with a unique understanding of the complex network of personnel and programs that lay behind the management of over 1.1 million acres of central Oregon forest land. Although her experiences disposed her to begin the History, two aspects of her character — her energy and her attention to detail — are responsible for its final shape.

Other National Forests in the Pacific Northwest have historical scrapbooks, but it is safe to say that none of them compares with Melva Bach's history of the Fremont. The original is over 800 pages long and contains excerpts from literally thousands of original source documents.

In its original, complete form, Bach's History is very useful to historians or other scholars because of its inclusiveness. Many of the sources that Bach quoted are unavailable elsewhere. Some were reports prepared by Fremont National Forest personnel or others who witnessed the activities described. Unlike many compilers, Bach resisted the temptation to intrude herself into her material. For the most part, she let the source documents speak for themselves.

Since the summer of 1988 when John Kaiser, Fremont National Forest Archaeologist, first suggested that an edited version of Bach's work would be useful to the Forest, we have considered several approaches to the editing job. The most obvious one was to use Bach's materials to prepare a conventional historical narrative. The problem with this is that the character and distinctiveness of the original would be lost, and the result would no longer be Bach's History.

The method that we have adopted in preparing this version has been to concentrate Bach's original by organizing the materials into a standard format for each decade, by paraphrasing or summarizing some of the original sources, and by deleting material that is extraneous. The result shortens the text by about 50%, but retains a good deal of its original flavor.

To provide some continuity, we have added an "Editor's Introduction" at the beginning of the text. The introduction orients readers to background events in regional and local history.

The sources that Bach used to prepare her history include published and unpublished documents. The published sources were most often Forest Service publications like "Six-Twenty-Six," the Pacific Northwest Regional Forest Service newsletter, or "Timberlines," the Fremont National Forest newsletter. Local newspapers also figure into the list of sources. Bach cited these sources with a simple and expedient form of parenthetical documentation which we have preserved.

Bach's unpublished sources include correspondence, diaries, and field reports from Forest Service personnel. These are generally not cited in the original, but are identified in context. We have followed this procedure, with the addition of occasional footnotes to avoid confusion where Bach's references are not clear.

One important source of information throughout the History is Bach's personal acquaintance with many of the people and events. Virtually everyone who knew Melva Bach comments on her remarkable ability to "keep in touch" with people after they had left the area.

Bach focused her History squarely on these people of the Fremont. The accounts she included, the events she chronicled, and the photographs she chose all revolve around the personalities of the Forest staff.

Melva Bach's History of the Fremont National Forest remains a unique document. It is more personal than a conventional history but more objective than a personal account.

Scholars of American folk culture have pointed to the craft of making patchwork quilts as an important element in frontier life. In many respects, Bach's work resembles this folk art form. The History has been assembled from diverse sources into a rich pattern that reveals a great deal of information not only about the Fremont National Forest, but also about lives and experiences of people living in south central Oregon during the first half of this century.

Ward Tonsfeldt,
Bend, Oregon