A History of Forest Conservation in the Pacific Northwest, 1891-1913

I

Protests over the National Academy reserves finally caused Congress to take action to create forest administration. Congress adjourned March 4, 1897, without having passed the government appropriation bill; therefore, it was necessary for the President to call a special session for that purpose. The result was that the forestry bill of 1897 was, like that of 1891, a rider on another bill, in this case appended to an appropriation for survey of the reserves by the Geological Survey. It was essentially the McRae Bill, with certain important additional clauses.

The bill specifically reaffirmed the power of the President to create new reserves under section 24 of the act of 1891; but modified that act to state that the reserves could only be created for specific purposes, to improve or protect forest land within the reservation, or to establish favorable conditions of water flow or a continuous supply of timber within the area. To appease those who had protested the new reserves, those reservations made by Cleveland in February, 1897, were suspended for a period of nine months, thus giving that period as an open season for filing claims on them.

Protection and administration of the reserves was placed under the Department of the Interior, which worked through the General Land Office. The Secretary might make rules for sale of timber and prospecting on the reserves. No mention was made of grazing. No money was appropriated for the Department to work with, however, until July, 1898, when $75,000 was appropriated to that end. The Geological Survey, however, was given an appropriation of $150,000 for survey of the reserves, and was able to begin work in the field season of 1897.

The act of 1897 was not devoid of clauses that had unexpected consequences. One such was the non-export clause, which in effect confined forest reserve lumber shipments to the state where the lumber was cut, working hardship on good utilization of lumber where the domestic needs were disproportionate to available timber supplies. Another, more important, was the homestead claim situation brought about by the "Forest Lieu" clause, which permitted homesteaders to select in lieu of their unperfected bona fide claims or patents within reservations other lands from unsurveyed areas of the public domain. Inside a few years Congress restricted selections to vacant non-mineral land and surveyed public lands open to homestead entry; but while the valuable land in homestead areas was opened, and while the President's proclamation was suspended, many homesteaders and corporate interests secured good timber in lieu of worthless lands. [1]

By 1898 the forestry organization of the Land Office was set up. The Land Office Commissioner had issued rules and regulations, stating general policies that would prevail, a year earlier; and in 1898 the organization was completed. The reserves were divided into eleven districts, generally with the state as a unit. Each district was headed by a superintendent; under each superintendent were a number of supervisors, generally one in charge of each forest; and under each supervisor a number of rangers, charged with patrol work and general protective measures, supervision of timber cutting, and of grazing.

Meanwhile, other agencies of the Department of the Interior were busy. For the general investigative work, the special agents of the Land Office were used to investigate timber land frauds or other matters pertaining to the forests. They worked directly under the Commissioner of the Land Office. The Geological Survey began its initial surveys; the work was under Henry Gannett, Geographer of the Survey, and by 1898 it had a large force in the field. The work, of course, was not finished within a year, or for $150,000; eventually 1-1/2 million dollars were spent, and by 1905, when the work was turned over to the Forest Service, only one third of the survey was complete. [2]

II

The year 1898 marks the end of an era in the forest conservation movement. The period 1860 to 1891 was that of education of the people, culminating in the bill of 1891; from 1891 to 1897, forests were established, forest conservation became a live issue with the people, and there was a search for a policy of forest administration. The years 1898 to 1905 marked the period in which management of the forests, of sorts, began, and in which took place a heated debate over measures, plans and principles.

Under the act of 1897, the Secretary of the Interior had final power in reserve matters; but, practically, the work was done by the Commissioner of the General Land Office, and matters not delegated to the Secretary did not need to go above the Commissioner. Below this, the field force consisted of superintendents, supervisors, and rangers, named in order of rank. The rangers did the field work, patrol work, fire fighting, timber scaling, and so on, the work varying greatly with the type of reserve. Their average salary was $60 per month, though in some cases it rose to $90. Each reserve was managed by a supervisor, to whom the rangers reported, who received from $1,200 to $2,500 per year. Above the supervisors were the superintendents, at $2,000 per year and expenses, though this position was abolished by 1902. [3]

The variety of reserve work required that ideally the forest officer be intelligent and have technical training. This, however, was not the case. Superintendents were always appointed through political influence, without regard to fitness; some were fairly good men, but the majority were worse than useless. Such was the case also with supervisors; as E. T. Allen wrote,

They have included lawyers, doctors, editors, real estate dealers, postmasters, and even a professional cornet player. Some have been so dishonest and depraved that they disgraced the service; all have been technically disqualified, yet many are excellent men, and by intelligence, honesty and executive ability, make up for their lack of timber knowledge.

Rangers included bartenders, "superannuated ward politicians and immature boys," whose weaknesses the few good men could not redeem. [4]

In Washington and in Oregon, the system was typical. Superintendent S. B. Ormsby, with headquarters at Salem, administered three supervisor districts; one, the northern division, the Cascade forest, and the Bull Run reserve; second, the central, Cascades; and third, the southern part of the Cascade Reserve and the Ashland Reserve. Under the supervisors were a total of 40 rangers. In Washington, the superintendent was D. B. Sheller, with headquarters in Tacoma. Under his supervision were four supervisor districts and 23 rangers. [5] Of the superintendents, Ormsby was actually in league with the lieu land sharks, and was indicted on such charges in the Oregon land fraud trials. Sheller, a one-time state representative, was not himself dishonest so far as any evidence is available, but he suffered from lack of support from the Land Office.

Another factor that made for difficulty was the fact that there often existed a corrupt alliance between the registers and receivers of the local Land Offices and the mining, timber and land interests. Registers and receivers were the subjects of Senatorial patronage; and senators often in their views reflected, or were associated with, the dominent economic views of the area. Thus, there is little doubt that the Land Office men in the Whatcom and Skagit County area, and on the Olympic Peninsula, were in sympathy with the entrymen who made claims of homesteads having from 5 to 12 million feet on them. In Roseburg, the receiver was the brother of the manager of the Booth-Kelly Lumber Company; in La Grande, he was related to the manager of the Grande Lumber Company. [6]

But there were other events in 1898 which had a great influence on the forestry movement. Bernhard Edouard Fernow, who had been head of the Bureau of Forestry since 1886, resigned at the end of 1898 to establish a forestry school at Cornell. He was succeeded by Gifford Pinchot. William McKinley died in 1901, and was succeeded by Theodore Roosevelt. These changes made for a different tempo in the forestry movement.

Fernow's work had been primarily that of a pioneer. Under his influence and direction, forestry organizations had sprung up in various parts of the country; education in forestry had made advances; and the first important national forest legislation had been passed. His had been fabian tactics, characterized by tact and horse-sense, working slowly with Congress in order not to antagonize a body dominated by economic man. As Jenks Cameron has written, in the best evaluation of his work:

. . . Dr. Fernow was not only the true pioneer of American Forestry but the man who established it on a firm and enduring foundation by hard work and sane work during its pioneer years. He planted the tree and tended it during its crucial years. Those who came after him had only to watch it grow. [7]

In Pinchot the movement had a leader of a different type. Born to wealth and social position, Pinchot had become interested in forestry at an early age. After studying forestry abroad, he became a practicing forester on the estate of George Vanderbilt in the Appalachians, in 1893. He became a leader in the fight against Fernow's fabian policies, feeling that something more aggressive was needed, and was to some extent responsible for the appointment of the National Academy Committee in 1896. The Committee's findings resulted in the formation of the Cleveland reserves; but the errors of the Committee report, especially in its arbitrary recommendations on the reserves, and its strictures on sheep grazing, were soon apparent. Pinchot was sufficient of an opportunist to disassociate himself with the views of the commission on the latter issue which came to be popularly associated, curiously enough, with Dr. Fernow, who had opposed the creation of the Committee. [8]

Pinchot set to work at once to make the most of his new position. The situation in regard to the public forests was peculiar. The Department of the Interior, through the Land Office, had charge of the reserves, but it had no foresters; the officials in charge, as has been mentioned, were politicians, not foresters. The Bureau of Forestry, on the other hand, had the few foresters in the country but no forests to work on. Pinchot set to work to increase both the number of foresters and the number of forests under his jurisdiction.

To make the Bureau more valuable and to give the men in it practical experience, he began a campaign to interest private forest owners in forestry—a campaign begun by Fernow, but carried on with increasing tempo by Pinchot, who had none of Fernow's scruples about using public funds to aid private owners by drawing up working plans for them. Profiting by the criticisms of men like John Minto, he took to the woods himself to examine local conditions and sent men into the woods, "to look and see and measure and count." Traveling in the west, he met men who were able to help him in his work; Edmond Meany, who influenced by Fernow, had started forestry instruction at the University of Washington; Judge Thomas Burke, whom he probably became acquainted with through Henry Stimson, and who aided him in the Puget Sound area; John Waldo, John Minto, and Malcolm Moody, the latter becoming one of his strongest supporters in the Congress; Will Cowles of the Spokesman-Review, with whom Pinchot had attended Yale, and who gave Pinchot good editorial support in his campaign. [9]

He also set to work to increase the number of foresters. Since forestry was in its infancy in this country, there had been but few places for training them. Instruction of a sort was available in various places—the Universities of Washington, Michigan, California, and Montana, for example—but the training was hardly of a professional nature.

However, in 1897 Pinchot opened a school for professional training on the Vanderbilts' Biltmore estate; in 1899 Fernow established a professional school at Cornell; and in 1900, through a grant from Pinchot's father, the Yale Forestry School was started. Pinchot also started a system of in-service training, taking young men who desired to make forestry their career, and paying them 25 a month and expenses in the field, to do the field work for the Bureau. The response to the program was great, and young men from all over the country responded. It offered a life of service, in a country long dominated, and tired of being dominated, by the interests, a varied life in the out-of-doors, and a new profession. Most of the applicants came from the east, but all sections of the country were represented. In Tacoma, for example, Edward T. Allen, a reporter on the Tacoma Ledger, one of the chief mouthpieces for the lumber interests, quit his job and went to work as a student assistant; and in [10] Baltimore George Cecil, working in his father's shoe factory, read an article in the Saturday Evening Post and decided that his soul wasn't fettered to an office stool. [11] Pinchot managed to inspire the new men with his own idealism. As one of his men wrote, He personally planned much of the organization and administration that has stood the test of fifty years.

He attracted to himself an exceptionally able, devoted, and zealous group of young men, who entered this new profession of forestry because of Pinchot's leadership. He even endowed and organized the curriculum of the Forest School that trained most of the first batches of technical foresters to enter the Forest Service. Pinchot was such an extraordinary organizer and executive that he got the Forest Service with its young crew started on ways that have been its strength ever since. [12]

The lumbermen were willing and ready to work with the Bureau. The more far-seeing lumbermen, with the end of free timber in sight, were ready to abandon out-and-get-out principles in favor of scientific management. More accurately, they were willing to consider conservative lumbering for the future, at such a time as it became economically feasible; in the case of the Weyerhauser interests, when white pine sold at $14 per thousand. Meantime, the work of the Bureau was valuable to them in getting, free of cost, information on management of the forests, such as taper and volume tables for Douglas fir and white pine, utilization of western hemlock, a predominant tree in the Northwest, but one which suffered from the bad reputation of eastern hemlock; reproduction of broadleaf pine in the south, and utilization of cypress. Firms such as Weyerhauser and the Weyerhauser subsidiaries, and owners like W. T. Radir and Frank Haines Lamb, asked for information from the Bureau and cooperated in its work. Bureau men were sent to all parts of the country, and by the competence of their work laid a foundation of good feeling for the future between the forest administration and the lumber men. [13]

As time went on, the Bureau of Forestry began to take over more and more of the functions regarding the reserves. Management of the reserves by the Department of the Interior was poor, not only because of the poor quality of the men among the Land Office personnel, but also because of poor leadership within the department. The Secretary of the Interior, Ethan Allen Hitchcock, was personally honest, but humorless and suspicious, and a poor administrator, He had been hard to convince of lieu land fraud in regard to the reserves, but once convinced, he sought to apply the laws with the assured fervor of an Old Testament prophet, angering many legitimate interests whose operations were held up by his strict application of land laws in the west. Nor were the Land Office Commissioners, in whose hands lay much of the work, any better. Binger Hermann, whose term extended from 1897 to 1903, has puzzled most writers including Gifford Pinchot and John Ise. His voting record in Congress shows a fair awareness of the problems involved in conservation, and as a Commissioner he seemed far more aware than his superior, Hitchcock, about the possibilities of fraud in regard to lieu land, with which problem he deals in the annual reports to the Commissioner. However, he was hopelessly slow in his work, and used his office as a means of rewarding political henchmen. His successor, W. A. Richards, though undoubtedly better, was still inefficient and Land Office work was still done by laborious hand copying of documents until Ballinger brought modern clerical methods to the office. [14] Within the department only the Geological Survey was organized on a professional basis.

Later, as the weaknesses of the Interior organization and personnel became more apparent, the Bureau of Forestry took on more and more work. In 1897, a man from the Agriculture Department, Frederick V. Coville, was borrowed to make recommendations for grazing administration in the Cascades. By 1901 men of the Bureau determined grazing allotments in the national forests. The Geological Survey asked aid of the Forest Service, and they assigned such men as Henry Graves, H. B. Ayres, H. D. Langille, and J. B. Leiberg to work with the Survey. By 1902 the Bureau began doing the most important boundary work, on their own and at their own expense.

The boundary work, for the future of the movement, became the most important work of the Bureau. The language of the appropriation for boundary work permitted the Bureau to "make and continue investigations on forestry, forest reserves, forest fires and lumbering." Both Roosevelt and Pinchot desired new reserves; and soon after Roosevelt became President it was arranged between Gannett and Pinchot that Pinchot might change the boundaries Gannett suggested. Much of the work concerning boundaries was work against time; a large group of timber locators were scouting the forests of the west for the choicest bodies of government timber, which, once located, would be claimed fairly or fraudulently, under one or another of the public land laws. Various examinations were made in 1902 by the Bureau; and in 1903 the work was organized in districts, under the general direction of F. E. Olmsted. E. T. Allen had charge of the work in Colorado, Montana, and Idaho; Albert Potter in California; and H. D. Langille in Washington and Oregon.

The work was hard and exacting. The boundary men worked, on foot or horseback, carrying supplies by packhorse or on their own backs, wherever the work led them. They often worked against time, to get their recommendations written up and wired in before the highly competent land thieves moved in ahead of them. One of their duties was to meet with members of the public, to explain to the persons concerned the exact purpose of the reserves. [15] They collected a great deal of information, not only about the reserves to be created, but about the people concerned, and the public sentiment in regard to the reserves; and their reports remain the best sources of information as to how the reserves were regarded by the people at the time. They are important, but neglected, primary documents in the history of forest conservation.

Two of these men deserve special mention. John D. Guthrie has written,

Bill Kent is almost a legendary character of American forestry. His individuality, his adventures, and the stories about him bespeak the lusty days that marked the early days of the Forest Service.

W. H. B. Kent was born in Meriden, Connecticut, in 1878. He went into forestry, first as a student assistant in the Black Hills, later for Division R of the Land Office as head ranger, and after March, 1903 for the Division of Forestry as examiner. By December, 1905, he had charge of all field work in boundaries. He later became forest inspector in Washington and Oregon.

Most of his official work was spent in boundary work—examining, locating, reporting, and mapping federal forest land of the western states.

Because of local resentment this work was as exacting, . . . and dangerous as any American foresters have had to do. At times it had to be done secretively or in a race with land grabbers and other exploiters. But it saved vast public lands for the American people. And many a forest is green on the map today because of W. H. B. Kent.

Kent was a man of serious appearance, but a Homeric sense of humor, a good actor, original, observant, calm in demeanor, and thorough in his reports, which are vivid reading. His recommendations were "short, pithy, and sometimes drastic." An able woodsman, he had been adopted into the Navajo Indian Tribe, and copied some of the Indian ways, such as mounting his horse from the right side. Known to his intimates as "Sherlock Holmes" after a now forgotten fictitious character of the time, he was one of the most colorful of the early workers for the Forest Service. [16]

Harold Douglas Langille was a man of a different type. Born in Nova Scotia in 1873, his family moved to Oregon in the 80's, and became inseparably connected with the Hood River and Mt. Hood area. They became mountaineering enthusiasts; Langille's father built Cloud Cap Inn, and he and his brother, W. H. Langille, became guides on the mountain. When Pinchot came through on the Academy jaunt of 1896, H. D. Langille was his guide in the Mt. Hood area. Pinchot became interested in the young man, and inspired him, and his brother as well, to take up forestry as a career. Langille spent some time studying at Yale, to gain the rudiments of the new science; he was in charge of the Geological Survey crew that did the boundary work in the Mt. Hood area, and in 1903 was put in charge of boundary work in the Pacific Northwest. A man with an "abrupt, outspoken, and occasionally mildly terrifying manner," he was a professional Oregonian, possessed of an ardent desire to save the woods of Oregon from the eastern lumber syndicates bent on exploiting them. His knowledge of Oregon conditions was of great value to the Service in making decisions in that area. Like Kent's, his reports are valuable pictures of the forces which led to creation of the reserves. Like Kent, also, he was something of a literary artist; his reports and occasional writings are good reading. [17]

Langille worked for the Forest Service, in the Pacific Northwest and in Alaska, until about 1910. when he went to work for the James Lacey Logging Company. He traveled to Chile in 1916 to report on logging conditions in that country. He died in February, 1953.

In addition to the boundary work, the Division helped Interior in other ways. Advice was given by the trained men of the Division to the Land Office on timber sales, beginning in 1900. By 1901, a Division of Forestry was set up in the Interior Department, headed by Filbert Roth, and with some men borrowed from the Bureau of Forestry as aides, including E. T. Allen as Inspector. Some progress was made, but it was a losing struggle against Land Office red tape and inefficiency, and most of the men drifted back to the old Division of Forestry.

After 1901 there came a drive to bring the complete Forestry administration over to the Agricultural Department. The Lacey Bill was introduced in Congress to make the transfer. Initially it was blocked in Congress, largely through Cannon's intervention. Sentiment in the West was divided; the Oregon State Legislature, in 1901, sent a memorial to Congress, protesting such a move, on the grounds that the Interior grazing regulations were suited to the country, though probably a more cogent reason was the opposition of Binger Hermann of the Land Office. On the other hand, Judge Thomas Burke of Seattle sent strong telegrams to the Washington delegation favoring the transfer. It finally failed on a vote. [18] Finally, however, through pressure from Roosevelt, from the findings of the Public Land Commission, and revelations of inefficiency in the Land Office, and through support from lumbermen, the American Forestry Association, and others, the transfer was made in 1905. Along with this transfer came other important moves: the lieu land act was repealed; the Bureau became the Forest Service; and the "Reserves" National Forests. Scientific management of the forests was at last at hand.

III

So far mention has been made only of official governmental action by the Federal Government. But another type of action should be noted—action by voluntary associations, acting as pressure groups or groups for educating the public. [19] At least four such groups had some influence, both nationally and in the region, during this time, and a complete picture should include their activity as well as official activity. [20]

The first such organizations were the conservation groups. These were, historically, the groups having as their members such men as Carl Schurz, John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt, and Bernhard Edouard Fernow. They worked through organized groups such as the American Academy for Advancement of Science, the American Forestry Association, The Sierra Club, the Boone and Crockett Club, and other organizations. Some, like the National Academy and the American Forestry Association, had quasi-official status, either through their membership or through close ties with governmental bureaus. A great share of the support and membership of these groups came from people interested in preserving wilderness values rather than those interested in practical forestry, but the groups did much to educate the public.

On the national scene, conservationists were significant in the beginning period of the drive for forest conservation, down to 1897 at least. After 1897 their influence was less strong, partly because of a divergence in aims among the various organizations, partly because of the rise of professional organizations with professional aims. The Pacific Northwest followed this national pattern. The Oregon Alpine Club, and its successor, the Mazamas, became of secondary importance after 1897. The American Forestry Association had a few members, but was not a significant group in the region.

The second group was composed of professional foresters, those engaged in forestry as a career. At this time, and until at least 1913, they were largely professional workers in governmental bureaus, largely the Geological Survey and the Forest Service. The states had no professional foresters, and there were few private ones. The chief organization through which they worked was the Society of American Foresters, a group of professional foresters organized in 1900 by Gifford Pinchot. [21] To this group could be added the great professors in colleges of forestry, such as Filibert Roth, Bernhard Fernow, George Wilcox Peavy, Francis G. Miller and Hugo Winkenwerder. These men, both through their classroom work in training foresters, and through their memberships in professional societies, had a great deal of influence. Both nationally and regionally, the professional foresters were the most influential group in this period.

The third organized group was that of the timber owners and lumber and pulp interests. They, too, had their organizations to express their views and act as pressure groups, such as the National Lumber Manufacturer's Association and the West Coast Lumbermen's Association. They often used as sounding boards special committees of chambers of commerce, or members of Congress sympathetic with their aims.

As a pressure group, however, the various trade associations were not a particularly strong group in regard to the conservation question. The trade organizations were primarily interested in better prices for lumber, uniform standards of grading, and keeping a high tariff on lumber, and their official actions were in regard to these matters, rather than governmental forest policy. This is not to underrate the role played by individual operators or groups of operators, both for and against conservation; they were potent forces. But the pressure was exerted directly, not through the existing trade associations. [22]

A fourth organized pressure group was composed of the grazing interests. The most important of these on a national level were the National Livestock Association and the National Woolgrower's Association. There were, in addition, many other such organizations on the state, regional and local level. They, like the lumber interests, had close relations with members of the State Legislatures and of Congress. [23]

Relations with grazers went through two stages. The first stage was from 1891 to 1897 or 1902, depending on the section of the country. During this time the main grievance of the operators was that they could not use the mountains in the reserves as summer range for their herds and flocks, since neither the act of 1891 nor of 1897 provided specifically for use of the forage resources. The restrictions affected the sheep owners particularly, for two reasons. One was that sheep, as close grazers, are much more destructive of the range than cattle or horses; and it was against sheep that the restrictions were primarily directed. The other was that trespass by sheep on the area reserved was a much more clear-out violation of the law than trespass by horses or cattle. Sheep must be close-herded, rather than be permitted to run wild on the range, as is the case with horses and cattle. Any sheep found on the reserves, therefore, would show a definite act of trespass. On the contrary, cattle or horse owners whose range bordered the reserve would permit their stock to graze there during the summer, if such stock was found in the reserve they could claim the animals had strayed.

The second stage came after a grazing policy for the national forest was established. There were a variety of factors which affected the attitude of the livestock men. One was the role of the forest administrators in stopping range wars or disputes between cattlemen and sheep owners, or "tramp" sheepmen and local owners of livestock. Second was the charging of fees for grazing, a practice many livestock owners thought illegal. Third was the size, length, and security of grazing permits, and the area covered. Fourth was the local situation; how well stabilized the industry was in a given region, the influence of local livestock organizations, and how well the local administration handled problems that arose. [24]

In the Pacific Northwest, the large organizations were not particularly strong at this time. Though most livestock owners were members of the national organizations, their main loyalties were to the state, county, or regional organizations, through which local problems were solved. Moreover, the local livestock organizations did not have such influence politically as did state organizations in such states as Wyoming. There were counter forces of other interests, such as lumbering, recreational, and civic interests, to balance the grazing section of the economy. [25]