Early Days in the Forest Service Volume 3

SOME HIGHLIGHTS OF MY FORESTRY CAREER
By Clarence C. Strong
(Retired 1957)

I was born at Arago, Oregon (Coos County) September 7, 1895. In the fall of 1903, I moved with my family from Bandon, Oregon, to Portland, Oregon, by wagon and on to Hood River, Oregon, from Portland by boat. We moved to Washougal, Washington, in 1908. I graduated from high school and entered the army on April 10, 1917; went overseas with the 162nd U.S. Infantry in December 1917; worked on a French forest for three months during the winter of 1918 while my unit was in quarantine. It was at that time that my interest in forestry was kindled.

In the fall of 1919, I entered Oregon State College. I stayed out a few short periods to bolster my finances and graduated in June 1924 with a degree in forestry; minored in forest products with the expectation of a career in logging or lumbering. However, jobs were scarce at that time in that field, so I accepted a job as laborer with the Office of Blister Rust Control, Bureau of Plant Industry, in North Idaho.

During college years I worked parts of two years with the Northwestern Lumber Company in the Gray's Harbor area; one period in the mill at Hoquiam, and the other as assistant to the logging engineer in their woods operations near Copalis Beach. One summer vacation was spent in the lumber-grading department of the Brooks-Scanlon Lumber Company at Bend, Oregon.

June 16, 1924, the first day of my forestry career with the U.S. Government, found Percy Melis and me at Coolin, Idaho, helping to load Sam Byer's barge with summer equipment and supplies for use in the Upper Priest River drainage, scene of the first real ribes-eradication program ever conducted in the Inland Empire. As we rode up the lake that afternoon and through the thoroughfare connecting Upper and Lower Priest Lake by moonlight, it seemed to us there couldn't be a more beautiful spot in all creation. No fires had scarred the lake shore, and logging had not progressed to the lake yet except for small, isolated pole operations. Only two years later, however, I was to see a great and disastrous fire sweep seven miles of the west shore and much of the back country. It was a sad day. Fortunately, however, planting, natural regenerating, hazard-reduction programs and good protection have converted most of that great devastated area to beautiful young forests.

We tied the barge to a dock at the upper end of Upper Priest Lake at midnight. Dog-tired and ready for sleep, we pulled off our shoes and rolled up in some canvas on the beach and fell asleep. But it was not for long. The beach pebbles made a poor mattress. Catnaps were of such short duration that we stuck a pole in the sand in the direction of the moon so that we could tell if it changed position between catnaps.

Four o'clock came after an eternity of catnaps. During breakfast, neighbors arrived to see the strange goings on. There was Pete Chase, miner, summertime guard for the Forest Service, and wintertime moonshiner when he wasn't in jail at Sandpoint. From Navigation across the lake came "Cougar" Gus Johnson. Many times during succeeding years we were to see "Cougar" scrawled across sawed log ends along trails and high-up on buckskin snags in the most remote parts of the Upper Priest country. Down the Priest River trail came an old recluse whom we later tabbed "Huckleberry Finn" because he was a Finlander who made most of his cash income by picking and selling huckleberries. These, and another old backwoodsman whose name has slipped my memory, were to be our nearest neighbors that first year in the forests of North Idaho.

That morning Percy and I shouldered our 50-lb. packs, and with a couple of tools apiece, started up the Priest River trail for our campsite, 12 miles away. Later that day others followed. Among our tools was a "froe." In our western Oregon stump-farm boyhood days, Melis and I had each rived many cedar shakes and boards. By the time the pack string arrived with equipment and supplies, we had cleared the campsite on the banks of Upper Priest River, and had split enough cedar shakes and boards for camp-building purposes. After a two-week training period we were promoted to crew foremen. We jokingly surmised the promotion was likely due to our adeptness in riving shakes.

That was my introduction to my professional forestry career - and I wouldn't have changed it.

In 1925 I was campboss of a 30-man ribes-eradication camp at Cedar Creek, about eight miles above Upper Priest Lake, and a side camp at McLean Mine near Continental Mountain. Among our visitors that summer was Regional Forester Fred Morrell. He learned that I had broken the stem of my pipe while arranging a bough bed for him. Before leaving camp he fished a good pipe from his pack and presented it to me. This and several other thoughtful acts on his part in later years left me always with a warm spot in my heart for him.

Forest fires that year served as a good training assignment for 1926 and the scorching fire years that followed during the next decade. Among other things, we learned that fires in the high country often burned downhill at night about as fast as they ran uphill in the daytime. One such fire gave me as bad a scare as I had in my entire career. I had taken one man with me. We had to travel through a dense spruce and alpine fir forest for about seven miles, arriving near the fire about 11:00 p.m., but the smoke had settled over the entire basin. After gridding the area for two hours we gave up trying to locate the fire till daybreak. We pulled off our shoes and rolled up in the two blankets we had and went to sleep. We were awakened a short time later by a deafening roar and looked up to see a crown fire racing downhill over our heads behind a stiff downhill wind. We grabbed our shoes, tools, and blankets and made a downhill run that probably set a record. We soon outdistanced the fire and about a quarter of a mile down, came to a small stream where we decided to make our stand. However, the fire quieted down before it reached us. Reinforcements arrived that morning, for which we were most thankful. But, we both will long remember that experience.

Another such fire was in the Lion's Head country. My ten-man crew arrived on the scene and found Ray Coster and three other men struggling with a 40-acre fire in dense lodgepole timber on a high and steep slope facing Two Mount Creek. The fire had repeatedly gone over their line on the downside. And it did the same every night for the next three nights. B.A. Anderson arrived with ten more men the fourth day. We got a good line around the downside and by putting our entire crew on for night duty were able to hold our ground. Warren V. Benedict was in my crew on that occasion. We were all so exhausted by the time we had that fire under control that we could barely muster enough strength to drag ourselves back to camp.

In 1926 I had charge of three ribes-eradication camp on the Kaniksu. Two of them were on Lamb Creek, and the third on Bimarch Creek. B.A. Anderson, Bill Guernsey, and George Luke, mathematics professor at the University of Idaho, were campbosses. All the oldtimers will remember the blistering electrical storm that hit the Kaniksu and several other forests the night of July 11. I recall that I was out all night organizing crews for daybreak smokechasing assignments. At almost any time during the entire night I could have read by the light from the lightning flashes. It was the longest continuous lightning storm I ever experienced. It didn't let up till long after daylight, and there wasn't a drop of rain. When daylight came we had already dispatched Anderson's crew to Bismark Ranger Station for duty in that area, and Guernsey's crew to Beaver Creek for duty in the Upper Priest River area. It was six weeks later when Guernsey and his crew returned.

When daylight came there were smokes curling upward in every direction one looked. I guessed there were forty fires on the Lamb Creek drainage alone. There were so many that we gridded portions of the drainage that first day, making each fire safe until we could get them all under control and mop them up later. How many fires we put out remains a mystery. We never had time to make any reports till five weeks later. The fourth day after the storm, Ranger Bealey called from Coolin and asked me to take one man and go into after a fire that had been reported there. We started at noon to hike the fifteen miles. About two hours later a strong wind came up, and within a few minutes reached a velocity of about thirty miles per hour. Within an hour we saw a mushroom of smoke rising over Bismark Mountain, still about seven miles ahead. We knew we were too late for that one, but decided to go on and investigate. When we broke over Bismark nearly all the Mush Creek drainage was a raging inferno. By the time we arrived back at camp the next day, that and other fires in Granite and Calispel Creeks had gutted most of the Calispel Creek drainage and a part of the Granite area. The smoke pall was so heavy that we never saw the sun again till rains came around the 20th of August.

Every bad fire year thereafter saw blister rust crews on the fireline much of the season.

Each year after 1926 saw rapid expansion of the ribes-eradication program. There were five camps on the Honeysuckle District of the Coeur d'Alene forest in 1927. From 1928 on there were crews in all our white pine forests and those of the timber protective associations. In 1933 and 1934 there were approximately 5,000 regular and relief workers engaged on the ribes-eradication program in the Inland Empire. In addition, a large part or all of the crews in more than 40 CCC camps were engaged in blister rust control work during 1933 and 1934.

By 1935 the Inland Empire blister rust control organization had amassed extensive experience in training overhead and in recruiting and managing thousands of workers engaged in ribes eradication programs. We had taken an active part in fire-control operations under Forest Service direction and had been a big factor in helping five timber protective associations during several historically bad fire years. In these years the foundation was laid for the very close coordination and cooperation that prevailed from the late twenties between these organizations. When the CCC program started in 1933 it was a simple matter to effect a workable agreement between the Division of Blister Rust Control and the U.S. Forest Service, setting up the responsibilities of each organization pertaining to the entire ribes-eradication project.

The Forest Service assigned Phil Neff and the B.R.C. assigned me to work as a team in heading up the entire program of ribes-eradication. Working with Phil was a great privilege and pleasure for me. I do not recall even one major problem for which we did not quickly find an amicable solution. The work on each white pine National Forest, including adjoining timber protective association lands, was headed by a team consisting of one forest officer assigned by the respective Forest, and one project supervisor assigned by the Division of B.R.C. Together we recruited and trained overhead for the regular, relief, and CCC crews engaged on ribes eradication. The CCC part of the program alone necessitated the recruiting and training of approximately 40 camp superintendents and 200 foremen.

The very depth of the great depression was in 1933, and few logging crews were in operation. Most of the logging superintendents normally employed in the white pine area were temporarily out of work. We naturally tuned to them for most of the needed overhead. I have long believed that no forest protection operation was ever headed by more able men than these former loggers. What ajob they did! And, what a pleasure it was to work with them. Some of these men have since passed on, some have retired, but a few are still holding key jobs with the logging and milling industry today.

Before leaving the blister rust control part of my career, I want to touch briefly on one of the most difficult problems with which we had to contend, especially in the early years of blister rust control work. No white pine blister rust was then known to be present in Inland Empire white pine stands south of the Canadian border. Most of our overhead and all the other workers had never seen any blister rust, either on ribes (the alternate host) or white pine. They had to accept the prediction of the widespread infection that future years confirmed and the necessity for control work strictly on faith in those who headed up the work.

Stephen Wyckoff, Sam Detwiler and other B.R.C. leaders took care of the problem by sending their staff leaders on "show-me" or educational details to infection centers in British Columbia and the New England States, where this disease was already in the serious-damage stage. Regional Forester Kelley, Elers Koch, Lyle Watts and other Forest Service leader made it their business to see and study the disease in these same infection areas. Many forestry leaders of the country and many industry leaders did likewise. It was my pleasure and privilege to accompany several such groups through the infection areas of British Columbia. One such group included Ovid Butler, Executive Secretary of the American Forestry Association.

In later years, after the disease spread rapidly through the white pine stands of the Inland Empire, this problem eased. In fact, the rapid intensification of the disease caused many to have doubts if control of blister rust was economically feasible. Wiser heads prevailed in the intervening years. Improved silvicultural practices that resulted from the experience of trying to control white pine blister rust had pretty well vindicated the judgment of these forestry leaders.

As would be expected, there was considerable lack of public understanding of the nature of white pine blister rust. Each year we would receive requests from residents of the Spokane area to examine trees to see if they might have blister rust. Invariably, of course we found the cause to be dwarf-mistletoe, bark beetles or some other local pest never blister rust. On one occasion we were quite amused to receive an inquiry as to whether that person's children might "catch" blister rust.

Then, there were always those who were ready to condemn public programs of whatever nature. The blister rust program was not spared. One summer we carried out a rather large spraying program in the St. Joe and Clearwater areas, testing the feasibility of chemicals to kill streamtype ribes. We used sodium chlorate with sodium chloride as a hygorscopic agent. The following winter was most severe throughout the Inland Empire, and there was a tragic loss of deer and elk in Idaho and Montana. Someone spread the rumor that the chemical we applied the previous summer was the cause. Preposterous as the story was, it gained a lot of headway and there was considerable criticism of the spraying program.

I had always had a major interest in tree propagation and forest planting. At our home in Spokane I maintained a hobby nursery. Unfortunately, my wife, Marie, had to do much of the work on it because I was away most of each summer. Among the species we grew were Kentucky coffee trees and sugar pine, both grown from seed. I gave several coffee trees to Bob Weidman who planted them at the Priest River Experiment Station. The climate proved adverse for them and they did not survive. Eight years after I planted 150 sugar pine seeds we still had two trees from them growing in our yard when we moved to Missoula in 1934. One of them was over six feet in height.

This interest in planting led me to apply for the planting position in Region One when Dave Olson left for the Shelterbelt Project in 1934. In September I was offered the job, which I immediately accepted. Thus was started the second phase of my forestry career. We in the Division of B.R.C. had worked so closely with personnel of the Regional Office and the western forests of the Region, that it seemed much like a move within the official family for me. However, my work in the planting division of Timber Management was to be short-lived, for in March of the following spring I accepted the job as chief of the Division of Operation, replacing L.C. Stockdale who had just been transferred to Washington.

During the brief interval on the planting job, I did have the satisfaction of preparing a plan and recommendations, under the direction of Elers Koch, for the expansion of Savenac Nursery, which plan was approved by Chief Silcox.

In 1935 the Division of Operation was responsible for a variety of activities which have since been assigned to other divisions or liquidated, as in the case of the CCC program. Fire Control, State & Private Forestry, improvement maintenance, and the recruiting and training phases of Personnel Management, were the activities later transferred. Naturally, it appeared to be a formidable assignment - and it was. There was so much for me to learn and in those days little available time for learning. It was for me a case of learning, with the tide of events crowding out time for reflection and study. Despite the best efforts of an able group of people making up the Division of Operation, many of us found ourselves working full days on Saturdays, several nights a week, many Sundays, and also many holidays. I recall that for three years in a row, Bill Hillman, Thad Lowary and I worked straight through the 4th of July holidays to get the allotments out to the Forests.

Interesting and challenging as were the nearly six years in the Regional Office, I developed an increasing desire to have the experience of serving on a Forest. I had not had that opportunity, and in the later stage of my service in the Division of Operation, I confided that desire to Regional Forester Evan Kelley. I think it must have struck a sympathetic response because, in 1940, when C.D. Simpson was transferred to Region 6, I was offered the Supervisorship of the Coeur d'Alene Forest and accepted.

One of the most satisfying aspects of the work in the Division of Operation was the close contact with Forest staffs and Rangers in the field of personnel development, and in financing and business relationships. To know each one personally and be able to call nearly all of them by their first names, was one of the highlights of that experience. Most of them I worked with at one time or another on the fireline, and the others on inspection trips. The toughest part of the whole assignment was reduction of manpower that was necessary with the curtailment of the CCC program. Termination of the employment of many able employees at a time when other employment was hard to secure, was about as agonizing at the time as to see some of the fine timber areas swept by fire, such as the Little Rockies were in 1936.

Daring blister rust control days our activities required personal knowledge of almost every drainage of the Coeur d'Alene Forest. I had worked in one capacity or another with all the staffmen and Rangers. Hence, it was like going home to be assigned there.

There are two features about my experience on the Coeur d'Alene on which I will comment. The period was February 1940 to May 1946, during the Second World War. The first was the variety of labor that was used at that time. One group was the Italian internees. At one time we had about 100 of them. They piled and burned brush; did timber-stand improvement work; constructed roads and bridges; and did fire suppression work, largely. Another group was the Mexican farm workers, during periods when they were not needed in the beet fields of Montana. The first group of Mexicans arrived simultaneously with one of those early spring snowstorms, and altogether it was not a pleasant experience. The Mexicans did much the same type of work as the Italian internees. Of course, the language barrier was one of the most difficult problems with which our field Supervisors had to contend. But the difficulties were overcome, and it was just another example of great flexibility and adaptability that has always characterized the U.S. Forest Service.

German prisoners of war, stationed at Farragut, were called on for fire suppression work on one or more occasions during the late stages of the war. Often times we had soldiers and sailors on fire-suppression jobs from nearby military training centers. And, as a cooperative undertaking, two emergency air strips were constructed on the Forest by aviation engineer units in training at bases near Spokane.

The use of 16- and 17-year-old boys on blister rust control work during the wartime period when the employment age limit was relaxed, constituted another interesting experiment. The first year this class of labor was used, we required acceptable proof that the applicant's age was 16 or over - either a birth certificate or an affidavit from a parent or guardian. During the training period it became evident that many were under age. In checking birth records, we found more than 50 who did not qualify and, of course, had to release them. One was only 13. Needless to say, there were many red faces from that experiment. Some of those released had done excellent work, incidentally.

The other important event that deserves comment was the beginning of work to learn the identity or cause of the death of so many pole-sized white pine trees at several locations on the Coeur d'Alene and Kaniksu Forests. The first work was done in the Cedars and Fourth-of-July Creek drainages during the summer of 1941, in cooperation with the School of Forestry of the University of Idaho. The losses had grown progressively more alarming, and I was convinced we could no longer delay efforts to learn the cause. The Regional Office concurred, and the project was started under the direction of Dr. John Ehrlich, with a graduate student named Baker in direct charge of the work. We furnished equipment and the necessary labor. That was the beginning of study on the malady that was later named "pole blight," since only pole-sized trees were attacked. Incidentally, Baker, who had to enter military service soon thereafter, lost his life in the Pacific Theater. His tragic death cut short the career of one who I felt would have gone far in the field of forest pathology. There were many amusing episodes in my forestry career. One that occurred along in the late war period is worth mentioning. While traveling down the east shore of Coeur d'Alene Lake one August day, I stopped to chat with a farmer who was just starting the mowing of a field of hay. He was an oldtimer in the area. The hay was overripe. This farmer told a sorry story of his attempts to get help for haying through the employment office in Coeur d'Alene. He also said he was in poor health and feared he would have to sell off his cattle if he couldn't get his hay harvested. There were several fields. This was on a Thursday, and I told him who I was and that if he would cut what he could between then and Saturday, I would bring out a crew of volunteers the following Sunday and stack what he had cut. He gladly accepted the offer. We went out and put the hay in on Sunday - about ten tons or more - and refused any pay. On Tuesday I saw in the paper that this man had been picked up drunk on Monday. We didn't think too much of that, but a few days later saw where he had been arrested again for drunkenness. We then inquired and found the man was a perennial drunk. So ended that wartime good turn.

June 1946 found me back in the Regional Office in charge of the Division of State & Private Forestry. Although Idaho, Montana, and Washington had maintained state forestry departments for many years, one of them carried on a strong, vigorous forestry program, as was envisioned by the framers of the cooperative legislation authorizing the several programs administered by the Forest Service, through which the Federal Government cooperated financially with the states. The next eight years brought steady expansion and strengthening in each state department of forestry. I left the Forest Service in 1954 with the satisfaction of knowing that many of our objectives aimed at strengthening state action in the field of state responsibilities in the forestry field had been accomplished or satisfactorily advanced.

In August 1954, I left Region One on a forestry venture which I supposed would close my forestry career with the Government. That was to serve as a forestry advisor on the foreign aid program of the U.S. Government in Afghanistan. There was not one professionally trained forester among the 12 million Afghans. Nor was there any literature or textbooks bearing even remotely on the practice of forestry in Afghanistan or its border areas. Now, fortunately, there are at least two young Afghans with degrees in forestry conferred by fully accredited American Forestry Schools, after completion of the required study. I had the pleasure of working with both as counterparts, while on the foreign assignment, and the degree work has come since. I was thus in on the formation of the first forestry program in Afghanistan, as well as having a hand in the training of its first professional foresters. Naturally, I will follow with interest the progress of forestry in that remote country.

Upon return to Region One in January 1956, I was asked to undertake a special analysis of first, the slash treatment program on the Region One Forests; and second, success of securing adequate stocking to desired species on recent cutover areas on the same areas where the slash treatment program was under study. It was the most satisfying way to close out an interesting forestry career. The guides worked out during that study, and later modified as found necessary, are in wide use today (three years later).

When I retired on September 30, 1957, it was with a feeling of satisfaction for having the opportunity to take a hand in so many worth-while and interesting forestry undertakings, and one of gratitude for having had the pleasure of working with so many able and devoted foresters. And, my fervent wish is that those who follow may end their professional forestry careers with the same degree of satisfaction that has been mine.

Wallace, Idaho, after the 1910 fire. On this terrace at Wallace every house was burned — about 200 in all.