Outback Nevada: Public Domain and Environmental Challenge
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University of Nevada, Reno Outback Nevada: Public Domain and Environmental Challenge A Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History by Ryan R. Powell William D. Rowley, Dissertation Advisor C. Elizabeth Raymond, Co-Chair December 2017 © by Ryan R. Powell 2017 All Rights Reserved i Abstract . With the arrival of Euro-Americans to Nevada, settlers and travelers experienced struggles and opportunities on marginal lands. These lands did not fit well with Euro- American ideas of progress and resource-use throughout the second part of the nineteenth century. After 1848, many marginal lands became part of America’s public domain with little promise for permanent settlements. Because of increased competition on limited rangelands, federal land managers working for the United States Forest Service (USFS) came to Nevada after 1905 and secured the water resources in the highest mountains to promote favorable conditions of water flows for preferred local settlers. These settlers were the cattle ranchers with permanent home ranches that depended on water from the high mountains for summer grazing and haymaking. In the early twentieth century, beginning with the creation of the USFS in 1905 and ending with the Taylor Grazing Act in 1934, federal land managers were critical to maintaining successful settlements on a challenging environment in outback Nevada. ii Acknowledgements I have had the pleasure of working with committee members, C. Elizabeth Raymond, Paul Starrs, Sterling Evans, and Michael Branch. Committee Chair, William D. Rowley, requires an additional acknowledgment for his unwavering support including, but not limited to, criticisms, revisions, and research. Several archives aided this project with materials and research including the National Archives and Records Administration II (NARA) in College Park, Maryland, the NARA regional branch in San Bernardino, CA, and Special Collections and the University of Nevada, Reno. Connected to this research, a special thanks goes out to Douglas Helms (National Resources and Conservation Service historian) for his assistance when researching at NARA II. I also take this opportunity to thank my family and colleagues. iii Table of Contents Introduction…………………………………………………………………………...1 Chapter 1 – Through the Heart of an Outback……………………………….………26 Chapter 2 – A Nevada Anomaly…………………………………………….……….74 Chapter 3 – National Forests and Mountain Grazing, 1897-1925………………….107 Chapter 4 – Nevada National Forests at Close Range……………………………...157 Chapter 5 – See Nevada First on Roads to a National Monument…………………209 Chapter 6 – Monitoring Mountain Snow…………………………………………...254 Summation………………………………………………………………………….284 Images………………………………………………………………………………293 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………..298 iv List of Images Image One: Basecamp to Nevada’s Outback…………………………………………4 Image Two: Ivar Tidestrom’s Use of Merriam’s Classification Scheme of Nevada………………………………………………….….151 Image Three: Ivar Tidestrom’s Profile of the 39th Parallel………………………....153 Image Four: National Forest Map of Nevada, 1914………………………………...293 Image Five: Las Angeles Evening Herald Caricature of Forest Management, 1925……………………………………………..295 Image Six: Santa Rose Range Floods at Rebel Creek Ranger Station, 1918………296 Image Seven: Santa Rosa Range Quadrat, 1918……………………………………297 Image Eight: Arthur Sampson’s Instructions for Reseeding………………………..298 1 Introduction In the late 1870s, the naturalist John Muir traveled across Nevada from Lake Tahoe to the Snake Range. Muir followed the 39th parallel from west to east crossing forested mountain chains between the Sierra Nevada and the Nevada-Utah border. He named the central transect “Nevada’s timber belt.” While passing along this irregular belt of timber, Muir described high mountain forests where Euro-American attempts to develop resources produced mining landscapes with barely “ten year old traditions” of boom and bust cycles leaving “dead mining towns” scattered about “like the bones of cattle that have died of thirst.” These failed towns, according to Muir, “do not represent any good accomplishment. They are monuments of fraud and ignorance—sins against science.”1 The colonizers struggling to remain along the timber belt, Muir stereotypically noted, were a “few plodding Dutchmen” who utilized all the available water for hayfields and stock watering. These Euro-American settlers doggedly placed themselves onto a precarious landscape of limited accessibility and natural resources—as the ruined mining towns testified. While the environment provided the native peoples with a, “pine-nut crop…, perhaps, greater than the entire wheat crop of California,” Muir noted the food source proved of little interest to the new colonizers. According to Muir, nature in Nevada did not serve the wasteful wants of Euro-American settlement.2 Where Muir saw the failure of Euro-American settlers, others found opportunity. Beginning in the 1850s, Euro-Americans settled in Nevada. Mining towns and Mormon 1 John Muir, Steep Trails, edited by William Frederic Bade (Boston and New York: Houghton and Mifflin Company, 1918), 169, 174-75, 203. 2 Muir, 157-58. 2 communities provided initial economic and religious motives to expand settlers throughout portions of Utah Territory and, after 1861, Nevada Territory. Nevada’s physical geography, composed of narrow mountain chains and expansive basins in an arid and semi-arid high desert, proved a challenging environment for settlers to impose Euro-American forms of land uses. After 1905, the United States Forest Service established rules and regulations on the mountains where livestock grazing dominated during the summer months. The transition from unregulated resource use of the nineteenth-century open range to the arrival of the Forest Service marked the beginning of a conservation movement in Nevada’s mountainous outback. Forest Service personnel worked with local stock operators to order the range use in the high mountains based on limiting stock numbers according to scientific principles for sustainable and efficient-use of forests, forage, and water. Nevada’s Great Basin environment offered marginal lands that challenged Euro- American settlement. Through the second half of the nineteenth century, Euro-Americans largely deplored Nevada’s landscape seeing little promise in a cold desert. Travelers perceived a geographic purgatory in an uncertain land between California’s Sierra and Utah’s Wasatch Mountains with expansive basins along limited and brackish water sources where alkali soils stunted forage growth. Most migrants and settlers, as a necessity, traveled or settled near the basin floors between ranges where water flowing from the mountains made for some opportunity in the high desert. Throughout much of the state, Nevada’s north-south trending mountain spines obstructed overland travelers, surveyors, and settlers but an east-to-west route along the Humboldt River north of the timber belt and another to the south where the Virgin River flowed into the Colorado 3 River were free of mountainous obstructions. Over time, Euro-American settlers sparsely colonized the central portion of Nevada where mountain environments on north-south ranges nurtured a scattering of forests and forage and stored significant reserves of water in the form of snowpack.3 Nevada’s marginal lands in a Great Basin between the Eden of California and the land of Zion in Utah has a monotonous appearance for the inexperienced interloper. Late twentieth century naturalist writer Stephen Trimble describes the Great Basin’s physical landscape in northern Nevada as a “sagebrush ocean.” Trimble points to a turbulent ocean where sagebrush mingles with many species of flora often interrupted across basin floors and alpine peaks.4 In 1859, Henry Engelmann suggested that the Great Basin suffered from a “confused hypsometry.” According to Engelmann, geologist for Captain James Hervey Simpson’s 1859 survey, the region was not a physical basin because it contained “gigantic mountains” at its center. Although hydrologically sound, the description of a place with internal drainage was counterintuitive to the elevated mountains in the Basin’s 3 Purgatory, wasteland, desolate, etc. describe the experiences of travelers in the Silver State. Negative experiences—in a land between—set the stage for Nevada as geographic purgatory. This condemnation of the Nevada environment has been a perception difficult to challenge, especially in a state that has been historically more of a thoroughfare than a destination. In other words, a place between. Richard G. Lillard, Desert Challenge: An Interpretation of Nevada (New York: Alfred K. Knopf, 1949), 36; Rob Schultheis, The Hidden West: Journeys in the American Outback (New York: Random House, 1982), 138; C. Elizabeth Raymond, “When the Desert Won’t Bloom: Environmental Limitation in the Great Basin,” David M. Wrobel and Michael C. Steiner, editors, Many Wests: Place, Culture, and Regional Identity (Lawrence: University Press Kansas, 1997), 75. 4 Steven Trimble, Sagebrush Ocean: A Natural History of the Great Basin, Tenth Anniversary Edition, (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1999), 8, 13-16. Trimble focuses his book on a biologically defined Great Basin and the extensive bio-diversity of the high desert. Trimble describes the “void” between the Wasatch and the Sierra where a biologically diverse and misunderstood place remains. If one explored the region they would come to know “a closed inland sea