A History of the Six Rivers National Forest

A HISTORY OF THE SIX RIVERS NATIONAL FOREST... Commemorating the First 50 Years By Pamela A. Conners Historian, Six Rivers National Forest April 1998 USDA Forest Service Pacific Southwest Region Six Rivers National Forest Eureka, California 95501 TABLE OF CONTENTS Cover Photos: (top left): Ranger Wes Hotelling with Maggie the Mule, 1937. (center): Forest Supervisor, William Fischer cleaning salmon, 1949. (top right): Karuk and archaeologist, Kathy McCovey teaches Six Rivers employees about Karuk culture. (center left): Forest Supervisor Wes Spinney, 1949. (center right): Fred Cronemiller on the Boundary Trail during his General Integrating Inspection, 1949. (bottom right): CCC-built Gasquet Ranger Station main office, 1964. (top right): Women employees at Humboldt Tree Nursery lifting seedlings, 1967. Acknowledgments Foreword "The Six Rivers is Now Officially on the Map" "There Are A Lot Of Things Brewing..." The Brandeberry Report Opening the Doors at 4th and E Streets... to the Anonymous National Forest The Announcement is Finally Made "Let's Limit Our Choice To A Good American Name..." Redwood . National Park National Forest Experimental Forest Gearing Up for Intensive Timber Management A Bare Bones Organization Forest Service Missionaries... Bringing the Word of Forestry to the North Coast "The Forest Situation in Humboldt and Del Norte Counties..." Timber Range Recreation The First Three Years The Challenge, the Promise, and the Vexations "The Region of The Last Stand..." The Six Rivers' First Timber Management Policy "It is Timely for a Shift in Emphasis in Administration..." The Formidable I & E Job Congresswoman Douglas and the Roosevelt Memorial Redwood National Forest The 1950s A Paradigm of Dedicated Uses and Gearing-Up for Maximization The Marginality Issue Native Americans and the Early Six Rivers Cracks in the Maximization Perspective From Creel and Bag Limits to Restoring Habitat... An Example of a Changing Paradigm From Summer Homes to Recreation Residences... Another Changing Paradigm From Fire Exclusion to Controlled Burns... Yet Another Changing Paradigm The 1960s...Paradigm Lost The Thousand Year Flood... An Agent of Change and Re-Consideration A Changing Context and New Problem Definitions The Northern Redwood Purchase Unit...Case Study of A Paradigm Lost Post Script Six Rivers National Forest Staff 1997 Notes Appendices 1: Time Markers 2: Six Rivers Personnel 3: Supervisors Offices References Cited ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This is a shortened version of a Six Rivers National Forest history written to commemorate the forest's fiftieth anniversary. In the seven weeks of researching and writing it, many individuals contributed to the project. I want to specially acknowledge Patti Bailey at the National Records Center. Thanks also to Richard Boyden at the National Records Center, Waverly Lowell at the National Archives, Brian Morris at the Smith River National Recreation Area, and Ted Hatzimanolis and Vern Hallin, former foresters on the Six Rivers National Forest. Finally my thanks to Heather Busam for her hard work, tenacity, and good humor in laying out this book and to Ken Wilson for believing in and promoting this idea. FOREWORD 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 The Six Rivers' history mid-1960s. By zeroing-in on this short but crucial wedge spans the beginnings and of the Six Rivers' history, there was a preponderance of development of the resource documentation regarding timber management with much management period and its less documentary evidence for other functional areas. It evolvement into an appeared that the more direct a function's tie to timber ecosystem management management, the more replete the documentary record. model. 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 . the depth of Gifford over depletion of forests in the east and midwest was at a Pinchot's belief accounted crescendo. Gifford Pinchot, the first Chief of the Forest for his zeal and doggedness Service, was a veritable engine behind this outcry and the and for the shape of early movement to save the nation from "timber famine" and to Forest Service policy and rescue public lands from private avarice. He held an institutional culture. 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

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