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Ninety years ago a highborn zealot named Gifford Pinchot knew more about woodlands than any man in America. What he did about them changed the country we live in and helped define .

ike most public offi- freedom, and prosperity. The cials, Gov. Gifford Pin- urge was not entirely selfless; chot of the acquisition and exercise of could not answer all power have gratifications to his mail personally. which Pinchot and his kind ..- __ Much of it had to be were by no means immune. left to aides, but not all of But at the forefront was a sol- these realized the character of emn and utterly earnest desire their boss. When a citizen that the lot of humanity wrote in 1931 to complain an- should be bettered by the grily about one of the gover- work of those who were nor's appointments, Pinchot equipped by circumstance, tal- was not pleased to find the ent, and training to change the following prepared for his sig- world. It had something to do nature: "I am somewhat sur- with duty and integrity and prised at the tone of your let- honesty, and if it was often ter. ... It has been my aim marred by arrogance, at its since I became Governor to se- best it was just as often lect the best possible person touched by compassion. for each position .... I hope And the world, in fact, was time will convince you how changed. greatly you have erred." The governor was not given have ... been a Gover- to such mewlings and forth- nor, every now and then, with composed his own letter: but I am a all the "Either you are totally out of time-have been, and touch with public sentiment, shall be, all my working or you decline to believe what life."GiffordPinchot made you hear .... To say that I was this pronouncement in a not attempting to do right speech not long before his when I made these appoint- death at the age of eighty-one, ments is nonsense. I was doing and repeated it in Breaking the best I knew how, and my New Ground, his account of confidence that I did so is by the early years of the conserva- no means impaired by your let- tion movement and his consid- ter." That was more like it- erable place in it. It was true and more like the man too. enough, but it could just as le- Gifford Pinchot passed gitimately be said of him that through nearly six decades ofAmerican public life like a Jere- he had been a forester every now and then but was a politi- miah, the flames of certitude seeming to dance behind his cian, had been and would be, all his working life. dark eyes. "Gifford Pinchot is a dear," his good friend and It could also be said that it was that taught him mentor once said of him, "but he is a fa- his politics. Pinchot was born on August 11, 1865, into the natic, with an element of hardness and narrowness in his tem- sort of environment that would normally have pointed him perament, and an extremist." in the direction of nothing more exotic than law or one of The complaint was legitimate, but the zealot in question the other gentlemanly persuasions. His father, James, a self- also was the living expression of an idea shared by much of made man of the classic stripe, had acquired so much an entire generation (indeed, shared by Roosevelt himself): money as a dry goods merchant in New York City that he the conviction that men and women could take hold of their government and shape it to great ends, great deeds, lifting Above, Pinchot near the turn of the century. Opposite page: High Rock all elements of American life to new levels of probity, grace, Lookout at Gifford Pinchot National , in State.

86 AMERICAN HERITAGE· FEBRUARYIMARCH 1991 GARY BRAASCH, 01990 r

He and Theodore Roosevelt hit it off from the start. "There has been a peculiar intimacy between you ... and me," the President wrote in later years, "because [we] have worked for the same causes, have dreamed the same dreams."

had been able to retire to the pur- touched forest land outside the es- suit of good works at the age of tate. This new enterprise became forty-four. His mother, Mary, was known as the Pisgah Forest, and it the daughter of , a Man- was there in 1895 that Pinchot in- hattan real estate tycoon whose troduced what were almost cer- Fifth Avenue Hotel was so valu- tainly the first scientific logging op- able a property that his estate was erations ever undertaken in this able to sell it after his death for country. the staggering figure of $7,250,000. By then the young man had The Pinchots figured promi- made a secure reputation in the nently, if sedately, in society and field; indeed, he was the field. In traveled ambitiously in England December 1893 he opened an of- and on the Continent. Gifford, his fice in as a "consulting younger brother, Amos, and their forester." Over the next several sister, Antoinette, all grew up able years, while continuing his work to speak French and snatches of for Vanderbilt in North Carolina, German at early ages, and Antoi- he provided advice and research nette, in fact, would become Lady work on forest lands in Michigan, Johnstone, wife of the British con- Pennsylvania, and New York sul in Copenhagen. State-including the six-million- Altogether it seemed an unlikely acre Adirondack Park and Forest background for a man who was to Preserve, established in 1895 as spend much of his adult life with the largest state-owned park in trees. There was not at the time a the nation. He could-and doubt- single American-born man and pre- Pinchot confers with President Theodore RooseveH less did-take satisfaction from a cious few men of any nationality aboard the steamer Mississippi in October 1907. description given of him by a news- in this country practicing anything paper columnist as early as 1892: that could remotely be described as forestry. Nevertheless, "Contrast the career of this Yale graduate with that of cer- "Howwould you like to be a forester?" Pinchot's father asked tain young men of Gotham who flatten their noses against him in the summer of 1885,as the young man prepared to en- club windows in the morning, and soften their brains with ter Yale. "It was an amazing question for that day and gen- gossip, champagne and the unmentionables at other periods eration," he remembered, "how amazing I didn't begin to of the day and night." understand at the time." In his travels the elder Pinchot had There was nothing soft in this graduate's brain, and since become an admirer of the kind of scientific forestry prac- he lived most of his time at home with his mother and fa- ticed in , Germany, and Switzerland and had even writ- ther, there was even less that could be called unmentionable ten a few articles on the subject. in his behavior or experience (his first fiancee died in 1894, The son proved open to his father's enthusiasm. From an event that so devastated him he did not marry until childhood Pinchot had been active in the outdoors, fond of twenty years later, after his mother's own death). By the hiking, camping, and, especially, trout fishing. Since there turn of the century he was fully equipped by temperament was nowhere yet in the United States to study his chosen pro- and experience to assume the task that would soon be given fession, after graduating from Yale he took himself back to him: the intelligent management of more forest land than Europe, where for more than a year he studied forest man- had ever been placed in the control of any single individual. agement at the French Forestry School in Nancy and put in a month of fieldwork under Forstmeister ("Chief Forester") t would be difficult to find a more convenient symbol Ulrich Meister in the city forest of Zurich, Switzerland. for the dark side of American enterprise than the state Back in this country he was hired by George W.Vander- of the nation's forest lands in the last quarter of the nine- bilt in 1892 to manage the five-thousand-acre forest on his teenth century. Restrained only by the dictates of the in North Carolina, a ragged patchwork of marketplace, the timber industry had enjoyed a free abused lands purchased from numerous individual farmers. hand for generations, and the wreckage was consider- While nursing this wrecked acreage back to health, the able. Most of the best forest land east of the Mississippi had young forester persuaded Vanderbilt to expand his holdings long since been logged out-sometimes twice over-and by an additional one hundred thousand acres of nearly un- while generally humid conditions had allowed some of the

88 AMERICAN HERITAGE· FEBRUARYIMARCH 1991 land to recover in second and third growth, erosion had of protection and managed use, Congress passed the Forest permanently scarred many areas. Unimpeded runoff during Organic Act of June 1897,which stipulated that the forest re- seasonal rains had caused such ghastly floods as that lead- serves were intended "to improve and protect the forest ... ing to the destruction of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, in 1889. for the purpose of securing favorable conditions of water The land of the Mississippi and Ohio valleys was almost en- flow, and to furnish a continuous supply of timber for the tirely privately owned; west of the use and necessities of citizens of Mississippi most of the land be- the United States." longed to the nation. It was called GiffordPinchot, the young "con- the public domain, its steward sulting forester," was the author of was the federal government, as rep- much of the language of the act. In resented by the General Land Of- the summer of 1896he had distin- fice, and for years it had been hos- guished himself as the secretary of tage to the careless enthusiasm of the National Forest Commission, a a tradition that looked upon land body formed by President Cleve- as a commodity to be sold or an land to investigate conditions in opportunity to be exploited, not a the nation's public and to resource to be husbanded. About recommend action for their two hundred million acres of this proper use and protection, and it federal land were forested, and was the commission that had put much of it, too, had been systemati- forth the need for an organic act. cally mutilated. Inaddition to legiti- No one knew more about Ameri- mate timber companies that con- can forests than Pinchot did, and sistently misused the various land he seemed the only logical choice laws by clear-cutting entire claims to head the Department of Agricul- without even bothering to remain ture's Forestry Division when the around long enough to establish fi- position of director fell vacant in nal title, many "tramp" lumbermen May 1898. simply marched men, mules, On the face of it, Pinchot's new oxen, and sometimes donkey en- post was less than prestigious. gines onto an attractive (and va- The chief forester lectures to a crowd around the time The Forestry Division was housed cant) tract of public forest land, he was getting himseH fired by President Taft, in 1909. in two rooms of the old red-brick stripped it, and moved out, know- Agriculture Building on the south ing full well that apprehension and prosecution were simply side of the Mall in Washington, D.C. It enjoyed a total of beyond the means or interest of the understaffed, over- eleven employees and an annual appropriation of $28,500. committed, and largely corrupt General Land Office.As early And since the forest reserves remained under the jurisdic- as 1866 such instances of cheerful plunder had gutted so tion of the Interior Department, the Forestry Division had lit- many forests of the public domain that the surveyors gen- tle to do beyond advising private landowners on the proper eral of both Washington Territory and Colorado Territory ear- management of their wood lots and forests. This was anath- nestly recommended to the General Land Office that the for- ema to an activist like Pinchot, and he was soon honing the est lands in their districts be sold immediately, while there skills that would make him one of the most persistent and ef- was something left to sell. fective lobbyists who ever prowled the cloakrooms and cub- The forests were not sold, nor did they vanish entirely, byholes of Congress. but they did remain vulnerable to regular depredation. It was not until 1891 and passage of an obscure legislative is ambition was not a small one: He wanted noth- rider called the Forest Reserve Clause that the slowly grow- ing less than to get the forest reserves transferred ing reform element in the executive branch was enabled to to Agriculture and placed under his care in the For- do anything about it. Armed with the power of this law, Presi- estry Division and then to build the division into dent Benjamin Harrison withdrew thirteen million acres of the first effective agency for the management and public forest land in the West from uses that would have conservation of public lands in the history of the na- been permitted by any of the plethora of lenient land laws tion. It did not hurt his chances when he became intimate then on the books, and at the end of his second term, Presi- with another early American conservationist - Theodore Roo- dent Grover Cleveland added another twenty-one million sevelt. acres. Since there was virtually no enforcement of the new Roosevelt had spent much of his youth killing and stuffing law, however, withdrawal provided little protection from il- birds and was to spend much of his adult life shooting big- legal use; at the same time, it specifically disallowed le- ger and better animals, which he had other people stuff for gitimate use of public timber and grasslands. In response to him. Nevertheless, when he assumed the Presidency in 1901, the howl that arose in the West and to give some semblance he became the first Chief Executive to play an informed and

90 AMERICAN HERITAGE· FEBRUARYIMARCH 1991 He crafted the Forest Service into an agency whose dedication to the ideal of service to the public was nearly unique. By 1909its domain had been enlarged to 148 million acres and it was one of the most respected government organizations in the nation.

active role in the conservation bringing over the forests- which movement. With George Bird Grin- now totaled more than sixty-three nell (editor of Forest and Stream million acres-the new law pro- magazine) he had been a cofoun- vided for the charging of fees for der of the Boone and Crockett cutting timber and grazing cattle Club,an exclusive gathering ofcon- and sheep, and this was followed servation-minded hook-and-bullet by the Agricultural Appropriation men whose influence had gone a Act of March 3, a section of which long way toward preserving the gave federal "authority to wildlife in Yellowstone National make arrests for the violation of Park and toward slowing the whole- laws and regulations relating to sale commercial slaughter that the forest reserves .... " had exterminated the passenger pi- The government was now in the geon and was well on its way to- tree business with a vengeance. ward wiping out several other spe- Shortly the name of the reserves cies. During his Presidency Roose- was changed to that of national for- velt would establish the first fed- ests, the Forestry Division 'to that eral wildlife refuges, support the of the U.S. Forest Service, and Gif- expansion of the national park sys- ford Pinchot was solidly in place tem, back passage of the Reclama- as the nation's first chief forester, tion Act of 1902, and use the full a position he would hold officially power of the Antiquities Act of only until his resignation in 1910 1906 to designate no fewer than but would hold in his heart for the eighteen national monuments, in- EXPECTING A ROAR FROM THE JUNGLE. rest of his life. cluding Grand Canyon, in Arizona. The party awaits Roosevelt's reaction to Pinchot's With his President's blessing, Nor was Roosevelt indifferent to dismissal in a cartoon from the Philadelphia Record. Pinchot crafted the young agency forests. "The American had but into a public body whose dedica- one thought about a tree," he once wrote, "and that was to tion to the ideal of service to the public was nearly unique cut it down." While governor of New York,he had sought for- for its time (or our own, for that matter). It came directly estry advice from Pinchot, and they had hit it off from the out of Pinchot's own convictions. "It is the first duty of a pub- start. "There has been a peculiar intimacy between you and lic officer to obey the law," he wrote in The Fight for Con- Jim [James R. Garfield, his Secretary of the Interior] and me," servation, in 1910."But it is his second duty, and a close sec- Roosevelt wrote Pinchot in later years, "because all three of ond, to do everything the law will let him do for the public us have worked for the same causes, have dreamed the good.... " same dreams, have felt a substantial identity of purpose as regards many of what we three deemed the most vital prob- t was an elite corps that Pinchot created, built on merit lems of today." Pinchot's own feelings bordered on adu- and merit alone, one in which both competence and lation, although Roosevelt maintained that the younger man stupidity were swiftly rewarded-and little went unno- admired his predatory instincts above all else. "He thinks," ticed by the chief forester ("I found him all tangled up," he told Archie Butt, his personal assistant, "that if we were Pinchot wrote to a lieutenant about one hapless em- cast away somewhere together and we were both hungry, I ployee, "and generally making an Ass of himself, with would kill him and eat him, and," he had added with that car- splendid success"). William R. Greeley, one of the twenty- nivore's grin of his, "I would, too." five hundred foresters who served under Pinchot (and who The two men combined almost immediately in an effort to later became chief forester himself), caught the spirit of get the forest reserves into Pinchot's care. The public lands Pinchot's influence precisely:"He made us ... feel like sol- committees of both the House and Senate, however, were diers in a patriotic cause." dominated by Westerners, many of whom had vested inter- The system this exemplary body of men administered was ests in the status quo, and it took more than three years of carefully structured by the chief forester. Individual forests public campaigning and artful cajolery, Roosevelt himself were divided up into management units, each with its own bringing the full weight of the Presidency to bear on the ranger or ranger force, and administrative headquarters point, before Pinchot was given his heart's desire: passage of were established in the six districts across the West where the Forest Transfer Act, on February 1, 1905. In addition to most of the forests were grouped, from Missoula, Montana,

FEBRUARYIMARCH 1991· AMERICAN HERITAGE 91 The principles Pinchot put to work would become one of the roots of the sensibility we call environmentalism. It was called conservation then, which, he wrote, "means the wise use of the earth and its resources for the lasting good of men." to Portland, Oregon. Pinchot gave March 1909, the national forest sys- his district supervisors a great tem had been enlarged to 148 mil- deal of autonomy and encouraged lion acres, and the Forest Service them to give their rangers simi- had become one of the most re- 1arly loose reins in the field- spected government services in whether selecting stands of har- the nation-reason enough for vestable trees, supervising a tim- the historian M. Nelson McGeary's ber sale, regulating the number encomium of 1960: "Had there of cows or sheep that might be been no Pinchot to build the U.S. allowed on a piece of grazing land, Forest Service into an exception- or fighting fires. The first step in ally effective agency, it would proper administration, he said, hardly have been possible to re- "was to find the right man and see port in 1957 that 'most' of the that he understood the scope and big lumber operators had adopted limits of his work, and just what forestry as a policy; or that the was expected of him"; then "the growth of saw timber has almost next step was to give him his head caught up with the rate of drain and let him use it." on forest resources from cutting, The chief forester did not re- fire, and natural losses .... " main aloof. He was given to unan- Nor, it is safe to say, would nounced field trips, poking his there have been much left of the prominent nose into every nook forests themselves. The principles and cranny of the system to see Pinchot put to work would inform what was what, and he maintained the management of the public a body of field inspectors who At home in Pennsylvania with his wife, Cornelia Elizabeth lands throughout most of the twen- reported regularly to him and Bryce, soon after their 1914 wedding. He was forty-nine. tieth century and become one of him alone. "To get results," he re- the roots of the sensibility we call membered, "we had to revise, common-sensitize, and make environmentalism. It was called conservation then, and alive the whole attitude and action of the men who had Pinchot always claimed that he was the first to put that use learned the Land Office way of handling the Reserves. . . . upon the word. "Conservation," he wrote, "means the wise Wehad to drive out red tape with intelligence, and unite the use of the earth and its resources for the lasting good of office and the field. Next ... we had to bring about a fun- men. Conservation is the foresighted utilization, preserva- damental change in the attitude and action of the men who tion, and lor renewal of forests, waters, lands, and minerals, lived in or near the Reserves and used them. We had to get for the greatest good of the greatest number for the longest their cooperation by earning their respect." time." That respect did not come easily. Those individuals and Wise use was the cornerstone, and Pinchot and his follow- corporations that had become accustomed to unrestricted ac- ers had little patience with the still-embryonic notion that cess to Western resources did not remain silent during all the natural world deserved preservation quite as much for this, nor did their politicians. At one point in 1908 the Rocky its own sake as for the sake of the men and women who Mountain News featured a cartoon showing "Czar Pinchot used it. , a hairy wood sprite of a naturalist whom and His Cossack Rangers." Others declared that the Forest Pinchot had met and befriended as early as 1896, personified Service was subverting the pioneering instinct that had built this more idealistic instinct, tracing the roots of his own in- the country. "While these chiefs of the Bureau of Forestry sit spiration back to Henry David Thoreau's declaration that "in within their marble halls," Sen. Charles W.Fulton of Oregon Wildness is the preservation of the World." For a time, the intoned in 1907, "and theorize and dream of waters con- two men were allies in spite of their differences, but the served, forests and streams protected and preserved through- friendship disintegrated after 1905, when Pinchot lent his sup- out the ages and the ages, the lowly pioneer is climbing the port to the efforts of the city of San Francisco to dam the mountain side where he will erect his humble cabin, and Valley in for a public within the shadow of the whispering pines and the lofty firs water-and-power project in order to free the city from a pri- of the forest engage in the laborious work of carving out for vate power monopoly. himself and his loved ones a home and a dwelling place." Muir, whose writings about Yosemite had brought him a Despite such cavils, by the time Roosevelt left office in measure of fame, had founded the in 1892 largely

92 AMERICAN HERITAGE· FEBRUARYIMARCH 1991 as a tool to protect the glorious trench of the Yosemite Valley and other pris- tine areas in the Sierra Nevada. Among these was the Hetch Hetchy Valley, which these early preservationists LUMBERING BEFORE PINCHOT maintained was the equal of Yosemite itself in beauty. The reservoir that would fill up behind the proposed dam on the Tuolumne River would obliter- ate that beauty. But this was exactly the sort of public power-and-water pro- ject that spoke most eloquently to the deepest pragmatic instincts of Pinchot and his kind, who argued that every measure of conservation as they under- stood it would be fulfilled by approval of the project. "Whoever dominates power," Pinchot wrote,"dominates all industry." Both sides in the argument faced off energetically in this first major conflict between the utilitarian and the preser- vationist wings of the , and it took nearly ten A riverful of timber floats down to the Babcock Lumber & Boom Company in 1909. years, the approval of two Presidents, and the passage of special legislation hen the Europeans The short, West Virginia yielded fif- by Congress in 1913 before San Fran- first saw the New teen thousand board feet cisco obtained permission to build its World, their over- loud death per acre. Exceptional dam."The destruction of the charming W whelming impres- of Canaan stands would yield as groves and gardens, the finest in all sion was of trees, an end- much as twenty thousand. California," Muir wrote to a friend, less forest covering a con- Valley The finest stands of white "goes to my heart. But in spite of Satan tinent. And even in the by Jack Waugh pine in the great northern & Co., some sort of compensation boundless timberland that forests of Michigan and must surely come out of this dark was eastern North America, WestVir- Minnesota produced forty thousand. damn-dam damnation." Pinchot had ginia's Land of Canaan was extraordi- From parts of Canaan Valley the lum- no doubts and no regrets. nary, for it contained the finest berjacks would haul eighty to a hun- stand of climax red spruce in the .dred thousand board feet per acre of inchot's devotion to the princi- world. red spruce. ples of conservation went be- The canoe-shaped Canaan Valley For four hectic decades the boom yond the immediate question itself, 150 miles west of present-day times the lumbermen thrust upon of use versus preservation. Mo- Washington, D.C., was not big-lit- this stillness were to rival the gold nopoly was evil personified, tle more than 14 miles long and 3 and silver rushes of the West in and monopoly, he believed, miles wide. It was boxed in by three brawling intensity and in return on in- stemmed directly from the control of rugged mountain ridges, shrouded vestment. And when it ended, Ca- the natural world."Monopoly of re- in misty fog, and utterly silent. The naan Valley and its surroundings sources," he wrote in Breaking New novelist Rebecca Harding Davis,writ- would be utterly destroyed. Ground, "which prevents, limits, or de- ing in 1880,called the region's abso- It would have been an outcome in- stroys equality of opportunity is one of lute stillness "strange and oppres- conceivable to the awed members of the most effective of all ways to con- sive as noonday" and wrote that the survey party that discovered the trol and limit human rights, especially "human voices were an imperti- valley. On Monday, October 13, the right of self-government." With this nence in the great and wordless 1746, a group that included the conviction to guide him, it did not take meanings of the woods." thirty-eight-year-old Co!. Peter Jef- him long to find his way from the To the lumbermen who rode in ferson, Thomas Jefferson's father, world of conservation to the world of with the railroad half a decade later, climbed to the top of Cabin Mountain politics, where, like thousands of his the meanings were clear enough. A and looked down on Canaan's forest class, he found his imagination seized good stand of hardwood timber in for the first time. The next day the by Progressive Republicanism.

WEST VIRGINIA REGIONAL AND HISTORICAL COLLECTION, WEST VIRGINIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARY, MORGANTOWN FEBRUARY/MARCH 1991· AMERICANHERITAGE 93 It took a bit more than a generation to reduce the Canaan Valley to stumps. After the clearing, fires would smolder for months.

party plunged into the valley itself. A surveyor named Thomas Lewis wished he had never come. He wrote in his journal that "from the . .. time WeEntred the Swamp I Did not See ap- lain Big Enough for aman to Lye on nor a horse to Stand." The party encountered a vast clutch- ing understory of eight- to ten-foot- high "loral" (rhododendron) that A team of sawyers and axmen take a break from the grueling .om of laying the valley bare. twisted across the forest floor, "all most as Obstinate as if Composed of Iron. Our horses and often our Selves fell into Clefts & Cavitys without see- ing the danger Before we felt the Ef- fects of it."

n leaving, Lewis made a last en- try: "Never was any poor Crea- turs in Such a Condition as we O were in nor Ever was a Criminal more glad by having made his Escape out of prison as we were to Get Rid of those Accursed Lorals." Many early settlers felt the same way. A century later one wrote that the valley was "as perfect a as our continent contained ... a howl- ing wilderness of some twenty or Loggers and their families enjoy a picnic surrounded by the devastated forest at Shingle Mill. thirty miles' compass, begirt on all sides by civilization, yet unexplored." of its destruction, the forest was virtu- pounded into the stretch of the sena- The valley was a relic of the last gla- ally as Lewis had seen and hated it. torial railroad that ran into the brand- cial age. When the Wisconsin ice sheet Henry Gassaway Davis changed that. new town of Davis on the rim of Ca- had crept down from the North to In 1866Davis, a railroad man and poli- naan Valley. Not long afterward a Penn- within a hundred or so miles twenty tician, convinced the West Virginia leg- sylvania lumberman named Jacob thousand years before, Canaan became islature to incorporate his Potomac Leathers Rumbarger built a band-saw a frost pocket, high and cold-perfect and Piedmont Coal and Railroad Com- mill on the Blackwater River between for red spruce. pany with powers, rights, and fran- Second and Third Street. The first of Nobody knows how the valley got its chises to do almost everything. By some thirty-one miles of logging rail- name, but in time, under the battering 1881Davis, then a U.S.senator, had in- roads began to push their twisting way of West Virginia usage, the bib- volved so many of his colleagues in his into the once impenetrable valley. lical "Cane-un," with its accent on the enterprises that the line working its From a population of two in 1884, first syllable, became "Kah-nane," with way toward Canaan Valley came to be Davis swelled to four thousand-a the accent hard on the last syllable. known as the "senatorial railroad." On town that in time came to include As late as the mid-1880s, on the eve November 1, 1884, the last spike was seven churches, an equal number of

94 AMERICAN HERITAGE· FEBRUARYIMARCH 1991 ALL, WEST VIRGINIA REGIONAL AND HISTORICAL COlLECTION, WEST VIRGINIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARY, MORGANTOWN barger in 1887, it imported French Ca- nadians from the North, who were ex- pert at riding the floating logs that sometimes filled the Blackwater River from bank to bank for twenty-five miles.

acks in their suspenders, their Wis- consin cork shoes, and their Rich- ie shirts swarmed into the valley Jfrom Pennsylvania, New York,Vir- ginia, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, and from as far away as Austria, Italy, and Sweden. True to Napoleon's dictum, this army moved on its stomach. The most important job in the lumbering camps A lumber-c:ompany locomotive and the men who will unload the logs behind it, around 1905. of Canaan, next to the foreman himself, was the cook. He pulled top wages -three dollars a day for a seven-day week. If he was good, he was more than worth it. A cook could make or break a camp overnight. The typical dinner menu at the talkless tables in the camps ran to boiled or roast beef, port, or steak, to- matoes, turnips, potatoes, beans, hash, cornbread, two different kinds of pies (quartered), and cake and cookies. Breakfasts were no less prodigious: flap- jacks, hot biscuits, steak, fried eggs, fried potatoes, oatmeal, cake, dough- nuts, and all the Arbuckles-coffee-a man could drink. A full complement of lumberjacks included swampers (road builders), Stacks of the product crowd the single railroad track at a lumberyard in the yalley in 1905. a cutting crew of sawyers and knot bumpers who felled and trimmed the saloons, a tannery, two banks, a sec- fed the boom hung uncertainly to the trees, teamsters who drove the horses ond major sawmill, two butcher shops, slopes of plunging hillsides, and they that skidded the logs to the road or two undertakers, five doctors, two lasted only as long as the lumber river, grab drivers to secure the trail of dentists, five restaurants, and four lasted. But while they did exist, they logs, and a blacksmith and a saw filer hotels. were microcosms of a special kind of (both well paid, as much as $2.50 a In the mid-nineties, a twelve-hun- life. Far from the reach of any recogniz- day-just below a cook's wages). dred-seat opera house went up on the able police force, they were ordered by Presiding over these crews, which in corner of Henry Avenue and Second, a code of conduct all their own. The a typical camp might number sixty within easy hearing of the sawmill's ex- men worked from dawn to dark and men, was the foreman, perhaps the haust engines. Under the illumination were generally too tired to raise hell most important man in the conquest of of that pale and flickering novelty, the even if they wanted to. the forest. The autocrat of the camp, electric light, audiences watched Uncle The lumberjacks came in from all he did the hiring and the firing, and Tom's Cabin and Ten Nights in a Bar- across the Eastern and Northern for- nobody questioned his judgment. Room. ests. When the Blackwater Boom and He was responsible to the woods su- The short-lived lumber camps that Lumber Company bought out Rum- perintendent, but a good foreman

FEBRUARYIMARCH 1991 . AMERICAN HERITAGE 95 The movement had been distilled from more than forty years of what the historian Howard Mumford Jones called "exuberance and wrath" follow- ing the Civil War. Its followers saw themselves and their values caught in a vise: threatened on one side by an in- creasingly violent and potentially revo- lutionary uprising on the part of the great unwashed-largely represented by the Democratic party-and on the other by a cynical plutocratic brother- hood-largely represented by the regu- lar Republican party-which brutally twisted and subverted American insti- tutions for purposes of personal greed and power... Imperfectly but noisily, Theodore Roosevelt had given these people in the middle a voice and a symbol to call their own, and when he chose not A barrens created by total deforestration and the fires that followed, near Davis, 1912. to run for a third term in 1908, they felt abandoned. Prominent among would buck even the su- The waste that logs were left to decay. them was Gifford Pinchot, and there is per in the interest of Despite the waste, some evidenceto suggest that he engi- . his camp. attended the the Canaan region neered his own dismissal as chief for- It took such men a obliteration of yielded up more than ester by President William Howard bit more than a genera- three billion board feet Taft, whom Roosevelt had groomed as tion to reduce Canaan . the spruce and of lumber. Its one hun- his own chosen successor. The oppor- Valley to stumps. hemlock forest dred thousand acres tunity carrie in 1909, when Pinchot Shorn of the tall spruce were only about one- learned that Taft's Secretary of the In- that had kept it dark was staggering. eighty-fifth of the total terior, Richard Ballinger, was deter- for centuries, stripped of its ironlike virgin forest cut in West Virginia mined to honor a number of coal-min- rhododendron understory, the dense in the hectic fifty years of the last ing claims on lands in Alaska that Roo- valley floor lay open to the sunlight. and first quarters of the nineteenth sevelt had earlier withdrawn from It dried. And fires followed, enor- and twentieth centuries. But its out- such uses. mous raging fires that burned to the put represented one-tenth of the When Taft backed his Interior Secre- bottom of the humus layer and smol- thirty billion board feet the state tary, Pinchot chose to see it as the be- dered for months. produced in those years. It was a ginning of a wholesale repudiation of prodigious pocket of timber. And fi- all that Roosevelt had done to cham- ne blaze broke out on the thir- nally it was gone. pion the public interest. He made no se- tieth of May, 1914, in the "Wedidn't leave a stick standing," cret of his conclusions, and Taft was woods of Blackwater Canyon, one company official boasted. certain that more than bureaucratic in- O three miles above the small The lumbermen moved north or tegrity was behind Pinchot's loudly lumber town of Hendricks, and west, Davis faded away to the qui- voiced concerns. "I am convinced," he burned for months. A man sitting on et community of eight hundred peo- wrote his brother, "that Pinchot with his porch in the town at midnight ple that it is today, and the Canaan his fanaticism and his disappointment that summer could read the after- Valley was left again to silence as at my decision in the Ballinger case noon paper by its light. profound-if not as awe-inspir- plans a coup by which I shall be com- The waste that attended the oblit- ing-as the one the lumbermen pelled to dismiss him and he will be eration of the forest was staggering. had first disturbed just forty years able to make out a martyrdom and try When the large stand of hemlock earlier. * to raise opposition against me." that coexisted with the spruce Taft resisted as long as he reason- ceased to sell during the Panic Jack Waugh is a free-lance writer who ably could, but when Pinchot violated of 1893, hemlock bark went to lives in Elkins, Virginia, not far from the President's direct orders to main- the tanneries, and the huge peeled the Canaan Valley. tain silence by writing an open letter to a Senate committee investigating

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The essential legacy of this committed, driven man, this public servant, this prince of rectitude, is the national forests themselves. There are 191million acres of them now, spreading over the West, still threatened and mismanaged and loved.

the Ballinger matter, he decided to which Pinchot had taken predict- he had no choice. Calling the let- able umbrage. This time, however, ter an example of insubordination the invective he launched against "almost unparalleled in the history the idea was more than matched of the government," Taft fired the by that of the self-described cur- chief forester of the United States mudgeon Ickes, as the two old Pro- on January 7, 1910. Pinchot gressives attempted to outdo each rushed home with the letter of dis- other in vitriol. missal and waved it at his mother, "What is behind all this?" crying, "I'm fired!." "My Mother's Pinchot asked the assembled mem- eyes flashed," he remembered, in bers of the Izaak Walton League in Breaking New Ground; "she threw April 1937. "The man who has back her head, flung one hand been my friend for more than a high above it, and answered with quarter of a century has allowed one word:'Hurrah!'" his ambition to get away with his judgement," and Ickes's great espite these memories of power had "bred the lust of triumph, the most effec- greater power." Ickes countered tive and rewarding part that "Gifford Pinchot, who is a of Pinchot's career had persistent fisherman inpolitical wa- come to an end. It cer- ters, exemplifies more than any- tainly would not have one else in American public life seemed so to him at the time, how- how the itch for public office can ever, as he joined in his friend Roo- break down one's intellectual integ- sevelt's 1912 campaign to unseat The old forester and ex-governor, in his late seventies, rity." The character of the debate Taft as a third-party candidate. chats with another Pres. Roosevelt in the earty 19405. between the two men rarely rose Pinchot had been promised the above this level until the begin- State Department if Roosevelt won, but Roosevelt lost and, ning of World War II rendered the question moot. The for- losing, split the Republican party and gave the Presidency to ests stayed in the Department of Agriculture. WDodrowWilson. All Pinchot got was the satisfaction of see- Appropriately, much of Pinchot's remaining years were ing Taft humiliated-which nonetheless was "something to spent in the writing of Breaking New Ground, which remains be proud and happy about," he crowed. one of the central documents of the American conservation There followed years of politicking, all with his old vigor, movement. That was a legacy worth the offering, and it is a but with mixed results and mostly confined to the state of pity that he did not live to see its publication before his Pennsylvania, where he served a couple of stormy, largely un- death on October 4, 1946. productive terms as governor. But the essential legacy of this committed, driven man, It all took him too far from the forests that were his abid- this public servant, this prince of rectitude, is the national for- ing interests. He had never lost sight of them, of course. In ests themselves. There are 191 million acres of them now, 1937, at the age of seventy-two, he undertook a five-thou- spreading over the mountain slopes and river valleys of the sand-mile trip sponsored by the Forest Service through the West like a great dark blanket, still the center of contro- national forests of Montana, Idaho, Oregon, and California, versy, still threatened and mismanaged and nurtured and sleeping out in the open, flying in Forest Service planes, and loved as they were when the son of a dry goods merchant generally re-creating the delights of his youthful days on the first walked in an American wood and wondered what could old Forest Commission. "What I saw gave me the greatest be done to save it for the future. * satisfaction," he wrote upon his return. "The service is bet- ter than it was when I left and everywhere the forests are I H. Watkins, a former senior editor on this magazine, has coming back. What more could a man ask?" been editor of Wilderness, the magazine of the Wilderness So- He was a good deal less mellow when FOR'sSecretary of ciety, since 1982. He is the author or coauthor of nineteen the Interior, his old friend and colleague Harold L. Ickes, books, including the recently published Righteous Pilgrim: opened a campaign to have the national forests taken out of The Life and Times of Harold L. Ickes, which has been nomi- the Department of Agriculture and placed back in Interior- nated for a National Book Award and from which portions of an effort that earlier Interior Secretaries had supported and this article were adapted.

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