HISTORY of the FREMONT NATIONAL FOREST by Melva Bach
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HISTORY OF THE FREMONT NATIONAL FOREST By Melva Bach Edited by Ward Tonsfeldt Tonsfeldt Consulting Bend, Oregon 1990 Forest Service — USDA Pacific Northwest Region Fremont National Forest TABLE OF CONTENTS Cover Editor's Preface Editor's Introduction Foreword Acknowledgement Chapter I Lake County Background Geography Indians and Explorers First Settlement Forest Reserves Chapter II The Early Years Personnel Fire Management Timber Management Wildlife Livestock Forest Operations Local News Chapter III The 'Teens Personnel Timber Management Fire Management Wildlife Livestock Forest Operations Local News Chapter IV The Twenties Personnel Timber Management Fire Management Wildlife Livestock Forest Operations Local News Chapter V The Thirties Personnel Timber Management Fire Management Wildlife Livestock Forest Operations Local News Chapter VI The Forties Personnel Timber Management Fire Management Wildlife Livestock Forest Operations Local News Chapter VII The Fifties Personnel Timber Management Fire Management Wildlife Livestock Forest Operations Local News Fremont National Forest EDITOR'S PREFACE Shortly after her retirement from nearly forty years' service with the Fremont National Forest, Melva Bach went back to work, beginning the enormous task of compiling an exquisitely detailed history of the Forest. For the next nine years, she would keep "pecking away" on her manuscript, gathering materials from files at the Supervisor's Office, and contacting former Fremont personnel now dispersed throughout the country. Bach's experience on the Fremont provided her with a unique understanding of the complex network of personnel and programs that lay behind the management of over 1.1 million acres of central Oregon forest land. Although her experiences disposed her to begin the History, two aspects of her character — her energy and her attention to detail — are responsible for its final shape. Other National Forests in the Pacific Northwest have historical scrapbooks, but it is safe to say that none of them compares with Melva Bach's history of the Fremont. The original is over 800 pages long and contains excerpts from literally thousands of original source documents. In its original, complete form, Bach's History is very useful to historians or other scholars because of its inclusiveness. Many of the sources that Bach quoted are unavailable elsewhere. Some were reports prepared by Fremont National Forest personnel or others who witnessed the activities described. Unlike many compilers, Bach resisted the temptation to intrude herself into her material. For the most part, she let the source documents speak for themselves. Since the summer of 1988 when John Kaiser, Fremont National Forest Archaeologist, first suggested that an edited version of Bach's work would be useful to the Forest, we have considered several approaches to the editing job. The most obvious one was to use Bach's materials to prepare a conventional historical narrative. The problem with this is that the character and distinctiveness of the original would be lost, and the result would no longer be Bach's History. The method that we have adopted in preparing this version has been to concentrate Bach's original by organizing the materials into a standard format for each decade, by paraphrasing or summarizing some of the original sources, and by deleting material that is extraneous. The result shortens the text by about 50%, but retains a good deal of its original flavor. To provide some continuity, we have added an "Editor's Introduction" at the beginning of the text. The introduction orients readers to background events in regional and local history. The sources that Bach used to prepare her history include published and unpublished documents. The published sources were most often Forest Service publications like "Six-Twenty-Six," the Pacific Northwest Regional Forest Service newsletter, or "Timberlines," the Fremont National Forest newsletter. Local newspapers also figure into the list of sources. Bach cited these sources with a simple and expedient form of parenthetical documentation which we have preserved. Bach's unpublished sources include correspondence, diaries, and field reports from Forest Service personnel. These are generally not cited in the original, but are identified in context. We have followed this procedure, with the addition of occasional footnotes to avoid confusion where Bach's references are not clear. One important source of information throughout the History is Bach's personal acquaintance with many of the people and events. Virtually everyone who knew Melva Bach comments on her remarkable ability to "keep in touch" with people after they had left the area. Bach focused her History squarely on these people of the Fremont. The accounts she included, the events she chronicled, and the photographs she chose all revolve around the personalities of the Forest staff. Melva Bach's History of the Fremont National Forest remains a unique document. It is more personal than a conventional history but more objective than a personal account. Scholars of American folk culture have pointed to the craft of making patchwork quilts as an important element in frontier life. In many respects, Bach's work resembles this folk art form. The History has been assembled from diverse sources into a rich pattern that reveals a great deal of information not only about the Fremont National Forest, but also about lives and experiences of people living in south central Oregon during the first half of this century. Ward Tonsfeldt, Bend, Oregon EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION The Fremont National Forest is situated near the geographical center of the West Coast's ponderosa pine timber belt. The pine lands of northern California stretch to the south of the Fremont, and to the north stretch the pine forests of Oregon's and Washington's Cascade Mountains. The inland portions of Oregon and Washington and the Rocky Mountain states contain additional ponderosa lands, of course, but the "pine belt" of the eastern Cascades once offered a continuous stand of mature timber covering thousands of square miles from central California to the Canadian border. Captain John C. Fremont The pine belt has figured into national history in several ways. In 1910, The Timberman magazine commented that the "timber belt of [West Coast pine]...constitutes the greatest body of standing pine timber now existing in America." The development of this immense resource involved some of the largest and most powerful industrial firms in the United States, including the Southern Pacific and Northern Pacific railways, the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company, the Long-Bell Lumber Company, Minnesota's Shevlin associates, and other lumber manufacturers. The western pine industry began after the western fir and redwood industries had gotten their starts during the middle decades of the Nineteenth Century. Because the pine forests of the western states were located in inland areas out of the reach of navigable waters, the industry developed only after the transcontinental railroads made distant markets accessible. For central Oregon, rail transport was not available until the second decade of the Twentieth Century. The development of the western pine industry was also influenced by the re-location of the lake states pine mills. Many of the pine lumber companies which had grown up in the Great Lakes region found themselves running short of timber as the Nineteenth Century drew to a close. While some of the lake states operators re-located in the fir-producing portions of the western states, the pine areas exercised a special attraction to others. The pine regions were less developed than the fir or redwood regions and the stumpage prices were correspondingly lower. Also, logging conditions in the western pine forests were closer to those prevailing in the midwestern forests. The trees were similar in size and stand density, the terrain was gentler than the coastal mountains, and the climate — with its cold winters and dry summers — offered an easier transition than the coastal rain forests. The result was that large and well-financed midwestern firms like the Red River Lumber Company, Shevlin-Hixon, and Weyerhaeuser began buying extensive tracts of pine timber during the 1890s and the years after the turn of the century. Oregon's Lake County — which contains much of the Fremont National Forest — attracted its share of this speculative attention during the 1890s and 1900s. Tracts of timber land were acquired from the Public Domain in Lake County (as elsewhere in the west) by expedients that skirted or openly flouted the law. Abuses of this kind led to the formation of the National Forest Reserve system and the protection of the Fremont lands. The advent of railroads offers a convenient line of demarcation between pre-industrial lumbering in pine areas and full-blown industrial production. Before railroads, lumber was manufactured on demand for local consumption; there was simply no way to get the product out of the country. After the railroad came, however, lumber could be cut steadily and sold to consumers as far away as the east coast. To offer a comparison between pre-industrial production and industrial production, we might consider the example provided by the Red River Lumber Company mill in Westwood, California. A pre-industrial water-powered sash mill such as those located in Lake or Klamath Counties might cut 100,000 board feet of lumber each year. The Red River mill — admittedly the largest western pine mill — at the peak of its production cut 800,000 board feet during an eight-hour shift. In 1909, a branch of the Southern Pacific Railroad reached Klamath Falls, Oregon; in 1912, the narrow-gauge Nevada-California-Oregon railroad reached Lakeview; and in 1911, a branch of the Great Northern reached Bend, Oregon. The lumber companies followed the railroads to Bend and Klamath Falls within a year or two, and these towns were well on their way to becoming national centers of pine production by the time of World War I. For Lakeview, however, the long-awaited railroad was a rather cruel joke.