Timber Users, Timber Savers: Homestake Mining Company and the First Regulated Timber Harvest

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Timber Users, Timber Savers: Homestake Mining Company and the First Regulated Timber Harvest Copyright © 1992 by the South Dakota State Historical Society. All Rights Reserved. Timber Users, Timber Savers: Homestake Mining Company and the First Regulated Timber Harvest RICHMOND L CLOW The Progressive Fra (1900-1916) has emerged as a period crucial to the success of the late nineteenth century conservation crusade. During this optimistic era of social reform, with its faith in tech- nology and efficiency, demands for a halt to the destruction and waste of the nation's natural resources became established federal policy. Many studies have examined the varied themes of the con- servation movement, from the aesthetic importance of the environ- ment to the fear that the depletion of resources, such as timber, threatened the very existence of American society.' These studies have most often defined the users of resources as the despoilers of the environment. Such an approach, however, ignores the role of industry in conservation. 1. Samuel P. Hays, Conser\'ation and the Cospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Con- servation Movement, 1890-1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959), pp. 1-3. Donald ]. Pisani, in "Forests and Conservation, 1865-1890,"/ouma/oMmencan History 75 (Sept. 1985): 340-59, asserts that a conservation "ethic" existed for several decades before Progressive reformers popularized the cause. While scientists led the later movement, its leaders in the post-Civil War years were as often "moralists and philosophers" who anticipated modern conservationists in their understanding of the interrelatedness of natural resources. For more on the late nineteenth cen- tury fears of timber famine that helped lo spur the conservation movement, see David A. Clary, Timber and the Forest Service (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1986), and Sherry H. Olson, The Depletion Myth: A History of Railroad Use of Timber {Cam- bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971). Copyright © 1992 by the South Dakota State Historical Society. All Rights Reserved. 274 Sour/7 Dakota History An illustration of the importance of resource users to the conser- vation story can be found in the Black Hills of South Dakota, where the Homestake Mining Company has been the largest consumer of trees from the region's public lands. The company's logging operations passed through three phases corresponding to changes in popular attitude and national policy regarding resource conser- vation. From just after the beginning of the Black Hills gold rush in 1876 until the creation of the Black Hills Forest Reserve In 1897, Homestake loggers destroyed large portions of the forest with the aid of legislation tbat encouraged the unlimited use of tbe nation's apparently inexhaustible timber resources. With the beginning of the shift in federal policy toward conservation and the advent of the forest reserve, the company initiated fraudulent mining claims to keep on cutting trees from the restricted land. Finally, once the leadership of Homestake understood the Progressive foundation of the movement to save resources and realized that conservation was in its best long-term interest, the mining company not only ac- cepted forest conservation but also played an active role in shap- ing modern forestry. Fmbracing the new conservation policy, Homestake initiated Timber Case No. 1, the first regulated timber harvest from a public forest reserve. Largely through the efforts of Gifford Pinchot, the leadership of Homestake Mining Company came to understand the movement's philosophical foundation and promote forest conservation. Pinchot, a young, energetic eastern forester who eventually became the first bead of the United States Forest Service, championed the cause of scientific management of the nation's forests. Under the system he espoused, foresters, not politicians or lumbermen, would guide lumber operations. For Progressives like Pinchot and his followers, "conservation" meant the proper management of forests for the pro- duction of a steady and ongoing supply of lumber for the nation's industries. Proponents of "preservation," on the other hand, stressed the perpetuation of the wilderness in a state of nonuse. No compromise existed between these competing views, as the public split in 1897 between Pinchot and John Muir, the country's leading preservationist, illustrated. When confronted with these two alternatives, Homestake supported conservation, whose emphasis on wise use of the forests would ensure a continual lumber supply for the company's gold-mining operations.^ 2. Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, rev. ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1973), pp. 134-38. Copyright © 1992 by the South Dakota State Historical Society. All Rights Reserved. Timber Users, Timber Savers 215 An important relationship existed between nineteenth-century gold-mining and lumbering. Trees provided cordwood for fuel, saw boards for building construction, and shoring for mine tunnels, all of which were essential to the recovery of gold. Thus, the commer- cial exploitation of the Black Hills forest had begun with the gold rush of 1876. In that year, entrepreneurs shipped several small saw- mills to the Black Hills to supply rough boards for the fledgling gold- mining industry as well as local building construction.^ Congress helped western mining operations obtain lumber by passing the Free Timber Act of 1878, authorizing miners to take for mining pur- poses "any timber or trees growing or being on the public [mineral landsj,. subject to such rules and regulations as the Secretary of the Interior may prescribe for the protection of the timber."'^ The secretary's office established regulations prohibiting the cutting of any tree less than eight inches in diameter and requiring that brush and treetops be disposed of in a manner that would prevent the spread of forest fires. Largely unenforced, these regulations did nothing to halt the quick destruction of the yellow, or ponderosa, pine forests in the Black Hills. Together, town builders and miners logged a billion and a half board feet from 1876 until 1898.'^ A small, isolated mountain range, the Black Hills lie along the South Dakota-Wyoming border between the Belle Fourche River and the south fork of the Cheyenne River. About one hundred twenty miles long and forty miles wide, the range rises up to four thou- sand feet above the surrounding short-grass prairie and, because of the higher elevation, receives more rainfall than the adjacent grassland.•* Accessible and well-timbered, the mountains permitted easy exploitation, a fact that was not lost on miners. Henry M. Chance, a mining engineer who had traveled the region, wrote in 1891 that large tracts of the pine forest in the northern Black Hills had "been cut on a large scale for use at the Homestake and other mines . [because the trees are] of inestimable value in the 3. U. S., Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, The Black Hills National Forest 50th Anniversary (Washington, D.C: Government Printing Office, 1948), pp. 1-2. 4. U. S., Statutes at Large, vol. 20, p. 88, Act of 3 June 1878. 5. Samuel Trask Dana, Forest and Range Policy: Its Development in the United States {New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1956), pp. 63-64; Darrell Hevenor Smith, The Forest Service: Its History, Activities and Organization (Washington, D.C.: Brook- ings Institution, 1930), p. 15; Black Hills National Forest 50th Anniversary, p. 7. 6. Henry S. Graves, "Black Hills Forest Reserve (South Dakota and Wyoming)," in U. S., Department of the Interior, Nineteenth Annual Report of the United States Geological Survey, pt. 5, Foresi Resen'es (Washington, D.G.; Government Printing Of- fice, 1899), pp. 68-69. Copyright © 1992 by the South Dakota State Historical Society. All Rights Reserved. 276 South Dakota History The mining industry's large appetite for lumber can be seen In the mountainous stacks of logs awaiting use at the mines and mills of Terraville in the northern Black Hills. Copyright © 1992 by the South Dakota State Historical Society. All Rights Reserved. Timber Users, Timber Savers 217 development of their mineral resources, furnishing a good, cheap mine-timber." The southern Hills, which offered limited mining op- portunities and therefore retained its trees, presented a mucln dif- ferent landscape. "It Is impossible," Chance observed, "to travel through the Black Hills, especially through their southern portion, without being charmed by the beauty of the country."' In the first years of logging, when timber was plentiful, only the best trees were taken. When timber became scarce and the second cuttings began, lumbermen took the remaining trees, leaving large clear-cut areas. Often, only fifty percent of each tree was used and the rest discarded as waste. Competition between mining com- panies contributed to the squandering of timber; lumbermen some- times cut logs only to prevent another mining company from getting them. Surplus logs often rotted at mining operations that had been abandoned. Henry S. Graves, a professional forester, noted that in the northern Hills, the center of the region's mining industry, timber 7. H. M. Chance, "The Resources of the Black Hills and Big Horn Country, Wyo- ming," The Transactions of the American Institute of Mining Engineers 19 (1891): 50, 58. Enormous waste characterized the lumbering practices of the 1870s and 1880s, when timber resources appeared inexhaustible. Here, boards have been left to rot at an abandoned sawmill. Copyright © 1992 by the South Dakota State Historical Society. All Rights Reserved. The destruction
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