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Oral History Interview with Horace M. Albright, June 21, 1979

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Oral History Interview with Horace M. Albright, June 21, 1979 Archives and Special Collections Mansfield Library, University of Montana Missoula MT 59812-9936 Email: [email protected] Telephone: (406) 243-2053 This transcript represents the nearly verbatim record of an unrehearsed interview. Please bear in mind that you are reading the spoken word rather than the written word. Oral History Number: 297-026, 027, 028a Interviewee: Horace M. Albright Interviewers: Gyongyver "Kitty" Beuchert and Forrest Anderson Date of Interview: June 21,1979 Project: Boone and Crockett Club Oral History Project Gyongyver "Kitty" Beuchert: The following is an oral history interview with Horace M. Albright on June 21 and 22, 1979, at his home at Sherman Apartments, 14144 Dickens Street, Sherman Oaks, California. The interviewers are Judge F. Anderson, one of the current first vice presidents of the Boone and Crockett Club, and Gyongyver Kitty Beuchert, office administrator of the Club. [Break in audio] Mr. Albright, could you give us your birthdate and your place of birth? Horace Albright: I was born January 6, 1890, in a little mountain town of Bishop, which is about 280 miles north of here in the Orange Valley on the east side of the High Sierra and about 50 miles from the eastern boundary of Yosemite National Park. GB: Your family went back to Candelaria for three years, didn't they, to live? HA: Well my family were living in Candelaria at the time I was born. There was no doctor there, and the expectant mothers would go to Bishop where there was a doctor. They could get on the little railroad and come over, and after the baby was born, they'd come back from Bishop. That's what my mother did. She had two babies born in Bishop. One didn't live, and then I came second. Went back and lived in Candelaria for about four years. Then we moved, finally, to Bishop where we lived the rest of my boyhood. GB: Would you give the names of your parents and tell us a little bit about your parents? HA: Well, we'd better go back one other generation. My grandfather was born and reared in Maine. When he was 19 years old, he wanted to join the gold rush so he went down to New York and got on a boat there and went to Nicaragua and crossed the Isthmus of Nicaragua. He got on a boat on the other side of the Pacific and came up to San Francisco then headed for the mining camps. That was about 1851. In 1865, my grandmother came across in covered wagon from Arkansas. Her mother started out with three girls and a boy. The father was detained to settle up some business, and just before they started to cross the mountains, the mother died of a heart attack. She was only 39. So her children, the three girls and the boy, went on over to Stockton. That's where my grandfather met my grandmother shortly afterwards, and they were married. Lived on in the mining camps on what we call the mother lode here—the foot of the Sierra Nevada, the Sierra Nevada Mountains. It shouldn't be mountains. You should say Sierra Nevada, you shouldn't say Sierra Nevada Mountains. 1 Horace M. Albright Interview, OH 297-026, 027, 028a, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana-Missoula. Then when the silver developers started down the east side of the mountains, my grandfather moved over there, and my mother was actually reared in Aurora, Nevada. My father was a Canadian. Came out in 1873 from a little town near Montreal and engaged in mining operations. He was millwright, a specialist in building tunnels or timbering tunnels and (unintelligible), then went on to installing machinery. That wasn't actually a miner. Then moved over to Aurora, near Virginia City, where he met my mother, and they were married and then moved to Candelaria. In 1893, when the Depression of that time came on, the mines closed down, why, they came down to Bishop, California. That's where we lived before I went away to college. I never went back after I went to college. That's about the size of it. My one brother was a very brilliant student. After he graduated from college and he got his master's degree, he was assigned a fellowship to study in Spanish territory, Spanish colonies, and Spain. Died in Spain of typhoid within a year. The other brother remained up there, but he was accidentally killed in an automobile accident here three years ago, so I'm the last of the family. GB: Could you describe the schools you attended, and I'm going to ask you specifically to go all the way back because I don't think too many people have attended a one-room school. HA: My life's schooling began up here in Bishop in a three-room school. Each room had three classes. I went through to the seventh grade. They had no high school, and so they had really nine grades, but they called the last two the eighth grade. Called each of them eighth grades. After I'd gone through one, seven—through to seventh grade—my mother and father felt (unintelligible) go into two eighth grades (unintelligible) school where there's only one eighth grade. So that's why they sent me to a one-room schoolhouse. That's where I graduated from grammar school. I had to ride a horse five miles out to the school. That suited me fine because I loved horses and loved to ride. The high school was started three years before, and so I entered high school in 1904 in the first class...I mean, in the fourth class. There were three classes already there. We had two teachers, each of them taught 16 classes a day because each class had four classes. It was one of those places where you didn't have any alternatives or any electives. You took four years of Latin, four years of English, three or four years of history, three years of mathematics, and a year of science. There were no changes. Even then it was difficult to get accredited to a university because it was a small school with just two teachers. We were admitted on probation. If we passed the first semester examination satisfactorily, we were in. Otherwise, we had to go back and do all the examinations (unintelligible) at the university. There were only four in our class when we graduated, and only two of us went to the university and we both got by all right. We didn't have to take the examinations. We went in on probation and passed the examination at the end of the semester and were in. 2 Horace M. Albright Interview, OH 297-026, 027, 028a, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana-Missoula. I was an undergraduate for four years. Graduated in the class of 1912. I went on to study law, specializing in mining and water law. I was halfway through that graduate work. In those days, you could start your law as a senior. You didn't have to be a graduate student before you started law. The courses were three years as they are now, but you could start as a senior. So I had one graduate year. I had my senior year and graduate year. I had only one more year to go before I got a doctor of jurisprudence. I was in quite a famous class because it contained Earl Warren, who became Chief Justice of the United States and also Governor of California—three times governor of California. I had this opportunity to go to Washington, and I went and took office on June 2, 1913, that's when I started serving. Well, I want to emphasize that the university I went to was the University of California, at Berkeley, which now has nine campuses with one right here in Los Angeles. But the one at Berkeley is the mother university and that's where I attended for five years. GB: Before I allow you to go on to your Washington career, I'd like to ask you a little bit about the grandfather you mentioned earlier. I think this was the one. Your grandfather Marden (?) had a great influence on your life as a conservationist, didn't he? HA: Yes he did, in this way. Of course, he was a miner. He had mined for years, and then when the mines shut down, he went into the logging business. He didn't own anything in the way of timber or mills or anything, but he contracted to take logs out and get them to the mills. He was a great lover of horses, and everything was on a horse-drawn basis in those days. But he talked about the waste of resources in logging, and of course, probably to some extent in mining. But in logging, where you cut the tree down and you left all the limbs and the tops and if the tree wasn't healthy you left the tree. You just went away leaving an enormous amount of rubbish. The next year fire started and burned over it. Burned up all the young trees and left more or less a desert situation. Sometimes lasted for years. Sometimes never reforested. That's the sort of thing he...He happened to be in that business when [Gifford] Pinchot came along and started forestry in this country, which was bitterly opposed by timber people, lumber people, and by everybody had anything to do with the forest.
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