A History of the United States Forest Service in Alaska / by Lawrence Rakestraw

A History of The United States Forest Service In Alaska By Lawrence Rakestraw A cooperative publication of the Alaska Historical Commission, Department of Education, State of Alaska; and the Alaska Region, United States Forest Service, Department of Agriculture; with the assis tance of the Alaska Historical Society. 2002 Reprint by the USDA Forest Service Reprinted with permission from Mary Rakestraw, July 2002 Cover photo: Ranger 10 at Old Kasaan village in 1941; a killer whale totem is in the foreground (Courtesy of U.S. Forest Service). Book design by Gay Pulley Reprinted by the USDA Forest Service 1994, 2002 Copyright 1981 by Lawrence Rakestraw Printed in the United States of America All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information retrieval system without permission in writing of the author, except for short excerpts in reviews or scholarly works. Rakestraw, Lawrence A history of the United States Forest Service in Alaska / by Lawrence Rakestraw. 1. United States. Forest Service. Alaska Region —History. 2. Forests and forestry —Alaska—History. I. Title. SD565.R24 81-620020 Contents Page Foreword v Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 Chapter 1 - The Forests of Alaska: From Prehistory to Creation of the Afognak Reserve 3 Chapter 2 - The Alexander Archipelago and Tongass National Forests through 1910 11 Chapter 3 - The Chugach National Forest through 1910 33 Chapter 4 - The Weigle Administration, 1911-1923 55 Chapter 5 - Team Management: Flory, Heintzleman, Merritt, 1919-1937 83 Chapter 6 - The Heintzleman Administration, 1937-1953 117 Chapter 7 - The Greeley, Hanson and Johnson Administrations 1953-1970 135 Chapter 8 -Epilogue: 1971-1979 155 Sources 179 Footnotes 183 Index 211 Maps I. The three major national forest areas in Alaska viii II Forest varieties of Alaska 2 III. Afognak Island Forest and Fish Culture Reserve 10 IV. Chugach National Forest boundaries in 1909 46 V. Chugach Nation Forest boundaries in 1980 177 VI. Tongass National Forest boundaries in 1980 178 Foreword The Forest Service, the largest bureau within the U.S. Department of Agriculture, has occu pied a central place in the historical development of natural resources administration in America. This is especially true in Alaska, where, in contrast to the older West, no significant utilization of forest resources preceded the bureau's establishment. On March 5, 1905, only one month after transferring control of a vast system of western forest reserves from the Department of the Interior to the Department of Agriculture, Congress created the Forest Serv ice in its modern form. In the seventy-five years since those beginnings under Theodore Roose velt and Gifford Pinchot, the Forest Service has grown and matured, not only in terms of forested lands administered but, especially since World War II, in the numbers and sophistica tion of its personnel and in the intensity of resource management. With this growth has come increasing controversy about the development and protection of the treasure-house of re sources entrusted to it. The characteristic esprit de corps of the Forest Service remains strong, but its policies are con stantly challenged by special interest groups motivated by a range of economic and philosophical assumptions. The challenges often evolve into political campaigns in which the contending parties sometimes distort the facts of the past and the present to serve their partic ular needs and ambitions. The issues are often blurred by public servants themselves, whose goals always include obtaining the budgetary appropriations necessary to maintain current activities and provide for additional "good work." There are, of course, regional variations to this profile. In Alaska, the great land and resource issues of the past decade have drawn a level of public attention to the Forest Service that would have been scarcely imaginable in earlier times. Public controversy prompts scholars to take stock from time to time — to examine the record of discrete units of our historical past, to measure them in the evolving context of larger themes, and to offer judgments that might yield better understanding of present and future concerns. Students of the Forest Service have gone about this stocktaking in various ways. John Ise in 1920, Jenks Cameron in 1928, and Darrell H. Smith in 1930 offered broadly similar interpreta tions of federal forestry that remain useful even if reflective of the times in which they were written. More encyclopedic in approach was Samuel T. Dana's Forest and Range Policy (1956), which is still widely used as a text and authoritative reference. Henry Clepper's Professionol — Forestry in America (1971) looked more broadly at the guild also from an insider's viewpoint. Political scientist Herbert Kaufman offered insights into the operation of field personnel in The Forest Ranger: A Study of Administrative Behavior (1960), and law professor Glen O. Rob inson evaluated recent issues in The Forest Service: A Study in Public Land Management (1975). The authoritative history, viewing its subject principally from "the tip of the administra tive triangle," is Harold K. Steen's The U.S. Forest Service: A History (1976). The serious stu dent must examine all of these books to ascertain the subject's scope — only then to discover that there are many additional scholarly works that contribute detail through the study of biog raphy, organizational functions, programs, special projects, and issues. Although the Forest Service has been a decentralized bureau almost from its inception, there are surprisingly few studies of its regional and local units. With a few notable exceptions, pro fessional historians have passed up opportunities to examine the Forest Service in the context of its various operational settings. One exception is Charles S. Peterson's Look to the Moun tains: Southeastern Utah and the La Sal National Forest (1975). There are also some histories of national forests by scholars recently produced as contracted "cultural resource overviews." More typical efforts, usually old-timers' colorful reminiscences brought together by Forest Ser vice staff, are symbolized by Early Days in the Forest Service (4 vols., 1944-1976), which are stories out of Region 1 in Missoula, Montana, and Men Who Matched the Mountains: The Forest Service in the Southwest (1972), by Edwin A. Tucker and George Fitzpatrick. These are rich in nostalgia and narration but short on interpretation. The activities of several regional forest and range experiment stations and subsidiary laboratories have been chronicled, but a general scholarly study of research in the Forest Service is badly needed. The only book-length scholarly study of a Forest Service administrative region is Lawrence Rakestraw's History of Forest Conservation in the Pacific Northwest, 1891-1913. a 1955 doc toral dissertation published in facsimile edition by Arno Press in 1979. Focusing on a limited time period in the timber-rich states of Oregon and Washington, Rakestraw's study established a model that finds fruition in his present work. In relating the history of the Forest Service in Alaska, Rakestraw provides an outline of evolv ing forest policy nationwide as a context for detailed illustration of the pioneering initiatives and workaday tasks of forest officers on America's last frontier. Alaska's first federal forest, the Afognak Forest and Fish Culture Reserve, was established in 1892 from the efforts of scien tists concerned with the conservation of fisheries. The Alexander Archipelago Forest Reserve was proclaimed in 1902 and enlarged five years later to become the Tongass National Forest. It is today the largest of the more than 150 national forests. Also established in 1907 was the Chugach National Forest, which absorbed the Afognak and covered vast regions of south- central Alaska before being reduced at the insistence of opponents. The central figure of nearly all forestry activity in Alaska from 1903 to 1911 was William A. Langille, an Oregonian who combined romantic adventure with hard-headed management in Forest Service duties performed across endless reaches of timber, swamp, stone, and ice. Langille got help from a small corps of rangers who adapted to Alaskan conditions by learning the use of boats and dog teams (instead of pack mules and saddle horses), enforcing regulations among handloggers, Natives, and other local users of forests (there were few genuine "lumber barons"), and patiently awaiting national recognition and development of Alaska's boundless resources. During the administrations of his successors — supervisors and regional foresters like William Weigle (1911-1919), Charles Flory (1919-1937), and B. Frank Heintzleman (1937-1953)— na tional attention finally came, sometimes in an overwhelming rush, and put an end to much of the romance and boyish innocence of the territory. Intensive utilization of forest resources, particularly in the form of a pulp and paper industry promoted by Heintzleman (who later served as governor of Alaska), only began to be realized when such developments as statehood introduced new claimants to resources, and a burgeoning environmental movement erected obstacles to the easy disposition of lands and timber. Preservationist groups zealously sought to "save" the last of America's wilderness, often without fair regard to the welfare of Alaska's residents. Through publicity campaigns, political lobbying,

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