American Eden An Administrative History Of Olympic National Park By Hal K. Rothman National Park Service American Eden: An Administrative History Of Olympic National Park By Hal K. Rothman FINAL DRAFT ADMINISTRATIVE HISTORY July 2006 Not for public distribution Do not photocopy or quote Without the written permission of the National Park Service An American Eden Table of Contents List of Maps ................................................................................................................iii Introduction.................................................................................................................v 1. Before the Park: The Olympic Peninsula Before 1909...........................................1 2. Creating the Park...................................................................................................39 3. Planning and Administering Olympic National Park ...........................................87 4. Natural Resource Management...........................................................................151 5. Cultural Resource Management..........................................................................207 6. Interpreting the Wilderness … and More ...........................................................245 7. Running the Park.................................................................................................285 8. Threats to the Park ..............................................................................................327 Appendices A. Olympic National Park Superintendents .....................................................367 B. Recreational Visits .......................................................................................369 C. Chronology of Significant Events................................................................371 Bibliography ...........................................................................................................379 Photographs follow each chapter. i An American Eden ii An American Eden List of Maps 1..................................................................................................................................... 2..................................................................................................................................... 3..................................................................................................................................... 4..................................................................................................................................... 5..................................................................................................................................... 6..................................................................................................................................... 7..................................................................................................................................... 8..................................................................................................................................... 9..................................................................................................................................... iii An American Eden iv An American Eden Introduction 1 Olympic National Park holds a pivotal place in the history of national parks in the United 2 States. Since its tumultuous establishment as a national park in 1938, it has served as a 3 bellwether of the national sentiment that favored preservation. Despite initial authorizing 4 legislation that established the area as a national monument under the scientific significance 5 designation of the Antiquities Act of 1906, the area that became Mount Olympus National 6 Monument was prized in no small part for its wilderness qualities at a time when Americans of 7 the influential classes bemoaned the loss of their natural past. This emphasis continued even as 8 the monument was reduced in size to accommodate commercial extractive endeavors. As a 9 result, alone among early U.S. national parks, Congress established Olympic National Park 10 specifically to preserve wilderness, and it became the singular place where the modern 11 preservation movement established its precepts and implemented its objectives. Simultaneously, 12 Olympic National Park has been a peculiar repository for the complicated feelings local 13 communities hold toward national parks – the oddly simultaneous ambivalence toward a 14 powerful entity that contains resources from which they can make a living and that adds 15 powerful social meaning to the place where they live. In this, Olympic National Park tells the 16 story of the evolution of national park management and of the responses of the national and local 17 constituencies to National Park Service policies, practices, and decisions. 18 The park also reveals an important dimension of evolving national park management. 19 Olympic National Park clearly shows the ways in which national parks became progressively 20 more sensitive to their surroundings and more skilled at building coalitions to support National v An American Eden 1 Park Service objectives. In this process, Olympic served as a forerunner, not always by the 2 agency’s choice, and its lessons translated to later park proclamation struggles and their usually 3 complicated aftermaths. The constituencies at Olympic – national and local, extractive and 4 preservation-oriented – gave the agency a range of choices, and over time, the National Park 5 Service moved from reliance on powerful and influential regional and national elites to a broader 6 embrace of the mass market tourism that followed World War II. In this, the conditions at 7 Olympic National Park anticipated what has come to be called the “New West,” with its 8 emphasis on quality of life, recreation, and leisure ahead of traditional extractive industries. 9 Olympic National Park was unique at its founding. Alone among existing U.S. national 10 parks, Olympic’s “wilderness” was a legacy of its proclamation as a national monument. Unlike 11 any other park area, Olympic was surrounded by a viable and functioning commercial extractive 12 economy – timber harvesting – that coveted the very resources included inside park boundaries. 13 The National Park Service and the local economy vied for the same timber resources; the former 14 for preservation and aesthetic values, the latter for sustained yield extraction. In this, Olympic 15 differed from the great nineteenth-century national parks, for which Yellowstone and Yosemite 16 served as the prototypes – those too high in elevation and too remote for practical commercial 17 extractive use, such as farming or timber cutting. These so-called “worthless lands” made park 18 establishment easy, for there were few other claimants to compete for jurisdiction. It also 19 differed from later entries in the first generation of national parks, for unlike Grand Teton 20 National Park, founded in 1929 as a mountaintop park in an area already largely dependent on its 21 scenery for economic sustenance, the area included in Olympic remained commercially useful. 22 The battle for Olympic National Park’s establishment became the classic dispute between the vi An American Eden 1 National Park Service and the U.S. Forest Service, the federal agency tasked with managing 2 national timber lands. It set into motion the forces that created the park of today. 3 Despite the obvious differences between an agency devoted to preserving resources and one 4 that saw sustained timber yield as its goal, the National Park Service and the Forest Service 5 shared both mission and constituency. The overlap led to strife from the founding of the National 6 Park Service in 1916, and by the 1930s, the two agencies regarded each other with intense 7 antipathy. The Forest Service preceded the National Park Service on the Olympic Peninsula, 8 managing a national monument it largely did not want for two decades and creating a template 9 for management that the National Park Service followed. Forest Service management created 10 expectations as well as patterns on the land, and the National Park Service had to address both. 11 In the 1930s, the Forest Service and the National Park Service were at the apex of what was by 12 then a twenty-year spat; it reached a resounding crescendo at Olympic. Even at the park’s 13 establishment, the roiling politics of U.S. conservation and federal land management agencies 14 already included the Olympic Peninsula. 15 With multiple constituencies and competitors, National Park Service management of 16 Olympic National Park required flexibility from the outset. In many ways, the agency learned to 17 compromise at the local level. Pulled between regional demands and its own powerful national 18 constituency, the National Park Service quickly learned that it had to give ground to get ground. 19 In this process, it found itself caught between its many friends and their diverse objectives. As a 20 result, Olympic’s managers often felt pulled between constituencies that became progressively 21 more strident over time. In a situation typical of the National Park Service at the end of the 22 1960s, the park’s purported friends did it more damage than its enemies. In no small part, the vii An American Eden 1 story of greater public attention to National Park Service decisions began at Olympic National 2 Park, and the agency learned how to respond to its friends in the Olympic Mountains. 3 In this lay