The trip West
Editor’s note: The U.S. Forest Service is 100 years old this year, and to help celebrate its centennial, you’ll find in the Handle Extra throughout 2005 a series of reminiscences by men who joined the agency and served it and the United State through its early years.
Today’s installment is drawn from Gifford Pinchot’s “Breaking New Ground” (Harcourt, Brace and Co., N.Y., 1947). Pinchot (1865-1946) was America’s first professionally trained forester. In 1897, he was a member of the Forest Commission of the National Academy of Sciences which, at President Grover Cleveland’s request, investigated the Western forests and proposed establishing federal forest reserves. President Theodore Roosevelt appointed Pinchot the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service.
On July 10, 1897, I left for the West. My brother Amos, to my great satisfaction, went along. At Blackfoot, Montana, we picked up Jack Monroe and proceeded to look over the Priest Lake Forest Reserve in Idaho, where stood, according to the report of the Commission, the “most valuable body of timber in the interior of the Continent.”
It wasn’t exactly an armchair job. Out of six days in the Priest Lake country my diary says we were up at 3:30 in the morning on three of them, on another at 4:00. The other two not stated.
Between the railroad and the lower lake we passed through a superb old forest of Western White Pine (locally called Silver Pine) mixed with Western Larch, most of which has now gone the way of all flesh. As we rowed the length of the lower lake (Kaniksu), through the thoroughfare, and into the upper lake (Priest Lake), the fire devastation of the old forest between the Priest Mountains to the east and the Pend Oreille range to the west was sickening. As my report said: “Except for one area of 1,600 acres on the Lower West Fork [of Priest River], there is probably not a body of one thousand acres on the whole reserve which has not been more or less seriously injured by fire.”
Larch supplied most of the young growth. Then as always I was immensely impressed with its gallant resistance to fire. Western Yellow Pine, Douglas-fir, Western Cedar, and Lodgepole Pine, whose specialty is seeding up old burns, made up most of the rest of the forest.
In addition to the enormous damage from fire, two incidents left an impression. One happened when I stepped out on the shore from our camp early one morning. Some fool, camped across the narrow lake, took a shot at me with his rifle and missed me narrowly. He was like other pestilent greenhorns in the woods who shoot at a motion or a noise. I rowed across and gave him my opinion free of charge.
The same day, while I was photographing the lake and its forests from an open burn, a mule-deer buck walked out of the brush and stood looking at me. My rifle, as it should have been, was leaning against the tripod of my camera within reach of my hand. I picked it up, killed the buck, leaned the rifle against the tripod again, took the photograph, and then walked over to my game.
It took Jack and me hours to tote that buck back to camp. His horns were in the velvet. I buried an antler in the coals of our camp fire, roasted it like a potato, and found it better than good. Have you ever tried roast horn?
July is no time to kill a deer in these days of game laws and game wardens. But in those days, back in the wilderness, we killed meat when we needed it.
From Priest Lake to Spokane, where Will Cowles, whom I had known at Yale, owned and directed the Spokane Spokesman-Review.
To him I went with my story that the Forest Reserves were made to be used, not just to look at; asked for his help; and got it. Next day appeared a long interview in his paper and an editorial backing up my point of view.