by Eric Rutkow
Morton had a theory to explain the worldwide resonance of a day devoted to tree planting: “‘Arbor Day’ . . . is not like other holidays. Each of those reposes upon the past, while Arbor Day proposes for the future. It contemplates, not the good and the beautiful of past generations, but it sketches, outlines, establishes the useful and the beautiful for the ages yet to come.”
While Arbor Day became the defining legacy of Morton’s life, it was far from his only accomplishment. He continued to promote agriculture throughout Nebraska for another three decades, and in 1893 President Grover Cleveland appointed him to his cabinet as the secretary of agriculture, a post Morton held for four years. After this he began to edit the multivolume Illustrated History of Nebraska, a project he was still working on when he died on April 27, 1902. Following Morton’s death, his family home in Nebraska City was turned into a state park, the Arbor Lodge State Historical Park and Arboretum. Known throughout his life as a devoted family man, Morton also had several sons who went on to earn great renown. One served as the secretary of the navy under President Theodore Roosevelt. Another founded the Morton Salt Company and devoted part of his fortune to erecting a massive arboretum in Illinois, testament to a love for tree planting instilled by his father.
THE EASTERN PART of Nebraska where J. Sterling Morton lived may have lacked trees, but the land was relatively fertile. Annual rainfall averaged around thirty inches, a paltry amount compared to the eastern states, but enough to sustain traditional agriculture techniques and, with care, tree cultivation. As Nebraska extended toward the West, however, the situation changed. Beyond the ninety-eighth meridian—a latitude demarcation roughly one-third of the way across the state—annual rainfall decreased to less than twenty inches, making conventional agriculture and tree raising near impossible. This arid region expanded far beyond western Nebraska, stretching from the ninety-eighth meridian in the east to the Rocky Mountains in the west, from the Canadian border in the north to almost the Mexican border in the south. Known in the nineteenth century as “The Great American Desert,” it included about one-fifth of the land in the continental United States.
Conditions in this region inhibited the traditional forms of agriculture-based permanent settlement that Americans had practiced since colonial times. The area’s primary inhabitants were Native Americans and ranchers who moved herds of grazing animals along these endless plains.
Many pioneering Americans refused to accept the fact that an enormous portion of the nation’s geography resisted domestication. Various theories appeared explaining how the land might be forced to yield to the entreaties of settlers. One school of thought suggested that the key was to increase rainfall, and over the years a belief developed that a possible way to accomplish this was through widespread tree planting. Exactly how trees might bring the rains remained vague, but the logic was compelling enough to win over many men of science.
Among the theory’s most influential proponents was Ferdinand V. Hayden, director of the United States Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories from 1867 to 1879. He had come across Marsh’s Man and Nature shortly after it was published and, like a number of readers, found compelling meteorological proof that forests increased rainfall. (While Marsh had quoted some favorable statements on the matter, he did this only to criticize them and assiduously avoided reaching any positive conclusions himself.) Hayden first expressed his belief that trees increased rainfall in an 1867 report on Nebraska. It read:
I do not believe that the prairies proper will ever become covered with timber except by artificial means. . . . It is believed, also, that the planting of ten or fifteen acres of forest trees on each quarter section will have a most important effect on the climate, equalizing and increasing the moisture and adding greatly to the fertility of the soil. The settlement of the country and the increase of the timber has already changed for the better the climate of that portion of Nebraska lying along the Missouri . . . [and] I am confident this change will continue to extend across the dry belt to the foot of the Rocky mountains as the settlements extend and the forest trees are planted in proper quantities.
Hayden’s report (and its follow-ups) not only bolstered the increased rainfall theory by adding the government’s imprimatur, it also injected the supposed authority of geographical expertise through the inclusion of passages paraphrased or directly reproduced from Man and Nature—Hayden discarded Marsh’s skeptical rejoinders and selectively inserted the positive assertions without sufficient context.
The increased rainfall theory gained force in the ensuing years. Horticultural societies throughout the Midwest debated its merits, while Hayden and other federal officials touted it as a potential solution to the challenge of the Great American Desert. To complicate matters, the entire prairie region was experiencing an upturn in annual rainfall. This eventually proved to be part of a cyclical weather pattern that oscillated between high rainfall and drought, but many saw it as evidence for the impact of settler tree plantings and as a rationale to expand the practice. The prevalence of the increased rainfall theory likely contributed to Arbor Day’s popularity across the Midwest—Morton himself hadn’t initially discussed this rationale, but in later years claimed that one of his several motivations was, in fact, “to improve the climatic conditions.” Some, like Major John Wesley Powell, director of the United States Geological Survey (a successor to Hayden’s survey), contested the increased rainfall crowd, but such dissents were largely drowned out.
As increasing numbers of people accepted that forests brought the rains, they began to demand that the federal government take action to hasten this vital natural phenomenon. The matter finally reached the United States Senate floor during the same winter that Morton had introduced Arbor Day. Its champion was Phineas Hitchcock, a senator from Nebraska who, like many midwestern politicians, showed almost unshakable faith in the region’s agricultural potential. He proposed a bill in February 1872 “to encourage the growth of timber on western prairies.” It would grant any settler a free quarter section in the plains states so long as he planted forty acres with forest trees and cultivated them for ten years—the bill resembled the famous Homestead Act of 1862, but essentially substituted tree planting for the residency requirements. Hitchcock’s proposal echoed the suggestions that Hayden had offered five years earlier. And while there were many reasons to encourage tree planting on the plains, Hitchcock took pains to make his belief in the increased rainfall theory clear: “The object of this bill is to encourage the growth of timber, not merely for the benefit of the soil, not merely for the value of the timber itself, but for its influence upon the climate.”
On March 3, 1873, President Ulysses Grant signed Hitchcock’s bill into law as the Timber Culture Act. Suddenly Americans were entitled to claim land simply by demonstrating a willingness to plant and tend trees. The nation had shifted 180 degrees from the days when land was free for the taking so long as a settler was willing to clear the trees away.
Problems with the Timber Culture Act, however, surfaced almost immediately. For starters, the requirement proved more onerous than the government had likely intended. Trees, in many cases, simply refused to grow in such arid conditions or died in winter frosts. A government land officer noted in 1884, “I have never seen any instances of . . . success, except in the eastern portion of Nebraska and southeastern Dakota [two regions east of the ninety-eighth meridian].” But the larger issue was the act’s susceptibility to abuse and fraud. Many were less concerned with bringing rains to the plains than with gaining title to cheap lands, and the act became a favorite vehicle for speculators. Morton expressed the frustration that many felt in an 1885 article: “[B]y the timber-culture act we pay bounties in millions of acres of the public domain every year for the sham planting of counterfeit forests,—forests which no more resemble in value, in beauty, and in sanitary influences the primeval pines and oaks which we tariff to their destruction than a five-cent nickel resembles a twenty-dollar gold piece.” Ult
imately, the Timber Culture Act turned out to be one of numerous late-nineteenth-century laws designed to encourage settlement but ripe for manipulation. Congress finally repealed the Timber Culture Act in 1891.
By the closing years of the nineteenth century, the increased rainfall theory began to be dismissed as junk science. Several severe droughts convinced even die-hard adherents that the trees planted across the plains had had no effect on the general climate. Some settlers who had emigrated to the Great American Desert fled back toward more fertile lands back East. Others began to develop techniques of dry-land farming and learned to survive in a region with little rainfall, though some of the more arid regions remained the exclusive province of ranchers or simply remained unpopulated. Eventually the increased rainfall claim landed in the trash heap with that other great canard of prairie development, “Rain follows the plow.”
For twenty years, however, the idea that tree planting might bring rains to the Great American Desert had shaped policies in states and territories throughout the high plains. And this was far from the only tree-based political movement coalescing in the late nineteenth century. In New York State, voices were starting to speak up on the need to protect forests, an idea whose time had finally arrived.
“A Central Park for the World”
FAR TO THE NORTH of New York City, beyond the state capital of Albany, up where the proud Hudson River takes it first breath, sits the broad Adirondack plateau. It lies between Lake Champlain in the east and the valley of the Black River in the west, extending toward the fertile plains of the St. Lawrence River to the north and the dells of the Mohawk River to the south, in total an area greater than the state of Vermont. Four hilly ranges run southeasterly across the Adirondack plateau, including a chain of mountains that climb above five thousand feet and contain Mount Marcy, the state’s highest peak. Nearly all of this land is blanketed in a dense forest, endless acres of sugar maples, beeches, and yellow birches with clumps of white pines, spruces, and hemlocks sprinkled throughout. Since colonial times, countless settlers had attempted to conquer these forests, but the soil is poor and withstood nearly all attempts at agriculture. For most of the nation’s history the land remained uninhabited save for some isolated hamlets and a small tourist section around Saranac Lake.
The Adirondack forests, however, captured the public’s imagination in 1869. That year the Reverend William H. H. Murray published Adventures in the Wilderness; or Camp-Life in the Adirondacks. Murray, who tended a congregation in Boston, was probably the nation’s second-most prominent preacher, trailing only the formidable Henry Ward Beecher. The book, he explained, was written “to encourage manly exercise in the open air, and familiarity with Nature in her wildest and grandest aspects.” It was not only a panegyric to the majesty of wilderness but something of a practical guide for recreation, explaining the best ways to reach the Adirondacks, providing the names of reputable guides, and even suggesting the best clothing for a woman to wear in the forests. The work seemed to tap a latent fervency of the general population for the outdoors and became a runaway success.
Thousands descended on the Adirondacks in the wake of Adventures in the Wilderness. The region quickly transformed into the most fashionable summer retreat for well-to-do easterners. Fancy “wilderness” hotels sprang up to meet this new demand, offering everything from hunting to gambling to horseback riding. One establishment built in 1882 was the first hotel in the world to outfit each room with electric lights; another boasted a guest list that eventually included four current or future presidents: Grover Cleveland, Calvin Coolidge, Benjamin Harrison, and Theodore Roosevelt. In addition to tourism the Adirondack forests began to serve as the nation’s premier retreat for those suffering from tuberculosis, a disease of the lungs that was the nation’s greatest killer for much of the late nineteenth century. Countless victims of this “White Plague” booked rooms in the sanitoriums that populated the mountains, hoping to benefit from an environment with air much purer than that of the cities.
So great was the flow of people toward the Adirondacks that as early as 1872 an opinion piece in the New York Times lamented: “[The Adirondack] region is now ruined for the lover of solitude and nature. . . . [T]hat once imposing forest solitude is now rather more crowded and decidedly gayer, than the Central Park on a summer’s Saturday afternoon.”
In truth, however, the more serious threat to the forests of the Adirondacks was not the tourist or consumptive, but the men eager to cut down the trees for profit. Tanners destroyed the hemlock trees for their bark; charcoal furnaces clear-cut the surrounding forests for fuel; and loggers felled every merchantable white pine within easy distance of a river. As in the Lake States forests, the threat from industry was not simply the trees that workers destroyed directly but the heightened risk of forest fire from the brush and slash that was left behind. The region’s long-term prospects were no better than those of any other commercial woodlands in the nation.
The earliest call for protection of the Adirondacks arose partly in reaction to these manifold threats. On August 9, 1864, the New York Times published a lone editorial, which historians suspect was written by a close friend of Frederick Law Olmsted:
Within an easy day’s ride of our great City, as steam teaches us to measure distance, is a tract of country fitted to make a Central Park for the world. . . . [L]et [our citizens] form combinations, and, seizing upon the choicest of the Adirondack Mountains, before they are despoiled of their forests, make of them grand parks. . . . In spite of all the din and dust of furnaces and foundries, the Adirondacks, thus husbanded, will furnish abundant seclusion for all time to come.
This proposal, however, was years ahead of its time: The nation was still in the throes of war; Marsh’s Man and Nature had only just arrived, and few Americans had absorbed its message; Murray’s Adventures in the Wilderness would not appear for another five years.
Practically the only person who heeded the Times message initially was a young man named Verplanck Colvin. His father had encouraged him to practice law but Colvin fell in love with the Adirondack mountains and forests. He began to survey them in 1865 and three years later started promoting the idea of a park. Among his many concerns was a fear—similar to the argument from Man and Nature that had been misappropriated by the increased rainfall crowd—that if the trees were destroyed then the land would no longer adequately regulate the water supply, causing havoc on the rivers that originated in the Adirondacks, including the Hudson. He submitted a report to the state legislature in 1870 that argued: “The interests of commerce and navigation demand that these forests should be preserved, and for posterity should be set aside.”
By the early 1870s others began to join in Colvin’s one-man show. Not only had many at this point discovered the Adirondack region through tourism, but circumstances had changed since the Times editorial. The fires of 1871, especially in Peshtigo, had awoken some to the potential threat of forest destruction back East—a drought that was ravaging New York State in 1872 stoked this fear. Additionally, a very public effort was under way (with Ferdinand Hayden at the helm) to preserve the scenic Yellowstone region in Wyoming with its fabulous geysers, wildlife, and vistas; this advocacy culminated in President Grant’s creation on March 1, 1872, of the Yellowstone National Park, the first such federally protected park in the nation or the world.
Shortly after Grant authorized Yellowstone, the New York State legislature finally took some action on the Adirondack question to placate the preservation crowd. It established a Commission of State Parks even though no actual parks yet existed. The commission’s mandate was simply “to inquire into the expediency of providing for vesting in the State the title to the timbered regions . . . [of the Adirondacks] and converting the same into a public park.” This directive nonetheless represented a significant first step in a long process toward the radical idea of placing forested lands within the hands of the people. The seven-person commission included Colvin, the most vocal champion for a park, a
s well as Horatio Seymour, a former governor whose participation added a degree of gravitas.
The following year the commission produced its inaugural annual report, the first serious study of the park question. It determined that protecting the forests from “wanton destruction” was “absolutely and immediately required.” The foremost concern—testament to Colvin’s influence on the commission—was the need to regulate the water supply. “Without a steady, constant supply of water from these streams of the wilderness, our canals would be dry, and a great portion of the grain and other produce of the western part of the State would be unable to find cheap transportation to the markets of the Hudson river valley.” (Interestingly, the report, which appeared two months after Congress enacted the Timber Culture Act, specifically refuted the claim that forests could increase rainfall.)
The outcome of the report, however, seemed to prove the old adage: When you want nothing to get done, appoint a committee. Following its release, the Adirondack issue languished for the better part of a decade with practically no public activity aside from Colvin’s continuing geographical surveys.
Nonetheless, the report’s arguments about watershed protection resonated with some of the state’s more influential downriver residents. Businessmen in New York City depended on the trade in goods along the Hudson River, and some grew anxious as the destruction of Adirondack forests continued unabated in the early 1880s. A New York Tribune article from 1883 noted: “The matter is reduced to a simple business issue. Is the [Hudson] river worth to the City and the state as much as it will cost to save the woods?” By the end of 1883 the powerful New York Chamber of Commerce had appointed a forestry committee to advocate on this issue. The committee’s president was Morris K. Jesup, a businessman who had made a fortune in the railroad business and then retired to pursue projects in the public interest—among other things, he helped found the YMCA and presided over both the American Museum of Natural History and the Audubon Society of New York State. The indefatigable Jesup recruited other organizations, like the New York Board of Trade and Transportation and the Brooklyn Constitution Club, to the cause, and his Forestry Committee pressured the state legislature to start purchasing lands within the Adirondack forest, going so far as to draft a model bill.
