Down to Earth_Nature's Role in American History
Page 20
In 1910, at precisely the same time that Pinchot argued for suppression, the eminent ecologist Frederic Clements confirmed the views of foresters like Fernow, who viewed fire as a creative and positive environmental force. But Pinchot and those who came after him in the Forest Service remained unimpressed with such thinking. In keeping with the guiding spirit of efficiency and control at the heart of his brand of conservation, Pinchot feared the disorder and chaos that fire produced, especially if the conflagration in question was set on purpose. In 1898, he wrote, “forest fires encourage a spirit of lawlessness and a disregard of property rights.” Those who burned the forest, for whatever reason, were no better than criminals, outlaws engaged in what federal foresters would soon call “incendiarism” or “woods arson.”13
In the year following the 1910 calamity, Congress passed the Weeks Act, which allowed the federal government to purchase as much as 75 million acres of land and led to a consensus among federal and state officials on the need for fire suppression. Suppressing forest fires—a major preoccupation of the Forest Service for the bulk of the twentieth century—proved in the end both misguided and self-defeating. Fires aid the decomposition of forest litter and help recycle nutrients through an ecosystem. Without them growth slows down. Worse still, by suppressing fires, the Forest Service allowed fuels to build up, increasing the possibility for catastrophic conflagrations. Once again, nature had the last laugh, as Pinchot’s brand of conservation centered on economic imperatives and anxiety over lawless behavior trumped an earlier, more broadminded concern with the forest’s noneconomic functions.14
REVENGE OF THE VARMINTS
There is a dark side to conservation, although one would never know it from reading a U.S. history textbook. Roosevelt and Pinchot swooping in to rescue the wanton destruction being carried out across the landscape, planting trees and giving birth to a new and improved forest—none of this smacks of anything cold-blooded in the least. Left out of this rosy scenario, however, is the fact that conservation, because it was founded on the most productive use of the land, sometimes ventured into the realm of death and destruction. It is no coincidence that the most destructive period in the nation’s wildlife history—replete with the ruthless and systematic annihilation of some entire animal species—coincided with the decades when conservation gripped the nation’s political imagination. Efficiency and extermination went hand in hand.
Taking their cue from Pinchot’s philosophy of making trees over into harvestable crops, game managers in the early twentieth century tried to do the same for animals, cultivating those species favored by sport hunters and tourists such as elk, bison, waterfowl, and especially deer. By the 1880s, overhunting and habitat loss had caused the populations of these animal groups to plummet. To revitalize them, federal and state wildlife managers pushed for laws regulating hunting and setting up refuges. In 1903, Roosevelt designated Pelican Island in Florida as the first such federal wildlife preserve. Five years later came the National Bison Range in Montana on an old Indian reservation. Tourists queued up to see what amounted to the pathetic remnants of the once abundant and glorious species.
PINCHOT WITH SCOUTS
A man concerned with law and order, Gifford Pinchot aggressively pursued the policy of total fire suppression. By interfering with the natural fire cycle, this approach increased the risk of calamitous conflagrations and, ironically, led to more loss of life. (Library of Congress)
Conserving some species, however, meant killing others. In 1915, Congress set up a new division within the Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Biological Survey, the arm of the government (founded in 1905) responsible for game management. It had an ominous title: Predatory Animal and Rodent Control Service. Its mission was to exterminate those creatures that preyed on the rancher’s cattle and sheep and the sport hunter’s elk and deer. In the eyes of the conservation-minded, mountain lions, wolves, coyotes, and bobcats, among other species, became the Satans of the animal kingdom. “Large predatory mammals destructive to livestock and game no longer have a place in our advancing civilization,” was how one biologist at the bureau put it.15
There were 40 million sheep in the West by the last decade of the nineteenth century, in addition to vast numbers of cattle. All were defenseless before the predators that roamed the plains looking for some substitute fare now that the buffalo had been driven off the land. Wolves proved especially destructive to livestock; indeed, it would be hard to overestimate the hatred ranchers had for the species. Cowboys commonly strung a captured wolf between two horses to tear it apart. But poison, mainly strychnine, was the preferred method of dispatching them.16
Bounties, established by a number of western states during the late nineteenth century, spurred hunters to kill predatory animals. But it took the intervention of the federal government with its extermination program to put an end to the predator problem. The ruthlessness of the campaign—steel traps, guns, and strychnine in hand—is hard to fathom. An astonishing 40,000 animals were killed in Wyoming alone between 1916 and 1928—coyotes, wolves, bears, bobcats, lynxes, and mountain lions, plus prairie dogs, gophers, squirrels, and jack rabbits, which had the annoying habit of eating the settlers’ crops. “Bring Them in Regardless of How,” went the slogan coined by one hunters’ newsletter. It was all-out war and when it was over—by 1926, no wolves existed in Arizona—the West’s ranchers, farmers, and sport hunters could rest easier at night.17
Life in western America seemed to be moving along swimmingly in the post-predatory age until it began to dawn on some people that such species as wolves, coyotes, and mountain lions actually served a purpose in life. An object lesson on the importance of predators unfolded on Arizona’s Kaibab Plateau. In 1906, Roosevelt set aside a portion of the area as a wildlife refuge known as the Grand Canyon National Game Preserve. Roughly 4,000 deer lived in the refuge in the year it was founded. Enter the federal hunters, who between 1916 and 1931 took 4,889 coyotes, 781 mountain lions, and 554 bobcats. Victory, went the shout, as the deer proliferated, swelling to perhaps as many as 100,000 by 1924, a gain in productivity to end all gains. But two winters later, the deer population crashed, reduced by some 60 percent, as the animals starved for lack of forage. When such predators as coyotes and mountain lions are not around to hold down their numbers, deer will reproduce almost endlessly, populating their habitat beyond what it can bear and dying in classic Malthusian style.18
While deer overran the Kaibab Plateau, hordes of mice were marching on the town of Taft, California. In 1924, the Bureau of Biological Survey had launched, to the glee of farmers, an all-out effort to eradicate coyotes, hawks, and other predators from Kern County. Two years later, the rodents, their numbers now unchecked, descended in droves. “The mice,” one report had it, “invaded beds and nibbled the hair of horrified sleepers, chewed through the sides of wooden storehouses to get at food supplies, and crawled boldly into children’s desks at Conley School.” Passing cars crushed the mice that littered the road, making some highways too slick for safe travel. Farmers resorted to mechanical harvesters to fend off the rodents. Eventually the Bureau of Biological Survey was called in to exterminate the varmints it had poisoned into existence in the first place. Conservation had more than a few such ironic moments.19
OF MICE AND MEN
Efforts to exterminate predators sometimes had perverse consequences. Here federal government forces repel an invasion of mice in California. (California Historical Society)
PARK RULES
Managing game was one thing, but administering it to attract thousands of big game–loving tourists was something yet again. The setting aside of national parks in the late nineteenth century raised a host of problems for the nation’s conservationists. Chief among these was how to rationalize game in the interests of tourism—that is, to create and preserve a wilderness experience where visitors could be sure to find elk, bison, and other large animals. In carrying out their mission, the managers of wildlife ran up against a number of
obstacles. Native Americans and rural whites—inclined to view the creatures more as a food source than as curiosities—did not appreciate the restrictions the managers imposed on hunting. Complicating matters further, delineating an arbitrary park boundary and using it to contain wild species with biological needs for food that sent them outside the park left government officials forever playing the role of traffic cop.
The national park movement stemmed, in part, from a change in American attitudes toward wilderness. Back in the colonial period, the word referred to desolate, wild places untouched, as yet, by civilization. There was little, if anything, positive about wilderness areas in the minds of the first settlers, who diligently set about improving—fencing and farming—the raw material of nature. By the late nineteenth century, however, the meaning of the word had undergone a sea change. Wilderness areas were no longer thought to be worthless; in fact, just the reverse was the case: They were increasingly viewed as places of virginal natural beauty in need of the most zealous care.
Not that the economic impulse that informed the early idea of wilderness disappeared completely. In setting aside the first national parks, Congress made a point of looking for worthless lands—regions with limited agricultural and ranching prospects and no sign of valuable minerals—possessed of monumental grandeur. Unlike European countries, the United States, a much younger nation by comparison, had few cultural icons to match the castles and cathedrals that gave Old World states unique national identities. With the country emerging from the divisive Civil War, its status as a unified nation still quite fragile, congressmen searched the landscape for awe-inspiring physical features—stunning mountain scenery, vast and colorful canyons, spectacular geysers—for its citizens to rally around.20
In 1872, Congress settled on a rectangular piece of land some two million acres in extent where Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana come together, an improbable place for agriculture, averaging some 6,000 feet in altitude and prone to frost, but containing hundreds of geysers, mud pots, and other geothermal wonders. Here was a picture-perfect spot to knit together the fledgling nation, North and South, East and West, a place so majestic and so capable of uniting the country under God that Congress purchased a painting of the area done by artist Thomas Moran to hang in the Capitol. “This will be the grandest park in the world—the grand, instructive museum of the grandest Government on Earth,” proclaimed the Nevada Territorial Enterprise. To congressmen such as Henry Dawes of Massachusetts, who worked to establish the park, Yellowstone represented nature in its most pristine state, a beautiful but harsh wilderness environment so formidable that not even Indians, he asserted, could live there, a place seemingly without history.21
It would be wrong, however, to see the establishment of Yellowstone, the nation’s first national park, as simply the work of Congress. The railroads played a major role as well—financiers such as Jay Cooke and Frederick Billings and their Northern Pacific company, a corporation that stood to gain immensely from the passenger traffic that the park would bring. As Billings once remarked, “commerce could serve the cause of conservation by bringing visitors to a site worthy of preservation.” In 1883, the Northern Pacific completed its route across the country, the second transcontinental railroad in the nation’s history, putting Yellowstone within reach of tourists nationwide. That same year the nation went on standard time to accommodate railroad travel, a key development in the streamlining of modern life that perhaps also explains the fascination tourists had with the scheduled eruptions of Yellowstone’s most famous geyser, Old Faithful, which as one observer remarked, “played by the clock.”22
YELLOWSTONE PARK ROUTE
Major supporters of national parks, railroads like the Northern Pacific drummed up riders by capitalizing on Yellowstone’s spectacular natural phenomena. (Library of Congress)
Advocates for Yellowstone may have thought they were preserving a wilderness area. But it is more accurate to say that they were inventing it. In Yellowstone’s case, creating wilderness meant rendering the Native Americans, who laid claim to the area, invisible when, in fact, they had long used it for hunting, fishing, and other means of survival. Preservation of the country’s national parks and Indian removal proceeded in lock-step motion. Treaties and executive orders signed between 1855 and 1875 effectively consigned the Bannock, Shoshone, Blackfeet, and Crow Indians to reservations, where they would be less likely to interfere with tourists headed for Yellowstone. Park supporters rationalized the removal of Indians by relying on a time-tested strategy first used in the colonial period. The Indians, they pointed out, made no agricultural improvements to the area; use it or lose it, went the boosters’ logic. The rugged physical environment of the park, inhospitable to farming and other economic uses, helped support this supposition, as did the view of park officials such as Philetus Norris, who explained that Indians avoided the Yellowstone area because they held its geothermal features in “superstitious awe.”23
As late as 1962, one historian observed that only “deteriorating, half-miserable-animal, half-miserable-man” types inhabited the park prior to its creation. This was little more than park and railroad propaganda masquerading as facts. Park officials were quite aware of the Native American presence in Yellowstone and its potential to frighten tourists. As Superintendent Moses Harris explained in 1888, “the mere rumor of the presence of Indians in the park is sufficient to cause much excitement and anxiety.” The Northern Pacific Railroad, meanwhile, did what it could to allay such fears. It recommended that tourists visit the Little Big Horn (where George Armstrong Custer and his troops went down to defeat in 1876) on their way to Yellowstone, safe in knowing that the Plains Indians no longer posed any threat.24
The year following Custer’s defeat, the U.S. Army waged war against the Nez Perce Indians, at one point chasing them straight through Yellowstone National Park. The Nez Perce, according to accounts written at the time, were lost and frightened by the park’s geothermal sites. But as Yellow Wolf recalled years after the battle, the Indians “knew that country well before passing through there in 1877. The hot smoking springs and high-shooting water were nothing new to us.”25
In fact, a number of Native American groups were intimately familiar with the park and its offerings. The Shoshones, for example, hunted buffalo, fished, and gathered various plants, activities that depending on the season could lead them into the area eventually designated as parkland. Aided by horses, even more distant Indian groups descended on the park to trap beaver and hunt elk. Perhaps not surprisingly, the decline of the buffalo beginning in the 1870s only made Indians more dependent on the park’s wildlife for food. And in an ironic turn of events, the displacement of Native Americans onto reservations may actually have increased their visits to the park. Denied adequate rations in the government camps, such groups as the Crows and Shoshones made up the balance by setting off to hunt on unoccupied public lands, a right granted to them in an 1868 treaty. As the agent for Idaho’s Fort Hall Reservation explained, “Being short-rationed and far from self-supporting according to the white man’s methods, they [Bannocks and Shoshones] simply follow their custom and hunt for the purpose of obtaining sustenance.”26
The prospect of Indians taking game found within the confines of Yellowstone was long a bone of contention between native groups and park officials. In 1889, Superintendent Moses Harris called Indian hunting an “unmitigated evil” and lamented that it would be impossible to protect the park’s remaining game if Yellowstone continued “to afford summer amusement and winter sustenance to a band of savage Indians.” Locals who acted as guides to well-off hunters from the East also resented Indian poaching of game because it instilled fear in their clients while decreasing the likelihood of a successful outing.27
In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court in the leading case of Ward v. Race Horse overturned the protection the 1868 treaty granted Indians to hunt on unoccupied government land in a seven-to-one decision. Even though it was common knowledge that the Shoshone and Bann
ock Indians hunted game to feed themselves and, moreover, that insufficient rations on the Fort Hall Reservation left many malnourished and more inclined to hunt on their own, Justice Edward White asserted that hunting was a privilege “given” to the tribes by the U.S. government, one that could be revoked when called for by “the necessities of civilization.” In his dissenting opinion, Justice Henry Brown pointed out that “the right to hunt on the unoccupied lands of the United States was a matter of supreme importance to them [the Indians]…. It is now proposed to take it away from them, not because they have violated a treaty, but because the State of Wyoming desires to preserve its game.” The case effectively upheld a 1895 Wyoming law regulating the taking of wildlife, making it illegal for Indians to hunt on public land during seasons closed to hunting and undermining the centuries-old subsistence practices of the Yellowstone area’s Native American groups. But unlike the well-known Plessy v. Ferguson case decided in the same year (establishing “separate but equal” segregation), Ward, although heavily criticized then and since, has not been systematically overturned, remaining to this day a legally influential opinion.28
The only thing as annoying to park officials as an Indian taking down one of Yellowstone’s grand four-legged creatures was the sight of a rural white doing so. The founding of Gardiner, Montana, in 1883, on Yellowstone’s northern border gave whites seeking game a base from which to launch their forays into the park. “In the town of Gardiner there are a number of men, armed with rifles, who toward game have the gray-wolf quality of mercy,” wrote the eminent conservationist William Hornaday.29 Whites also gathered wood from the park and grazed cattle, creating a situation so chaotic that the U.S. government was forced to call on the military to restore order in the wilderness. In 1886, the cavalry moved in and stayed more than 30 years, until 1916 when the National Park Service took over the administration of Yellowstone.