Crater Lake Historic Resource Study

VI. Steps Leading Toward Establishment of Crater Lake National Park (continued)

I. John Muir Assists the National Park Concept

Following establishment of Yellowstone Park in 1872, a period of eighteen years elapsed before any more national parks were established. During this time a small group of intellectuals, including scientists, naturalists, landscape architects, arboriculturists, foresters, geologists, and a handful of editors of national magazines, were refining the basic concepts of conservation. Through their provocative writings and energetic leadership they made headway in reversing the traditional American attitude toward the use and disposal of natural resources. One particularly articulate and widely read spokesman for the national park idea was John Muir, a well-educated Scotsman who in the 1870s acquired a love for the mountains and forests of the Far West and who campaigned ceaselessly for forty-five years in favor of the preservation of the wilderness and federal control of forests. He was actively supported in these endeavors by the Sierra Club, which he organized in 1892 and of which he served as president until 1914. His chief concerns were the waste and destruction of forests by lumbermen, cattle, and sheep. [18]

Due considerably to Muir's campaigning, three new parks were established in 1890: Yosemite, Sequoia, and General Grant--all established to preserve the Sierra forests from timbering excesses and overgrazing. Their bills slipped through Congress with few problems and little fanfare. Monumentalism, combined with economic worthlessness, were the predetermining factors leading to the establishment of all of them. As Alfred Runte explains, "only where scenic nationalism did not conflict with materialism could the national park idea further expand." [19]

Despite this progress, valuable public timber land continued to fall into the hands of large corporations and timber speculators, primarily through provisions of the Timber Cutting and the Timber and Stone acts of 1878, the former permitting citizens of certain western states and territories to cut timber from public mineral lands free of charge for mining and domestic purposes, and the latter providing for the sale to citizens in certain western states of public lands valuable chiefly for timber and stone. Both laws were abused, with the consequent loss of much valuable timber land. The problem was aggravated in 1892 when the Timber and Stone Act was extended to public land in all states, resulting in a loss from the public forest domain of more than 13,500,000 acres of the most valuable timber property in the United States. [20]

J. Federal Forest Reservations

In 1890 a committee of the American Association for the Advancement of Science recommended to President Benjamin Harrison that a commission be set up to investigate the necessity of preserving certain parts of the present public forest as watersheds in order to maintain favorable water conditions. It also suggested that, pending this survey, all U.S. timber lands should be withdrawn from sale, protected from theft and fire, and harvested in a rational manner until some system of forest administration could be set up on a permanent basis. Harrison agreed in March 1891 . Congress then proceeded to repeal the Timber Culture Act of 1873, which had encouraged the staking out of larger holdings by prospective homesteaders, and to approve the Forest Reserve Act empowering the president of the United States, when he saw fit, to set apart as public reservations forested public lands in any state or territory. This law establishing the principle of federal forest reservations was later characterized by Gifford Pinchot, American forester, as "the most important legislation in the history of Forestry in America" because it established the precedent that not all of the public domain would be disposed of to private individuals- -a reversal of former frontier attitudes. [21] Harrison utilized this act during his administration, withdrawing a total of over 13,400,000 acres of the public domain, located chiefly in California, Oregon, and Wyoming, as forest reserves. Still, Congress refused to grant the authority necessary to protect, administer, and utilize the new reserves, thereby enabling western lumbermen, miners, settlers, and stockmen who could not obtain legal title to lands in the federal forest reserves to continue to trespass. The future of conservation-oriented legislation continued to look promising, however, on the eve of Cleveland's second administration.

K. Cascade Range Forest Reserve

While Steel pursued his tireless efforts to win recognition of Crater Lake's potential as a national park, another significant event took place. In 1892 the Oregon Alpine Club--in whose formation both Steel and Breck were involved in the late 1880s and which was composed of enthusiastic mountain-climbers--petitioned Washington for establishment of a forest reserve along the Cascade Range in Oregon. They requested this in accordance with the act of March 3, 1891, that authorized the president to set aside public lands as forest reserves. President Cleveland approved this proposal and on September 28, 1893, established the Cascade Range Forest Reserve, which embraced practically all of the Cascade Range in Oregon and which, most importantly, included Crater Lake and its environs in its southern section. [22]

L. The Mazamas' Expedition to Crater Lake

Until 1896 the mountain containing Crater Lake did not have a name. It was due to the efforts of a large mountaineering organization that this oversight was finally remedied. Will Steel was the motivating force behind the creation of this mountain club of experienced climbers more serious in purpose than the Alpine Club, which had degenerated, Steel felt, into a group of Sunday dilettantes. The new group would be formally organized on the top of Mount Hood among the clouds and endless snow. As a result of organizational meetings during 1894, announcements were published in several newspapers of the Northwest asking interested persons to meet on the summit of 11,225-foot-high Mount Hood. Here they would organize the Mazamas, a name derived from a vanishing species of mountain goat. Of the 300 people who answered the call to assemble at the summit of the pass south of Mount Hood, 155 men and 38 women completed the climb and joined in the ceremony formally organizing the Mazamas that was held on a sheltered ledge on top of the mountain.

In the months after the club's formation, its first president, Will Steel, watched anxiously as the spreading tentacles of greedy timber companies and land developers neared the forests of southern Oregon. The menace of land fraud scandals and wholesale destruction of its timber had already prompted another trip to Washington by Steel--representing the executive council of the Mazamas--to champion preservation of the Cascade Range Forest Reserve. That area, its resources by now having been brought to the attention of both the public and of economic interests, was being seriously threatened. Lumber concerns, allying certain politicians on their side, not only began arguing that the reserved townships should be reopened for sale and public entry, but also began the illegal cutting of timber on Mazama's slopes. Facilitating these inroads by exploiters and despoilers was the fact that, although Crater Lake had been vaguely known for the past forty years, visitation and widespread interest in it were still minimal because of its remoteness, difficulty of access, and lack of advertising.

In another desperate attempt to highlight the area s plight, Steel proposed that the Mazamas make Crater Lake the destination of a summer outing and mountain-climbing excursion. In addition to its recreational aspects, this August 1896 trip had the nature of a scientific expedition, for numerous professional men from Washington, D.C., were invited to join the group. These notables included Dr. C. Hart Merriam, chief of the U.S. Biological Survey; J.S. Diller, geologist of the U.S. Geological Survey; Frederick V. Coville, chief botanist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and Professor Barton W. Evermann, an icthyologist with the U.S. Fish Commission. Their purpose was to study the lake and its neighborhood in detail.

About fifty Mazamas joined these men on the crater rim in the middle of August, along with several hundred other individuals traveling by wagon and on foot from Ashland, Medford, and Klamath Falls. Also present were participants from the Fort Klamath Indian Reservation and the nearby army post. The executive council meeting of the club was held in the Witch's Cauldron in the crater of Wizard Island; new members were elected and the decision made to set aside each August 21 as Mazama Day. Guided nature walks and campfire lectures by the eminent scientists on the flora, fauna, and geology of the region occupied the group's time. This outing culminated in the christening of "Mount Mazama" when Miss Fay Fuller, first white woman to climb Mount Rainier and first historian of the Mazamas, broke a bottle of crystal-clear water distilled from the snow in Wizard Island's crater against a rock on the mountain side. Other highlights of the event included a speech by Steel and the recitation of an original poem about Mount Mazama by Miss Fuller. The evening ended with a gorgeous illumination by red fire of the crater on Wizard Island, accompanied by the firing of Winchester rifles and the execution of the club yell.

The scientific conclusions drawn from this trip were of the utmost importance, having had the benefit of more extended study in their formulation. There was a general feeling that

the geology of the region offers problems of the greatest interest for solution; the fauna is said to be the most interesting of any part of the Cascades. . . The most important discovery, however, was that made in taking temperatures of the water. . . The conclusion is almost irresistible that this curious phenomenon [higher temperatures in the lower depths of the lake] is due to the presence of very considerable volcanic heat. [23]

Probably the most important result of the participation by the scientists was that each one of them eventually recommended passage of the Crater Lake Park bill. Their arguments were made on the basis of the area s being a great natural wonder, favorably situated for a healthful and instructive pleasure resort; being potentially valuable as an attraction for scientific study; being a potential contributor to the economic prosperity of the region; and being too easily susceptible to the ravages of fire and worthy of more care than it was receiving under its status as a timber reserve. [24]

M. The National Forest Commission Visits Crater Lake

While this widely publicized visit and the ensuing accounts of the lake in scholarly periodicals attracted more attention than any previous scientific studies, it would still require tireless, concentrated effort to fulfill Will Steel's dream of making Crater Lake a national park. Supporting his cause were an increasing number of Americans concerned over the misuse and squandering of the country's natural resources who clamored for a policy favoring federal control to protect for future generations our timber, water, and arable land. The realization was dawning that natural resources were not inexhaustible and that the federal government should protect the public interest by regulating the preservation and use of resources, especially those on federally owned lands. In the summer of 1896 the National Academy of Sciences, determined to take steps to bring about the end of the wasteful misuse of forests under federal ownership, asked the Department of the Interior for a report on whether forestry management of public lands would be desireable. At the request of the secretary of the interior, a National Forest Commission set out on an expedition to examine the forests on the public lands of the West. Composed of top scientists and conservationists, the commission would make conservation history and its observations prove valuable for the future of Crater Lake.

John Muir met the group in Chicago and joined others such as botanist Charles Sprague Sargent, Henry L. Abbott of the Army Corps of Engineers, and Gifford Pinchot, first American to become a professional forester, in their thorough investigation of the forests of the Pacific Northwest and the Pacific slope. During this trip they visited Crater Lake. Although not able to deny its fascination, they concentrated their writings on scientific descriptions of the caldera and its surrounding trees and wildlife rather than on the poetical word pictures that previous observers had been wont to indulge in. Of this general section of the Cascade Range they commented:

Thence we turned southward and examined the great Cascade Mountain Forest Reserve, going up through it by Klamath Lake to Crater Lake on the summit of the range, and down by way of the Rogue River Valley, noting its marvellous wealth of lodge-pole pine, yellow pine, sugar-pine, mountain-pine, Sitka spruce, incense-cedar, noble silver-fir, and pure forests of the Paton hemlock--the most graceful of evergreens, but, like all the dry woods everywhere, horribly blackened and devastated by devilish fires. [25]

The committee's final recommendations covered several points: the immediate withdrawal from entry and sale of all forest-bearing lands still left in government possession; military control of these lands until a forest bureau could be established in the Department of the Interior to protect the reserves; the establishment and implementation of a practical forest management system; the creation of thirteen new forest reservations in eight western states; the repeal or modification of timber and mining laws leading to fraud on public forest lands; scientific management of federal forests; and establishment of two new national parks--Grand Canyon in Arizona and Mount Rainier in Washington. The report opened the way for the founding of the United States Forest Service and for an enlargement of the national park system. A more important result for Crater Lake would be establishment of the Umpqua, Rogue River, and Winema national forests, an action further protecting the approaches to the future national park.

Before leaving office, President Cleveland established the new forest reserves by an executive order of February 1897, but they went unprotected for a year because of an effort by Congress to appease militant western lobbyists by suspending the effect of the order until March 1898, thereby opening the lands to "settlement." John Muir, in one of his articles, praises the reservation system and satirizes the reaction of vested interests on hearing of President Cleveland's establishment of these new reserves:

All our precious mountains, with their stores of timber and grass, silver and gold, fertile valleys and streams--all the natural resources of our great growing States are set aside from use, smothered up in mere pleasure-grounds for wild beasts and a set of sick, rich, dawdling sentimentalists. For this purpose business is blocked and every current of industry dammed. Will our people stand this? [27]

By a close vote in March 1898 Congress determined that the people would stand for this. The national forest reservation system was saved, and the new reservations were again closed to public entry. The forest commission s proposal for establishment of a Bureau of Forestry was not acted upon, however, and the new reserves were left in the charge of the General Land Office of the Department of the Interior until 1905, when they were transferred to the new Forest Service in the Department of Agriculture. Another suggestion of the commission was acted upon in 1899 when the sixth national park, Mount Rainier, was designated.