Mount Rainier Administrative History

PART FOUR: DEPRESSION AND WAR YEARS, 1930-1945

XI. THE IMPACT OF THE NEW DEAL

INTRODUCTION

During the Depression the NPS continued to define park visitors as all those people who visited the park for pleasure. The actual number of people in the park was considerably higher as hundreds of men came to work in emergency relief camps. In 1933-34, the Civil Works Administration employed several hundred men and furnished their lodging at Longmire, Ohanapecosh, and Carbon River. Between 1933 and 1940, the Civilian Conservation Corps had camps at Tahoma Creek, Narada Falls, Ipsut Creek, St. Andrews Creek, White River, Ohanapecosh, and Sunshine Point, with as many as two hundred men in each camp company. Altogether, these relief camps held as many as a thousand men during the early to mid-1930s. Apart from the valuable work that these men accomplished, their residence in the park added considerably to the administrative burdens and to the cumulative human impact on the park's natural resources.

After a brief slowdown at the beginning of the Depression, Mount Rainier once more became the scene of much construction work in the 1930s, as it had been in the 1920s. The difference was in the kind of work being performed. The main focus of construction shifted from major road and hotel construction to scores of smaller projects that could be accomplished by CCC crews. These included campground improvements, minor road and trail improvements, administrative buildings, backcountry shelters, landscape rehabilitation, plant beds, scenic turnouts, picnic areas, and various other items. Major road work went forward at a slower pace; the Eastside Road, completed in 1940, was the most important addition to the road system in this era.

Emergency relief projects were indicative of the NPS's expanded mission after 1933. During the famous "Hundred Days" in which the new Franklin D. Roosevelt Administration sent up a raft of emergency and reform bills to Congress, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes enlisted NPS Director Horace Albright and the Park Service in the effort to bring about a national economic recovery. [1] During the New Deal, all national park administrators were called upon to contribute to this effort. Various federal emergency relief administrations were established to provide work for the unemployed which would not only aid families without income but would thereby increase household consumption and stimulate the economy. Thus, the several relief camps in Mount Rainier National Park had more to do with the national emergency than they did with traditional NPS management goals. During the New Deal era, all projects were evaluated not only for their ability to serve the core NPS mandate of preserving the park for the enjoyment of present and future generations, but for their potential to create jobs, too. The park administration garnered massive amounts of money for myriad projects through various New Deal programs (the PWA, the WPA, the CWA, the CCC). These relief funds enriched all areas of park administration, from museum development to trail improvement. Actual park appropriations, meanwhile, grew by relatively small increments in the 1930s. When economic depression gave way to national defense preparations in 1940-41, the NPS experienced a painful period of adjustment. Relief programs were dismantled without a commensurate increase in park appropriations. After the U.S. entered World War II, the NPS actually faced deep budget cuts in addition to the loss of these New Deal programs.

At the same time that the Roosevelt Administration made the Park Service a major player in various emergency relief programs, it greatly enlarged the Park Service's scope of responsibilities in other areas. By two executive orders of June 10 and July 28, 1933, Roosevelt added scores of national memorials, battlefield sites, parkways, and other areas of national significance to the national park system. The Roosevelt Administration called upon the NPS for advice and expertise on everything from community recreation planning to historic preservation. After the creation of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the Park Service worked with CCC administrators to implement a program of "emergency conservation work" in units of the national park system and in state parks. Throughout the New Deal era, the national parks obtained large allotments from federal emergency relief appropriations with which to employ thousands of men and women on public works projects.

This chapter considers the overall impact of the New Deal on Mount Rainier National Park. It begins with an analysis of the effects of the Civilian Conservation Corps, and then proceeds to a discussion of other public works programs in the park. The last section of the chapter attempts to place the park in the context of regional conservation politics and the burgeoning national park system and looks at the changing role of the Mount Rainier National Park superintendency.

THE CIVILIAN CONSERVATION CORPS

Each summer during the New Deal years, hundreds of young men lived in CCC camps in Mount Rainier National Park. They spent their working hours erecting buildings, improving trails and campgrounds, fighting white pine blister rust, and planting trees and shrubs. Their labor and energy, together with the accompanying infusion of funds into the park's operating budget, came close to creating a distinct "CCC era" in the national park's history. On closer examination one finds that many of the trends that are popularly associated with the CCC era in national parks and forests--such as the construction of buildings in a rustic architectural style, the all-out effort to suppress forest fires, and the increased commitment to biological research and management--began before the creation of the CCC. One also finds that the increased funds available to the NPS came from a variety of federal relief programs of which the CCC was only the most renowned. Still, the fact remains that the Civilian Conservation Corps was one of the most popular and memorable programs of the New Deal. It came to symbolize the impact of the New Deal on national forests and national parks, including Mount Rainier National Park. [2]

The establishment of the Emergency Conservation Work (ECW) program, more commonly known as the CCC, presented park administrators with two new obligations. One objective, plainly, was to accomplish valuable conservation work. The other objective was to provide emergency relief for CCC enrollees. These were distinct, albeit compatible, objectives. Park officials viewed each CCC enrollee not just as a source of labor but as a new client--a new type of visitor who could find spiritual renewal in nature through the collective CCC experience. As Superintendent Tomlinson explained to the CCC camp superintendents, the fundamental values that guided national park management in normal times would be "effective in their entirety during the Emergency Conservation Work, with the additional requirement of training and character building of the young men enrolled as a part of the nationwide employment relief plan." [3] As a former military officer, Tomlinson welcomed the chance for the park to serve as a place for "man building."

This section of the chapter focuses first on how the NPS administered the CCC in Mount Rainier National Park and how the CCC permanently changed the park staff organization. It then reviews the considerable physical accomplishments of the CCC in the park. Finally, it considers the CCC in Mount Rainier as a unique social experience in the park's history.

Administration of the CCC

The CCC was President Franklin D. Roosevelt's own brainchild. It was among the first of the legislative initiatives which the new administration hammered through Congress in the spring of 1933. Even as the CCC was under discussion by Congress, senior officials in the NPS recognized that it would be a boon for the national parks. Already, in the last year of the Hoover Administration, Congress had allotted emergency relief funds for road construction in the national parks in an effort to stimulate the economy. The master plans which the NPS had prepared for each national park during the preceding five years outlined the work which needed to be done throughout the system and assured that the national parks would receive due consideration for public works projects during the Depression. [4]

From a Park Service administrative standpoint, the difference between the CCC and earlier emergency relief measures was that the CCC involved the NPS much more deeply in the task of managing a labor force. Administering the CCC was not merely a matter of turning more federal funds into road construction contracts under the Bureau of Public Roads. Rather, it involved the formulation of a wide array of work projects and the development of a technical staff to supervise those projects. It required cooperation with the Army, the Department of Labor, and to a lesser extent other land management agencies in the Interior and Agriculture Departments, and the development of liaisons with these parties at all levels of administration from the directorship to the park superintendency. It entailed the location and supply of hundreds of CCC camps throughout the national park system, as well as the administration of the CCC program in state parks. To deal with the administrative burdens that the CCC placed on the NPS, it became necessary to increase the amount of support staff in field offices such as the one in San Francisco and eventually, in 1937, to divide the national park system into four regions. Mount Rainier National Park, like all other units in the system, came to rely more and more on the technical staff and services provided by each regional office.

Setting up the CCC was a mammoth task in itself. President Roosevelt's announced goal was to have a quarter of a million men enrolled in the CCC by July. Horace Albright, serving out his last months as director of the NPS, represented the Interior Department on the CCC's organizing council that spring as the administration formulated how this goal was to be accomplished. It immediately became obvious that conservation agencies like the Park Service and the Forest Service were too small to build and run the camps as originally envisioned; only the Army could handle that. Therefore, the division of responsibility between government agencies was made as follows: the Army would process the enrollees and form them into companies with Army commanders, dispatch the companies to their respective camps, build the camps, and maintain discipline in the camps; the conservation agencies such as the Park Service and the Forest Service would select all CCC camp locations, furnish the camps with tools and vehicles, employ the enrollees in useful conservation work, and supervise their efforts. [5]

Meanwhile, the Labor Department was given the special task of enrolling supervisory personnel in the CCC. These would be older men with experience in forest work or a building trade who would serve as camp leaders and crew foremen for the young enrollees. The law required that they be recruited from the local area and that they receive a higher rate of pay than the other enrollees, so that it would not seem to the local inhabitants near a CCC camp that the CCC was taking away jobs or further depressing the wage scale. In what must be one of the gems of the New Deal's distinctive nomenclature, these supervisory personnel were designated by the homely title of "local experienced men," or LEMs. [6]

Superintendent Tomlinson worked with Army officers from Fort Lewis, Washington, in planning when and where CCC camps would be built in Mount Rainier National Park. Suitable sites were selected and cleared of trees, building materials were shipped to the site, and camp equipment was requisitioned. Tomlinson's years of military experience in the Philippines no doubt proved an asset to him now as he found himself involved in a rapid mobilization of manpower for emergency conservation work. "These are strenuous days," he confided in a note to Cammerer. Along with the heavy demands imposed by the CCC, Tomlinson was preparing estimates for a two-year public works program under the PWA, and contending with "wild rumors" about an impending shake-up of the department by the new Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes. [7] Despite all the distractions, he could report by mid- July that more than a thousand men were deployed in the park in five CCC camps. Most of the men were performing trail work and roadside cleanup while their camp buildings were still under construction. [8]

Company 2941 of the Civilian Conservation Corps at Sunshine Point Camp. This was one of seven sites in the park which NPS officials selected for CCC camps. (Darius Kinsey photo courtesy of Mount Rainier National Park.)

Probably the most immediate effect that the CCC had on the administration of the park was in the area of fiscal management. Before the camps were even occupied, Tomlinson was informed that all funds authorized for new construction in Mount Rainier had been impounded and pooled with funds set aside for the CCC. This was in addition to a 25 percent cut in regular maintenance and operation allotments and a 15 percent cut in the allotment for personnel. The purpose of the impoundment of funds was to ensure that the ECW program would be assimilated quickly into the bureaucratic power structure. Tomlinson illustrated the dramatic change in the park's sources of funding with this tabulation of figures on July 4, 1933:

APPROPRIATIONS AVAILABLE FOR OPERATION AND CONSTRUCTION

	1933 Fiscal Year	1934 Fiscal Year
Administration & Operation	$132,250.00	$103,250.00
Construction Projects	72,250.00	none
Forest Protection & Fire Prevention	19,830.00	6,125.00
Roads & Trails
Minor Projects, NPS Force Account	50,000.00	none
Major Projects, Contracted by BPR	230,000.00	none
Emergency Relief Allotments
Minor Projects, NPS Force Account	22,400.00	none
Major Projects, Contracted by BPR	420,000.00	none
Public Works Program (1934-1935)	none	$2,534,279.00
Total:	$946,730.00	$2,643,654.00

These figures did not include ECW funds and manpower nor other relief funds that would shortly come available to the park under the Civil Works Administration (CWA). Nevertheless, they demonstrated that NPS officials would need to change the way they did business, working closely with federal relief administrators to obtain a large part of their operating budgets from year to year. [9]

Another effect of the CCC on the park administration was to increase the level of contact with state and federal officials outside the NPS. This was inevitable when the park became closely involved in an unemployment relief program. Tomlinson's close coordination with officers at Fort Lewis has already been mentioned; at another level, Tomlinson's rangers worked almost daily with the handful of Army personnel who were assigned to the CCC camps in Mount Rainier, as well as the supervisory personnel, or LEMs, in the CCC. District rangers trained all CCC enrollees in fire prevention, and CCC fire crews were given frequent fire drills. The superintendent, meanwhile, had frequent contacts with the CCC's Washington Procurement Office and the Washington State Park Authority. Since Mount Rainier experienced heavy snowfall in winter, the CCC camps had to be vacated each fall. It was found that the most efficient procedure was to have the CCC companies in Mount Rainier move out to winter quarters located in Washington state parks at or near sea level. Tomlinson worked out a schedule for these moves each fall and spring with state officials. [10]

The CCC program led to an increase in the number of technicians on the park staff. The technicians were needed to supervise the myriad CCC work projects. These new staff members were not part of the park's regular staff; their salaries were paid with ECW funds, and their positions were subject to renewal after each six-month enrollment period of the CCC. Moreover, they were assigned to the park by the NPS branch offices of landscape architecture, architecture, engineering, and wildlife in San Francisco. They answered to those offices' two representatives in the park, Engineer R.D. Waterhouse and Landscape Architect Ernest A. Davidson, as well as to the superintendent. At the end of the 1934 season, this new corps of "detached technicians and aides" in Mount Rainier had taken shape as follows: C.E. Drysdale and H.J. Cremer, supervising engineers; Russell L. McKown and Halsey M. Davidson, supervising landscape architects; E.A. Kitchin, wildlife technician; E. S. Foley, headquarters clerk. [11] Despite their highly contingent status, these ECW-funded personnel remained in the park together with the two NPS field technicians, Waterhouse and Davidson, to the end of the 1930s.

As indicated above, the primary responsibility of the NPS in administering the ECW program was to supervise the CCC crews in their conservation work. Senior NPS officials helped work out a broad-brush program for the CCC for each new six-month enrollment period; it remained for the park staff to compile a detailed list of projects. Tomlinson consulted with his chief ranger, maintenance foreman, park naturalist, landscape architect, and engineer to fashion a list of projects; he then prioritized them according to their importance and seasonality (those projects situated at lower elevations in the park could be undertaken early in the summer while those at higher elevations had to wait until the summer advanced). Ernest A. Davidson commented to Tom Vint on the first season's list of projects, "I believe the preparation of this definite program was the best kind of start toward a successful season's work." [12] It was a credit to Tomlinson's skill as an administrator that this process was relatively frictionless despite the keen competition between administrative departments for the CCC's labor.

When it came to deciding how much the CCC would be capable of doing, Ernest Davidson was perhaps the most skeptical member of Tomlinson's staff Davidson worried that the NPS would employ inexperienced CCC crews on types of projects that properly deserved more expertise. The result would be an impressive amount of work accomplished in the short term, but accomplished to such a low standard that it would have to be redone a few years later. To avoid this outcome, Davidson wanted the park administration to put the CCC on projects that could be closely supervised or at least adequately monitored: roadside cleanup, erosion control, blister rust control, trail maintenance. Even concerning trail work, Davidson wanted the CCC to widen and improve the drainage of existing trails rather than relocate trails or construct new ones. [13] Tomlinson weighed Davidson's concerns carefully. For the most part, Davidson got his way.

Tomlinson prepared a detailed letter of introduction for all the CCC camp superintendents, briefing them on "National Park fundamentals and policies," on the administrative organization of the park, and on how the CCC would be administered in Mount Rainier National Park. On the latter, he wrote:

Officials of the park organization with whom you will closely cooperate are as follows: Chief Ranger, Mr. John M. Davis, whose department has complete charge of all matters pertaining to the protection and policing of the park; the acting Park Engineer, Mr. R.D. Waterhouse, who prepares all plans for construction and improvement, and advises on all engineering matters; the General Foreman, Mr. Frank Akehurst, who is charged with the details of organizing and supervising personnel for all maintenance. Mr. Akehurst also has charge of all park equipment and will be available to assist and advise when requested, regarding work plans. As a rule, Mr. Akehurst will be available only upon request. The Fiscal Agent, Assistant Superintendent O.W. Carlson, will advise on all financial matters....

Of the various staff and technical officials most concerned with the Emergency Conservation Work are the Chief Architect, the Fire Control Expert, and the Chief Engineer from the San Francisco offices. These officials will make inspections of the work, and through the Park organization, offer suggestions. The Chief Architect's assistant, Mr. E.A. Davidson of the Branch of Plans and Designs, will have full charge of all matters pertaining to landscape and natural features protection. Your cooperation with Mr. Davidson is especially required, as this official has full responsibility for carrying out the fundamental policies of the National Park Service for the protection and preservation of the natural features, and it is this work that I desire to emphasize as second in importance only to protection against fire and other destructive elements. [14]

Tomlinson took one further precaution. To ensure close cooperation between the CCC supervisory personnel and the landscape architects, Tomlinson directed Davidson to select one local experienced man (LEM) from each camp to serve as landscape foreman or erosion control foreman for the whole company. The LEMs varied in quality; some were practically an extension of the park staff, while others were incompetent or insensitive to national park values. Tomlinson's action seems to have been aimed at bringing the best talent to the fore among the CCC's supervisory personnel, and Davidson thought the system worked admirably. [15]

The Park Service played a supporting role in administering the CCC camps. As noted above, the Army was in charge of constructing, provisioning, and running the camps. But the NPS naturally took a keen interest in where the camps were located, how they appeared to tourists, and what kind of impact the camps had on plants and wildlife. In the rush to get the CCC mobilized in 1933, five camps were established in Mount Rainier. In the summer of 1934, when the CCC in Mount Rainier reached full steam, a sixth camp was added and the park was divided into six areas for purposes of CCC projects. These were set up as follows:

1. Tahoma Creek Camp (NP-1) located on Westside Road. Camp 1 Area included the lower Westside Road, Longmire, and the southwest corner of the park.

2. Narada Falls Camp (NP-2). Camp 2 Area included Paradise and the south side of the park from the Nisqually Bridge to the upper Stevens Canyon.

3. Carbon River Camp (NP-3). Camp 3 Area covered the northwest corner of the park from the Mowich entrance to Mystic Lake.

4. St. Andrews Creek Camp (NP-4) located on Westside Road. Camp 4 Area covered the west side from Round Pass north to Sunset Park.

5. White River Camp (NP-5) located on State Route 410 north of the East Entrance. Camp 5 Area covered the northeast corner of the park including Sunrise, White River Campground, and the Cayuse Pass Tipsoo Lakes area.

6. Ohanapecosh Camp (NP-6). Camp 6 Area covered the southeast corner of the park where the Eastside Road was under construction. The camp was accessed through Packwood, Washington. [16]

In the late 1930s additional camps were built as others were abandoned but the total number of camps never exceeded six. Virtually all camps were vacated in the fall and rehabilitated and reoccupied the following spring--a pattern which was repeated until each camp's abandonment toward the end of the CCC era. The single exception appears to have been Sunshine Point Camp (NP-8), which was built in the fall of 1938 as an all-year camp. [17]

Mount Rainier National Park in 1934 was divided into six areas for purposes of CCC work.

Physical Accomplishments of the CCC

So popular was the CCC during the New Deal that its conservation work has become almost legendary. According to popular tradition, most of the pre-World War II administrative buildings that are seen in the national parks and forests today were built by the CCC. The buildings were designed predominantly in a rustic architectural style, and it is also popular tradition that the CCC practically originated this style. Both these traditions are considerably wide of the mark. With regard to the invention of the rustic style, landscape designer Phoebe Cutler sets the record straight in her book, The Public Landscape of the New Deal:

The rustic style had, in fact, already established itself as the architectural dialect of the national parks and forests. As early as 1903, the Old Faithful Inn, a rambling assemblage of logs, shingles, and enormous dormers, made a major statement in the rustic vernacular at Yellowstone. Similar log-and-boulder structures abounded at Yosemite, Crater Lake, the Grand Canyon, and Glacier National Parks. Nonetheless, the structures of the 1900s through the 1920s were grand primary-use edifices such as Herb Maier's assortment of museums and lodges. The New Deal did not innovate so much as it mass-produced. [18]

The other fondly-remembered assumption about the CCC--that it single-handedly constructed all the Depression-era buildings in the national parks and forests--is also a fallacy. In fact, the CCC crews were mainly assigned to jobs that required less skill than construction of buildings did. The Public Works Administration (PWA) was at least as responsible as the CCC for the florescence of Government Rustic in the 1930s. In Mount Rainier National Park, Tomlinson oversaw yearly allotments from the PWA with which to pursue a massive public works program that he had outlined in 1933. Some of these funds were used to hire temporary, skilled workers for building construction. That was how many of the ranger residences, patrol cabins, fire lookouts, and other administrative buildings of the Depression era came to be built.

The CCC's actual accomplishments were extensive and varied. Quarterly reports on the CCC quantified each camp's accomplishments in terms of man-days spent on each project. The number of projects, large and small, multiplied with each passing enrollment period. Statistics for the whole park mounted so quickly as to become mind-numbing. Never before or since had the park administration had so much unskilled labor at its command. The best that can be done here is to give an impression of the hundreds of jobs accomplished by the CCC, listed by project type.

1. Roadside Cleanup. The object of roadside cleanup was two-fold: to reduce forest fire hazard and to improve the appearance of the roadway. After all the road construction accomplished in the 1920s, the sides of the roads remained littered with debris. In places, large "docks" of piled logs could be seen. Such debris intruded on the natural scene and posed a fire hazard. CCC crews either hauled the logs to one of the temporary sawmills in the park or sawed them into sections and burned them. There were also areas where high winds had toppled exposed trees at the edge of the road, and these too were removed. A lot of dry, unsightly, fire-hazardous material was raked out and eliminated. Snags that posed a risk to road safety were cut down and removed.

2. Erosion Control. Many road cuts and fills required work to stabilize their unnaturally steep and bare surfaces and prevent erosion problems. CCC crews used a variety of methods to accomplish slope stabilization, including sodding, seeding, flattening or rounding, applying a stone riprapping, and even constructing giant, log grids against the road cuts which would later be subsumed by earth and vegetation. Another aspect of erosion control was river-channel cleanup. Log jams were removed wherever they were directing a streamflow against a road embankment or threatening to take out a bridge. The banks of the Nisqually and Carbon rivers were reinforced with log cribs to protect the Longmire area and the Carbon Road from potential flood damage.

3. Landscape Naturalization. The vegetative cover in numerous areas in the park was scarred by new construction or by past use and abandonment. Near the Tipsoo Lakes, for example, an abandoned fishing camp had left behind a number of old roads and trails which the Park Service wanted to obliterate. The CCC devoted 201 man-days to resodding 2,000 square yards of abandoned road and trail surface and transplanting 532 trees and shrubs. The new development site in Yakima Park, the residential village at Longmire, and the lower campground at Paradise also received extensive treatment by the CCC.

4. Trail Construction. A large percentage of man-days went to trail work of various kinds, including new construction, improvement of tread and drainage on existing trails, building of bridges, and repairs. Some of this work was very labor intensive. One CCC crew spent 703 man-days reconditioning a little more than a mile of trail past Narada Falls, where the work included putting in an observation station with log railing opposite the waterfall, relocating and surfacing with crushed stone the portion of the trail that was frequently made wet by the spray of the falls, and installing no less than 69 rock and cedar culverts. Some new trails, such as the Huckleberry Creek trail and various boundary trails, were built principally for fire protection.

5. Campground Improvement. Another major undertaking by the CCC was the redevelopment of Mount Rainier's campgrounds according to the Meinecke system. In the late 1920s, the NPS had contracted with plant pathologist E.P. Meinecke to determine how campgrounds which were being worn out by overuse could be rehabilitated. Meinecke had found that trampling by campers and soil compaction by automobiles was inhibiting plant regeneration. The solution, Meinecke wrote, was to limit the movements of campers and vehicles by the creation of individual campsites with fixed fireplaces, tables, and "garages," or spurs for vehicle parking, in combination with the subtle placement of shrubs, logs, and boulders to delineate each site. Until the coming of the CCC, Mount Rainier National Park had made slow progress toward "Meineckizing" its campgrounds. CCC crews provided the needed manpower. Working under the close supervision of landscape architects, CCC crews redeveloped the campgrounds at Longmire, Paradise, Tahoma Creek, White River, and Ohanapecosh along the lines recommended by Meinecke. In addition, the White River Camp (NP-5) fitted out the campground at Yakima Park with permanent fireplaces and an amphitheater.

6. Telephone and Power Lines. The CCC took over the task of maintaining and repairing the park's 172 miles of telephone lines, and constructed many miles of new telephone and power lines as well. Old wires and insulators were upgraded, brush was cleared away from the lines, and the system was expanded in order to furnish electric lighting and telephone connections for the public campgrounds and for the CCC camps themselves.

7. Forest Fire Protection. All CCC companies in the park were on standby to fight forest fires. Men with fire-fighting experience were culled from the ranks and given special training by the rangers. These men in turn led eight-man squads made up of the balance of the labor force. All CCC companies held fire drills at regular intervals, and when a fire occurred the whole 1,000-man force was at the park administration's disposal to fight it.

8. Blister Rust Control. CCC crews built upon earlier efforts to stop the spread of this white pine disease. Blister rust control was accomplished by eradicating the disease's alternative host plant, ribes, from the vicinity of white pine stands. A few picked men from each company were trained to recognize the various species of ribes and in some cases these small eradication crews were gradually augmented so that dozens of men were employed in this work by the end of the summer. Where the ribes were dense, it could take up to ten man-days to clear each acre. Blister rust control was most intensive in Stevens Canyon, where the men worked out of spike camps.

9. Headquarters Detail. The Tahoma Creek Camp (NP-1) provided a detail of about 25 enrollees for the park administration at Longmire. These men were assigned to various departments and performed everything from clerical work to campground maintenance to curation in the Longmire Museum.

10. Buildings. The CCC built a variety of structures in the park, from simple, three sided backcountry shelters to four-room, bath, and basement residences. The quality of workmanship was generally high. A skilled foreman working with a small crew of helpers was capable of fine work as evidenced by the ranger cabin built near the mouth of Ipsut Creek in 1934. On the other hand, inexperienced crews could make a mess of a project. Landscape Architect Ernest A. Davidson expressed skepticism about the CCC's capacity for handling large building projects, an opinion which seemed to be born out by the difficulties encountered in the construction of the Paradise ski lodge between 1938 and 1941. Yet CCC crews from Camp Narada (NP-2) built four residences at Longmire during the summer of 1938; they then finished the interiors expeditiously after moving to Sunshine Point Camp (NP-8) for the winter.

A CCC crew landscaping Paradise campground. (Photo courtesy of Mount Rainier National Park.)

Building construction made up a relatively small proportion of the total man-days expended by the CCC in Mount Rainier National Park. Yet these rustic structures are the CCC's most enduring legacy. The fine log cabins, the well-crafted stone comfort stations and trailside exhibit shelters, the carefully-laid flagstone paths, the many stone guardrails--these features are as ubiquitous as they are unpretentious. They have become a familiar part of the national park experience for millions of Americans. As one NPS architectural historian has contended, "park design includes numerous subtle and sometimes subconscious cues to the visitor. These features contribute to the sense of place of a national park." [19] The CCC--and the particular way in which the NPS used the CCC--made a significant contribution to that special quality which makes national parks such a distinctive part of the American landscape.

The CCC Experience

The physical accomplishments of the CCC cannot be evaluated apart from the humanitarian ideals and democratic yearning for national renewal that brought the CCC into being. Horace Albright, who spent his last few months as director of the NPS representing the Interior Department on the CCC's advisory council, commented on the CCC's objectives in his annual report for 1933:

Officials of the National Park Service have a deep appreciation that they were enabled to assist in carrying out President Roosevelt's emergency conservation program, one of the greatest humanitarian movements ever conceived for the relief of distress. In addition to its primary purpose of relief, the conservation work accomplished will be of far-reaching importance to the whole country and will build up the health and morale of a large portion of the young manhood of the Nation, fitting them better to be leaders of the future. [20]

It is difficult to generalize about the thousands of CCC enrollees who passed a summer or two at Mount Rainier. To enroll in the CCC, a man had to be eighteen to twenty-five years of age, single, unemployed, from a family on relief, and physically fit. Usually the enrollees were assigned to companies with men from the same city or county. Enrollees were generally put with men of the same race, too. Blacks were considerably underrepresented in the CCC, and in most cases they were formed into separate companies. Native Americans likewise were enrolled in separate units, which were employed on Indian reservations and administered by a separate branch of the CCC called the CCC-Indian Division.

Ideally, a CCC company was assigned to a camp within about 200 miles of where it was formed, so that the young men could go home to their families every other weekend. However, since most of the national forests and parks were in the West and most of the enrollees came from the East, a large number of CCC companies were put on trains and sent westward. As a result, CCC companies which were assigned to camps in Mount Rainier National Park tended to be either from nearby counties in Washington State or from distant states in the East or Deep South. [21] In the first enrollment period, for example, the five camps in the park were occupied by three companies from New York, one from Illinois, and one from western Washington. Meanwhile, the supervisory personnel for each camp invariably consisted of local men. CCC companies that spent summers in Mount Rainier usually spent winters in one of Washington's state parks. [22] CCC companies and their supervisory personnel sometimes returned to the same camp two summers in a row, but more often there was a complete turnover of companies from one summer to the next.

Two examples of specific camps in Mount Rainier suggest the differences and similarities that could be found among the CCC companies. Company 1303 occupied Camp NP-2 at Narada Falls during the summer of 1934. The camp superintendent was W.C. Pabst, a general contractor from Everett, Washington. The 199 enrollees in this company were from western Washington, with most of them, according to Pabst, already possessing "woods, trail, and forest fire experience." Among the supervising personnel, or crew foremen, of Company 1303 were two graduates of the University of Washington's School of Forestry and three former NPS employees, one with seven years experience in the landscape department. Pabst stated that the company's morale was excellent, with "gold-bricking" (shirking or playing sick) practically non-existent. [23]

Company 1303's baseball team at Camp Narada. (Photo courtesy of Mount Rainier National Park.)

The men of Camp Narada lived close to the outdoors. Like all of the CCC's summer camps in Mount Rainier National Park, Camp Narada was a mixture of frame buildings and tents. The mess hall, wash and shower houses, and latrines were all permanent buildings, constructed in 1933. The camp kitchen, sleeping quarters, and infirmary were all under canvas. All camp buildings were wired for lighting and furnished with heater stoves. [24] The CCC enrollees had scarcely any more shelter than the campers in the public campgrounds, and less privacy than either the campers or the NPS staff who lived in the park.

The company was fortunate to have a number of experienced cooks and a baker in its ranks, and the men were kept well-fueled for their outdoor labor. A typical breakfast consisted of canned Hawaiian pineapple, oatmeal mush, fresh milk, bacon omelette, buttermilk pancakes with syrup, coffee, milk, and sugar. Dinner might consist of beef stew, assorted garden vegetables, mashed potatoes with brown gravy, raisin sauce, tea, milk, and sugar. This was followed by a supper of roast beef with brown gravy, browned potatoes, cold tomato, lettuce salad, bran muffins, and coffee, milk, and sugar. [25] There were some complaints about the camp food during the CCC's first summer at the park, but provisions seem to have been adequate by 1934.

The men's favorite recreational activities at Camp Narada consisted of baseball, softball, horse shoes, boxing, fishing, and "considerable hiking on weekends." Indoor recreation included motion picture shows at the community buildings at Longmire and Paradise, and an occasional dance held outside the park. Four weeks after their arrival, the men of Company 1303 were in the process of forming a social club, stamp club, climber's club, and fisherman's club. Five musicians in the camp formed an orchestra and practiced at the community building at Longmire. The camp had a bi-weekly newspaper called The Narada Narrator. [26]

The work day generally ran from 7:45 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Each morning the men assembled into their various work details and rode to work on the company's Chevrolet trucks. About two-thirds of the time they were employed in trail and forest improvement work. A large project that summer was clearing trees from either side of the RNPC's power lines between Longmire and Paradise in order to reduce the fire hazard. Some 400,000 feet of felled timber was bucked to suitable lengths for the park's sawmill. Smaller projects included renaturalization with plantings, campground improvement, construction of a truck trail, and repair of telephone lines. [27]

For many of the young men in Company 1303, the CCC provided an opportunity to acquire more diverse experience in a field of work with which they were already acquainted. Perhaps the greatest value of the CCC for many of these men was that it provided them with work experience and a calling. As one appreciative landscape designer has written: "The CCC left a patrimony of men dedicated to the outdoors and skilled in appropriate trades." [28] The superintendent of Tahoma Creek Camp (NP-l) may have been right when he wrote about the CCC: "It gives a man a chance to get out of the common labor class and likewise increases his possibilities of finding employment." [29] Pabst him self noted that a large number of the men in Company 1303 showed a keenness for landscape work.

Another camp superintendent in Mount Rainier seemed to think that the CCC's greatest value could be found in its socializing experience. William S. Nowlin was superintendent of Camp NP-6 on the Ohanapecosh River in the summer of 1937. He was a landscape architect with twenty years of professional experience prior to his service in the CCC. His company consisted of 140 enrollees from far away Arkansas. With a sense of fatherly pride, Nowlin described the CCC company's activities in a letter to his friend, Representative Charles H. Leavy of Washington. Leavy found Nowlin's letter so evocative of the CCC experience that he read long extracts from it in a speech before the U.S. House of Representatives on July 8, 1937.

All's quiet along the Ohanapecosh except the raindrops pattering on my tent. It can rain so easily here. The clouds seem to hang on the treetops and release the moisture so gently, so cheerfully, and so unceasingly. The sun is always on the point of breaking through but never quite succeeds...

All week these CCC Arkansas boys have worked out in the woods uncomplainingly until yesterday. They put on those Army rainproof clothes--tin pants they call 'em. They lean them up against a stump, climb up on the top and jump into them. They are about as stiff as a suit of armor, like the knights used to wear, except the armor had joints at the knees and elbows. They do not clank or ring but when they walk it makes a noise like filing a saw.

One of my "gang" (a little fellow weighing about 100 pounds) came out to work the other day without his "tin pants" and I sent him back to get them. There was only one pair left--size 44. Well, he got into them, bent the bottoms up so that he could walk, found a piece of half-inch rope, made a gallus [suspenders] to hold them up, and on the way back he gathered moss enough to fill them out around the waist and he also made himself a wig and some whiskers of moss and reported "ready for duty." These boys have a sense of humor.

There is such a variety and contrast to this work. One day we are planting delicate, lacy ferns on the bank of a stream and laying a carpet of green moss around them.. .the next day we will be digging with a steam shovel or using a "Cherry picker" to replace weathered boulders, weighing about a ton, to keep these dumb campers from driving where they are not supposed to.

Then we build huge log tables, so heavy the people can't move them around, and stone fireplaces[,] and stencil and carve and burn signs on the face of a cedar log cut in half, and build trails and footpaths, and haul gravel in dump trucks to surface roads, and, believe me, these boys are workers. They average over 20 years old, and most of this camp has had more than a year's experience in national park work (which is a lucky thing for me). The hardest task is to have work enough lined up to keep them busy. I assign them a job what I think will last all day, and in a few hours the leader will come and ask what to do next...

I hope they make the C.C.C. permanent, even if they have to discontinue the Army and Navy. It's a great character-building institution. They get a better training than in any school or college. I think it is the greatest thing the present administration has done.

I wish you could see this river--the Ohanapecosh. . .On a hot day, when the glacier silt come down, it turns milky white, and at times it appears blue and white. It is always in such a hurry and is always singing.... [30]

Park officials played a significant role in making the CCC experience a positive one. Their involvement with the CCC went far beyond what the division of responsibilities between the NPS and the Army required of them. On paper, the park administration's responsibility was to design suitable work projects for the CCC; the Army, meanwhile, was to set up and supply the camps, organize the CCC companies and transport them to the park, and maintain discipline in the camps. But park officials did much more than assign jobs. Superintendent Tomlinson worked closely with Brigadier General Joseph C. Castner, commanding officer at Fort Lewis, Washington, in planning the placement of camps. Landscape Architect E.A. Davidson and Engineer R.D. Waterhouse provided instruction to CCC superintendents and foremen, some of whom were former NPS colleagues. Park rangers and naturalists had considerable contact with the CCC enrollees during their leisure time in the park, leading them on fishing, hiking, and climbing trips. [31] "The men have excellent opportunity for recreation on account of the friendliness of park officials," a CCC inspector reported. Even the park's interpretive program catered to the needs of the CCC enrollees. "Park officials also lecture on forestry," the inspector wrote, "and will show movies from time to time on forestry work." [32] In November 1933, an appreciative park staff treated a CCC company that was the last to depart for the winter to an elaborate turkey dinner at Longmire. [33] In his annual report for 1933, Tomlinson stated that the CCC enrollees had received much useful training in conservation work and citizenship, and he credited his own ranger staff with helping to keep the young men healthy and happy. It was partly through the many ranger-led activities that the CCC enrollees came to a "full appreciation of what their Government was doing for them." [34]