Mount Rainier Administrative History

PART TWO: FOUNDING YEARS, 1893-1916

V. RUDIMENTS OF ADMINISTRATION

INTRODUCTION

After passing the Mount Rainier Park Act, Congress showed little enthusiasm for appropriating funds with which to administer the new national park. Not until 1903 was the park placed under the nominal supervision of Mount Rainier Forest Reserve Supervisor Grenville F. Allen, and not until 1910 did the park have its own superintendent. Yet in spite of these limitations, park officials established the rudiments of administration during the first decade and a half of the park's existence. They built up a ranger force, cleared trails, constructed administrative buildings, and strung telephone lines. With the help of the state legislature and Congress, they resolved all doubts about their authority to enforce regulations within the jurisdiction of the park. They helped coordinate the efforts of the General Land Office, the Geological Survey, and the Forest Service on a variety of land issues. These included the disposition of the Northern Pacific's land grant inside the park, the marking of boundaries, the completion of Mount Rainier's first topographical survey, and the maintenance of the park access road where it crossed a three-mile strip of national forest land.

Congress was a little more generous in appropriating funds for road development in the park. As it had in Yellowstone, Congress assigned this work to the War Department. The work included two surveys in 1903-04--one from the west entrance to Paradise, and the other from the east side of the Cascades to Cowlitz Park--followed by construction of the road to Paradise between 1906 and 1910. In 1913, Congress transferred responsibility for the road from the War Department to the Interior Department. The latter agency oversaw the ongoing work of widening, resurfacing, and repairing it.

This chapter examines how the government accomplished the task of building the park's basic administrative organization and infrastructure in the period 1899-1915. It is divided into sections on the development of a ranger force, development of the park road, the problem of jurisdiction, and land issues.

DEVELOPMENT OF A RANGER FORCE

The early national park "ranger" had two lines of ancestry. One line could be traced back to the military troops who were stationed in Yellowstone, Yosemite, Sequoia, and General Grant national parks beginning in the 1880s and 1890s. The military influence was recognizable in the Park Service's early emphasis on a centralized, paramilitary organization. The other line of ancestry went back to the forest rangers who were hired to patrol the forest reserves beginning in 1897. The Forest Service influence could be seen in the development of a ranger mystique that revolved around such nonmilitary virtues as independent judgment, self-reliance, and versatility. As the nation's fifth national park, Mount Rainier confronted government officials, politicians, and preservationists with the choice of employing troops or rangers to enforce the law. Their decisions affected not only Mount Rainier but the emerging national park system as well.

Local preservationists called for troops to protect the Paradise meadows as early as 1893, after the area had been set aside as the Pacific Forest Reserve. [1] At that time Congress had made no provision for the protection of forest reserves, and the only examples of natural reserves that were being protected with force were Yellowstone and the three national parks in California. With these precedents in view, local opinion appeared to favor the use of troops for the protection of Mount Rainier. But no action resulted. These local demands were renewed after 1900. [2]

On December 4, 1901, Senator Addison G. Foster of Washington introduced a bill (S.270) that would have authorized the Secretary of the Interior to request a detail of troops for Mount Rainier National Park. It had the support of Secretary of the Interior Ethan A. Hitchcock as well as Secretary of War Elihu Root. The bill was reported favorably by the Committee on Military Affairs and was passed by the Senate, but it failed in the House. [3] As events would have it, Mount Rainier National Park emerged as the first national park to be patrolled exclusively by rangers, without resort to troops. To contemporaries, however, the concept of a park ranger force was still so inchoate that calls for troops did not seem inappropriate. Indeed, another bill providing for a detail of troops to Mount Rainier National Park was introduced in 1910 and once again garnered the support of the Secretary of the Interior, though it too did not pass. [4]

Meanwhile, the new "forestry service" provided some nominal protection of Mount Rainier visitors and resources. The Forest Reserve Act of 1897 authorized the Secretary of the Interior to appoint forest supervisors and rangers to patrol the forest reserves. Under the new "forestry service," the Commissioner of the General Land Office appointed a forest supervisor to take up headquarters in a town near each forest, and the forest supervisor in turn hired rangers to patrol districts within the forest and enforce the regulations locally. [5] Beginning in 1898 or 1899, the forest supervisor of the Mount Rainier Forest Reserve detailed a single ranger to visit Paradise Park periodically and keep a watchful eye on campers. [6] This was the first instance of "visitor protection" in Mount Rainier, and must have been among the first such ranger assignments in the nation.

The call for a permanent ranger force in Mount Rainier National Park originated with the Allen family of Ashford, Washington. In the early 1890s, O.D. Allen, a Yale University botany professor, moved to the Pacific Northwest for the benefit of his health, and established a homestead about two miles east of Kernahan's Ranch (Ashford). Over the next ten years, Allen and his sons, Edward and Grenville, made innumerable botanical expeditions to Mount Rainier, producing the first notable scientific collection of Mount Rainier's flora. [7] By the 1900s, the Allen sons possessed what Edward described as "an intimate personal knowledge of all the southern slopes of Mt. Rainier." Though Edward Allen had been in every state west of the Mississippi, nowhere else had he "seen a region so beautiful and more unique." [8] In 1903, Edward and Grenville Allen assumed two of the most influential forestry positions in the region, Grenville as supervisor of the Mount Rainier Forest Reserve and Edward as the General Land Office's forest inspector. Grenville had investigated the unauthorized charging of a toll on the trail to Paradise Park the previous year when he was a forest ranger, and both men recognized the need for more rangers to patrol the national park. [9]

In March 1903, Forest Inspector Edward Allen made a report to the Secretary of the Interior urging that the recent appropriation by Congress for improving the park should be used for protection as well as road development. Allen's report was the first official overview of the resources of the new national park. It reiterated Bailey Willis's conception of the park as an arctic island in a temperate zone. "The extent of this truly high mountain territory has preserved conditions such as were widespread immediately after the ice age more perfectly than has any other region in the United States," the report stated, "and there still exist many species of Arctic fauna and flora extinct elsewhere except in the inaccessible North." Forest Inspector Allen recommended specifically that at least two forest rangers be assigned to the park, one in the Paradise-Longmire vicinity and the other in the Spray Park-Carbon River area, "to perform fire and game protection work from July 1 to the coming of heavy snow, usually in November." [10] The Secretary of the Interior concurred with this recommendation and authorized Forest Supervisor Grenville Allen to assume charge of Mount Rainier National Park and assign two men to the northern and southern sections of the park beginning that season. [11] This marked the real beginning of ranger protection in Mount Rainier National Park. It is notable that one Allen son recommended it while another saw to its implementation, and that both men were officials of the new forestry service (now the U.S. Forest Service).

Grenville Alien

Grenville Allen served as acting superintendent of Mount Rainier National Park from 1903 to 1910 and was responsible for founding the ranger force. He appears to have had in mind from the outset that this ranger force would be made up of trustworthy, self-motivated, professional men. The qualities he looked for in these rangers were firmness, discretion, business ability, and of course, woodcraft skills. It is not known how Allen recruited his rangers, but in some cases he secured their service year after year. Still, as he pointed out to his superiors, the seasonality of the work made it difficult to get competent men. In 1908, with the opening of the park to automobiles and the resulting increase in park revenues, he urged that some of the ranger positions be made permanent. "The organization of an efficient ranger force requires the permanent employment of men who can be depended upon to be thoroughly devoted to their occupation," he wrote. "On the whole, it seems to me that most of the rangers in the park should be employed throughout the year, and I believe that their exertions during the summer would compensate for the periods of enforced idleness during the winter." [12] The following year, the first two permanent ranger positions were created at Mount Rainier National Park.

Two years into Allen's acting superintendency, the young forestry service was transferred from the Department of the Interior to the Department of Agriculture. Formerly a division of the General Land Office, the forestry service now became a separate bureau, the U.S. Forest Service, under Chief Forester Gifford Pinchot. Pinchot laid a strong emphasis on professionalism, esprit de corps, and decentralization of authority. These initiatives influenced the development of Mount Rainier's ranger force. They not only influenced Allen's recommendations to the Secretary of the Interior to create permanent ranger positions, but probably inspired his suggestion of a uniform for park rangers and his push to construct ranger cabins in the park. [13] Mirroring the pattern of administration on forest reserves (renamed national forests in 1907), Allen divided the national park into ranger districts, putting each ranger in charge of a specified area. Allen also showed a preference for local men. His first two recruits, William McCullough and Alfred B. Conrad, were from Ashford and Eatonville respectively. [14] Whether his decision to recruit local men was merely expedient or deliberately in keeping with Forest Service policy is not known.

The rangers performed virtually all of the field work involved in administering the park. Their primary function was patrol. By patrolling the more frequently visited areas of the park, rangers were able to suppress poaching and the more brazen acts of vandalism, such as the cutting of green timber to construct temporary shelters or the making of bonfires using whole trees. Regular patrol also aided in the suppression of forest fires, and enabled the rangers to keep track of prospectors and grazers either inside or bordering on the park boundary. (These activities are discussed in more detail in Chapter VI on protection of resources.)

In the few weeks at either end of the tourist season when weather permitted, the rangers turned to road and trail repairs and new trail construction. The principal aim of trail development was to facilitate patrol and thereby improve the protection of park resources. A secondary aim was to open new areas of the park to backcountry users, although this was not without risk, as Allen explained in his annual report for 1904:

A very small portion of the area included in the national park is frequented by tourists. This portion is, however, peculiarly attractive, and is extensive enough for the needs of all who are likely to enter the park for many years. The mountainous and broken nature of the country, its high altitude, and the absence of trails, prevent the other parts of the park from being frequented by tourists. These conditions are a natural protection to the park. It would not be advisable to extend a system of trails into the remoter parts of the reserve unless the force of rangers was at the same time so increased as to enable such patrol to be maintained as would protect the region thus opened from forest fires and the destruction of game. [15]

During Allen's superintendency, trail development was limited to the north and south sides of the park. Rangers rerouted and improved the trail to Indian Henry's Hunting Ground, extended the Carbon River trail over to the White River, and improved the trails to Crater (Mowich) Lake and Spray Park. There were existing hunters' trails on the west and east sides, but these remained unimproved. Visitors made what would today be called a "social trail" from Paradise Valley past Sluiskin Falls to the Cowlitz Glacier. [16] It was probably a good indication of Allen's administrative priorities that the first two trails built primarily for their scenic value to tourists were completed after Superintendent Edward Hall took charge in 1910. These were the trails to Eagle Peak and Rampart Ridge, both commencing at Longmire Springs. [17]

As dedicated as Allen was to the protection of the national park, his responsibilities as supervisor of the Rainier National Forest seriously divided his time. Two of his biggest concerns, fire suppression on the drier eastern slope of the Cascades and management of grazing permits on the national forest, largely drew his attention away from the park. In 1906, the Secretary of the Interior tried to enter an agreement with the Department of Agriculture whereby a portion of Allen's salary would be paid from the Mount Rainier National Park budget, but an 1885 law prevented this. Instead, Allen continued to draw his entire salary from the Forest Service while serving as acting superintendent for the national park. Local organizations such as The Mountaineers protested this arrangement, and in 1910 Congress finally approved the Department's request for an appropriation to cover a superintendent's salary as well as the salaries of a force of rangers. [18]

This was no panacea for improving the administration of the park, however. Until the creation of the National Park Service, national park superintendents were customarily selected according to the spoils system. This meant that the political party which controlled the executive branch of government used these salaried positions to reward the party faithful, giving little consideration to job qualifications. From 1910 to 1916, Mount Rainier National Park had four superintendents (called supervisors from 1914 to 1916, after Secretary of the Interior Franklin K. Lane appointed a general superintendent for all the national parks), and only the last in the series had appropriate training. Edward S. Hall, a Republican Party stalwart who served from January 1910 to July 1913, capably guided the park administration through the early years of expanding visitor use and concessions development, but his reputation finally suffered due to some questionable dealings with a timber sale contractor who operated inside the park (see Chapter VI). In the summer of 1913, after the Democratic Party captured the White House for the first time in sixteen years, Hall was among more than half a dozen national park superintendents who found himself without a job. He was replaced by a loyal Democrat, Ethan Allen (no relation to Grenville Allen), who resigned after eighteen months and was succeeded by another political appointee, John J. Sheehan, in January 1915. When Stephen Mather met Sheehan at the third National Parks Conference that spring he was singularly unimpressed, and afterwards had him removed from office. [19] Sheehan's removal touched off another scramble for political patronage. This caused some disgust among the friends of the national park in Washington state who were following the matter and thought the national parks deserved more professional stewardship. [20] But the last pre-NPS superintendent was Mather's choice: DeWitt L. Reaburn, a USGS topographical engineer, with railroad-building experience in Alaska and South America and, according to Mather's biographer, "more of credit in his record than the bulk of the political superintendents combined." [21] Reaburn served for nearly four years and really belonged to the new era that began with the formation of the National Park Service.

Beginning in 1910, the superintendent maintained an office at the park entrance and a "gatekeeper" was duty-stationed in the same building to handle automobile permits and compile a record of everyone entering the park. Superintendent Hall started in 1910 with a ranger force of six men--two permanent and four seasonal, including the gatekeeper. The two permanent rangers were assigned to the north and south sides of the park respectively. This force fell to five in 1911 and 1912, rose to seven in 1913 and 1914, and reached nine in 1915. Superintendent Reaburn gave a full picture of the distribution of the ranger force in that year:

During the season there were employed in the park service nine park rangers: Thomas E. O'Farrell, chief park ranger, stationed on the Carbon River at the northwest corner of the park, from which point he directed the patrol, trail, and telephone construction work on the north side; Prof. J.B. Flett, park ranger, stationed at Longmire Springs in charge of traffic, camp grounds, and the distribution of park literature, general information concerning the flora, trees, shrubbery, etc.; Rudolph L. Rosso, park ranger, stationed at Paradise Valley, in charge of Paradise Valley and Indian Henry's Camps; Arthur White, temporary park ranger, stationed on White River in the northeast corner of the park; Herman B. Burnett, temporary park ranger, stationed at Ohanapecosh Hot Springs in the southeast corner of the park; Earl V. Clifford, temporary park ranger, stationed at the park entrance, in charge of registration of visitors and issuing automobile permits; Archibald Duncan, L.D. Boyle, and M.D. Gunston, temporary park rangers, stationed at Nisqually Glacier, Narada Falls, and Paradise Valley, respectively, as traffic officers, under the supervision of Chas. A. Clark, general foreman of road improvement work. [22]

It is worth noting that with the opening of the road for automobiles all the way to Paradise Park, fully one third of the ranger force was now assigned to traffic control. In a sense, this marked the coming of age of Mount Rainier National Park.

Building an Infrastructure

Still another duty performed by rangers in these early years was the construction of ranger cabins. Each ranger was given a "station" as well as a district to patrol; this was the site to which he normally returned at the end of his working day. Ranger stations preceded cabins, and rangers must have made do with mere tent accommodations at first. In 1913, for example, Superintendent Ethan Allen indicated that "the Indian Henry's Hunting Ground Station is in need of ranger quarters." [23] Understandably, rangers were eager to build cabins as soon as they could get authorization to do so. The first ranger cabin was built by the gatekeeper at the main park entrance in 1908, and by 1916 every ranger station in the park was furnished with a log or frame building. These ranger stations were distributed as follows: Nisqually Entrance, Longmire, Paradise Park, Indian Henry's Hunting Ground, Carbon River, White River, and Ohanapecosh (cabins), and Nisqually Glacier and Narada Falls (frame buildings) [24]

The Oscar Brown cabin. The Interior Department 's chief clerk, Clement S. Ucker, recommended that this cabin serve as a model ranger cabin for other national parks. (Photo courtesy of Mount Rainier National Park.)

The first cabin, known locally as the Oscar Brown cabin after the ranger who built it, is the only one from this era that still exists. [25] With the exception of the Oscar Brown cabin and the cabin at Longmire Springs, which both served as family residences, these cabins were simple, one-room structures, which apparently went up with little administrative oversight. [26] In the case of the Oscar Brown cabin, Acting Superintendent Grenville Allen provided Ranger Brown with a building plan, and Brown apparently built the cabin with Ranger McCullough's help in the early spring of 1908. Five years later, this cabin caught the eye of the Interior Department's chief clerk, Clement S. Ucker, who thought it was "an ideal cabin for the national park service." Ucker requested Superintendent Hall to send him a photograph of the cabin, a drawing of the floor plan, and its approximate cost. He then directed that the plan be redrawn by a draughtsman and distributed to the other park superintendents with the suggestion that it be adopted as a model ranger cabin. It is not known what became of this plan, though the requested photographs were in fact preserved in the department's files. [27]

The structure which absorbed the most official attention was the log archway over the main park entrance. Arguably, the archway represented the first effort to beautify Mount Rainier National Park with a structure of rustic design. (The Oscar Brown cabin was older, but officials showed little interest in its aesthetics until later.) The idea for the archway originated with Secretary of the Interior Ballinger, who visited the park in 1910 and found the entrance unattractive, with a dry riverbed on one side of the narrow road and jumbled rock on the other and nothing marking the boundary except the ranger's cabin and a painted signboard. At Ballinger's request, Superintendent Hall submitted a plan and cost estimate. Hall's idea was "to use the largest cedar logs obtainable for this work." It would consist of "two uprights on each side of the road with cross pieces to bind them together at the top and one or two heavy logs to run from the uprights across the road." [28] Ballinger approved $250 for labor and materials, stipulating that the plans should include "a gate of rustic design constructed of cedar poles. The gate to be of somewhat similar design to that at the entrance of the home of Superintendent Hall but larger." [29] The archway was erected in the spring of 1911. From the arch a three-foot diameter log, planed on two sides, was suspended by heavy chains with "MT. RAINIER NATIONAL PARK" chiselled into its face. [30]

Another innovation in this period was the introduction of telephone communications between ranger stations, road construction camps, and the superintendent's headquarters. The first telephone line in the park was built by the Tacoma and Eastern Railroad Company under a special use permit dated April 29, 1911. Park officials used this line to communicate between Longmire Springs and the park entrance. In 1913, the government constructed its own single-wire telephone line from the park entrance to Paradise Park, with intermediate stations at Kautz Creek, Longmire Springs, Nisqually Glacier, and Narada Falls, at a cost of $750. By connecting with Forest Service lines south of the park, communication between the park headquarters and the Ohanapecosh Ranger Station was also established. [31] In 1915, the line was extended over the west-side trail from Longmire Springs through Indian Henry's all the way to Carbon River, providing the first direct telephone link between the north and south sides of the park. [32] Later that summer, the department authorized a $900 expenditure for construction of a line from boundary post no.66 (White River Entrance) to Glacier Basin, linking the last ranger station at White River into the system. [33] This gave the park a total of ninety miles of government telephone line in addition to the six-mile Tacoma and Eastern telephone line from the park entrance to Longmire Springs. The system brought the whole ranger force into direct telephone communication with the superintendent's headquarters at Nisqually Entrance.

The archway at the Nisqually entrance. Note the National Parks Highway sign on the left. (Photo courtesy of Mount Rainier National Park.)