Mount Rainier Administrative History

PART TWO: FOUNDING YEARS, 1893-1916

VI. RESOURCE PROTECTION IN THE EARLY YEARS (continued)

FORESTS

Natural resource policy in Mount Rainier National Park originally laid stress on the preservation of objects (timber, mineral deposits, natural curiosities) rather than biological communities. Forest policy focused on the care and management of healthy trees, because the underlying conception of a forest was that it consisted of so many individual, preferably green, trees (hence the term "timber" in the Mount Rainier National Park Act). Early park superintendents only dimly acknowledged the ecological relationships between dead and living, old and young, or diseased and healthy trees, or between trees and undergrowth. A good forest, in their view, was a forest unblemished by bums, insect infestations, blowdowns, and the like. "While there are considerable tracts on which the trees were killed by fire many years before the creation of the park," wrote Grenville F. Allen in one of his annual reports, "the timber is on the whole in a thrifty condition." [54] Allen assumed that market values and aesthetics neatly coincided, that park visitors admired big, harvestable trees. Commenting on the fire danger caused by the presence of many dead cedars along the Nisqually and Carbon rivers, Allen wrote, "The removal of these unsightly snags should add to the attractiveness of the park." [55]

Most of the early park superintendents were themselves involved with the Forest Service or the lumbering industry. Grenville F. Allen served in a dual capacity as acting superintendent of the park and supervisor of the surrounding national forest. Edward S. Hall, who had a homestead claim nearly adjacent to Allen's in Ashford, owned and operated the Rainier Mill on his own property before assuming the job of superintendent in 1910. Ethan Allen, manager of a Tacoma printing company prior to his appointment as superintendent in 1913, was certainly no stranger to the timber industry, either. All of these men viewed the forests of Mount Rainier National Park with a timberman's eye. Ethan Allen noted in his two annual reports of 1913 and 1914:

The timbered areas have never been cruised with a view to determining quantities and values, but such a cruise would furnish valuable information, particularly on which to base a reasonable annual expenditure for protection against fire. It would also serve to show the extent and value of mature, dead, and down timber which could be disposed of commercially without injury to the natural beauty of the forest and which is now a serious menace to that timber which is most desirable to have preserved. [56]

In these years, forest policy in the national park bore strong similarities to forest policy in the adjoining national forest. The early park superintendents concerned themselves primarily with suppression of all forest fires and elimination of trespass and vandalism. When time permitted, they thought about ways that the forest could be "improved," by fighting insect infestations or clearing out dead or "overmature" trees so that new growth could come in. Though they were certainly cognizant of the forest's scenic and scientific values, their background sometimes led them to manage the forest as if it were so much timber on the stump.

Forest Fire Suppression

Acting Superintendent Grenville F. Allen characterized the fire danger in Mount Rainier National Park as low throughout most of the summer, but "very great" during the month of August. According to Allen, rangers and local settlers were aware of the high fire hazard in August and were generally conscientious about putting out their campfires, but tourists often did not know better. Unattended or abandoned campfires were a serious problem. Park regulations permitted campers to use dead or fallen timber for fuel, and stipulated that fires would be lit only when necessary and completely extinguished when no longer required. But many campers either did not know the regulations or chose to disobey them. [57]

The most important element of fire protection in the park was ranger patrols. Rangers tried to educate campers about the need to extinguish their campfires, and in many cases they put out unattended campfires themselves. Rangers also organized ad hoc crews of firefighters when necessary. The following report by Ranger William Sethe provides a clear picture of how this would occur:

Ashford, Wash., Sept. 21, 1909

Acting Superintendent,
     Mt. Rainier Natl. Park
     Orting, Wash.

Dear Sir:

On Saturday September 18th about 4.30 P.M. it was reported to me at Longmire Springs that there was a fire burning in the old burn along the Paradise river a little below Carter Falls.

I at once took three men and started notifying [miners] Baker Long and Frank Hendericks [sic] on our way towards the fire.

When we reached the fire I seen at once that we would need more men to control the fire. Leaving what men I had to do the best they could I went up to the Gov. camp at Narada Falls and imployed [sic] ten men to help fight the fire.

After a lot of hard work we managed to get it under control at midnight after that until 7 o'clock A.M. the men were all kept busy watching and putting out small fires.

One man was imployed besides three miners and myself held it in check through the day.

Heavy rain set in about six o'clock P.M. the fire was left is now about out.

As to how the fire started is not known at present.

A list of names of the men employed is inclosed.

Yours truly
[Signed] William Sethe
Park Ranger. [58]

Next to patrol, the most important part of fire protection was trail development, which improved the rangers' prospects of reaching a fire before it got too big to suppress. Of course, trail development also tended to disperse campers and thereby spread the fire danger over a wider area. For this reason, Acting Superintendent Allen was of two minds about trail development. Initially he considered the absence of trails to be a "natural protection to the park" and urged that no more trails be built until the park had an adequate ranger force to patrol them. [59] By 1907, however, he was recommending an extension of the trail system into the northern and eastern sections of the park. In part his change of mind was a concession to public use; in part it was an acknowledgement of the fact that a growing number of prospectors were dispersing all over the park with or without a good trail system anyway, and the slash they produced when felling timber for their small cabins created fire hazards all over the park. [60]

At one point Allen thought he might make use of these prospectors. Many of them applied for permission to carry firearms in the park, and Allen thought the department should issue each gun permit in the form of an agreement specifying that the applicant would assist in fighting forest fires and inform the district ranger of any park violations that he observed. Allen also suggested that the park be supplied with fire boxes, so that shovels and axes could be stowed at various points along the road and trails. Neither suggestion was acted upon, however. [61]

As logging operations moved up the Nisqually Valley and indeed right into the national park in the period 1910-13, a new fire danger arose. This was the danger from "slash." The woody debris left behind by logging made uncommonly good fuel for forest fires. Some of the slash was piled alongside the road in the park, some of it was on the Rainier National Forest under Forest Service supervision, and some of it was on Northern Pacific land under no one's supervision. Ethan Allen described the situation shortly before taking over the job of park superintendent in June 1913:

As far as I have been able to see, there are no [logging] operations in progress by private parties within the Rainier National Park, and none within a reasonable distance of the Park line at this time, but the unclean condition of patented lands adjoining, and others near, constitute a serious menace to Park timber. This is a condition which has existed for several years past.

The control or influence the Interior Department may be able to exert, however, is a serious question. Perhaps the owners may be proceeded against in the Washington State Courts for permitting a nuisance to exist, which constitutes a danger and a menace to Government property. Undoubtedly these old cuttings are dangerous, and, indeed, may at any time conduct a fire into the Park timber and inflict great loss. [62]

As luck would have it, no such large-scale fire eventuated. Forest fires in this period were generally small, burning no more than a few acres. The largest on record occurred on August 26-27, 1906 in Paradise Park, burning about twenty-five acres and destroying about ten acres of green trees. It started when a party of campers left their campfire unextinguished. [63] Despite the growing number of campers from year to year, the incidence of fire did not increase, suggesting that park rangers were more or less successful in educating the public about the need to put out their campfires.

Disposal of Dead and Down Timber

In the fall of 1908, there came a request from one Beall Foster of Tacoma to remove a quantity of dead and down cedar that lay about fifty feet of the park road and about two miles inside the park entrance. Acting Superintendent Grenville F. Allen forwarded Foster's application to the Secretary of the Interior, stating that he did not know the policy of the Interior Department with regard to the sale of dead timber on national park lands, but in this case thought the sale would be "desirable." [64] Two weeks later, Assistant Secretary Frank Pierce authorized the timber sale, informing Allen simply that it was "the desire of the Department to dispose of all such dead timber within the limits of the park." [65] The decision appears to have been without precedent. Subsequently, two national parks (Glacier and Lassen Volcanic) would be established with provision made in the law for the sale of dead and down timber under rules and regulations devised by the Secretary of the Interior, but no such provision obtained in the Mount Rainier National Park Act. Critics would soon charge that the timber sale violated the law.

Unfortunately, the department's thinking on this issue is impossible to trace. Was the timber sale authorized to raise revenue? Reduce the fire hazard? Improve the appearance of the forest? It should be pointed out that logging was not a new activity in Mount Rainier National Park; a considerable amount of merchantable timber had already been removed incidental to the clearing and widening of the roadway in 1905-08. But the timber removed during road construction was not sold directly by the government for revenue; rather, its commercial value was factored into the contractors' bids for clearing the ground. Thus, it represented an offset to the War Department's expenditures in the park and did not affect the Interior Department's park budget. [66]

The timber sale soon acquired a momentum of its own. Beall Foster's offer to purchase 200 cords of dead cedar for shingle bolts at $.85 per cord was superseded by Edward S. Hall's application to purchase 1,000 cords at $1.10 per cord. Hall then lost out to the Big Creek Shingle Company, which topped his offer with $1.30 per cord. The department approved a contract with the Big Creek Shingle Company on June 7, 1909. That summer, while the company installed a mill near Ashford and cleared the trees along the Nisqually River to make a suitable landing, Acting Superintendent Allen assigned Ranger William Sethe to scale and mark the timber inside the park. Sethe's estimate came to 5,235 cords, for a total stumpage value of $6,805.50. As of the end of 1909, the Big Creek Shingle Company had paid the Interior Department $3,600 for this sale. [67] Thus, before the logging operation in the park was even underway, its projected scope had already increased by more than twenty-five fold. And it would grow larger still. No wonder that two members of The Mountaineers who were appointed to investigate the sale declared that the contract was "only an entering wedge, and if the work is not stopped at once, may lead to the cutting of all the timber in the park." [68]

In spite of some objections to the sale by the Seattle and Tacoma chambers of commerce, Acting Superintendent Allen remained enthusiastic. In his annual report for 1909, he suggested that the logging should be extended to dead, standing timber as well as dead and down material.

Along the Carbon and Nisqually rivers there is a considerable amount of dead cedar. The removal of this material, if conducted in a proper manner, will be a decided advantage to the park. It will to some extent reduce the fire danger. The greatest difficulty in extinguishing small fires arises from the presence of dead standing timber. The fire burns to the top of the dead trees and the sparks are blown to a great distance. The stumps should be cut very low, so that they will be concealed by the growth of vegetation. The debris should be carefully cleaned up. The removal of these unsightly snags should add to the attractiveness of the park, and the clearing up of the fallen timber and building of the wood roads will make many pleasant camping grounds along the bank of the river. The work should be constantly supervised by one of the park officers, in order to prevent damage to undergrowth and standing timber. [69]

In the spring of 1910, the new park superintendent, Edward S. Hall, also expressed support for the sale, in spite of mounting criticism of it. Responding to complaints that the Big Creek Shingle Company was cutting down green timber, and that much underbrush was being killed in the process of taking out the dead timber, Hall conceded that a number of trees with "one or two green branches" had been taken, but these were so far gone that they were "of no more material beauty to the Park than the other dead standing timber which the Department decided it was advisable to have removed." Noting the additional revenue derived from these trees, he thought it was a "good plan to remove them as they increase the fire risk very much." [70]

Both The Mountaineers and Assistant Engineer Eugene Ricksecker sharply attacked the timber sale in May 1910. A report by two Mountaineers charged the superintendent with collusion in stretching the definition of "dead trees" to include all cedars with dry tops. "If a dry top is counted a dead tree, ninety-nine per cent of the cedar in Mount Rainier National Park can be cut." The Mountaineers' report alleged that the cutting was in violation of the contract, and the contract was in violation of the Mount Rainier National Park Act. [71] Ricksecker, for his part, described the damage in poignant terms:

Where the road was well shaded and the surface protected, as for instance across the sandy river bottom just east of Tahoma Fork, the sun now penetrates, drying the sand, and making travel heavy. Where the forest growth was so thick it was impossible for the eye to penetrate a distance of one hundred feet beyond the limits of the road the country is now opened for distances of eight hundred to a thousand feet... .This portion of the road passes thru the largest body of uniformly large cedars that exist in this part of the country. It was said to have few equals; no superiors. Its natural wildness, undisturbed by man, was its beauty and constituted a feature of this Park retention of which should have been jealously guarded. [72]

Following his receipt of these letters, Secretary Ballinger dispatched a special inspector to Mount Rainier to investigate the logging operation and Superintendent Hall's role in it. Special Inspector Edward W. Dixon confirmed that Hall had ordered the ranger in charge to mark all cedars with dry or "spiked" tops, even though this would classify as dead "practically all the standing cedar in the National Park." But he defended the superintendent, saying that Hall had admitted "poor judgment" in the matter and that he was an intelligent man and would make an acceptable officer in charge. As for the general policy of removing dead timber from the park, Dixon advised that the small amount of revenue from the sale of dead cedar did not compensate the government for the destruction of young growth and damage to live trees that inevitably resulted, nor for the increased fire risk from the accumulation of slash. [73]

The problem remained of how to terminate the logging operation. The department's chief clerk, Clement S. Ucker, investigated the legal precedents and found that the law was clear about what constituted dead timber; therefore, the company could be held liable for damages for violating its contract. [74] After making a personal inspection late in the summer, Secretary Ballinger decided to charge the company for double stumpage on the green timber it had cut, plus the cost of the timber cruiser, plus the cost to the government of piling the slash so that it could be burned. He wanted the company to pay a cash settlement and get out of the park immediately. If the department wanted to remove dead and down timber from the park in the future, Ballinger told Ucker, it should be done by government employees under the direct supervision of the superintendent. [75]

Sketch map of the timber sale area in 1909

This timber sale probably stands as one of the most egregious mistakes in the administrative history of Mount Rainier National Park. If the contract did not technically violate the Mount Rainier National Park Act (the secretary's regulations of June 10, 1908 prohibited the cutting or injury of any timber growing on the park lands), it was certainly illegal in its execution. What was most remarkable about the incident was the fact that all the hard criticism came from outside the Interior Department--from the Seattle and Tacoma chambers of commerce, The Mountaineers, and the Army Corps of Engineers. One wonders if Interior officials would have eventually called a halt to the logging in the absence of such a public outcry, or whether Ricksecker was correct when he announced grimly that spring, "It is with keen regret that I report that the blight of commercial greed has fastened itself upon the southwestern corner of the Park with no uncertain grip." [76]

Forest Infestations

Early park superintendents regarded tree disease as injurious to the forest resource, but they acknowledged that there was little they could do except monitor it. Acting Superintendent Grenville F. Allen reported in 1906 that there were some instances of tree disease in the park. He noted that alpine fir and mountain hemlock were frequently attacked by a fungus or injured by some other cause which affected the leaves, but he did not think the problem was serious. He reported that western white pine was attacked by an insect borer which could be quite destructive. He thought the insect was increasing, but he did not know of any way to check the spread of this infestation. [77]

Prevention of Trespass and Vandalism

The Mount Rainier Park Act provided that the "timber" in the park would be protected from "injury or spoliation." [78] The Secretary of the Interior's regulations for the park further defined this provision by declaring that "no person shall cut, break, remove, impair, or interfere with any trees, shrubs, plants, growing timber, curiosities, wonders, or other objects of interest on the Government lands in the park." [79] This language was born of a desire to protect the natural resources from acts of "vandalism" and "trespass." These were the terms contemporaries used to describe a range of willful acts on the public lands. Trespass meant any use of the national park that was unauthorized by the land laws such as logging, grazing, hunting, trapping, and, after 1908, prospecting. Vandalism referred to the defacement or destruction of natural objects, principally trees, underbrush, wildflowers, and wildlife. There was a significant overlap between vandalism and trespass, but generally speaking, acts of vandalism were associated with people who were in the park purely for pleasure and who harmed the natural resources out of sheer malice or ignorance. As indicated by the repeated calls for troops to patrol the park, preservationists generally regarded the prevention of trespass and vandalism as the most important task of park administration. [80]

The park administration's concerns about vandalism naturally focused on the popular highcountry areas on the south side of the mountain. Wherever there were concentrations of campers, there was apt to be some vandalism. Moreover, damage to the resources in these high mountain meadows was especially conspicuous and the vegetation was slow to regenerate. Acting Superintendent Grenville F. Allen remarked in 1908, "In Paradise Valley and in the other mountain parks trees require from one hundred to one hundred and fifty years to attain a diameter of 12 inches. Since their destruction would be a permanent injury to the park, the utmost care should be taken to prevent them from being cut or killed by fire." [81]

It is interesting to note that even in these early years, park officials appreciated the fact that crowds of campers in the alpine sections of the park tended to degrade the environment. The chief difference between their outlook and that of modem natural resource managers was the way they laid stress on gross violations of the park rules, or so-called acts of vandalism, rather than on the cumulative effects of so many people overloading a fragile environment. Considering the low level of environmental consciousness among the camping public in that era, the early park officials' emphasis on vandalism was probably not misplaced. One ignorant person with an axe could do a lot of damage; one abandoned campfire could set a forest on fire. When a camper was arrested in Paradise Park for cutting down a tree with which he wanted to make an overnight shelter, park officials hoped that such a negative example would serve to teach other campers that the park rules were not to be violated. [82] Rangers were dealing with a camping public that, judging by the standards of a later era, often lacked the most basic environmental ethics.

So undeveloped were the ethics of highcountry camping in this era that park administrators were sometimes one step ahead of the mountain clubs in their efforts at consciousness-raising. When the Sierra Club's secretary, William E. Colby, wrote to Secretary of the Interior Hitchcock for permission for his large party to cut a few green trees for fuel wood at Paradise Park in 1905, he received this enlightened response from Acting Superintendent Allen:

I am not authorized to permit the cutting of green timber. While the falling of a few small trees by your party might be no great injury to the natural attractions of the Park, the precedent established would be likely to result in indiscriminate cutting by others and to seriously embarrass the rangers in enforcing the regulations. [83]

Such sound logic did not always prevail, however. In 1914, no less venerable a Mount Rainier preservationist than Edward S. Ingraham requested permission for a party of 200 Campfire Girls and their guardians to pick wildflowers at Indian Henry's Hunting Ground for a floral display at the San Francisco Exposition. Ingraham thought the rule against cutting plants should not apply to wildflowers. "From what knowledge I have of floriculture," Ingraham wrote to the superintendent, "I understand that the plucking, prunning [sic] and thinning out of flowers, adds to their vigor of growth and beauty. It is only by such cultivation that species can be made to reach their highest perfection." [84] Whether or not the department accepted Ingraham's dubious floricultural theory, Assistant Secretary Lewis G. Laylin consented in this instance to waive the park regulation. [85]

Park officials had relatively little trouble with "timber trespass" in the narrow sense of the term, meaning the unlawful use of natural resources for private gain. The probable cutting of trees for sale to lumber interests by mining companies in the Carbon River area has already been mentioned. There was one unlawful squatter in the northwest corner of the park who was noteworthy mainly because he was the only one of his kind. [86] Park officials perceived the greatest danger of timber trespass to be from stockmen who might attempt to graze their sheep or cattle in the mountain meadows in late summer. Some grazing had occurred in the high meadows on the east side of Mount Rainier prior to 1899, causing the Seattle Times to comment that the creation of the park "will effectively keep the sheep herders with their countless flocks out of these wonderful alpine meadows." [87] But the threat of trespass by stockmen soon receded as better range management and a shift from sheep to cattle raising in the Yakima Valley lessened the attractiveness of Mount Rainier National Park's distant and mostly snowbound meadows to stockmen. [88]

Meanwhile, park officials had to determine whether or not to permit grazing by saddle and pack horses in the park. Here, economic considerations were allowed to take precedence over environmental concerns; the horses kept on hand at Longmire Springs for hire by tourists had to be fed hay brought from outside the park, but the hotel camps at Paradise Park and Indian Henry's were each permitted to graze four milch cows and an indefinite number of horses because of the difficulty of shipping hay bales to these remote locations. [89] As a result, the alpine meadows around these two camps were heavily grazed.

WILDLIFE

The Mount Rainier National Park Act stated that the Secretary of the Interior would provide against the "wanton destruction" of game in the park, and against their "capture or destruction for the purposes of merchandise or profit." Significantly, this rather cumbersome wording spelled out something less than a prohibition against all hunting. The idea that national parks were the nation's most inviolate game sanctuaries, where no hunting whatsoever was allowed, would evolve later. As with the park's deep forests and marvelous displays of alpine wildflowers, the Department of the Interior regarded the park's wild animals as objects which increased the park's appeal to the public. The idea that the totality of plants and animals in a given area, together with soil, water, sunlight, and climate, formed a complete ecosystem, and that this was what the national park should aim to preserve--that idea still lay more than thirty years in the future. The protection of wildlife in Mount Rainier National Park in the period 1899-1916 was based on a different set of assumptions.

The department's policies were attributable to three distinct ideas about Mount Rainier National Park's wild animals. First, it was commonly observed that many species of Mount Rainier's fauna were unusual and interesting animals because of their adaptation to an alpine habitat. These included the mountain goat, ptarmigan, marmot, and pika. The park's founders had noted this (and stretched the point a little) when they described the mountain as "an arctic island in a temperate zone." They assumed that various animal species found on the higher slopes of Mount Rainier constituted remnant populations which had retreated upward rather than northward at the end of the last ice age. As Forest Inspector Edward T. Allen wrote in 1903:

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 and there still exist many species of Arctic fauna and flora extinct elsewhere except in the inaccessible North. The importance of preventing the wanton destruction of such objects which has hitherto been unrestricted is obvious. [90]

This conceptual model not only gave the mountain special significance, but it also suggested that the island populations of wildlife were vulnerable to extermination. Mountain goats, in particular, needed protection.

The second idea was that virtually all species of wildlife in the park were in a depleted condition when the park was created in 1899. This was no doubt an accurate view. A second major goal of wildlife protection, then, was to restore the wildlife to its former abundance. The possibility that some populations might eventually become overabundant did not seem to concern park officials in this era. Recognizing that the park only took in the summer range for some animals like deer and elk, officials focused on the problem of protecting the animals in their winter range outside the park and remained oblivious to the potential problem of overgrazing of summer range inside the park. The operational idea, here, was that the park could be "stocked" with game, while any surplus population would take care of itself by overflowing into the surrounding country where it would be trimmed down to size by sport hunters. [91]

The third idea which underpinned the department's national park wildlife policy in this era was that the value of wild animals could be based solely on aesthetics. Park visitors generally liked large and majestic animals such as deer, elk, and mountain goats, or small and cute ones like raccoons and chipmunks. They were not inclined to admire, much less have an opportunity to observe, predators like the cougar, wolverine, or fisher. Therefore, it seemed like good policy to eliminate predators and thereby increase the number of desirable animals in the park. The gradual reversal of popular attitudes and public policy toward predators stands as one of the most intriguing and contentious episodes in the history of wildlife management, but it is important to understand that this, too, lay in the future during the era now under discussion.

The Department of the Interior managed Mount Rainier National Park's wildlife resources with the overall goal of satisfying the park visitors' desire to see wild animals. As with its management of the park's forest resources, the department made little attempt to differentiate national park from national forest wildlife policy. In an era when "game management" in the United States owed less to an understanding of animal ecology than it did to the experience of European gamekeepers on their hunting estates, park officials sought to employ three standard tools in order to increase the park's "game." These tools consisted of the elimination of poaching, the elimination of predators, and restocking the park with game animals brought from elsewhere.

Elimination of Poaching

Illegal hunting and trapping was so prevalent in the park's early years that it posed a real menace to the wildlife populations. Beaver and otter were thought to have been entirely trapped out by 1905. The mountain goat had long been a prized quarry of sport hunters; the population fell off considerably in the 1890s, and probably continued to decline in the early 1900s. [92] Deer and bear were also relatively scarce. Unfortunately, estimating game population trends in the park was at best difficult. Official estimates were based on an impressionistic summation of many people's reports, which were in turn highly impressionistic. Park rangers patrolling on foot, for example, gained a different impression of wildlife abundance or scarcity than officials who spent most of their time on the park road. Eugene Ricksecker's description of wildlife conditions in the park to Secretary of the Interior James R. Garfield gives a good idea of the quality of data which officials had to work with. "The noticeable scarcity of game in the Rainier Park is a subject of comment," Ricksecker wrote.

I have made some forty trips into this Park during the last five years and have seen but one lynx, one deer, and two or three ptarmigan. A small herd of elk are said to frequent some portions of the Park; deer and bear signs are visible here and there and several bands of mountain goat, fast disappearing, have been seen. Quite recently a goat weighing 300 lbs. was killed by a person in the Park who is said to have shot it just outside the boundary. [93]

It was unclear to the park staff whether deer and mountain goat were becoming scarce throughout the whole park or whether they were moving into the backcountry; and they debated whether the scarcity was due to poaching, predation by cougars, or the frequent blasting involved in road construction which might be chasing the animals into the highcountry. Sightings of deer by automobilists on the park road were very rare, yet deer were thought to be abundant on the west side between the Puyallup and Mowich rivers. Poaching seemed to take the heaviest toll in the Carbon River area, where local residents in the town of Fairfax were not in sympathy with either the state or federal game laws. Some residents kept hounds for running deer and would hire themselves out as guides "to the more disreputable sportsmen of Tacoma and Seattle" as soon as the ranger patrols ended for the season. [94]

The amount of poaching diminished sharply after about 1910. A park ranger arrested one poacher for killing a deer in 1909 and the park secured a conviction and a fine of $100. [95] More important than this single negative example to the public, however, was the public's growing acceptance of the hunting ban on principle. Acting Superintendent Allen noted the willingness of most park visitors to comply with the prohibition against taking firearms into the park. [96]The growing size of the park ranger staff and increasing effectiveness of patrol no doubt helped to suppress poaching, too, although the determined poacher could evade the entire force of park rangers without difficulty if he took precautions. [97]

Bearing in mind that estimates of wildlife populations were very rough, there seems to have been a general upward trend for most big-game species after about 1910. Park superintendents attributed the increase to several factors: the virtual elimination of poaching, the elimination of several cougars from the park, and the two mild winters of 1913-14 and 1914-15. By the end of the era, deer were considered to be abundant and mountain goats were making a very encouraging comeback. The reappearance of a band of goats in Van Trump Park, a few miles above Christine Falls on the road to Paradise, in 1914, suggested that the goats had in fact been driven out of the area by the noise of dynamite explosions some six years earlier. [98] Probably the mountain goats were acclimating to the increased human presence in the area.

Elimination of Predators

Cougars were thought to be an important factor in the depleted condition of deer and mountain goat populations in Mount Rainier National Park. Wolves, coyotes, wolverines, and fishers were also regarded as a menace to the park's wildlife. According to popular thinking, these predatory animals could all be classified as "varmints," or noxious pests, to be destroyed whenever possible, so that more desirable species like deer and mountain goat could flourish in their absence. [99] Even though the popular attitude toward predators was shaped mainly by material considerations--a desire by western stockmen to reduce their losses of cattle and sheep, a desire by sportsmen's clubs to increase the supply of game for sport hunting--federal officials saw no reason to buck the popular sentiment toward predators in the context of national parks. Later generations of Americans would assume, almost reflexively, that the commitment to preserve wildlife in national parks in a "natural condition" meant the preservation of natural predator-prey relationships, but officials in the early twentieth century construed this commitment to mean simply that the public would be able to view wild animals in a natural setting, or against a scenic backdrop. They saw nothing intrinsic in the national park legislation that required the preservation of predators.

Rangers hunted cougars and other predators in the park during the winter when they had little else to occupy their time. They were permitted to sell the furs and skins for additional income. The park administration sometimes employed local men to hunt and trap predatory animals, too. [100]No complete record of their kills survives, but occasional references in the annual reports of the superintendent indicate that park staff thought the predator control work was effective. Park staff killed two cougars, two "wild cats" (bobcat or lynx), and twenty-five marten in the winter of 1913-14, in what was presumably a good year. [101]

In December 1914, Ranger Rudolph Rosso caught two men trespassing in the park with steel traps and a 25-20 caliber Winchester rifle. He seized the traps and rifle, but because the men insisted that they had "no intention of trapping any game in the park except varmint which infest it," he recommended that these articles be returned and the matter be dropped. The park supervisor referred the matter to Stephen Mather, then assistant to the Secretary of the Interior, who approved the recommendation. The incident was revealing of the distinction which park officials made between "good" and "bad" animals. [102]

Mather also stipulated in his reply, "Whenever it is necessary to do any trapping for carnivorous animals or varmint this work will be performed by park rangers under the direction of the Supervisor of the park." This ended the practice of hiring local men to kill predators in the park. It was also a minor but timely indication of the professionalization that Mather would soon bring to the National Park Service. Although predator control would continue in the park into the 192Os, it would be conducted solely by park rangers or an agent of the Bureau of the Biological Survey. This was an important change, because it insulated the subsequent debate over predator control from local economic interests.

Restocking the Park

One of the favorite tools of game management in this era of reduced game populations was to take surplus game from one area and release it in another area where the game had been wiped out. Yellowstone National Park was a favorite source of game for many such transplants. In Washington state, sportsmen clubs were particularly interested in restocking the Cascade Mountains and eastern Washington with Yellowstone elk. Due to the elk's habits of gathering in open areas and bugling during the rutting season, hunters had practically wiped out the elk in the state by the end of the nineteenth century. The only significant population remaining was the herd in the Olympic Mountains. In 1905, the Washington state legislature passed a law that prohibited the hunting of these elk or any other remnant populations in the state for twenty years. Washington state sportsmen's clubs generally supported the moratorium on elk hunting, and wanted to use this period to make numerous transplants of elk from Yellowstone National Park.

In 1911, Superintendent Hall recommended that some Yellowstone elk be released in Mount Rainier National Park, because "it is believed that elk would thrive in the park." [103] The Washington Game Protective and Propagation Association supported the proposal and Washington's Senator Stanton Warburton soon raised the issue with the Department of the Interior. Governor Ernest Lister and the Elks Club of Tacoma endorsed the proposal, too, expressing the opinion that it would be "eminently proper" for the Department of the Interior "to transfer its surplus herds from one National Park to another." [104]

Some wildlife conservationists urged caution in making transplants of game, claiming that many species were being introduced into areas outside of their original range. They objected that sportsmen's clubs were sponsoring transplants without doing the necessary historical research into whether the transplanted animals had formerly existed in the area. They insisted that regional variations in a game animal like the elk constituted separate speciation, and that bringing closely related species together through haphazard restocking programs would lead to hybridization, or even degeneracy.

One such controversy revolved around the Roosevelt and Rocky Mountain elk. The Roosevelt elk, named after Theodore Roosevelt by the noted taxonomist C. Hart Merriam, was larger and stockier than the Rocky Mountain variety, and it had narrower antlers. [105] When Superintendent Hall proposed that Yellowstone elk be used to restock Mount Rainier National Park, he probably had no idea whether this variety of elk was actually native to the park and did not himself think it was important. At the time, scientific understanding of the Roosevelt elk was sketchy. Asked by the Secretary of the Interior for an opinion on the speciation of elk in Washington state, the Bureau of the Biological Survey averred that the Roosevelt elk was a separate species from the Rocky Mountain elk and that the Roosevelt elk's former range extended along the coastal mountain ranges from British Columbia to northern California. Therefore, it advised the Secretary of the Interior that no transplants of Rocky Mountain elk from Yellowstone National Park should be made west of the Cascade Mountains. [106]

Ironically, by the time the Bureau of the Biological Survey rendered this opinion, the first shipment of Yellowstone elk to Washington state had already been completed; some elk were released in the national forest near the town of Sultan, in Snohomish County, north of Mount Rainier. Moreover, two additional shipments of Yellowstone elk arrived at North Bend and Enumclaw, in King County on January 1, 1913, after the Biological Survey had gone on record against any more transplants of Rocky Mountain elk in the area. By the time the Department of the Interior's chief clerk, Clement S. Ucker, conveyed the Biological Survey's opinion to the Secretary of Agriculture, however, these animals had already been released in the national forest. The elk in the latter shipment were released on Grass Mountain, north of Mount Rainier National Park. [107] Still more transplants were made on the east side of the Cascade Range in 1914 and 1915. These elk were released on Bethel Ridge, west of Yakima. [108] In 1914, park officials observed a small elk herd in the east central portion of the park. The sighting was "unusual," according to Superintendent Ethan Allen, but he did not comment on whether the elk were thought to be native or reintroduced animals. [109]

The Biological Survey's opinion did come in time to kill the proposal to transplant a herd of about forty Yellowstone elk directly inside Mount Rainier National Park. Both the American Game Protective and Propagation Association and the Biological Survey recommended that the plan should be modified such that the restocking of former elk range in Mount Rainier National Park should be done with Roosevelt elk captured in the Olympic Mountains. [110] Secretary of Agriculture James Wilson concurred. [111] Unfortunately, the Olympic elk were much less accessible and subject to capture than the Yellowstone elk. For the time being, the plan was abandoned.

Nevertheless, the attempt by officials in the Biological Survey and the Department of the Interior to preserve the genetic purity of western Washington's elk held some definite implications for national park wildlife policy. It implied first of all, that if biological and historical data were to have a bearing on wildlife preservation efforts anywhere, it should influence wildlife policy in national parks. National parks were not to serve simply as game farms; rather, they would preserve wildlife in a condition that had occurred in the past. Thus, the controversy over the elk transplant represented an early movement toward a new definition of what was entailed in preserving national parks in a "natural condition." Secondly, the controversy highlighted the fact that when natural resource policy in national parks and forests diverged, political boundaries would not always succeed in protecting the park from environmental changes occurring around it.