| North Cascades |
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Chapter 1:
CONTESTED TERRAIN: THE ESTABLISHMENT OF
NORTH CASCADES NATIONAL PARK
At the turn of the century, the North Cascades were an undiscovered country for most Americans. While the range's wild, alpine grandeur inspired explorers and tourists, often with no small measure of terror, its steep terrain and severe climate limited their access and thus few voices called for its preservation. Material progress, the hallmark of nineteenth-century America, was the order of the day. Yet the range's stingy environment prevented developments in overland travel, whether in the establishment of trails, wagon roads, or railroad routes. It also restricted commercial ventures. Although the range's western drainages were densely forested, its steep-sided valleys proved difficult to log, and transporting timber out of the remote range down its narrow canyons and swift rivers was equally difficult and costly. Similarly, the climate and terrain precluded extensive agriculture and limited ranching opportunities. The most promising economic ventures were in mining, especially with the excitement surrounding the Klondike strikes in the late 1890s when prospectors flooded the range's major drainages in search of precious metals. Yet, while mining was active in the various districts on the Skagit, Cascade, and Stehekin rivers, it never turned into a large-scale enterprise. The range's desired storehouse of minerals never adequately offset costs for, and problems with, transportation, access, short working seasons, inclement weather, and a lack of capital. Although large companies took over the operations with the greatest potential, these, too, eventually subsided at the turn of the century when prices dropped and capital evaporated. [1]
Around this same time, homesteaders gradually moved into the range's major watersheds, following the miners. Small settlements, such as Marblemount on the Skagit and Stehekin at the head of Lake Chelan, grew as supply centers for the mines in the mountainous interior. Homesteaders managed to make a meager living, raising crops and livestock for a local market. They often supplemented their income by packing in mining supplies, by offering their cabins as hostelries, by trapping, and by working outside of the mountains part of the year. Nevertheless, this hard life took its toll; only a relative handful of homesteaders proved up on their claims. Thus much of the land in the North Cascades remained in the public domain by the turn of the century. [2]
Some settlers and entrepreneurs, however, envisioned that the economic future of the region lay not in timber, agriculture, livestock, or mining but in tourism. They did not advocate just any brand of tasteless entertainment, but tourism based on a close and somewhat comfortable encounter with nature. By the turn of the century, some had seized the opportunity to provide more elaborate accommodations for lodging, such as the elegant Field Hotel at the head of Lake Chelan, to cater to the tourists and travelers who at first shared space with, and later outnumbered, miners making their way to this impressive mountain district. The period's upper-class tourists were drawn to the spectacular scenery of mountains, forests, lakes, rivers, and waterfalls; they also wanted to experience the region's renowned fishing and hunting, and climb and explore its peaks, alpine meadows, and valleys by foot or horseback. [3] Their presence here also represented a growing interest in outdoor recreation and mirrored a national "back to nature" movement at the turn of the century when more Americans, faced with a new, urban-industrial society, sought relief for the body and soul in closer contact with wild lands. [4]
Of all the areas in the North Cascades, the Stehekin River Valley at the head of Lake Chelan achieved the greatest popularity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In part, relatively easy access contributed to its popularity. In the 1880s and 1890s, tourists could reach Stehekin by a "civilized" route, which included a train to Wenatchee, a steamboat up the Columbia River to Chelan Falls, a stage up to the town of Chelan, and finally a day-long excursion aboard a comfortable steamer up the fifty-five mile Lake Chelan. More important, the valley offered tourists the sublime and picturesque scenery they so valued. A mysterious and secluded world awaited them at the head of the lake where perpendicular peaks, capped in snow and ice, rose from the shore to heights just under 9,000 feet, towering some 7,000 feet above the level of the lake. Here was scenery, they thought, greater than Switzerland's. [5]
Not surprisingly, early proposals for a national park in the North Cascades focused primarily on the Lake Chelan country. This impressive fjord-like lake and backdrop of high, glacier-chiseled mountains inspired local residents and tourists with its scenic grandeur. This alone, they suggested, warranted turning the northern section of the lake and surrounding high country into a national park similar to Yellowstone, the nation's premier scenic wonder and symbol of the national park idea. At the same time, park advocates believed a park was necessary to curb the "encroachments of civilization...already marring the beauties of nature," and the wanton destruction of "the immense game preserves," namely the cherished populations of elk, deer, and mountain goats. They attributed these problems to increased settlement and visiting trophy hunters staying at several lake hotels. A national park, then, would meet the needs of protection and tourism, and save for the nation a superb example of mountain scenery of "a more varied, beautiful and artistic nature" than is found elsewhere in the "picturesque Northwest." [6]
These were the issues at stake in 1892 when a group of central Washington citizens issued the first proposal to establish a national park for Lake Chelan. Commercial interests in the region, however, did not share the group's opinion. Local boosters represented by Chelan land developer L.H. Woodin, for example, railed against the notion of a national park. Echoing traditional western sentiments, Woodin argued that a park would restrict unfairly an individual's right to use land for his own commercial gain. Woodin's opinions reflected the idea that the public domain was an American birthright -- the right to an abundant supply of free or cheap land. And since most of Lake Chelan and adjacent country was still in the public domain, it represented a resource hinterland for present and future growth. Ironically, he asserted that both the lake country's scenery and natural resources were imperative for future growth because both attracted settlers. Chelan townspeople, therefore, wanted the lake "for business and pleasure." Let the laws of the young Washington State protect the wildlife; neither scenery nor wildlife merited restriction from unfettered use. Thus, Woodin emphatically urged readers to "answer decisively, No!" to the park petition. [7]
The park petition died, lacking support in face of material arguments, but this early exchange would be repeated often whenever the park idea was raised for the northern Cascades. At the heart of the dispute was the schism between preservation and conservation which emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By the 1890s, it was clear that national expansion, with its combined faith in individualism, the market economy, and natural abundance, had depleted large tracts of the nation's "inexhaustible" natural resources. Rising up in response, the conservation movement espoused Progressive era beliefs in efficiency and scientific management of resources as articulated by Theodore Roosevelt's administration and the nation's first scientifically trained forester, Gifford Pinchot. Pinchot, who helped found the U.S. Forest Service in 1905, preached the doctrine of wise use of resources through federal management. His agency came to embody not only this principle but also promoted the concept of managed use as the most effective cure for eliminating wasteful grazing or logging practices, for example, and ensuring that natural resources on all public lands would produce the maximum amount of crops or services for generations to come. But conservation was complex. While Roosevelt and Pinchot found answers to resource problems in the Progressive era's faith in science and regulated use, others, like the naturalist John Muir, supported conservation in order to preserve the last tracts of unmodified nature as America transformed into a more urban-industrial society; wilderness would act as a balm for the ills of modern civilization. [8]
n the North Cascades, as elsewhere in the country, the complexity of the conservation movement seemed naturally to lead to a disagreement over what the proper course was to pursue, for conservation meant different things to different people. The fragile fusion of conservation and preservation interests exploded with the proposal to dam Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park, an episode that symbolized the strength of utilitarian arguments, with their pragmatic and rational emphasis on conservation as a form of wise development. As Pinchot liked to say, "Wilderness is waste," dismissing aesthetic notions of conservation held by Muir as "sentimental." Muir's views, after all, reflected the period's antimodern strain of thought; they were romantic, expressed a longing for the passing frontier that, in turn, fostered an appreciation of the nation's remaining wilderness and led to the protection of some of its most wondrous regions. To Muir, nature offered spiritual renewal; it was the embodiment of the divine spirit, harmonious, and a source of inspiration. It should be revered, not subdued by the new industrial age's machinery and lust for progress. [9]
The idea of a national park in Washington's northern Cascades confronted this division between utilitarian and preservation interests, but the lines between the two were not so clearly drawn. Advocates of a Lake Chelan national park, as well as many scenic preservationists, shared some of Muir's convictions. Like Muir, they promoted parks as places that would benefit national health in a modern society. Moreover, by saving "one of the most picturesque spots in America," they were arguing that national parks were a source of national pride. The national park idea, as historian Alfred Runte asserts, was born out of "cultural nationalism," the concern that nineteenth-century Americans felt for their country's lack of cultural attainments when compared with those of Europe. In their minds, the ageless wonders of the American West -- its time-hewn canyons, ancient trees, and towering mountains -- surpassed the Old World's masterpieces of art and architecture. Preserving monumental scenery for cultural ends proved to be a convincing reason for creating national parks, as exemplified by the first parks, Yellowstone (1872) and Yosemite (1890). That these areas were economically worthless also contributed to their protection. But unlike Muir, many park supporters did not see preservation as an end in itself, for they also strongly believed that saving places like Lake Chelan as a national park would promote economic growth. In this respect, the economic argument helped scenic preservationists justify parks and ensure their protection, especially with loss of Hetch Hetchy, by meeting the utilitarian arguments of their opponents. In the years after Hetch Hetchy, they successfully championed parks as economic engines for tourism, as well as places for physical and spiritual well-being. Parks, in short, were for people. [10]
Although this justification for parks worked well for the next half-century, the idea of a park in the northern Cascades was nurtured slowly throughout the late 1890s and early 1900s. News of the range's scenic wonders spread through regional newspapers and national magazines with reports about mountaineers, geologists, and adventuresome tourists trekking through the Stehekin country and surrounding mountains, all of whom extolled the range's "primeval grandeur." In 1899, for example, William G. Steel, who championed the cause of Crater Lake National Park, described the Portland Mazamas' climb up Mount Sahale in euphoric prose that bordered on a religious experience: "Each moment we were more and more enraptured of the scene; each moment more helpless to express the deep emotion in our hearts." [11]
With this burst of enthusiasm, another national park proposal surfaced when Canadian-born artist Julian E. Itter proposed that the Lake Chelan country be set aside as a national park in 1906. In January of that year, Itter displayed his paintings of the Lake Chelan country's enchanting natural beauty before a Seattle audience and received wide acclaim. Itter's popularity, in part, demonstrated that an appreciation of wilderness had developed in urban settings. Seattle residents, especially its business leaders and members of the Mountaineers, the city's climbing club, understood the value of natural wonders to the local economy, urban identity, and recreation with the popularity of the recently established Mount Rainier National Park (1899). Buoyed by the reception of his paintings, Itter may have been motivated to propose a national park for Lake Chelan and surrounding mountains some two months later. Striking a familiar theme, the artist promoted a park, similar in size to the 1892 proposal, as a scenic wonder certain to draw tourists to the region, just as Yosemite had done for California. More important, visitors would find that this magnificent country rivaled both Yosemite and Yellowstone in scenic grandeur. [12]
Itter's idea received support from the Mazamas, the Seattle, Spokane, and Wenatchee chambers of commerce, the Chelan Commercial Club, and the "See America First" league, but his whirlwind campaign soon withered when Chelan residents protested the park proposal as an outside threat to the local mining industry -- "the chief source of future wealth for the Chelan country." Ironically, no large-scale mining operations existed, yet park opponents argued persuasively that given the choice between a park and the mining industry they would choose the latter which, once developed, would produce "almost unbounded wealth." [13]
Desperate, perhaps, to appease commercial interests, Itter suggested that the proposed park could accommodate mining, and that a park might even further the development of mining operations by attracting wealthy tourists who would invest in their holdings. When he made this statement, Itter may have been thinking of the mining clause in Mount Rainier's establishing legislation, or he simply believed, as many did at the turn of the century, that the main purpose of a park was the protection of its primary wonders rather than its larger natural values. Nevertheless, Washington's congressional delegation did not believe that such a balance of mining and scenic preservation could be achieved, that ultimately a park would prohibit mining, and that purchasing mining claims would be too costly. Moreover, a parsimonious Congress was averse to creating parks because it did not want to fund their operations; Mount Rainier's meager budgets attested to this. Instead, Congress treated new park propositions as ploys to boost the local tourist economy at the expense of the federal government. Anticipating these problems, the state's congressional representatives sided with Chelan's vocal mining interests and did not introduce legislation. [14]
Though it failed, the 1906 proposal advanced several important elements of the park idea in the northern Cascades. First, for the most part, local interests resisted establishing a national park because they envisioned that the future of their community hinged on the development of the region's natural resources. They placed more faith in a potential mine to produce "unbounded wealth" than they did a national park. Second, Itter's willingness to allow mining and Congress' attitude toward parks pointed up that national parks suffered from the lack of a clear purpose. Until the creation of the National Park Service in 1916, no standards for national parks existed and few people had a clear concept of what a national park was: spa or nature preserve? Even though Yellowstone and Yosemite set the stage for scenic preservation, by the turn of the century the perception that a national park would boost a local economy contributed to the creation of some decidedly inferior parks and thus to Congress' resistance to their establishment. [15]
Third, an important measure of protection had come to the range in recent years. Empowered by one of the most significant pieces of legislation in conservation history, the Forest Reserve Act of 1891, President Grover Cleveland established the Washington Forest Reserve on February 22, 1897, covering some three and a half million acres. Reaching nearly 150 million acres by the early twentieth century, the forest reserves withdrew unclaimed timberlands from the public domain in the American West to protect them from indiscriminate logging practices and for watershed protection. The Washington Forest Reserve embraced both slopes of the North Cascades, including land west of Mount Baker, from the Canadian border south to Lake Chelan, and extended federal control over most of the land which today comprises North Cascades National Park. [16]
While the forest reserve withdrawal assured that the northern Cascades would remain in public ownership, the reserves were poorly funded by Congress and thus poorly managed by the General Land Office within the Department of the Interior. In 1905, Gifford Pinchot successfully campaigned to have the forest reserves transferred to the newly created Forest Service within the Department of Agriculture. Under Pinchot's leadership, the Forest Service fashioned policies of multiple use and sustained yield, which, as noted above, emphasized programs of forest use for present and future production through scientific management. Pinchot demonstrated this commitment two years later when he changed the name of the reserves to national forests to remove any doubt that forests were for use. Reflecting this change, the Chelan and Washington national forests, whose common boundary was the summit of the North Cascades, were carved out of parts of the former Washington Forest Reserve in 1908. Although the Forest Service's management role was mostly custodial, it developed policies to regulate and promote grazing, timber, water-power projects, mining, and recreational developments. All of these, following Pinchot's principles, were to take into account the needs of local industries first. Thus when it came to creating a national park, scenic preservationists would have to contend with opponents from local communities and commercial interests who had found a strong ally in the Forest Service and the tenets of forest management. [17]
The presence of the Forest Service in the northern Cascades, however, did not diminish enthusiasm for establishing a national park out of some or all of this panorama of craggy peaks during the first two decades of this century. By this time, scenic preservation had evolved into a national movement. Influenced by the nation's rapid transformation from a rural to urban-based society, Americans appreciated nature for recreation and self-affirmation. With a tinge of romance, Americans envisioned rural life and the outdoors as an escape from the grimy, crowded, and noisy existence of city life. In addition, marketing scenery proved lucrative to the local tourist economy and was thus an element in defense of protecting scenic wonders, such as national parks. In the years surrounding World War I, the "See America First" movement typified the popularity of scenic preservation. It convinced many Americans with new-found leisure time to seek out the scenic grandeur of the American West, particularly its national parks, by rail and later, with the onset of the automobile revolution, by car. [18]
In the main, preservationists hoped that another park in Washington's Cascade Range would enhance the state's status as a "scenic summer playground" for both residents and tourists. The Spokane Chamber of Commerce, for example, took the lead in promoting Lake Chelan for national park status in 1916, proclaiming that "Another great national park in Washington will simply kindle additional interest in the hearts of Americans to visit the northwest during the summer time and will be a great aid in the entertainment of our rapidly growing army of tourist travelers." Already many national parks had been opened to automobiles, and the designation of the Parks-to-Parks Highway promised to entice more easterners to visit the Northwest. Once developed for tourists, a Lake Chelan national park would be "one of the greatest assets in this state," like Mount Rainier National Park, "to lure travelers to the great American Alps." [19]
The qualifications of the northern Cascades for a national park seemed indisputable. Novelist and national park advocate Mary Roberts Rinehart endorsed the range's park qualities after visiting the Lake Chelan-Glacier Peak country in 1916. "It is superb," she declared, and should be a national park, for there is "no other word for it." [20] Rinehart and other scenic preservationists, however, would be disappointed. No legislation was introduced for a park in the Lake Chelan-Glacier Peak country. In addition, numerous bills were introduced to create a national park around the Mount Baker area between 1916 and 1921, but they failed to secure congressional approval. [21]
It was with a small amount of irony that these park petitions and bills faltered, for the most part, because the National Park Service opposed them. With its creation in 1916, the Park Service set out to administer the system of national parks by bringing order to their chaotic management, setting standards to keep inferior parks out of the system, and strengthening their preservation through national publicity and the development of park roads and tourist accommodations to attract visitors and ensure the parks' political support. The agency's energetic leader, Stephen T. Mather, masterminded this practical mix of business and preservation in order to assure a conservative Congress that his bureau was worth funding; it also enabled him to overcome the opposition of the Forest Service to aesthetic conservation of any kind and the establishment of the Park Service itself.
Standards played an important part in Mather's decision not to pursue a park in Washington's northern Cascades. From the beginning Mather's small bureau was inundated with numerous proposals for new parks, many of them of poor quality, and he had created park standards so that only "areas large enough, primitive enough, and/or unique enough to be national in interest" were added to the system and thereby keeping alive the original national park idea. Based on these new guidelines, Lake Chelan was "just not good enough." On the other hand, the proposed Mount Baker national park, which included Mount Shuksan, was not suitable primarily because its signature features -- a volcanic cone, rugged mountain crest, and immense glacier systems -- too closely resembled "the features of Mount Rainier National Park, which represents the noblest example of this type of scenery." [22]
The fifth national park and Washington's first, Mount Rainier set a precedent for national parks in the Pacific Northwest. In this respect, all new park proposals in the Cascades competed with Mount Rainier's scenic grandeur and its ranking as the range's highest peak. The mountain, hovering above the skyline of the Puget Sound, symbolized the monumentalism at the heart of the national park idea. For this reason, the Park Service was not inclined to consider proposals for solitary peaks in the northern Cascades, such as Mount Baker or Glacier Peak, for fear that the addition of more peaks would diminish the significance of Mount Rainier -- an argument which maverick conservationist Willard Van Name called "indefensible nonsense" concocted by Mather to dodge demands for additional parks. [23] Mount Rainier also established a precedent for the commercial advantages associated with a national park. The nationally renowned peak was coveted by both Seattle and Tacoma as a drawing card for a lucrative tourist business. Bellingham residents, for example, envisioned for Mount Baker a kind of tourist paradise similar to Mount Rainier that only a national park and Park Service management could bring. [24]
There were political reasons as well. The notion of a park in the northern Cascades was opposed by the Forest Service. Since most new parks came from areas of exceptional scenery on national forests, the Park Service grew at the expense of the Forest Service, causing frequent disputes between the bureaus. There conflicts flowed naturally from differing conservation philosophies, the Forest Service representing the principles of utilitarian conservation, the Park Service the principles of scenic preservation. As Mather's biographer keenly noted, "unpleasantness was hard to avoid." Although in time the Park Service would become more aggressive and acquisitive, Mather wanted to maintain friendly relations with the older and more politically powerful Forest Service in his agency's early years. Accordingly, he suspended any investigations of Mount Baker in 1919, honoring an agreement between his agency and the Forest Service to study jointly new park areas which were on national forest lands. [25]
In the Pacific Northwest, Forest Service officials anticipated that some of the most magnificent natural wonders in the northern Cascades, such as the Mount Baker, Lake Chelan, and Glacier Peak regions, would eventually be converted into national parks. They therefore moved to defend the agency's territory. One common argument the agency employed was that park propositions were merely a change in name rather than management. In Mount Baker's case, the Forest Service noted that the proposed park legislation allowed for continued utilitarian management, such as mineral leases, railroad rights of way, water power and irrigation developments, and timber sales. Although some of these uses were eliminated in subsequent bills, the agency interpreted the major thrust of the park proposal as an effort to capitalize on a national park's attraction to tourists and to take advantage of federal appropriations for road construction to open the mountain up to auto tourists. The Forest Service claimed that it could just as easily provide improvements to public campgrounds and implement a road building program as the Park Service. (The Washington National Forest supervisor had in fact presented his own park proposal for the Mount Baker area in 1913.) And thus "the public needs for recreation and pleasure will be quite as well served on the Washington National Forest as they would be on the Baker National Park, and the results could perhaps be obtained much more quickly." [26]
Although somewhat misleading, given the Forest Service's commitment to the commercial management of natural resources, this statement related to another method used to resist the transfer of forest lands to Park Service jurisdiction: recreation. By the 1920s, the park bureau had built a national reputation as the federal agency best-suited to manage areas of exceptional scenery, as well as historic and archaeological features. In the process, it had gained a powerful political constituency, primarily from an urban-based population, because it marketed national parks as wilderness playgrounds at a time when outdoor recreation was experiencing rapid growth. The Forest Service found ways to battle the aggressiveness of its rival agency by claiming its niche in wilderness preservation, something the tourist and development oriented Park Service seemed to overlook. Influenced by the wilderness ideas and advocacy of Aldo Leopold, Arthur Carhart, and Robert Marshall, the Forest Service displayed a budding awareness of aesthetic values in the 1920s with the concept of primitive areas, a classification which set aside forest lands to be managed for their wilderness values. The agency also began to plan more for outdoor recreation which included camping, hunting, fishing, hiking, as well as leasing land for summer homes, hotels, and stores. [27]
By the early 1930s, the Forest Service had prepared recreation plans for all the forests in the northern Cascades, and its new emphasis succeeded in quieting calls for parks when they appeared during this period. In 1926, for example, the service deflected three park proposals. First, when yet another proposal appeared for a Lake Chelan national park, Chelan residents were quick to stress that the Forest Service was providing good protection for the region's scenic beauties, and under these circumstances, they preferred its management to the Park Service's. Second, by that year the Forest Service had accommodated earlier interest in a Mount Baker national park by designating the Mount Baker Park Division, a recreation area of 74,859 acres surrounding the second highest peak in Washington. In addition, the bureau also helped to finance the construction of a road and leased the site for a private lodge at Heather Meadows. And third, when Wenatchee citizens pressed for a national park for Glacier Peak in 1926, they soon changed their proposal in favor of a recreation area managed by the Forest Service. In this way, all interests would be served; Glacier Peak's scenic grandeur would be protected, attract tourists, and keep its natural resources available for commercial development. [28] In 1931, the Forest Service recommended the establishment of the Glacier Peak-Cascade Recreation Area, 233,600 acres which would encompass the peak mostly above timberline. [29] The bureau also extended more permanent protection for wilderness as part of its recreation program. That same year it established the Whatcom Primitive Area (172,800 acres) in the extreme northern portion of the North Cascades east of Mount Baker. In 1935, the service enlarged the area to 801,000 acres; the expanded area, renamed the North Cascades Primitive Area, straddled the spine of the North Cascades -- some of the range's most rugged terrain -- along the Canadian border. [30]
While the Forest Service may have incorporated recreation into its multiple-use doctrine, it wore the preservation mantle reluctantly. Passed in 1929, the regulation creating primitive areas, Regulation L-20, cast doubt on the agency's commitment to wilderness, for it continued to allow road construction, grazing, and logging. The Forest Service, it seemed, was more concerned with wilderness preservation as a way to appease preservationists and fend off Park Service land grabs than as a standard management practice. [31] This became especially clear during the depression of the 1930s, when the New Deal conservation programs placed the Park Service in a position to study a park in the North Cascades for the first time.
http://www.nps.gov/noca/adhi-1.htm