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Chapter 8:
STEHEKIN: LAND OF FREEDOM AND WANT
Lake Chelan National Recreation Area (NRA) presented park managers with problems similar to those in Ross Lake National Recreation Area and the issues surrounding Seattle City Light's operations. They faced the challenge of managing a recreation area where the underlying question was whether or not the protection of natural values should take precedence over existing uses. At the center of Lake Chelan NRA's management, however, was something far different from a hydroelectric project. The focus here was the community of Stehekin, consisting of a vocal group of some ninety year-round residents who have captured the attention and time of Park Service staff.
The Park Service's management of the Stehekin Valley has been complicated by its classification as a national recreation area (many, including agency officials, have contended it should have been a national park) and its accompanying legislation and congressional documents. Equally important in complicating the valley's management has been Stehekin's image and its history as a place removed from the currents of modern America. Popular views of Stehekin suggest that it represents a place where America's pioneer past still exists, and this existence has had, and continues to have, a powerful hold on the imagination. Real or imagined, the frontier lifestyle of a self-sufficient, self-reliant people evokes passionate and often contrary opinions from individuals from all walks of life about how this place should be protected. Given the spirited individualism of residents and the values visitors find in the valley's isolated setting and remarkable scenery, there has been little popular consensus about the area's management, and thus the course taken by the Park Service naturally has been rocky.
One way to think of the Park Service's management issues in Stehekin is to frame them within the paradox that characterizes much of the history of the American West, the paradox of freedom and want. That is, Americans derived their sense of identity, their sense of being unrestrained and free, from the West's landscape of bountiful nature, a landscape where nature seems forever pristine and new and wears a powerfully attractive image. This condition of free land, open spaces, and natural wealth and beauty nurtured the myth of the American West. But at the other end of this state of mind was the fact that westerners came to dominate the natural world through technology, something they believed was a positive force, enabling them to extract minerals, build irrigation systems and dams, cut forests, and make other improvements for profits and livelihoods. The problem, of course, was that one came at the expense of the other; nature, restrained and altered by technology, could not offer a sense of freedom. [1]
This paradox, these opposing dreams, helps to understand the history of Stehekin, a microcosm of the western condition. At the turn of the century, the valley's impressive natural scenery and apparent wealth attracted the area's first miners and homesteaders and others who, more often with a greater margin of failure than success, pursued their visions of prosperity and new beginnings. Moreover, there is another element to this paradox that adds some insight to Stehekin and the Park Service's presence: the role the federal government played in fostering -- and later protecting -- this sense of freedom through the ownership of property. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, the federal government distributed the public lands to Americans using a number of land laws. Soon after, however, when land speculation and resource depletion demonstrated the shortcomings of the agrarian ideal, the federal government closed the public domain to settlement. It then began to manage the nation's remaining public lands, with the rise of the conservation, as a kind of national commons -- forest reserves (national forests) and national parks being the most predominant areas. [2]
Federal land management not only regulated the use of the nation's forests and preserved the country's natural wonders, but it also helped maintain the feeling of freedom that westerners, residents of the Stehekin Valley included, derived from owning, and to a large extent, earning their living from their own land. For it was often the case that these lands were nested in, or were close to, federal lands. By protecting and managing the use of national forests surrounding private lands, such as those in Stehekin, the federal government helped perpetuate the ideal of self-reliance. The Forest Service, for example, prevented the wanton exploitation of the forests of the northern Cascades for commercial purposes that could have degraded the quality of life for Stehekin residents. In the meantime, residents were able to use these same forests, in accordance with regulations, for such things as grazing livestock or harvesting timber for their own subsistence. Paradoxically, the sense of freedom and individualism in places like Stehekin was to a large degree dependent upon a federal presence, a presence that has simultaneously engendered a hatred or dislike of the federal government because it represents a threat to the very sense of independence it has helped create. Generally speaking, westerners wanted the services and assistance provided by federal land management agencies, but they chafed at the limits to their liberty posed by the federal government.
http://www.nps.gov/noca/adhi-8.htm