It is interesting to note that Commissioner Steel, who had begun the campaign to add the Diamond Lake region to the park in 1914, opposed the extension in August 1926. Writing to the President’s Coordinating Committee on August 3 Steel provided the rationale for his change of mind:
About ten or twelve years ago, while 1 was superintendent of the Crater Lake National Park, I started a movement to extend the boundaries of the park, so as to take in Diamond lake, but since then my mind has changed, for I have come to realize it is not for the best interests of the park.
Diamond lake is a beautiful sheet of water, similar to hundreds of others throughout the country, with no national features, but very dear to local residents, who love to camp there during the Summer, together with their families and enjoy a relief from business cares, in the mountain wilds. It is exclusively local in character and should be left free of such restraints as go with a great national attraction, which it is not. It has no interests in common with Crater Lake and the two should not be combined.
In a spirit of local pride certain citizens of Southern Oregon have invested money in its development in good faith, under a concession of the Agricultural Department, trusting in the honesty of that branch of the government, and suspicious of the Park Service, because of the fact that the only man on earth who was willing to invest his own money at Crater Lake, was dispossessed of his concession, which was given to others, no better able to make good than he.
The inclusion of Diamond Lake in the Crater Lake National Park, means an immense increase of fire hazard, because of the vast area of dead and down timber, to which there is no offset in benefits. . . .
If an addition is desired to the park of real benefit, the Western line should be extended, so as to protect deer that move down in that direction, just in time to be slaughtered by hunters in the Fall. [77]
Park boundary extensions again became a political issue in April 1932 when Superintendent Solinsky recommended that approximately 400 square miles of Forest Service lands be added to Crater Lake. This extension included not only the Diamond Lake-Mount Thielson-Mount Bailey region but also the Upper Rogue River Valley and Union Creek area west of the park. Prior to this time nothing as large as Solinsky’s recommendation for the Union Creek extension had ever been contemplated. The opposition of the Forest Service, which viewed the proposed westward extension as a “land grab,” and the combined opposition of that agency and various private and commercial interests in the Diamond Lake area doomed the proposal to defeat. [78]
In March 1936 Acting NPS Director Arthur E. Demaray revealed several heretofore unspecified reasons for the continuing interest of Park Service officials in Diamond Lake. Among other things he observed:
Diamond Lake has always been considered essential to the Crater Lake unit. Its inclusion within the park was advocated and sponsored by organizations throughout Oregon as early as 1915, but the Forest Service defeated the project and the Lake was promptly developed as a summer home and recreational area. Since that time we have been forced to concentrate more developments at Crater Lake than we consider appropriate or desirable.
Because of the high altitude of Crater Lake it has been necessary to establish both a summer and a winter headquarters for the park. We did not advocate the inclusion of Diamond Lake as a competing and detracting exhibit; we advocated it for the protection of Crater Lake, so that Crater Lake would not be marred by overdevelopment. It might be said that Diamond Lake could perform that function in the national forest just as well as it could if it were in the park. Theoretically, that sounds fine, but the simple facts are that Diamond Lake has never been developed to take care of the Crater Lake visitors and it does not perform that function. It has been given over to a different type of land use.
Demaray concluded, however, that the question of the extension, while a worthy conservation cause, had become so misrepresented by various interest groups that it had “almost assumed the reputation of the Bad Man from Bodie.” [79]
