VI. Steps Leading Toward Establishment of Crater Lake National Park

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M. The National Forest Commission Visits Crater Lake

While this widely publicized visit and the ensuing accounts of the lake in scholarly periodicals attracted more attention than any previous scientific studies, it would still require tireless, concentrated effort to fulfill Will Steel's dream of making Crater Lake a national park. Supporting his cause were an increasing number of Americans concerned over the misuse and squandering of the country's natural resources who clamored for a policy favoring federal control to protect for future generations our timber, water, and arable land. The realization was dawning that natural resources were not inexhaustible and that the federal government should protect the public interest by regulating the preservation and use of resources, especially those on federally owned lands. In the summer of 1896 the National Academy of Sciences, determined to take steps to bring about the end of the wasteful misuse of forests under federal ownership, asked the Department of the Interior for a report on whether forestry management of public lands would be desirable. At the request of the secretary of the interior, a National Forest Commission set out on an expedition to examine the forests on the public lands of the West. Composed of top scientists and conservationists, the commission would make conservation history and its observations prove valuable for the future of Crater Lake.

John Muir met the group in Chicago and joined others such as botanist Charles Sprague Sargent, Henry L. Abbott of the Army Corps of Engineers, and Gifford Pinchot, first American to become a professional forester, in their thorough investigation of the forests of the Pacific Northwest and the Pacific slope. During this trip they visited Crater Lake. Although not able to deny its fascination, they concentrated their writings on scientific descriptions of the caldera and its surrounding trees and wildlife rather than on the poetical word pictures that previous observers had been wont to indulge in. Of this general section of the Cascade Range they commented:

Thence we turned southward and examined the great Cascade Mountain Forest Reserve, going up through it by Klamath Lake to Crater Lake on the summit of the range, and down by way of the Rogue River Valley, noting its marvellous wealth of lodge-pole pine, yellow pine, sugar-pine, mountain-pine, Sitka spruce, incense-cedar, noble silver-fir, and pure forests of the Paton hemlock--the most graceful of evergreens, but, like all the dry woods everywhere, horribly blackened and devastated by devilish fires. [25]

The committee's final recommendations covered several points: the immediate withdrawal from entry and sale of all forest-bearing lands still left in government possession; military control of these lands until a forest bureau could be established in the Department of the Interior to protect the reserves; the establishment and implementation of a practical forest management system; the creation of thirteen new forest reservations in eight western states; the repeal or modification of timber and mining laws leading to fraud on public forest lands; scientific management of federal forests; and establishment of two new national parks--Grand Canyon in Arizona and Mount Rainier in Washington. The report opened the way for the founding of the United States Forest Service and for an enlargement of the national park system. A more important result for Crater Lake would be establishment of the Umpqua, Rogue River, and Winema national forests, an action further protecting the approaches to the future national park.

Before leaving office, President Cleveland established the new forest reserves by an executive order of February 1897, but they went unprotected for a year because of an effort by Congress to appease militant western lobbyists by suspending the effect of the order until March 1898, thereby opening the lands to "settlement." John Muir, in one of his articles, praises the reservation system and satirizes the reaction of vested interests on hearing of President Cleveland's establishment of these new reserves:

All our precious mountains, with their stores of timber and grass, silver and gold, fertile valleys and streams--all the natural resources of our great growing States are set aside from use, smothered up in mere pleasure-grounds for wild beasts and a set of sick, rich, dawdling sentimentalists. For this purpose business is blocked and every current of industry dammed. Will our people stand this? [27]

By a close vote in March 1898 Congress determined that the people would stand for this. The national forest reservation system was saved, and the new reservations were again closed to public entry. The forest commission s proposal for establishment of a Bureau of Forestry was not acted upon, however, and the new reserves were left in the charge of the General Land Office of the Department of the Interior until 1905, when they were transferred to the new Forest Service in the Department of Agriculture. Another suggestion of the commission was acted upon in 1899 when the sixth national park, Mount Rainier, was designated.