Curious about logging and preservation of our local forests? I recommend T.H. Watkins’ Righteous Pilgrim: The Life and Times of Harold L. Ickes, 1874-1952, which traces the origins of declining forests on the Olympic Peninsula over 100 years.
Gifford Pinchot, U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt’s head of the U.S. Forest Service, had a life-long rivalry with Ickes, both men having emerged from the party’s progressive wing. In 1937 Pinchot attacked Ickes, and by implication his boss Franklin D. Roosevelt, for betraying the conservation movement. Ickes struck back, and the centerpiece of their brawl was the scope of the Olympic National Park.
In 1897, President Grover Cleveland established a 2.18-million-acre forest reserve on the Olympic Peninsula. Curiously, a driving force behind this act was the killing of Olympic elk, frequently for the animals’ teeth which were used as talismans by the fraternal organization of the Benevolent and Protective order of Elk. The alleged elk slaughter was again used by President Theodore Roosevelt to establish Mt. Olympus National Monument on 620,000 acres of Cleveland’s original reserve, and to ban hunting as well as logging.
An interesting boondoggle was initiated by the U.S. Forest Service in 1915, ever since rare deposits of manganese were found near the Olympic Peninsula’s center. With the probability of war in Europe growing, President Woodrow Wilson removed the monument’s 292,000 acres of so-called “manganese lands.” However, no significant deposits of manganese were ever found. Instead, this suddenly-available land was raided by the timber industry for Douglas fir, spruce, and western red cedar. A conservationist at that time noted that as a result, “the Forest Service took all the meat and left the bones for the public.”
In 1933 the Washington State Game Commission allowed a four-day elk hunt in the Olympic National Forest. Most of the kills were big bulls, severely depleting the future strength of the herd. Conservationists expressed outrage. The result was a Park Service report recommending that the Olympic National Monument be expanded. Congressman and later Governor Mon C. Wallgren seized on the issue and introduced legislation to expand the park for public use.
Opposition, like the later spotted owl controversy, came from the Forest Service and towns and organizations dependent on the timber industry. Secretary of the Interior Ickes and Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace (with the Forest Service under his authority) began a jurisdictional dispute over which of their departments should determine the Olympic Peninsula’s future. Several bills in Congress to expand or limit the size of Olympic National Monument became their battleground.
The impasse was overcome as a result of FDR’s 1937 visit to the Peninsula. He showed his hand during a speech in Port Angeles in which he proclaimed: “I think you can count on my help in getting that National Park.” Later, while driving through the National Forest and spotting an old clear-cut area that had not recovered, FDR said: “I hope the (SOB) who logged that is roasting in hell.”
Roosevelt ultimately backed Wallgren’s revised bill, as did Ickes, and Henry Wallace backed down. On June 16, 1938 a bill was passed to establish an Olympic National Park of 648,000 acres while giving the president authority to add up to 250,292 more acres. Hikers around their campfires have a lot of public officials to toast.
During a later visit to the Olympic Peninsula, Harold Ickes wrote in his diary: “It is truly a wonderland of nature, and it is more than I can understand how people who pretend to be interested in conservation could be opposed to its creation into a national park.”
