The Fight to Save the Redwoods: A History of the Environmental Reform, 1917–1978

1. Progressives and Scenic Preservation

1 Progressives and Scenic Preservation ON AN August afternoon in 1917, three men drove north from San Francisco in search of "a forest wall reported to have mystery and charm unique among living works of creation." Madison Grant, Henry Fairfield Osborn, and John Campbell Merriam left from the Russian River in Sonoma County to camp in the northern redwoods, made accessible that year by a new highway. The trio had first swung west to the Pacific Ocean and followed the coastline to Fort Bragg. Below Shelter Cove they crossed inland over low coastal mountains and descended into the valley of the South Fork of the Eel River. They turned north on the dusty new highway as it followed the South Fork over hilly, wooded terrain. Merriam said of this stretch, "Dark masses of fir gave place now and then to redwood, or a patch of ripened grass-land rested like a golden brooch in the deep green velvet of the forest."1 Soon they were in dense forest. A few miles above the junction of the South Fork and the main Eel River, they turned south into the valley of Bull Creek. They left the highway and "dropped down a steep slope into primeval redwood timber," their car quietly rolling over the "leafy carpet." Merriam recalled how the three proceeded on foot, as the "shade deepened into twilight." Between close-set trunks, they looked as if "through windows framed in shadow, often darkening till all detail disappeared."2 Their dismay that none of the groves they would visit were in public ownership grew as sounds of logging filtered into their camp. They resolved to rescue Bull Creek.3 Their decision can only be fully understood in the context of these scientists' lives, the trees' unique character, and the emergence of the preservation movement. 3 4 THE FIGHT TO SAVE THE REDWOODS A distinguished-looking, middle-aged New York patrician of "strong impulse," Madison Grant was the product of eastern prep schools and colleges. Trained as a lawyer, he had inherited wealth that allowed him to be an amateur natural scientist and to help found the New York Zoological Society, the American Bison Society, and the Boone and Crockett Club. The second edition of his popular book The Passing of the Great Race had recently come off the press. In it he predicted the extinction of the Nordic race through interbreeding with what he saw as inferior stock.4 Figure I.,Redwoods in the Eel River area, the Devil's Elbow Curve, June, 1919, The recently graded Highway 101 as it wound through the redwoods near the Eel River, Photo by Edward Ayer, From the Edward Ayer Collection. Courtesy of the Save-theRedwoods League. Educated under Thomas Henry Huxley in London and Francis Balfour at Cambridge, Henry Fairfield Osborn had returned to teach at Columbia University in 1880 as a young comparative anatomist. PROGRESSIVES AND SCENIC PRESERVATION 5 In 1917 he was sixty; by then, as curator and collector, he had made the New York Museum of Natural History a great repository of fossils and pioneered the use of lifelike fossil displays. His books and articles popularized Darwinian theories of evolution, from their paleontological evidences to their religious implications.5 John Campbell Merriam had attended a small Presbyterian college in his home state of Iowa, after which he took his doctorate in paleontology at the University of Munich. In the mid-1890s he began teaching at the Berkeley campus of the University of California and spent the next years uncovering traces of the Pacific Coast's prehistoric past.6 By 1917 he had related western invertebrate and paleobotanical evidence to a stratified geologic column. This enabled him to place the natural history of the West Coast within the world pattern of evolution.7 As he aged, however, Merriam thought increasingly about the philosophic import of Darwinian evolution.8 He was a sober man who in 1917 was simultaneously involved in the defense work of World War I and in efforts to establish international understanding. This summer venture was a brief retreat from worldly cares into a forest of beauty and evolutionary significance. Although in 1917 much remained to be learned about the redwoods, the United States Forest Service had confirmed the tree's longevity, now known to be as much as two thousand years. It was, however, the history of the species that interested scientists. Fifty million years earlier...