Crow's Range: An Environmental History Of The Sierra Nevada

4: Establishing Resource Management, 1905-1945

Loggers and felled sequoia, 1880s. Courtesy National Park Service Archives of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks Skeleton of the Mother of the Forest Tree, Calaveras County, after the bark had been stripped for exhibition. The metal frame indicates the tree’s former girth. From Edward Vischer, Vischer’s Pictorial of California. Courtesy California History Room, California State Library, Sacramento Cutting down the Mark Twain Tree, Tulare County. C. C. Curtis photograph. Courtesy California History Room, California State Library, Sacramento (opposite, top) A sequoia being cut by park officials near the Grant Forest facilities. It was leaning and considered a threat to the lodge and public visiting the park. Courtesy National Park Service Archives of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks (opposite, bottom) Ponderosa pine forest, Kern Canyon, seven miles south of Soda Springs. The openness of the forest reflects the effects of heavy grazing. Photograph by Mary Austin. Reproduced by permission A band of sheep grazing in Tuolumne Meadows. Courtesy Yosemite National Park Research Library Mountain lions shot as part of the predator-control efforts in Sequoia National Park. Courtesy National Park Service Archives of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks Map of National Parks and Forests of the Sierra Nevada The author inspects a carving of “Jani” at Perazzo Meadows near Truckee. For many years, hundreds of Basque herders oversaw millions of sheep grazing throughout the Sierra Nevada and the Great Basin. Some of them recorded their presence and experiences in tree carvings like the ones in this photograph. “Jani” was apparently an itinerant prostitute known to many herders during the late 1920s and 1930s. The herder who carved this portrait left similar portraits of her in several aspen groves in the northern Sierra. Photo courtesy Michael P. Claytor : Establishing Resource Management, – The role of the federal government as manager of public lands is an established idea today, even if the details of how those lands are managed remain subject to conflict. There is no one living who remembers the time when something called the Government Land Office parceled out federal land in the West under the provisions of the Homestead, Timber Culture, or Desert Land Acts. “Doing a land office business” is a phrase from the past that some still use, but its meaning has become separated from the practices that led to its coining. That era’s version of “corporate welfare” is over. Railroads no longer get gargantuan land grants for free. Timber companies and ranchers cannot use fraudulent filings under swamplands or flooded lands acts to enrich themselves at the public expense and acquire landed empires. At the beginning of the last decade of the nineteenth century, federal law created Yosemite, Sequoia , and General Grant National Parks. The passage of the Forest Reserve and Forest Management Acts of the s started a national forest policy that included Sierran forestlands. Even though conflicts over these public lands in the Sierra continued in the years that followed, the nation generally remained on a path of public management in the Sierra Nevada that has stood the test of time.1 Many historians have written about the politics of public land use during those years, and certainly the creation of the United States Forest and Park Services and the roles played by California and municipal agencies established after  are important topics. But there is something missing from many of those past accounts. Few examine how new public policy that came with those agencies altered the Sierran environment and affected its wildlife and forests. Public management left behind a record of activities and contemporary ideas about the uses of Sierran lands. Unintentionally, the new agencies provided successive baselines or inventories of species as part of their activities, even as new policies reshaped public lands. They also interacted with some private interests, such as railroad logging companies, in cutting most of the range’s most ancient trees in the Tahoe Basin and in lower-elevation west-side areas. New public agencies interacted with the Sierra Nevada just as glaciers, fire, and past human generations did. John Muir unfortunately was right in  when, in an address to the 118 Crow’s Range Sierra Club, he said: “The battle we have fought, and are still fighting, for the forests is a part of the eternal conflict between right and wrong, and we cannot...