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139 Introduction: I’d A Darnedsight Rather Go Fishing Carhart once wrote: “And sometimes I wonder why in the devil I’m driven to be three men: landscape architect, greenhouse executive and key pounder! I’d a darnedsight rather go fishing!”2 Conservation advocacy was an important part of Carhart’s key pounding. He was beginning to see that the writing skills he had developed while in the Forest Service might not only serve the cause of conservation but could also contribute to his goal of making enough money to buy a brick house in Park Hill and to open a greenhouse in Cañon City. While Chapter 9 examines Carhart’s development as a writer through the end of the 1920s, this chapter looks at his conservation advocacy, his work as a landscape architect, and the Carhart/Van Sickle family business venture—the Colorado Floral Company. These aspects of his life spread into each other as he rode the perilous riptides of the 1920s to financial and professional success. At the end of the 1920s all the tides receded at once, and Carhart learned the old That Threadbare Theory “Leave Nature Alone” I guess I told you once what Stahl said to me one day when talking of the Superior and our work for it. He said, “Well, if I had to do this over again I don’t think I’d play with you fellows at all. I think I’d tell you to go to hell.” And then went on to read me a bitter lecture on my near “treachery” because I wrote you the menace to the Superior in confidence two months before the time I resigned from the Service. In other words, should have “stood hitched” and as that was one thing which I would not do I deemed it best to get out where I could be an entirely free agent, stating my views as I saw them. —Carhart to Paul Riis, 19261 C h ap t e r e i g h t That Threadbare Theory “Leave Nature Alone” 140 saw about being careful what you wish for. He got to “go fishing,” embarking on the phase of his career during which he became America’s premier outdoors writer. However bitter he might have been at times about the Forest Service, Carhart almost always tried to imagine a better agency. He was less sanguine about the Bureau of Biological Survey (BBS), notwithstanding his friendship with BBS employees Olaus Murie, Stanley P. Young, and Howard Zahniser. Like Aldo Leopold and Olaus Murie, Carhart remained ambivalent about predators, especially the wolf. He knew firsthand that wolves still roamed the Boundary Waters area in the 1920s and 1930s. But he learned to dislike the methods of the wolfers—especially the use of poison, which he attacked in Sports Afield in 1929.3 Carhart also knew anti-predator grazing interests wielded great power in both the BBS and the Forest Service. As a Coloradoan, he was all too familiar with the power of local congressman Edward Taylor, whose 1934 Taylor Grazing Act not only signaled the closing of the frontier but also delivered the open range to ranchers who quickly claimed that predator-free public lands grazing was a right rather than a privilege. This was the sort of special interest favoritism Carhart despised, whether the beneficiaries were tourists or ranchers or sportsmen or loggers. He thought public lands ought to be for the public good. Boundary Waters: To Hell with Carhart and His Comical Ideas If readers today retain any image of Arthur Carhart, they know the classic Boundary Waters photo of 1921, showing a handsome young man about to embark on a canoe trip, delightedly hefting an eighty-pound muslin bag of food stuffed into a Zenith backpack. This is the photo the Forest Service used to promote its Arthur Carhart National Wilderness Training Center in Missoula, Montana.4 Carhart did not meet Paul Riis in person until he had left the Forest Service, but on his 1921 trip he did encounter Sigurd Olson and Will Dilg. Carhart already knew Dilg from Denver, where Dilg had helped connect him to Outdoor Life magazine, which later published many of Carhart’s conservation -oriented fishing and hunting articles. Dilg was also organizing the Izaak Walton League of America,5 and he was looking for a crusader’s cause to spark his efforts. He found it in the Superior National Forest, where he had a powerful ally in...

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