Forest Dreams, Forest Nightmares: The Paradox of Old Growth in the Inland West

Before the Forest Service

Before the Forest Service M any people assume that before whites showed up in the vast open lands of the inland Northwest, the area was a pristine wilderness. Federal foresters had much the same idea: they thought they had come to save wild nature. But the forests and grasslands were not natural, nor were they wild, if by natural and wild we mean free of human management. Indians had bee~ changing those lands for millennia, reshaping them according to their needs and desires. The forests that so pleased the whites were in large part artificial creations.! When the whites saw the open parklands full of yellow pine, they immediately lost their hearts to them. But they hated the fires that swept through the mountains, and usually saw the Indian burning practices as threatening the open forests they loved. They failed to realize that excluding fire would lead to the demise of what they liked most about the forest. To understand why the federal foresters felt they had to intervene to save the forests, we need to understand who preceded them in the Blues-Indians and whites-and how those people perceived the land. Whites came to the Blue Mountains looking for paradise, and what they saw often deceived them into thinking they had found it. They brought their own cultural values and then imposed a web of expectations, needs, and assumptions onto the landscape that awaited them. Whites came in a slow trickle of fur traders that started in 1811, then in a stream of Oregon Trail emigrants and settlers, and finally in a flood of miners, ranchers, and loggers. How they changed the land depended on how they viewed it, and how they viewed it depended on two things: what kind of land they were familiar with, and what commodities they wanted from the 42 BEFORE THE FOREST SERVICE 43 land. They came with assumptions·about the proper relationship between culture and nature, and these assumptions led them to misunderstand the land in different ways. Although the first whites came in 1811, settlement did not begin in most parts of the Blues until the 1870s, and heavy logging began only after the transcontinental railroad reached Baker in 1884. Historians often argue that exploitation of the region was delayed because the area was so isolated.2 But the Blues were anything but isolated for the tribes who lived, hunted, traded, and traveled there. The mountains and grasslands were a meeting ground for diverse cultures and the nexus of trading networks that connected the Plains, Plateau, and Pacific Coast tribes. Yet, because there was no easy access to American and European markets until the transcontinental railroad arrived, the region was indeed at the periphery of what the historians William Robbins and Donald Wolf called the "immense market-induced ecological exchanges" taking place in the post-Columbian world.3 The story of landscape change in the Blues is, in the simplest version, a story of the land's transformation into commodities that could be removed and taken elsewhere. Indians had certainly altered the landscape, but when whites showed up they set in motion changes that far outpaced any past ones. The critical difference was that the Blues finally became a source of resourcestimber , gold, meat, and wool-to feed the engines of market capitalism . Yet before whites came, the region had been connected to outside markets. Local tribes had extensive ties to trading networks that spread west to the pacific Ocean and east to the Great Plains.4 Indians did extract elements from the local ecosystem, and in the process they changed the local ecology to meet their needs. But their needs did not include removing large quantities of wood fiber for fuel, fertilizer, or construction. Indian land use was not necessarily sustainable, nor was it in any kind of inherent balance with the land's limits. Yet it was fundamentally different from the land use that whites instituted, for it did not include the wholesale extraction and export of resources. The Forest Service arrived on a stage whose scene had been set by a century of conflict. During the nineteenth century, the Blues 44 BEFORE THE FOREST SERVICE had witnessed massive transformations. An intense and often explosive meeting of cultures took place as Scottish explorers, American traders, French-Canadian trappers, Umatilla, Palouse, Blackfoot, Paiute, Cayuse, Shoshone, Nez Perce Indians, Belgian Jesuits , Protestant missionaries, and American emigrants all came with...