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5 Lovejoy We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. —Aldo Leopold A Sand County Almanac, 1948 It was not for lack of trying that the idea of cultivating the wilderness died. In 1903, the Otsego County Herald ran two stories that, from our perspective, clearly show the desperation of an idea not working. Settlers Wanted in Northern Michigan Lansing, Dec. 17—Land Commissioner Wildey has disposed of 135,000 acres of state tax lands during the past year, and he is endeavoring to secure reduced rates from the railroad companies for actual settlers on state lands. . . . The railroads are desirous of inducing actual settlers to locate in northern Michigan. Lansing, Dec. 18—Land Commissioner Wildey says that the receipts of his of‹ce for the present ‹scal year are in excess of $200,000. This is the effect of the law which provides for the deeding to the state and the sale of lands that have been returned delinquent for taxes for ‹ve consecutive years or more and the recent restoration to market of agricultural college lands. The average price per acre during the period named was $1.37. Aside from the proceeds of the sale of these lands, the state is a far greater gainer because the lands are now in the hands of private owners and are again on the tax rolls. 61 People not only failed to create a paradise out of the wilderness; they couldn’t even pay taxes on the land, and it lay ravished and untended. In 1903, a young Parish Storrs Lovejoy enrolled as one of the ‹rst students in the new School of Forestry at the University of Michigan. It had been only ‹ve years since Gifford Pinchot was appointed head of the Agriculture Department’s new Forestry Division, which was to become the U.S. Forest Service, under legislation allowing the president to set aside land that would otherwise be destroyed by free enterprise. In 1905, Lovejoy left the University of Michigan and entered the U.S. Forest Service. He was appointed supervisor of the Medicine Bow National Forest in Wyoming. In 1910, he transferred to the Olympic National Forest in Washington, and in 1912 he returned to Ann Arbor as an assistant professor of forestry at the university. P. S. Lovejoy was one of the bright people of vision who, out of the desolation of the lumbering era, pioneered new concepts of land use management . He was an academic with mud on his shoes, an engineer who called himself “tec poobah.” He is remembered with particular fondness in the Pigeon River Country because he was so instrumental in setting the area aside as the “Big Wild.” The Pigeon was one of his favorite places, and when he died his ashes were placed near the river just downstream from the headquarters complex. Lovejoy led the effort to enlarge the state’s holdings around the forest. In 1919, 6,468 acres of tax-reverted lands were added. The Otsego Wildlife Refuge, some 13,320 acres east of Vanderbilt, was added in 1926, purchased primarily with hunting license money. The two areas were eventually combined. Altogether, some 65 percent of the forest before the addition of Green Timbers in 1982 was purchased with hunters’ deer license revenues. Lovejoy called the Pigeon the Wilderness Tract or the P.R. “The essence of our proper job on the P.R.,” he wrote, was “to handle [it] to 10–25–50 years hence, [so] the then people (of the sort which count most) will not be cussing us; will mebbe be saying ‘Good Eye.’” In 1916, Lovejoy began writing Paul Bunyan stories in the American Lumberman, out of Chicago, “in an effort to stimulate the old timers to supplement my collection .” He wrote in a vernacular and in what he called the Bunyan code, “which is a peculiar but well de‹ned minstrel-end-man thing, with the chief bard getting assistance from his end man for the (real or ostensible) bene‹t of a greenhorn.” That means, he explained later, “Bumptullips Joe playing end-man to Freezeout Jake and the greenhorn listening in with his PIGEON RIVER COUNTRY o 62 eyes bugged out.” Such colorful language crept with increasing frequency into his public and private pronouncements, obviously an effort on his part to pry serious matters into consciousness...

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