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Chapter Two: Early Science in the Douglas Fir Region
- Oregon State University Press
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{ 23 Chapter Two Early Science in the Douglas Fir Region { By and large, we greenhorn foresters from the eastern forest schools got accepted quite quickly. —Thornton T. Munger1 Although Gifford Pinchot had been trained in Europe as a forester, he was reluctant to import European foresters to staff his new agency. In 1900, at Pinchot’s suggestion, his family endowed a school of forestry at Yale University, with the objective of producing “American foresters trained by Americans in American ways for the work ahead in American forests.”2 Some of the first forest scientists to go to Wind River were fresh from Yale, armed with their experience from the East Coast and Europe. They discovered new challenges in the unruly, wild nature of the Pacific Northwest. Among the stands of giant, ancient trees, they saw places denuded by fire and careless harvest. Privately owned forests were abandoned after harvest, left to the whims of encroaching brush and frequent fire. Even the national forests were ignored following harvest. The first order of business for the new forest researchers was to survey the forests. Maps of the Mount Rainier Forest Reserve, published in 1900 as part of Henry Gannett’s work for the U.S. Geological Survey, included general descriptions of forest types and condition, hydrology, fire history, and grazing use. But few records were kept following timber sales, and little was known about the land’s ability to regenerate. This was all about to change. “The practice of forestry is still young in this district,” wrote Fred Ames, the first head of silviculture in District Six, “and we have much to learn regarding the practical management of forests.”4 Beginning in 24 { Chapter Two 1908, Ames directed an inventory of forests in the Pacific Northwest. He asked for a full accounting of standing forests and cutover areas, detailed enough to answer future questions. He hired crews of college men to spend their summers in the woods as estimators, compassmen, and draftsmen, recording tree species and age, estimating timber volume, and assessing the number of trees they considered overmature, defective, or lacking in marketable value. Scientific crews often shared the tasks of packer and cook. One of those crew members was T. J. Starker, who was among the first graduates of Oregon Agricultural College’s forestry program, which was established in Corvallis in 1906. “Going back to 1909, I spent a summer on the Columbia National Forest mapping the timber types,” Starker recalled years later. “There were no maps so we climbed the higher elevations and mapped in the age groups as best we could. Called ‘Extensive Reconnaissance.’”5 Another young researcher in District Six was Thornton T. Munger (fig. 2.1). Following graduation from Yale and a three-month stint working with Raphael Zon in the Washington, D.C., office of the Forest Service, T. T. Munger headed west in 1908. The young New Englander had been assigned to study the encroachment of lodgepole pine into ponderosa pine on the eastern slopes of Oregon’s Cascade Mountains. Munger may have hoped for a more romantic assignment. “Some people looked down on research in those days and would have considered [this assignment] a lemon,” he remembered later. “In general the more romantic administrative frontier work appealed to them more than what they considered the ring-counting work of a researcher.”6 But he took on the task, spending three months in the saddle, riding hundreds of miles and recording his observations throughout the pine forests of eastern Oregon. “I was very fortunate when I went into this central Oregon country that I could ride horseback, because if you didn’t know how to handle a horse, you didn’t get any respect from the westerners in those days.”7 When his work was completed, Munger stayed at District Six as a one-man research unit, the Section of Silvics within the branch of silviculture. In 1908 silvics was the study of habits and the natural history of forest trees and the basis for all practical silvicultural operations, as defined by George Sudworth, the Forest Service [3.235.75.229] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 17:46 GMT) Early Science in the Douglas-fir Region { 25 dendrologist who wrote one of the first compendiums of forest trees on the Pacific slope.8 One of Munger’s assignments during his first winter in the Pacific Northwest came directly from the secretary of agriculture James Wilson, who thought the Forest Service was too slow in...