Shoshone Cavern National Monument was the second national monument created in Wyoming and the only one in the state to be delisted and turned over to local government.

President William Howard Taft issued the proclamation creating the monument on September 21, 1909, just nine months after the cavern was discovered by Cody-area outfitter and rancher Ned Frost.

The cavern’s story offers interesting background for current debates over whether public lands in the West are best managed by local or federal governments. For four decades, the cave was managed by the National Park Service. In 1954, locals persuaded Congress to turn it over to the City of Cody, Wyo. After years of neglect the site passed back into federal hands in 1977, where it remains and is administered by the Bureau of Land Management.

Discovery

The cave was discovered by a man and his dog. Located on the east flank of Cedar Mountain, about five miles west of downtown Cody, the entrance was hidden below an outcropping.

One cold January afternoon in 1909, Frost was hunting on the mountainside—federally owned public land—accompanied by a large retriever. A bobcat, escaping from Frost's hunting dog, darted down the entrance with the dog in hot pursuit. Frost followed, soon discovering that he lacked sufficient matches to see much beyond the "great room" just beyond the cavern's entrance. Inside, he saw the first of what turned out to be hundreds of rooms linked together with tunnels. As a later visitor observed, the cave featured "a carnival of color running from red to purple, blue to yellow, brown to orange."

The day after his discovery, Frost reported his find, and, a few days later, an exploration party including Cody's founder and world-renowned showman, William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody, inspected the cavern with lanterns and ropes. The cavern, in the view of Col. Cody and other visitors, warranted federal designation. Just nine months later, President Taft set it aside under the Antiquities Act.

The site was initially named Frost Cave, in honor of the discoverer, but the federal government believed the name implied cold temperatures in the cave, and suggested Crystal Cave as an alternative. Because of the proximity to Shoshone Canyon, a compromise resulted in the Shoshone Cavern name.

Surveyed to more than 4,000 feet below the entrance point, some experts believe the cave descends far deeper, perhaps running under the Shoshone River just north of Cedar Mountain and into the base of Rattlesnake Mountain to the north of the river. Geologists say the cavern was formed by hydrogen-sulfide-rich water, ascending aggressively inside cracks of the mountain, and creating crystalline encrustation on the cave's walls.

National Park Service administration

The National Park Service administered the cavern, along with the 210-acre site surrounding the entrance, from 1916, when the NPS was created, until 1954.

The cavern entrance, at an elevation of 6,300 feet--about 2,200 feet above the road along the floor of the Shoshone River canyon --made public access to the site difficult. In 1934, crews from the Civil Works Administration graded a narrow but passable automobile route that switchbacks up to the cave entrance. Even after minor improvements over the next two decades, the steep climb did little to encourage tourists to drive the road to the site.

Over the years, Park Service officials viewed the cave as interesting, but not as compelling as other NPS-administered caves such as Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico or Wind Cave in South Dakota. The Park Service did little to resist the efforts of Wyoming advocates for "return" of the cave to local government. Some advocates said that future management of the site would be a test of whether public lands could be better administered by local and state government than by the federal government.

Delisting the monument

Amid great fanfare, Congress passed an act in 1954 delisting the monument and returning the site to local administration. On May 17, 1954, after many years of lobbying by Cody boosters who contended that the site could be better run if it were not in federal hands, the federal government turned over the site to the City of Cody. The site was renamed Spirit Mountain Caverns, based on a mythical tale of Indian observances in or near the cave.

But the city and private concessionaires slowly came to realize that that the task of improving and operating such a site was beyond their means and expertise. Local businessman Claud Brown leased the cave from the city, formed a corporation and sold stock to 300 shareholders. He planned to open the cave to tourists the following summer, charge a fee of $1.50 each and sell snacks and souvenirs. Work proved difficult and expensive, however, and the grand opening did not come until September 1957.

Brown made improvements, paving the parking lot and stringing electric lights in the cave. He announced plans for a $190,000 cable car to the site but was unable to raise the money. And tourists mostly stayed away.

Brown operated the site until the late 1960s when the cave was entirely abandoned. Another group signed a lease in 1972 but did nothing more. The Cody City Council allowed for the cavern and the site to be returned to federal ownership in September 1977. After that, the location was incorporated into surrounding federal lands and is currently administered by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.

Experienced cavers may access the entrance to the cave, now sealed by a padlocked gate, through application to the Cody office of the BLM. Bureau officials say Spirit Mountain Cave, as it’s now generally called, draws 600 to 700 spelunkers per year.

The primary historical significance of Shoshone Cavern National Monument is that it was one of the few national monuments ever to be delisted. The fate of the cavern, practically forgotten today, is one example that argues against the proposition that public lands would be better served if they were overseen by local governments or private owners, a result entirely contrary to the assumptions of those who sought the delisting.

Resources

• Roberts, Phil. Cody's Cave: National Monuments and the Politics of Public Lands in the 20th Century West. Laramie, Wyo.: Skyline West, 2012.

Illustrations

• The 1909 photo of Buffalo Bill and other locals at the cave is from the Wyoming State Archives, Division of State Parks and Cultural Resources. Used with permission and thanks.
• The map was published in President William Howard Taft's proclamation of the national monument, Proclamation 880, 36 Stat. 2501, Part 2 (1911).

On June 30, 1988, lightning struck a tree in the Crown Butte region of Yellowstone National Park, in the park’s far northwest corner near where the borders of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming meet. The lightning bolt started a small forest fire, which became known as the Fan Fire. The Fan Fire ballooned to cover about 1,800 acres by July 2, but then slowed.

The Fan Fire was the first fire of that summer to erupt within Yellowstone National Park, though the Storm Creek fire had ignited about a week earlier north of the park boundary and would eventually make its way into the park proper.

Park fire experts noted the Fan Fire’s ignition and did … nothing.

Then, in rapid succession over a period of about two weeks, a series of fires broke out across Yellowstone National Park. The largest were named Fan, North Fork, Clover-Mist, Hellroaring, Storm Creek, Mink, Snake and Huck. They grew so large they were no longer fires but “complexes,” according to a 1994 report issued by the U.S. Department of the Interior. During that overheated summer of 1988, they burned about 683,000 of the park’s 2.2 million acres and about 1.2 million acres total within the greater Yellowstone area, which includes several national forests adjoining the park as well as Grand Teton National Park.

Yellowstone’s fire policy

Fire experts originally did nothing to combat the blazes because that was park policy—a policy that surprised a lot of reporters and politicians, including the president of the United States. President Ronald Reagan, roused to comment on the policy, admitted that he hadn’t known about it until September 14, after the fires had been long under way.

The understanding of fire in natural ecosystems had been growing for years prior to the Yellowstone conflagrations, and one of the legislative mandates of Yellowstone National Park is to maintain as nearly as possible “primitive ecological conditions.”

Fire is one of the most basic natural processes. In fact, many plant species within the park are fire-adapted. Some lodgepole pines, which make up about 80 percent of the park’s forests, have cones that are sealed by resin until the intense heat of fire cracks them open and releases the seeds. Fire also stimulates regeneration of sagebrush, aspen and willow.

Since the mid-1970s, park fire policy had been to allow natural fires—started by lightning or other natural causes—to burn. Human-caused fires were extinguished. The park also had an active prescribed burn program to try to reduce fuel loads—fallen trees and dried vegetation—that could contribute to catastrophic burns. In 1975, an environmental assessment was prepared which allowed natural burning on 1.7 million of the park’s 2.2 million acres.

In the years between this assessment and the 1988 fires, the policy was a quiet, uncontroversial success. Tens of thousands of lightning strikes simply fizzled. There were 140 fires, but most burned themselves out after swallowing a few acres. The average burn size was 250 acres. The largest fire during that time was 7,400 acres.

A very dry year

In 1988, as in past years, each fire was evaluated individually to determine how it related to the fire plan. The Fan Fire, for instance, a natural fire, was permitted to burn at first. In the early summer, before the Fan Fire struck, 20 lightning-caused fires had hit the park. Eleven burned themselves out, just like fires in the previous seasons. So park scientists and managers seemed justified in sticking to their fire plan.

But weather conditions in 1988 in Yellowstone Park were taking on a dimension not seen since the park was established in 1872. After a wet spring, the summer months were the driest ever recorded. Still, by July 15, only 8,500 acres had burned in the entire greater Yellowstone ecosystem. But a week later, visitors were noticing the smoke, and the national news media was starting to pay attention to the situation. Dry conditions and high winds were creating perfect conditions for massive fires.

Fires out of control

By July 21, things were spiraling out of control. Park officials decided to try to suppress all new and existing fires as resources allowed. At the time, all the fires in the park covered a total of about 17,000 acres—about 2.5 percent of the area that eventually burned.

In a paper prepared shortly after the fires for the journal Northwest Science, YNP technical writer Paul Schullery writes, “Extreme fire behavior became nearly the order of the day, as fires ran as much as 10 miles in a day, sending embers as much as a mile and a half ahead of the main fire to create dozens of ‘spot fires.’ The presence of so many spot fires, along with the rapid and wide advance of the main fires, made it impossible to fight the fires head-on without risking many lives. Hundreds of miles of fire lines were constructed, but with the spotting behavior fires routinely jumped usual barriers such as rivers and roads.”

“Standard hand- or bulldozer-built lines were no barrier at all,” Schullery continues. “Among the examples of black humor (an appropriate term, if ever there was one) with firefighters was, ‘What's black on both sides and brown in the middle?’ The answer: a bulldozer line in Yellowstone.”

At the peak of firefighting efforts, 9,500 military and civilian firefighters were engaged, using dozens of helicopters and more than 100 fire trucks to try to stop the blazes. Costs passed $120 million. Remarkably, no firefighters died fighting the fires in Yellowstone, though there were two fire-related deaths outside the park.

Students from an elementary school sent trees to firefighters to replace the ones lost. Women of Broadus, Mont., sent them homemade cookies. Chief Ranger Dan Sholly wrote the women a thank-you note: “From the speed with which they disappeared, I know they were appreciated by all of us in the fire camp and on the fireline.”

Despite the manpower, the fires continued to grow. A total of 248 fires ignited that summer, but the seven largest caused 95 percent of the damage. On July 5, the Lava fire started; July 11, the Mink and Clover fires; July 22, North Fork fire; July 23, the Clover and Mist fires join; and so on. There were eventually a total of eight fire complexes—depending on who’s counting—with every section of the park aflame.

News coverage

But if the fire line was hot, the descriptive prose was hotter still. Media reporting was often poorly informed and contradictory. The words disaster, devastating and catastrophic appeared often. The New York Times report noted, “stretches of charred, lifeless landscape left by the months of fires.”

Newspapers began covering the story in early July almost as soon as the fires ignited, while national broadcast television coverage came weeks later. The ABC and NBC television networks broadcast their first stories on July 25. CBS broadcast its first story on August 22.

Ohio State University journalism professor Conrad Smith writes in a 1991 paper, “The Yellowstone fires were more newsworthy in the west than in the east. They made the front page of the Los Angeles Times 39 times, starting on July 18 with a news brief about wildfires in the West; the front page of the Washington Post three times, starting on September 8 after the fire’s visit to the Old Faithful Geyser Complex; and the front page of the New York Times three times, starting on September 11 when the secretaries of Interior and Agriculture arrived in Yellowstone for an inspection.”

Both print and broadcast media made some serious mistakes in their coverage. For instance, on July 21, 1988, the park abandoned its “let-burn” policy and began suppressing all fires. But as late as September 1, the New York Times was still reporting that some fires were being allowed to burn. And on September 10, the paper reported on criticism by Wyoming Republican U.S. senators Alan Simpson and Malcolm Wallop of Yellowstone’s natural burn policy, despite the fact that this hadn’t been the policy since mid-July.

But that was nothing compared to an August 30 news story on ABC television featuring an interview with “Stanley Mott, director, National Park Service.” Except that the director of the National Park Service at the time was William Penn Mott, and the ABC interviewee was a tourist.

Local media did better in the assessments of coverage produced by scholars later, especially Montana’s Billings Gazette’s coverage of the economic impact on park-dependent businesses by Robert Ekey, and Wyoming’s Casper Star-Tribune’s coverage of the ecological dynamics by Andrew Melnykovich and Geoff O’Gara.

But the rest of the nation got a different story. Time captured the spirit of the coverage when its editors wrote, “The fires have ruined 1.2 million acres of Yellowstone and adjoining national forests.”

Politics

All this hyperbole quickly worked its way into the political discourse. President Reagan called the park fire policy “cockamamie.”

''It's a disaster,'' U.S. Department of the Interior Secretary Donald P. Hodel told the New York Times as he and U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Richard E. Lyng visited the park. ''I think it's devastating, and we've only seen part of it.”

Wyoming’s Sen. Wallop said the park’s 16-year-old “let-burn” policy was “absurd” and scientifically unsound. He joined with Sen. Alan Simpson in calling for the resignation of National Park Service Director Mott. Montana Democratic Sen. John Melcher told The New York Times, “They'll never go back to this policy. From now on the policy will be putting the fire out when they see the flames.”

Bob Barbee, then the superintendent of Yellowstone, was cast as the bad guy in the park fire drama. In a 2013 retrospective piece about the fires, Barbee told the New York Times,“It’s like, ‘Well, why don’t you just put it out?’ Well, why don’t you just stop the hurricane or the tornado? You don’t just put it out.”

On Sept. 11, 1988, a quarter-inch of snow fell across the greater Yellowstone area, and the fires quickly died out. Underneath that quarter-inch of snow lay the blackened carcasses of trees, bleached-white, heat-blasted soils—and deep uncertainty about post-fire future of the park. It was accepted wisdom that Yellowstone wouldn’t recover for a hundred years.

Even so, Yellowstone’s big fires were not a surprise to everyone. Paul Schullery wrote in his 1989 Northwest Science article, “Only months before the fires of 1988, a preliminary research report by Dr. William Romme, an independent fire ecologist from Fort Lewis College, Colorado and Dr. Don Despain, NPS plant ecologist, suggested that the Yellowstone area fire regime involved many small fires interspersed every 200-400 years by massive fires that swept across large portions of the park. Romme and Despain concluded that ‘another major burning cycle may begin within the next century, as extensive areas are now developing flammable late successional forests.’”

During the fires themselves, Despain achieved a level of notoriety unusual for a plant ecologist when he showed a Denver Post reporter a fire impact research plot near Ice Lake near Norris Geyser Basin. Environment writer Todd Wilkinson described the incident recently in a Jackson Hole News & Guide column published in April 2015: “The site was established to allow researchers to gauge how fire, drought and disease affect arboreal ecology. As a wildfire approached and swept across his research area, Despain playfully muttered, ‘Burn, baby, burn.’ His quote was included in [the Post’s] story, but a headline writer bannered the words as if Despain were a pyro, not caring if the entire park went up in flames. Wyoming politicians, including U.S. Sens. Malcolm Wallop and Alan K. Simpson, had a field day skewering park officials. Despain was ordered not to talk to reporters for two weeks.”

Recovery

But Despain and the other fire scientists had the last word. The recovery in Yellowstone was a slam dunk for science and the let-burn forest policy.

As little as five years after the fires, the park was recovering well. "The forest is going to be re-established. In many cases, the seedling density is greater than the original stand density," said Monica Turner of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory at a 1993 meeting in Jackson held to discuss the implications of the 1988 fire. “In many burned-over areas where mature lodgepole pines once stood,” Turner said, “the number of established seedlings is eight times as large as the original number of trees. Many lodgepole seeds require fire to open.”

The fires also put to rest the Bambi myth—that wildlife flees in panic from approaching flames. At the same 1993 conference, grizzly bear researcher Steve French said, “We didn't see a lot of stress on animals. Bison right in front of the fire line only moved out of the way very casually,” he said.

A survey French conducted of large animal deaths found more than 390 documented deaths from fire, nearly all from smoke inhalation. Of those, 333 were elk, 32 mule deer, 12 moose, nine bison and six black bears. There were no antelope, mountain lion, grizzly bear or bighorn sheep carcasses. With rare exceptions, animals saw the flames coming and simply stepped aside.

University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point professor Mark Boyce said in a talk at the conference that if he were superintendent of Yellowstone, "I would maintain fire every chance I had. I would do my best to eradicate this species”—at this, he showed a slide of Smokey Bear, the patron saint of fire suppression advertisements—“from the park."

Research findings on the ecological impacts of the Yellowstone fires indicate there were very few cases—one-tenth of one percent of the burned area—where high fire temperatures burned deep roots. The impact on park wildlife was minimal. Despite early concerns, white bark pine and aspen came back.

The Yellowstone fires were a watershed in the public understanding of fire’s impact on ecosystems. Wild-land fires have become more easily tolerated except in cases where fires threaten people’s houses and structures--an increasing problem as more people move into the “urban-wild-land interface.” But climate studies indicate that large fires will probably become more frequent around the world. In the Rocky Mountain West, there has already been an increase in the frequency and severity of wild-land fires over the last 25 years, according to a 2008 U.S. Department of the Interior report. A sophisticated, context-sensitive understanding of fire is critical for both safety and ecological reasons. The lessons from Yellowstone in 1988 should inform decisions about this coming whirlwind.

Resources

• National Park Service. The Yellowstone Fires of 1988. 2008, accessed June 24, 2015 at http://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/nature/upload/firesupplement.pdf.
• Romme, W.H. et al. “Twenty Years after the 1988 Yellowstone Fires: Lessons about Disturbance and Ecosystems.” Ecosystems. 2008. U.S. Department of the Interior: 10.1007/s10021-011-9470-6. Accessed June 24, 2015 at http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10021-011-9470-6#page-1.
• Rothermel, Richard C., Roberta A. Hartford and Carolyn H. Chase. Fire Growth Maps for the 1988 Greater Yellowstone Area Fires. 1994. U.S. Forest Service General Technical Report INT-304, accessed June 24, 2015 at http://www.fs.fed.us/rm/pubs_int/int_gtr304.pdf.
• Schullery, Paul. “Yellowstone Fires: A Preliminary Report.” Northwest Science 63, no. 1 (1989): 44-54, accessed June 24, 2015 at https://research.libraries.wsu.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/2376/1686/v63%20p44%20Schullery.PDF?sequence=1.
• Smith, Conrad. 1991, Yellowstone Media Myths: Print and Television Coverage of the 1988 Fires. In Fire and the Environment: Ecological and Cultural Perspectives. Proceedings of an International Symposium. Knoxville, Tenn. 1990, accessed June 25, 2015 via http://www.treesearch.fs.fed.us/pubs/2722 at http://www.srs.fs.usda.gov/pubs/gtr/gtr_se069/gtr_se069-section05.pdf.
• Whipple, Dan. “Nature turns massive fire at Yellowstone to its benefit.” Los Angeles Times. Oct.12, 1993, accessed June 22, 2015, at http://articles.latimes.com/1993-10-13/news/mn-45340_1_greater-yellowstone-area.
• Wilkinson, Todd. “Yellowstone fire guru ponders ’88 and now.” Jackson Hole News & Guide. April 1, 2015, accessed June 22, 2015, at http://www.jhnewsandguide.com/opinion/columnists/the_new_west_todd_wilkinson/yellowstone-fire-guru-ponders-and-now/article_2b886c94-6f04-58ea-9eb4-bfc05788a7e6.html.
• Winerup, Michael. “Lessons from the Yellowstone Fires of 1988.” New York Times. Sept. 2, 2013, accessed June 22, 2015, at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/02/booming/lessons-from-the-yellowstone-fires-of-1988.html?_r=1.

Illustrations

• The photos are from the National Park Service’s excellent web pages of photos of the 1998 Yellowtone fires. Used with thanks.

Red Fenwick couldn't believe what he saw in 1933 when he met the train that carried a motley group of Bronx youth to Canyon Junction in Yellowstone National Park.

"It was the sorriest assemblage of humans since Indian treaty days," recalled Fenwick, a foreman assigned to whip into shape the first Civilian Conservation Corps crew assigned to work in the park.

Fenwick, who later became a well-known Denver Post reporter, wrote in a 1965 column that some enrollees were already homesick, while others were clearly out of control.

"All needed a shower and shave," he remembered. "They looked as though they had walked past an army surplus supply depot after an explosion and had grabbed whatever items of clothing they fancied."

The young men took a truck to their camp where one of Yellowstone's many geysers greeted them, sending an impressive column of steam and hot water high into the sky. Fenwick remembered one young rider who excitedly told his companions, “‘Hey youse guys! Lookit dat t'ing squoiting outa d'ground. It's a geezer! Dat's wot it is--a'geezer.’"

Roosevelt’s Tree Army

Throughout Wyoming and across America, thousands of young men were also getting acquainted with their new environments. It was part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's plan during the Great Depression to provide jobs and educations for millions of unemployed youths while conserving the nation's natural resources.

The CCC went from an idea to reality in lightning speed, especially compared to modern-day federal programs. A month after his proposal to Congress, Roosevelt signed the law officially creating the Emergency Conservation Work (ECW) project on March 30, 1933. It quickly became known as the Civilian Conservation Corps, and also had a popular nickname—the "Tree Army."

By June 1,300 CCC camps had been created nationwide, and by the next month they were staffed by a total of more than a quarter-million enrollees. Initially there were 24 camps in Wyoming, each expected to house 200 men.

To join, enrollees had to be 18 to 25 years old, unmarried, unemployed and with a family on relief. The pay was low, even for the Depression. The CCC paid the enrollees $1 a day, so each earned about $30 each month. But $25 was taken from their checks and sent to their families, leaving them only $5.

"None of the men are going to do any work like that for a dollar a day," predicted Maurice Miller of Chicago, a group leader at the CCC encampment at Fort Hunt, Va.

Joseph Bosc, a Chicago clerk, said he definitely wouldn't enroll. "[It's] not for me; it's like being sold into slavery," he said.

Most of the new members of the Corps, though, didn't look at it that way. Jobs and money were scarce, and signing up was a way to help their families. Their room and board would be paid for, and they would be sent to areas of the country most had never seen before.

Not all were such willing participants, however. Precinct police captains in New York City gave some young men a choice: Sign up or go to the reformatory.

Creation of the CCC

More than 1,000 young men served in the state between 1934 and 1938. During this period age restrictions were lifted so more veterans of World War I could find work, and so was the requirement that enrollees had to be unmarried.

They constructed sewer and water systems, service roads, museums and exhibits, boat docks, phone lines, utility buildings and snowshoe cabins for patrols. They eradicated gophers, eliminated locoweed and dug garbage pits.

Major projects in Wyoming's national forests involved protecting the Colorado and Missouri River watersheds, developing recreation facilities and thinning forests. The CCC launched several wildlife protection projects, including preservation of the country's largest elk herds. The young men also transplanted beaver from overstocked areas to more favorable sites. Crews took censuses of wildlife and studied game ranges, migratory patterns and feeding habits. In several forest areas, especially in the Medicine Bow National Forest, bark beetle control was a constant battle. Blizzard relief was undertaken during the harsh winter of 1936-37.

And the men were always on call to fight forest fires, which could quickly turn deadly. Nine members of various CCC companies in the area died fighting the Blackwater Creek fire west of Cody in 1937. Five professional firefighters from the Forest Service who were supervising the work crews also perished in the blaze.

One of the most challenging CCC projects in the state was undertaken by a Gillette crew, which fought the fires burning more or less constantly in some exposed coal seams and abandoned mines. At least 17 coal fires were burning in Campbell County, many started by lightning decades before.

Some of the fires were about 1,000 feet in length along the outcrop. The CCC enrollees would either dig out the burning material and then cover the remaining exposed coal with sand or extinguish the fire by sealing it and depriving it of oxygen. By all accounts the effort was impressive—but also slow going.

Jackson Lake saw one of the largest projects undertaken by the CCC in Wyoming. A dam built by the U.S. Reclamation Service in 1916 enlarged the lake, and as it filled it flooded more land and submerged more than 8,000 acres of timber.

The stretches of dead timber around Jackson Lake created a barren and dangerous setting, and the Hoover administration began the cleanup in 1929. Roosevelt had the CCC take over the job in 1933.

“Over 100 young men spent the summer of 1934 cutting and piling some 17,000 cords of wood to be burned during the winter months," noted Historian Robert Righter. By the mid-1930s the CCC had removed the shoreline tragedy at Jackson Lake.

CCC members could serve up to four six-month hitches. Despite the demanding work, more than half re-upped at least once.

Many enrolled in camp educational programs. Camp Miller in Sublette County offered vocational courses like blacksmithing, bulldozer operation, carpentry, woodworking, cooking, vocational guidance, road construction, tractor operation and photography. Academic courses included English composition, spelling, business arithmetic, trigonometry, Latin, Spanish and citizenship.

Enrollees were also given the opportunity to take correspondence studies with the University of Wyoming, including English, mathematics, social science, biology, typing and shorthand. The University also offered special courses for CCC recruits in auto mechanics, forestry, journalism and bookkeeping.

Towns lobbied for Camps

By August 1933, 24 camps were already established in Wyoming. Seven camps were attached to the National Park Service— four in Yellowstone and three in Grand Teton. Fifteen camps were supervised by the Forest Service, including seven in Medicine Bow National Forest—at Pole Mountain, Chimney Park, Centennial, Arlington, Encampment, French Creek, and Ryan Park. There was also at least one in the Bighorn National Forest—Camp O’Connor near the subsequent Muddy Guard Station in the Buffalo Ranger District.

Because of the lack of a complete Forest Service CCC inventory, the location of seven camps during the initial year are unknown. One camp may have also been located on the Wind River Indian Reservation, still then called the Shoshone Agency, before 1937. The final Wyoming camp, GLO-1, was operated by the U.S. General Land Office, a precursor of today’s Bureau of Land Management, and located on private land near Gillette.

The number of CCC camps in Wyoming likely peaked at 32 in 1935; that number dropped to 15 camps within two years. Wyoming towns wanted more camps, not fewer, because the program provided jobs for unemployed local carpenters and other workers hired for the skilled labor required by many CCC projects. Communities located near camps also benefited economically when CCC members made weekly excursions into town. Locals lobbied their congressional representatives and the ECW director for more enrollees and more camps.

But even worthy projects promoted by commercial, business, agricultural and civic leaders were turned down. Citizens of Bridger Valley in southwestern Wyoming spent the first two years of the CCC program trying to get a camp on the Bear River in Uinta County. They needed dams built on the Green River's Black’s Fork or Smith's Fork to control flooding for approximately 200 family ranches. If the reservoirs could not be constructed, the leaders said, families would not be able to continue making a living in Bridger Valley.

The lobbying effort was led by an impressive group of officials: Fort Bridger American Legion Commander H. M. Hopkinson, Black’s Fork Water Users Association President Joseph Micheli, Uinta County Farm Bureau President Starvold Steward, Evanston Chamber of Commerce President Glen Eastman, and Van Rupe, president of the Lyman Lions Club.

Desperate for help, the coalition noted if they could not secure a camp in Uinta County, they would "settle" for one across the state line in Utah. By 1935, though, the CCC was starting to close camps, not add them. As Roosevelt's Second New Deal began, the president ordered that camps still working on their original projects be continued, but funding was not available for new ones.

Primitive conditions

In the early days of the CCC, living conditions were primitive. The men slept in cheaply made tents until they built their own camps, with the work usually supervised by out-of-work miners and carpenters from the nearest town. This immediately established good relationships between the CCC and local residents who saw a boost in their economy from both construction and visits from the men to their towns on weekends.

The first wave of CCC enrollees were given hand-me-down U.S. Army surplus uniforms and equipment from World War I. Later, they were outfitted in new spruce green uniforms.

Fenwick said the cooks at his first Yellowstone camp regularly burned food and served cold-boiled potatoes that were hated by all of the hard-working, hungry diners. "The men had plotted to stand at signal at dinner and throw the potatoes at the mess officer," Fenwick recalled. The commanding officer, a holstered .45-caliber service revolver on his hip, told them he knew about their plan.

"I warn you that I've taken just about all I can stand from you," he said. "The first man that throws a potato in that mess hall tonight will get a bullet right between his eyes. I can put it there."

The commander stood at the mess hall door throughout the entire meal. Fenwick wasn't surprised that no potato protest materialized.

CCC members had to stretch their scarce dollars. They paid for personal items like toothpaste, tobacco products, hair oil, candy and gum, which they bought at the camp's post exchange. The men bought $2 vouchers, and the money was deducted from their pay.

To make extra money, some used their pre-CCC experience or learned new skills like cooking and took jobs in nearby communities during their off hours. Leo Vaughn, who worked at a camp in Thermopolis, knew how to sew and boosted his income by sewing on buttons and mending clothes.

Leo Kimmett, who was stationed at a CCC camp in Yellowstone, asked to borrow a typewriter from the company clerk so he could address a letter. A clerk's six-month hitch in the CCC was nearly over and the camp needed someone who could type and take over his duties. Kimmett was the only one in camp who could type, so he was the obvious replacement. He didn't mind, since the job paid him an extra $6 per month and he got to work inside, away from the tough labor outdoors.

But Kimmett didn't stay in the job long. One day he accidentally told the wrong lieutenant that he was wanted on the telephone, and the officer who should have received the message chewed him out.

"Because of that lack of communication I was given a royal, typical army verbal reprimand. This hurt," Kimmett later wrote. "Coming from the gentle farming community of Powell, [Wyo.,] where such vituperation was unknown, the shock of the reprimand, unjustified in all respects, had an acute effect on me."

After a sleepless night, the next day Kimmett asked to be put back on a work crew. "I decided that to be mentally upset like this was not worth the extra $6 a month," he recalled.

Hard work at Guernsey

Two camps run by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation were set up in Guernsey State Park on the North Platte River in Platte County. Enrollees at one camp, BR-9, worked on the park's east side, while BR-10 was assigned to the area south of the 7-year-old Lake Guernsey.

Today, the CCC's work at Guernsey is considered one of the nation's best examples of how the program was used to enhance recreational opportunities and improve the landscape at a state park. Visitors still use many of the projects the BR-9 crew built, including the boat dock, the hand-drilled stone drinking fountain and picnic shelters named for Indian leaders Spotted Tail, Sitting Bull and Red Cloud.

But BR-9's most impressive accomplishment was the park's museum, which took the crew 6,100 man-hours to build. The museum is a one-of-a-kind, limestone-and-log structure known as an excellent example of the Rustic architecture movement. Its floor was quarried, cut, numbered and assembled in Thermopolis and shipped 250 miles to the park, where it was reassembled. Most of the museum's original displays are nearly untouched.

Meanwhile, Camp BR-10 built the Guernsey State Park Castle and a latrine/outhouse called the "Million Dollar Biffy." The CCC put up the latter for only $6,000; park officials have estimated it would cost $1 million today to be rebuilt. The park's Castle is a two-room picnic shelter that has enormous log supports, limestone rock walls and a massive fireplace.

The daily routine

BR-10 was operated as a strict military camp, while BR-9 was overseen by a U.S. Bureau of Reclamation superintendent, James Coffman. The work crews at both camps were divided into engineering, agricultural and landscaping units.

The schedule was the same for both—reveille at 6 a.m. sharp and breakfast precisely an hour later. A typical breakfast included bacon or ham, fruit, eggs and cereal.

Lunch was brought to crews working in the field unless they were close enough to walk to camp. The menu for supper was a large portion of roast beef, pork or chicken, potatoes and gravy, vegetables and fruit, bread, butter and jellies.

The men were required to be clean and presentable at all times, which meant clean and combed hair, brushed teeth and a shower at least once a week.

From 7:30 to 9 p.m., men could shop at the post exchange or play cards at the canteen. The recreation center had two pool tables and a pingpong table. The "lights out" order was given promptly at 10 p.m.

Friday night was reserved for entertainment, including talent shows, singing and dancing. Boxing and wrestling matches were also held. People from the local town often came to entertainment night, both as performers and just to see the show.

Guernsey State Park had a nine-hole public golf course built by the CCC, but there is no evidence that the men ever spent any time playing golf. The course was abandoned in the early 1940s.

On weekends the men at Wyoming CCC camps played pick-up baseball, often against local teams or teams from other camps. Hiking, climbing, horseshoes and basketball on dirt courts were also popular, as were trips to town where sometimes the CCC members were not on their best behavior, especially if the town had a red-light district or ignored Prohibition, still at least nominally in effect in 1933.

Kimmett recalled that after the June 1933 payday, a half-dozen boys at his Yellowstone camp spent the weekend in Gardiner, Mont. "Returning to camp early Monday morning, about three or four of the boys were rolling in their vomit on the floor of the stake truck," he wrote. "These unfortunates learned the hard way about the prevalent falsehood that rubbing alcohol became harmless when filtered through a slice of bread."

The CCC's final days

Roosevelt wanted to make the CCC permanent, but Congress wouldn't go along with him. When World War II started, lawmakers realized it needed the members of the Corps to enter the military. Congress never actually abolished the CCC, but it quit funding the program. On July 1, 1942, it approved $8 million to liquidate it.

The primary impact of the program on the state and nation was three-fold. First, its $25 per month benefit for members' families is credited with helping to jump-start the Depression economy when a spark was desperately needed. The CCC put more than 2.5 million men and 8,000 women to work nationwide.

Second, Wyoming has many one-of-a-kind structures such as the classic Guernsey State Park Museum that remain well used and popular. The CCC crews also greatly expanded the state's infrastructure. In the Bighorn National Forest alone, workers helped build Sibley and Meadowlark Dams, developed 102 acres of campground, built three fire towers, constructed 25 bridges and strung 88 miles of telephone line.

The CCC provided substantial economic help to the families in towns near the camps. Local workers who had lost their jobs were hired to build many of the larger facilities and structures at the camps. By preserving valuable timber resources, the CCC also helped keep alive the industries that communities depended upon.

An intangible but vital benefit of the CCC was the positive impact the program had on those who served. It helped thousands of young men learn construction and wildlife preservation skills, gave them an opportunity to continue their formal education and even transformed their appearance and attitude. The program changed their lives and helped make them better citizens when they returned home.

In September 1933, a convoy of CCC men was taken by truck to meet a train headed out of the park at West Yellowstone. Decades later, Denver Post columnist Red Fenwick recalled that the crews he supervised were no longer the rag-tag, insubordinate troops who began working that spring. "Uniforms were neat. Neckties were tied. There was order and discipline," he recalled. "And the men themselves were tougher, browner, heavier, more self-assured, confident and cooperative."

Resources

• Cassity, Mike. "Building Up Wyoming, Depression-Era Federal Projects in Wyoming, 1929–1943." Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office. 2013, 68-76. Accessed March 1, 2016, at http://wyoshpo.state.wy.us/pdf/BuildingUpWyoming.pdf.
• Fenwick, Red. "The Civilian Conservation Corps: They Took to the Woods--and Came Out Men."The Denver Post, Empire section, June 20, 1965.
• Kimmett, Leo. "Life in a Yellowstone Camp."Annals of Wyoming, 56 no. 1: (Spring 1984), 12-21. Accessed Feb. 17, 2016, at https://archive.org/stream/annalsofwyom56121984wyom#page/n13/mode/2up.
• Noble, Ann. "Civilian Conservation Corp." Accessed Feb. 17, 2016, at
• http://www.sublette.com/history/ccc/.
• Waring, Neil A. "Civilian Conservation Corps and the Building of Guernsey State Park: With Folktales and Stories of the Park," Guernsey, Wyo.: Old Trails Publishing, 2015.
• Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.or/wiki/Category:Civilian_Conservation_Corps_in_Wyoming. Accessed July 25, 2016. 

Illustrations

• The photos of the young CCC men playing craps and sitting on a bench with Vlasta Fisher are from the Lora Nichols Collection at the Grand Encampment Museum. Used with permission and thanks.
• The photo of The Castle at Guernsey State Park was originally published at WyomingHeritage.org, a former project of the University of Wyoming Anthropology Department and the state of Wyoming. The photo of the park looking through an archway of The Castle is by Venice Beske, from Wyoming Places. Both are used with permission and thanks.
• The rest of the photos are from Wyoming State Archives. Used with permission and thanks.

Fifty years after witnessing one of the deadliest forest fires in the nation's history, Bob Johnstone could still remember the screams of the young men at Blackwater Creek about 35 miles west of Cody, Wyo.

"We wanted to see if we could help get these [firefighters] who were trapped," recalled Johnstone, who, as an 18-year-old in the Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps, was on the Blackwater fire line. "We could hear those people below us, but we couldn't get down there to help them. ... It was a terrible thing. I hate to tell you some of the grisly things about it."

The fourth deadliest wildfire in the nation's history, the Blackwater Creek fire was started by a lightning strike in the pine-filled Shoshone National Forest on Aug. 18, 1937. The fire smoldered and crept through the ground fuels for two days before it was spotted by the owners of a local hunting camp. It covered about 2 acres; by the time it was controlled four days later it had consumed 1,700 acres.

At about the same time on Aug. 20, seven CCC enrollees returning from a work detail saw the fire crowning into the treetops and decided on their own to begin scraping a fire line at the base of the blaze. The crew's initiative spared the local men at hunting and tourist camps who normally fought forest fires in the Shoshone from having to leave their jobs during the busiest month of the year.

The CCC camp at Wapiti, about 25 miles west of Cody on the road to Yellowstone National Park, was alerted about the fire at 3:30 p.m. Within 20 minutes, 70 CCC enrollees and rangers from the camp were moving toward it. By nightfall the blaze had grown to 200 acres, and firefighters were constructing a fire line around it. Despite only light winds, the canyons pumped air to the fire and pushed spot fires ahead of the main one.

Investigators who later analyzed what happened pointed to several factors that impeded the efforts to contain the fire. There were no radios, so men had to carry notes between the various crews to relay information about where spot fires were cropping up and increasing in intensity because of adverse weather conditions.

Shifting weather

On Aug. 21, weather observers in Idaho told the Riverton, Wyo., weather office that a storm front with strong winds was moving into the Blackwater Creek area. That vital information was given to U.S. Forest Service managers at the Wapiti ranger station. But the lack of radios prevented the station from telling firefighters about the dangerous weather coming their way.

Poor phone communication was another problem. Investigators later determined it, too, probably played a role in the deaths of several firefighters who found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time when the fire went out of control. The Ten Sleep CCC camp in the Bighorn National Forest, far away across the Bighorn Basin, was ordered to send about 50 CCC enrollees and Forest Service personnel to Blackwater Creek, to arrive no later than 8 a.m. the next morning. But there was an unexplained three-hour delay between the attempted phone call notification and when it was received.

By daybreak 120 men were working the fire, but the Ten Sleep crew was nowhere in sight. The Ten Sleep CCC enrollees were meant to serve as fresh reinforcements for those who had been battling the fire since the previous night. But the new men, who traveled more than 180 miles over rough roads in the dark, did not reach the fire until about 11:30 a.m. They were given a quick meal, outfitted with hand tools and marched toward the east fire line, which was being constructed in a canyon that had numerous ravines and moderate to steep slopes with a gradient of 20 to 60 percent.

The fire was blowing in a northeasterly direction, overtopping Trail Ridge to burn in green timber on the other side. Prevailing winds made this area the fire's “hot spot." The forest was dense and mature with heavy fuel loads from dead trees with dead limbs extending to the ground. The situation provided a fuel ladder for fire to leap easily into the treetops.

Fire investigators later speculated that if they had arrived on schedule, the Ten Sleep crew members could have already extended the fire line past this treacherous area when the fire turned deadly and trapped them.

Inexperienced firefighters, rough terrain

The CCC members from the Ten Sleep camp were all Texans with little experience fighting fires. Three months before they were transferred to Wyoming, they had been in their home state helping create a park, establishing bridle paths and stocking lakes with fish. Their new Forest Service supervisors, however, were all experienced firefighters ready to guide them in their Cowboy State assignment.

Forest Ranger Urban Post and Junior Forester Paul Tyrrell led the way for the CCC party, with Ranger Al Clayton and Foreman James Saban taking the rear. They crossed a draw with a small trickle of water where Post detailed one man to remain and build a small dam to impound water for the backpack pumps. Because of the rough climb ahead, the men were told to carry their backpack pumps only half-full.

By 12:40 p.m., aerial observers reported seeing several spot fires near the east and west fire lines. It was 90 degrees, with the relative humidity at only 6 percent. Despite these tinderbox conditions, Ranger Post later recalled he was still optimistic they could get the relatively small fire under control. The fire was barely smoking, and his men were in good spirits. All they had to do, he thought, was extend the fire line to connect with a natural firebreak created by a rocky ridge to the northeast.

Ranger Post left six men to assist Clayton, who only had one firefighter with him, then led his 40-man crew east up a ridge. Clayton and his crew continued to suppress small fires that were spotting over fire lines started earlier by a Bureau of Public Roads crew.

From his higher vantage point Post could see more spot fires below. Clayton saw them too and his small crew quickly went to work to put them out. Recognizing the potential hazard, Clayton wrote a note to Post and gave it to a CCC enrollee to deliver.

The note read, "Post, We are on the ridge in back of you and I am going down to the spot in the hole. It looks like [the fire] can carry on over the ridge east and north of you. If you can send any men, please do so, since there are only eight of us. Clayton."

But the note seeking reinforcements didn't reach Post until it was too late for Clayton and his men. The dry weather front approached at 3:30 p.m., and steady 30 mile-per-hour winds blew from the southwest. Fifteen minutes later, the wind shifted abruptly to the west, causing increased crowning, with the fire leaping from treetop to treetop, and even more spot fires. Gusts reached 45 mph and whipped the flames into a raging firestorm racing east up ravines and gullies, trapping Clayton and his crew. The 45-year-old ranger and six of his men died, and another later succumbed to his injuries in the hospital.

“We have no safer place”

Post’s crew found themselves in an equally dangerous spot. If they were to save themselves, they had only one option: Abandon the fire line, find an escape route and run for their lives. When the wind suddenly pushed the fire back toward the southwest, Post ordered his crew to head northeast to a ridgeline, where they took cover on a rocky outcropping as fire swept over the ridge. They moved around to avoid each successive wave of heat and fire, but soon the rocks below them grew unbearably hot. Their flesh blistered and their clothing caught on fire.

"The heat is terrific, and it seems unbearable, but we have no safer place," Post later wrote about the terrifying ordeal. "If this is the end, we must take it here."

"Tops of the trees swung in the strong wind which was coming up through the basin, spot fires developed between the large spot fire and the main fire, and the wind had reached our line almost at once, and the large fire was a furnace immediately," Post recalled. "... Some of us wait for Tyrrell and the last ones out. The smoke is thick, the air is hot; we hurry up the ridge. Heavy tools are left behind. We take lady shovels, Pulaskis and canteens – we may need them for our own protection." A Pulaski is a tool used for constructing firebreaks that combines an axe and an adze in one head.

Post and his foreman, James Saban, ordered their CCC crew to stay down, but some panicked and refused to remain low while others sat up to say prayers. The 24-year-old Tyrrell bravely pinned three men to the ground, shielding them from the heat. But five other men decided to risk running into the flames, hoping to reach safety on the other side. It was a horrible choice: Four did not make it alive–Billy Lea, a Bureau of Public Roads crewman, and CCC enrollees Clyde Allen, Ernest Seelke and Rubin Sherry. The fifth man did survive but he was badly burned.

Since no one in Clayton's crew survived, their actions as the firestorm swept through the area are unknown. One fire inspector speculated Clayton may have taken some of the men with him to check a spot fire, while the rest waited for the requested reinforcements from Post's crew that were never sent. Once he discovered the danger ahead, Clayton may have tried to lead them back up a gulch toward a streambed, but based upon where the ranger's body was found he probably did not make it before fire overtook the entire crew.

Altogether, the fire killed 15 firefighters–all eight in Clayton’s crew and seven in Post’s unit. Ten CCC enrollees, all Texans between 17 and 20 years old; one was their foreman. Three of the deceased worked for the Forest Service and one was an employee of Wyoming’s Bureau of Public Roads. Thirty-eight more men were burned, many of them badly.

Recovering bodies

By 5 p.m. the worst of the fire was over, but the smoke was so thick the survivors in Post's crew who could walk stayed in place for nearly three more hours before leaving the site.

In the morning hours of Aug. 22, the bodies of Clayton and six of his men were found within 30 feet of each other. Sixty feet away rescuers found CCC enrollee Roy Bevens, who was badly burned but clinging to life. "God, how lucky I am to be alive!" he told the men who evacuated him to Cody, but he later died of his severe injuries at the hospital.

The solemn scene of the bodies Clayton's crew being taken from the forest was recorded by a Cody news reporter. "Seven pack-horses, each with angular forms wrapped in canvas and lashed to the saddles, filed slowly out of the wooded ravine and stopped at the cars," the journalist wrote. "Over a hundred wide-eyed, ashen-gray youngsters, just ready to go to the fire line, pushed forward, drawn by a chilling magnetism to see what their former comrades looked like."

What they witnessed that day stayed with the men, who were haunted by the deaths. In 1987, on the 50th anniversary of the Blackwater fire, CCC firefighter Lloyd Hull described that horrific afternoon. "It baked everybody below [the tree-top fire]. The heat was so intense," Hull remembered. "You knew it was happening. There was no 'figure' to it. We knew it."

Hull was part of the team that searched for bodies and helped the injured. So was 17-year-old Vernon Pitt, a just-discharged CCC enrollee from Cody who volunteered to stay and help.

"There was no way they could get out," Pitt said. "It was a pretty sad deal. Them boys was all young boys."

Morris Simpers, superintendent of the CCC's Cody camp, said when Clayton's body was discovered it appeared remarkably unscathed. Then he described how the ranger's woolen clothing crumpled into ashes when it was touched.

"Clayton's men could have walked to safety within seven minutes," Simpers later told the Billings Gazette. "That shows how fast the fire came up."

Ten of the casualties were young members of the CCC. The five others killed were employed by the U.S. Forest Service. Thirty-eight other men were injured. Putting out the fire took a back seat to the search for victims, but afterward fresh crews numbering up to 500 attacked the fire. It was officially contained three days later on Aug. 24, and the final firefighting crew was disbanded a week afterward.

Changes in firefighting

The Blackwater Creek Fire is a distant memory in wildfire history, but it led to an important change in the way forest fires would be fought in the future. David P. Godwin of the U.S. Forest Service's Division of Fire Control investigated the fire and determined the foremen and supervisors admirably performed their duties and were not to blame for the tragedy. It was beyond their control.

But Godwin questioned delays in the travel times of firefighting units, particularly the one dispatched from Ten Sleep. The investigator speculated that if they had arrived as scheduled, the Texans who left the Ten Sleep camp would not have been deployed where they were when the fire blew up. In his report Godwin noted in that scenario they may very well have survived unharmed.

Godwin ultimately concluded units needed to be on the scene much earlier, and two years after the Blackwater fire he authorized funds to carry out parachute jumping experiments linked to fire suppression. The federal government's smokejumper program, initially tested in Winthrop, Wash., and at two locations in Montana, was born.

On the second anniversary of the Blackwater Creek fire, 500 local residents helped dedicate a 71-foot-long stone monument, which contains the names of all the men who were killed or injured. It is located 38 miles west of Cody on U.S. Highway 14/16, near the junction of Blackwater Creek and the North Fork of the Shoshone River.

Two smaller monuments, accessible only by hiking or horseback on a 12-mile-round-trip trail, were built by CCC crews. One is located at the renamed "Clayton Gulch," and the second is at "Post Point," which fittingly marks the spot where Ranger Post and his men sought refuge. Post received the nation's first forest-fighting medal for leading his men to safety.

Clayton, meanwhile, was honored in a lengthy 1937 poem, "Alfred G. Clayton, Requiescat in Peace." It is credited to "L.C. Shoemaker and Roosevelt." The poem concludes:

"A hero? Oh no! just a ranger
Who answered unquestioned the call;
Whose motto -- like ours -- was service;
Who gave to 'The Service' his all.
And a promise we give to his loved ones,
That as long as rangers shall ride,The name of Alfred G. Clayton
Will still be remembered with pride."

Killed in the Blackwater Fire:

• Alfred G. Clayton, Ranger South Fork District, Shoshone National Forest, age 45.
• James T. Saban, CCC Technical Foreman - Ten Sleep Camp F-35 (former Forest Ranger on Medicine Bow and Chippewa National Forests), age 36.
• Rex A. Hale, Junior Assistant to the Technician, Shoshone National Forest; from the Wapiti CCC camp, age 21.
• Paul E. Tyrrell, Junior Forester, Bighorn National Forest (Foreman), died Aug. 26 at hospital, age 24.
• Billy Lea, Bureau of Public Roads Crewman, originally from Oregon, died later at hospital.
• Civilian Conservation Corps Enrollees: Ten Sleep Camp F-35 in the Bighorn National Forest; Company 1811 -- 3 months earlier came from Bastrop area of Texas, ages 17 to 20 years:
• John B. Gerdes of Halletsville, TX
• Will C. Griffith of Bastrop, TX
• Mack T. Mayabb of Smithville, TX
• George E. Rodgers of George, TX
• Roy Bevens of Smithville, TX, died later at Cody hospital.
• Clyde Allen of McDade, TX
• Ernest Seelke of LaGrange, TX
• Rubin D. Sherry of Smithville, TX
• William Whitlock of Austin, TX, died later at Cody hospital.
• Ambrocio Garza of Corpus Christi, TX, died later at Cody hospital.

Resources

• Always Remember website. “1937 08/21 WY15-Fatality Blackwater CCC.” Accessed May 15, 2016 at http://www.wlfalwaysremember.org/incident-lists/255-blackwater.html. Includes the list of the deceased, reproduced here.
• Forest Army: Remembering the Civilian Conservation Corps. “Death on the Fireline: The Blackwater Fire of 1937.” Accessed May 15, 2016 at http://forestarmy.blogspot.com/2007/08/death-on-fire-line-blackwater-fire-of.html.
• Howard, Tom. “CCC Reunion: 'Never Forget Fire.’” Billings Gazette, June 29, 1987.
• Kaufman, Erle. “Death in Blackwater Canyon.” American Forests, November 1937, 534-540, 538-539. Accessed June 21, 2016 at http://www.fireleadership.gov/toolbox/staffride/downloads/lsr5/lsr5_death_in_blackwater_nov1937.pdf. Good article published just three months after the fire, with photos of the Blackwater Creek terrain. If document does not load, copy and re-paste url directly into address window.
• Perry, Dave. “The Fatal Blackwater Fire.” Riverton Ranger, June 30, 1987
• Wikipedia. “Blackwater Fire of 1937.” Accessed June 29, 2016 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackwater_fire_of_1937
• For Further Reading and Research
• Gabbert, Bill. “Blackwater Fire of 1937 Remembered.” Wildfire Today, May 15, 2012. Accessed June 30, 2016 at http://wildfiretoday.com/2012/05/15/blackwater-fire-of-1937-remembered/.
• Gabbert, Bill. “Commemoration of the 75^th Anniversary of the Blackwater Fire.” Wildfire Today, August 17, 2012. Accessed June 30, 2016 at http://wildfiretoday.com/2012/08/17/commemoration-of-the-75th-anniversary-of-the-blackwater-fire/.

Illustrations

• The photos of the firefighters monument and of the burned firefighters in hospital were both produced by Hoskins Studio, of Cody, probably in the late 1930s and are now in the collections of the Park County Archives. Used with permission and thanks.
• Archives staffers caution that the photo of the burned men and their nurse was identified by its donor as being of firefighters injured in the Blackwater Fire, but the print itself contains no information on the back that would make that identification more certain.
• The aerial photo of the Blackwater Fire is from the U.S. Forest Service. The U.S. Forest service map and graphic about the Blackwater Fire was reproduced on Wildfire Today. Used with thanks.
• The advertisement for backpack water pumps for firefighters was published alongside the 1937 Erle Kauffman article in American Forests, cited and linked in the bibliography above. Used with thanks.
• For 30 more Forest Service photos of the Blackwater Fire and its aftermath, click here.

Mrs. Robert C. Morris of New York is an authority on Western fishing. ... In the Winter she lives on Fifth Avenue, and goes to the opera, and rides in her limousine, and does the other things that city women do; in the Summer she is off to the Rockies to fish, ride the mountain trails, camp, and fish again (New York Times, May 12, 1918).

A wealthy New York socialite seemed an unlikely candidate to spearhead one of the earliest efforts to establish a standard trail system in Yellowstone National Park. But Alice Morris was no stranger to the park. By 1917, she had come to the Yellowstone country each summer for many years, camping, fishing and riding horses.

From Army to Park Service

When Morris came to Yellowstone – “America’s Wonderland” – the park was struggling through a difficult transition. In 1883, the U.S. Army took over management of the park, which was suffering from vandalism, poaching and poor administration. The Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Cavalry managed the park until 1916, when President Woodrow Wilson signed the National Park Service Act. The last soldiers left Fort Yellowstone in October, turning over management to the National Park Service. The first Park rangers were 22 discharged Army men.

The transition did not go smoothly. Local communities wanted the Army back, and politicians blocked funding for the civilian force. Army management made a temporary return, but when the United States entered World War I, troops were needed in Europe. Congress reluctantly provided non-military funding for the park in July 1918.

Getting around

The original road system was built by the competent Army Corps of Engineers. One of the earliest park superintendents, Philetus W. Norris, devised a system of circular loop roads to connect the natural wonders. During his tenure from 1877-1882, workers completed about 104 miles of today’s 140-mile Grand Loop Road.

The Army then took over administration. Lieutenant Dan C. Kingman concentrated on improving the hastily built roads, set park road standards, and built several substantial bridges. Norris and other pre-Army superintendents also began laying out a system of foot and horseback trails to access the park’s attractions and to patrol the backcountry. These early trails often followed existing American Indian routes, game trails, or, simply, paths of least resistance.

The military, charged with controlling poaching and wildfires, established regular patrols that used existing roads and trails. Gradually new trails were added to the park system. Starting in about 1890, the Army built patrol cabins for shelter during the winter months. These so-called snowshoe cabins were strategically located throughout the park and were eventually connected by trails.

Fire control was a major concern after the Great Fire of 1910 (“the Big Blowup”), which burned over 3 million acres of forest in Washington, Idaho and Montana, and killed at least 85 people. The Army began building new trails that served a dual purpose—tourism and fire prevention. Many of the trails were designated as “firelanes.”

By 1917, about 400 hundred miles of trails were in common use, including 280 miles classified as firelanes. Milton P. Skinner, a geologist intimately familiar with the park, suggested an additional 521 miles of new trails. In 1916, cars began streaming into the park, and it became imperative to separate horseback travel from auto traffic.

“I had long known the Park”

Although Alice Morris was a world traveler and could afford to visit any destination, she chose Yellowstone National Park. For several summers she stayed on a homestead claimed in 1913 by G. Milton Ames along Slough Creek just north of the park. “Lady Morris,” as she was known, first stayed in a tent, later a log cabin accompanied by her cook, Estelle. Morris kept five ponies and a colt on the homestead and often traveled into the park.

Usually, she left her husband in New York. Robert Clark Morris was born into a prominent New England family. He graduated with a law degree from Yale. In 1890, he married Alice Parmelee, age 17, and soon established a law practice in New York City. He and Alice were active in civic, social and political affairs. In 1896 they sailed to Japan, where they visited Yokohama, Tokyo, Kyoto, and Nara. She subsequently wrote an illustrated book, Dragons and Cherry Blossoms, about the adventure. This thin volume displayed her writing skills, which she would one day put to good use in her reports on the Yellowstone trails.

An invitation

Alice must have been a notable sight during her visits to Yellowstone, exploring the park on horseback. In 1917, at age 44, she was invited by the Park Service to undertake a study of the trails. That summer, she covered 1,500 miles on horseback, mapping and blazing a system of trails.

She described her adventures to a reporter in a New York Times article that ran February 10, 1918. She related her daily regimen of waking at 5 AM, riding all day working out a route across a variety of terrains, sometimes through deep snow, and swimming the horses through rivers. She concluded her long days around a campfire, making notes of the day’s journey. “Work? Of course it was work,” she said. “But it was the most stimulating kind of work you can imagine.”

Two reports

As a result of that summer’s explorations, she compiled two official reports. The first,“Notes on Trail Study in Yellowstone Park” (1917), provided park officials with specific recommendations, including suggestions for trail connections and complete marking of the trails. Her subsequent report, “Map and Description of the Trails in and about Yellowstone Park” (1918) was an eloquent essay on the beauty and wildness Yellowstone offered tourists willing to travel the back country. Her observations included colorful descriptions of wildlife, flora and geysers.

Her 1917 report recommended three circular trails. One, she urged, should connect the principal hotels; the second would be a series of trails radiating like spokes from the hotels for short trips; her third recommendation proposed an outer loop through the wilderness to the borders of the park, based on existing firelanes. The report listed all the trails she rode and her recommendations for specific improvements, shortcuts or new trails.

She advised that trail specifications be followed and used as a basis for construction and inspection of new trails:

Trails should be cut 6 ft. wide through timber, and graded 3 ft. wide on all side hills, and through rough ground. Also that overhanging branches be removed from trees. Small stumps and snags should be cut below the level of the ground, if possible, and the trail should be reasonably free from sharp turns, sudden declivities and loose stones. All trails to be constructed should be run out with a hypsometer [an instrument for measuring height or altitude] or some such simple instrument and staked, in order to establish an even grade. Recommended that the maximum grade on any trail constructed be 10 per cent, very few grades being over 8 per cent.

…It is suggested that on this trail work there be appointed a Trail Master, whose business it should be to plan and superintend work on all trails in order that the system of trails may present a uniform appearance. The existing trails give an unpleasant impression of dissimilarity of method of construction.

Appreciative of her summer’s labors, Superintendent Lindsley graciously wrote Alice: “The manner in which you have handled this important problem of our National Park, and the completeness and charm of expression of your reports and notes, is a joy. And best of all, to my mind, you have made the whole scheme perfectly a practicable one, and I hope that you can be the one to see it carried eventually to completion, and enjoyed and appreciated by the public.”

“The fishing – Oh, the fishing!”

The unusual combination of socialite and explorer had begun to catch the public’s eye. Morris was interviewed by a New York Times reporter for an article that appeared on May 12, 1918. Answering his questions about fly fishing, she scoffed at any fisherman who would sink to using worms. “The keenest joy in fishing,” she observed, “was luring a trout that you’ve never been able to catch…But when you get him, you are satisfied… It has been a battle of wits, a tussle of strategy, and you’ve won! That’s fishing!”

Fishing remained one of Alice Morris’s greatest passions. She exclaimed in the Times article, “The fishing—Oh, the fishing in the Yellowstone!—is such fishing as the passionate angler dreams of….The day’s ride along the trails finds always a jewel-like lake in the mountains, or a crystal sparkling stream, at the edge of which to make camp when evening falls.”

“This unique splendor”

Alice Morris expected that her longer, more impressionistic 1918 report, along with 32 photos, would be published by the National Park Service. However, this author was unable to locate any record of an officially published version. The 1918 report survives in the Yellowstone National Park archives. This second report provides the basis of this article and will be quoted at length. She began by explaining the urgent necessity of her explorations. The introduction of the automobile had made travel much easier, she wrote, but many feared a loss of the park’s “primitive charm” would result.

To…make public the information that would establish the Yellowstone National Park more firmly than it ever had been before as the people’s wonderland – a unique and marvelous thing to see, a safe and simple place to visit, a delightful, picturesque, magnificent country to ride through and camp in and enjoy – the National Park Service of the Department of the Interior asked me to map the trails and bridle paths…The motor cars travel over a small part of the park’s great area. Into all the magnificence of the wilderness, otherwise inaccessible, go the trails.

Of course, Alice Morris lived in a world far removed from today’s. Present-day park management of some 4 million visitors per year would have been beyond her imagination.

“Harmless, good-natured” bears

Though Alice Morris was an experienced backcountry traveler, her attitudes towards safety on pack trips seem naïve today:

It is safe in spite of black bears and mountain elk, of precipitous canyons and rushing rivers. It is so safe that women and children may set out with a pack-train. The pack-train is of course accompanied by a guide, and all the Yellowstone guides are well-known and experienced men…As for the wild animals that roam the hills…they simply pay no attention to him at all. Now and then a great black bear will come lumbering out of the forest and cross the bridle-path. His big clumsy body may halt its swinging gait as he hears the pack-train’s approach; his wistful, humourous [sic] face may turn gravely for a moment toward the intruders in his domain; but after all he is used to them; they are harmless; they are not worth more than an instant’s attention; he ambles on. And the horses, by no means disturbed, keep on their way. … The grizzly bears are made of different stuff. They seek no compromise in their ancient enmity. They have their homes – the few that are in the Park – in remote fastnesses high up in the hills. Man almost never meets them; he never wants to.

Morris did not record any incidents involving bears during her horseback rides through the park that summer of 1917. Only the summer before, however, a large grizzly attacked and killed a teamster, Frank Welch, who was sleeping under his wagon. His was the first documented death from grizzly attack in Yellowstone National Park.

The “bear problem” started after two large hotels opened in the park in 1891 and developed large waste dumps. Emboldened by these dumps, bears gradually lost their fear of humans and started begging from tourists along the park roads. Visitors tended to underestimate the risk, approaching the bears to feed or photograph them.

From 1931 to 1969, an average of 46 people per year were injured by black bears. Only 8 people have been killed by grizzly bears in Yellowstone National Park during its 146-year history. Eventually, the dangerous combination of garbage dumps and tourists became evident. By 1973, the dumps were permanently closed, and many problem bears were transplanted to remote areas.

“The whole park is a flower garden”

Alice observed that “the flowers grow, wild and luxuriant, as they grow in primeval lands,” and singled out a few as objects of her particular affection. Lupine, pale lavender to deep purple and blue, was the dominant flower growing in masses on the hillsides; the gentian was “…a clear blue fringed flower that…remains characteristically the Yellowstone’s own.” She was especially charmed by columbine and Indian paintbrush, which changed to a large, gracefully formed flower of deep magenta or crimson in the high peaks.

Morris admitted that the auto tourist could now visit most of the “spectacular wonders” of the park, but only those who traveled the trails by pack-train could linger in their own favorite places for as long as they chose, even all summer if they liked. “Everyone knows that there are geysers there,” she wrote; “almost everyone knows that there are petrified forests; few Americans, I think, understand the untouched natural beauty and interest even in little things that lie in this American wonderland.”

Magic fountains

Despite the fact that Alice Morris considered the geysers an obvious Yellowstone attraction, she devoted several pages of her report to their description. Although geologists classified and explained the geyser phenomena in great detail, Morris related to the simple “wonder and delight” of the tourist in seeing them. “These great bursts of silver beauty from the earth are so mysterious, so splendid, so curiously varied.” Many of the names she used are still in use today:

Here is Black Warrior, whose fountain play never ceases, and the indolent lovely majestic Giantess that rests from five to forty days! The explosive Minute Man sends his silver shower into the air for fifteen, twenty, thirty seconds, and then stops. The Giant plays for precisely one hour at a time. And there is the exquisite little Jewel, whose magic fountain is never more than twenty feet high, whereas the Giant, the highest stream of all, sends forth a gleaming misted tower with a minimum of 200 and a maximum of 250 feet. The Fan is unlike most of the other geysers in that it throws its water at an angle instead of vertically. Castle Geyser, with a gush of seventy-five feet or so, has built itself an impressive crater from which it takes its name. The Beehive is a creation of simple artistry – a slender column of water that rises to a height of 200 feet from a small beehive mound. The Great Fountain’s basin is strangely and pleasingly ornamented, and its volume of water is extraordinarily large.

In her 1918 report, Alice Morris called the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone “one of the great natural wonders of the world”:

It is a place not only of beauty and majesty of line, but of magnificent color – so magnificent, so varied, that it is as if a single artist has spilled his gorgeous tint upon the rocks. Leaving its quiet valley, the river tumbles first over the Upper Falls and then on to the Lower Falls, where it is truly a queen in its flowing robes of silver as it dashes in glory down what is perhaps the most beautiful waterfall in the world.

“Into all the magnificence of the wilderness, otherwise inaccessible, go the trails”

The nuts and bolts of Alice’s 1918 report were the trail-by-trail descriptions. Portions of this segment of her 1918 trail study were printed in the “Yellowstone National Park: Rules and Regulations” issued in 1920. However, as stated earlier, it does not appear that her 1918 report was ever printed in its entirety as an official park pamphlet.

The recommendations

Correspondence between Alice Morris and Superintendent Lindsley in February and March 1918 indicate how seriously he took her recommendations concerning the park trail system. In regard to her 1917 report, Lindsley stated that “I only wish there were room for all of it in our little booklet on park information which is distributed by the thousands each summer. I have already recommended that your Trail Notes be added to that circular, and trust it may not be too late to have it done for the season of 1918.”

In a letter dated February 15, Lindsley stressed the necessity of cutting out and marking the north boundary line of the park and the west line of the park from the northwest corner, “as this is a favorite hunting country in the fall and there is some doubt as to the location of the line on the part of hunters.” He also recommended heavy rock work on the trail north of the Yellowstone River.

Lindsley requested a map from Morris, as well as cost estimates for conducting the work, based on three (possibly four) crews of four men each and four pack horses in the field; a map and cost figures were attached to his letter in park files, indicating her response. Her agenda for trail work was much more ambitious than Lindsley mentioned in his letter. She also calculated the number of days needed for each project to be completed.

She attached two appendices, one of which provided for improvement of Uncle Tom’s Trail from the canyon rim to the shore of the river. “Many people persist in using this trail in its present dangerous condition in spite of sign at its head and warnings duly given. Steps can be cut in rock, iron hand-rails provided, and earth part widened, relocated, and re-graded.”

Many of Alice’s recommendations were later incorporated by the Park Service as funding and other priorities allowed. One of her suggestions for a new trail has become today’s Trail Creek Trail, which follows the north and east sides of Heart Lake, then continues east along the south shores of the South and Southeast Arms of Yellowstone Lake to connect with the Thorofare Trail. Milton P. Skinner also recommended this route in his 1917 report. He stated that “a fair game trail covers most of the route.” Superintendent Albright agreed with them both and recommended that it be added to the trail system in his 1919 and 1920 “Report of the Superintendent.” The trail was finally constructed during the years 1934-1936.

In the same area, she recommended constructing what has become today’s Snake River or Snake River Cutoff Trail. She also suggested the construction of the Elephant’s Back Trail at the north end of Lake Yellowstone, which was subsequently built in 1928, as well as what is today’s Buffalo Fork Trail at the north end of the park. This trail was finally designated on park maps in 1937.

Down the rabbit hole

As for the rest of Alice’s life, after her 1917 summer of trail-breaking and subsequent articles, little is known about her. The Slough Creek homestead, her summer home for many years, was sold in 1918 and became a part of the Silver Tip Ranch, a guest ranch with a rustic lodge and polo field. Alice Morris ceased her summer visits to the homestead, and her name is not mentioned in a history of the Silver Tip Ranch from 1922-1947, written by A. Conger Goodyear.

No evidence has been found of any further association between Alice Morris and Yellowstone National Park. After G. Milton Ames sold his property in 1918, Alice Morris stayed with Mrs. Joe B. Duret, wife of “Frenchy” Duret, on a nearby homestead. Her visit in June 1921 was mentioned in a local newspaper: “Mrs. Duret looks after the comforts of a number of tourists every year at her place on Slough Creek on the Cooke City Road, where she will entertain this year, Mrs. Robert Morris, wife of a prominent New York lawyer, who arrived in Livingston Wednesday from the east.”

The remainder of Alice Morris’s life is a mystery. In the 1920s, she and Robert C. Morris were divorced. The couple never had any children. After the divorce, her name vanished from the society pages of the New York Times. Robert C. Morris remarried, but his second wife died only 17 months later. He passed away in 1938, leaving one-quarter of his estate to Alice. At that time, Alice had not remarried, and she resided in Palm Springs, California.

Did Alice Morris ever return to Yellowstone National Park after committing so much time and energy to the development of its trail system? Further research may cast new light on her later life, but for now this dynamic woman from New York City deserves recognition for her contributions to Yellowstone’s backcountry trails. In her report, she added:

I had long known the Park… and had literally chosen it as in all the world the most interesting, enjoyable goal for summer journeyings. Certainly, too, the earth knows no place more beautiful, just as it knows no place that is at all like the Yellowstone National Park.

Resources

Primary Sources

• Anderson, George S. Report of the Superintendent of the Yellowstone National Park to the Secretary of the Interior, 1892. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1892.
• Anderson, George S. Report of the Superintendent of the Yellowstone National Park to the Secretary of the Interior, 1895. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1895.
• Hale, Elaine Skinner. “A Brief History of the Slough Creek Wagon Road,” typewritten 13-page manuscript dated 19 June 2006. On file at Branch of Cultural Resources, Yellowstone Center for Resources, Yellowstone National Park.
• National Park Service. Yellowstone National Park: Rules and Regulations, 1920. “Trails in and About Yellowstone National Park”, by Mrs. Robert C. Morris. Accessed Nov. 1, 2016 at https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/brochures/1920/yell/sec4.htm.
• Yellowstone National Park Archives, Pre-National Park Service Collection, Letter Box 72, Item No. 113: Roads and Trails, 1912-1918; letter report dated November 15, 1916, from Chester A. Lindsley, Acting Supervisor to the Superintendent of National Parks, Washington, D.C. concerning statistics for roads and trails in Yellowstone National Park.
• Yellowstone National Park Archives, Pre-National Park Service Collection, Item No. 113: Roads & Trails, 1912-1918, “June 1917, Suggested Addition to System of Trails in Yellowstone National Park with Advantages of the Trails Mentioned, Present Condition of Trails where Old Trails Exist, and Estimated Cost of Necessary Work” by Milton P. Skinner, Geologist, 13 pages.
• Yellowstone National Park Archives, Pre-National Park Service Collection, Item No. 113: Roads & Trails, 1912-1918. Folder 342, five page letter dated November 20, 1917, from Major John W.H. Schulz, District Engineer, Corps of Engineers, to the Chief of Engineers, U.S. Army, Washington, D.C. concerning trails in Yellowstone National Park.
• Yellowstone National Park Archives, Pre-National Park Service Collection, Letter Box 72, Folder: Notes on Trail Study in Yellowstone Park, 1917, by Alice P. Morris, File No. 332.4; Yellowstone Trails by Alice P. Morris, 1918.
• Yellowstone National Park Archives, Pre-National Park Service Collection, Letter Box 72, File No. 332.4; letters dated February 15 and March 14, 1918, from C.A. Lindsley, Superintendent Yellowstone National Park, to Alice Morris, concerning Yellowstone National Park trails and suggested improvements.
• “Yellowstone Trails Blazed by New York Woman.” The New York Times Magazine, 10 February 1918, p. 7.
• “From Fifth Avenue She Turns to Fly-Fishing.” The New York Times, 12 May 1918.
• Mrs. Robert C. Morris of New York at her camp, Mammoth Hot Springs, Yellowstone Park, Wyoming.” Photograph and caption, The New York Times, 16 August 1914.
• “Local News.” The Park County News, Livingston, Montana, 28 June 1921. Reference to Mrs. Joe B. Duret and summer visit of Mrs. Robert Morris.
• “Bear Killed and Ate Mont. Trapper.” The Cody Enterprise, Cody, Wyoming, 28 June 1922, p. 1.
• U.S. Forest Service. “The 1910 Fires.” U.S. Forest Service History. Forest History Society 2012. Accessed Nov. 1, 2016 at http://www.foresthistory.org/ASPNET/Policy/Fire/FamousFires/1910Fires.aspx.

Secondary Sources

• Culpin, Mary Shivers. The History of the Construction of the Road System in Yellowstone National Park, 1872-1966. Historic Resource Study, Vol. 1, No. 5. Denver: National Park Service, Rocky Mountain Region, 1994.
• Egan, Timothy. The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America. New York, New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2009.
• Haines, Aubrey L. The Yellowstone Story, Volumes 1 and 2. Niwot, Colorado: University Press of Colorado, 1996.
• No Author. “Robert Clark Morris, 1869-1938.” The New York Community Trust, New York, NY. http://www.nycommunitytrust.org/Portals/0/…/BioBrochures/Robert%20Clark%20Morris.pdf.
• Whithorn, Doris. Twice Told on the Upper Yellowstone, Volume 2. Published by Doris Whithorn, Livingston, Montana, 1994.
• Whittlesey, Lee H. Death in Yellowstone: Accidents and Foolhardiness in the First National Park. Second Edition. Lanham, Maryland: Roberts Rinehart Publishers, 2014.

Illustrations

• The photos of Alice Morris on her horse, the cabin on Slough Creek and the cook, Estelle, are from the Yellowstone Gateway Museum of Park County, Livingston, Montana, all now in the authors’ collection as well. Used with thanks.
• The map of Yellowstone trails that Alice Morris prepared for her 1918 report to the Department of the Interior is from the Pre-National Park Service Collection, Yellowstone National Park Archives, now in the authors’ collection. The photos the Trail Creek Trail bridge, tourists riding the Howard Eaton Trail and the tourist above the Yellowstone River, are all from Box L-8, 1934 Fire Trails, Yellowstone National Park Archives and are now in the authors’ collection as well. Used with thanks.
• The photos of the steps to the foot of the Lower Yellowstone Falls and the waterfall itself are by the authors, 2009. The photo of the Blue Sapphire Pool is from 2016, also by the authors. Used with thanks.

In 1973 in Lander, Wyo., a father faced a difficult choice: Buy rubber boots to get his daughter through the Wyoming snows? Or continue pouring family funds into his newspaper and its quixotic mission—saving Wyoming? High Country News Publisher and Editor Tom Bell must have chosen the boots.

Bell announced in the March 2, 1973 edition that he was closing the newspaper, which he had launched just four years earlier. His wife, Tommie, and he had put $30,000 into its operation; he had drawn a salary in 1971 and 1972 that totaled only $910.97, he said. He had three little children at home, all adopted. He still owed $7,500 on a bank note from when the paper was first launched. He said he had few regrets about giving up.

High Country News still lives, however, 43 years later. After the 1973 announcement, pledges and commitments flooded in; readers sent in small checks and appealed to their philanthropic friends. In the July 6, 1973, issue, he announced a “miracle”: They had received $29,467.75, and he paid off the bank loan.

Why did this small newspaper with only 2,608 subscribers inspire such a dramatic response? When asked to remember those days, Wyomingites told Wyohistory.org that they credit both the man and the significance of the threats the region faced at that time.

The threats

The most significant threat was coal development. In earlier decades, most of the coal was mined underground in Wyoming, but by the early 1970s, huge strip mines were being proposed along with power plants and synthetic fuel plants that would transform the rural region into what Bell and his supporters saw as an industrialized colony. Some called it a National Sacrifice Area. The North Central Power Study, a joint government-industry effort published in 1971, predicted construction of 42 power plants on the Northern Plains. While the six major Western coal states would produce only 9,000 megawatts of coal-fired electricity in 1972, the study predicted that the northern states would produce five times that much by 1980 and 200,000 megawatts per year by the year 2020.

Government and industry looked to the Northern Plains to solve the nation’s energy crisis and proposed ambitious projects. Near Pinedale, Wyo., the Atomic Energy Commission wanted to use 100 nuclear bombs underground to frack tight shale beds to release natural gas. Along the Green River in southwestern Wyoming, developers proposed diverting water across the Continental Divide to feed the giant coal-fired power plants. Another plan called for tapping precious groundwater and mixing it into a coal slurry that would be shipped to Arkansas.

At the same time, ranchers were shooting and poisoning hundreds of eagles to protect their livestock. Pronghorns were suffering slow deaths, tangled in illegal barbed-wire fences on public lands in the Red Desert, fences that also excluded the public from those lands. The Forest Service was allowing huge, 1,000-acre clear cuts of timber that denuded hillsides, filled rivers with topsoil and could not be sustained.

The High Country News covered all of these issues, and despite its small circulation, enjoyed an outsized influence. Reading about the North Central Power Study in HCN, the editor of Science News called Bell to confirm what he read: The numbers could not be right. When Bell referred him to the study itself, the editor ran a front page story on it. Wyoming’s lone congressman, U.S. Rep. Teno Roncalio, was on a first-name basis not only with Bell but also with his office manager, Mary Margaret Davis.

Dick Prouty, environmental reporter for the Denver Post, recognized early the importance of the High Country News when the big energy companies began quoting it. “They respected the reporting there, and we all started using it for ideas,” Prouty said. The paper’s “miracle” was covered by the Los Angeles Times. Audubon magazine sent historian Alvin Josephy to investigate the threats and ran his in-depth analysis of the North Central Power Study, “Agony of the Northern Plains,” in its July 1, 1973, issue.

The man

Tom Bell was born in Wyoming, and so was the High Country News. Their indigenous roots served them well in an era when ranchers and mining interests tried to tie the fledgling environmental movement to outsiders. No one could question Bell’s credentials. He didn’t just wear jeans, cowboy boots and a cowboy hat. He hunted, lived on a ranch—until he had to sell it to save the newspaper—trapped and, when he was a student at the University of Wyoming after World War II, started the rodeo club there. His father was a coal miner.

Tom had staked uranium claims with his fellow teachers, later selling the uranium stock to subsidize HCN. It was his passion, however, that ignited a movement in Wyoming. Small in stature, he seemed to have a gargantuan presence.

Many people shared his desire to save Wyoming, but the Northern Plains had no environmental movement in the 1960s, only isolated organizations with differing priorities and no paid staff. In 1967 Bell started the Wyoming Outdoor Coordinating Council, now called the Wyoming Outdoor Council.

Though he did not intend to start an environmental newspaper, Bell needed a forum for sharing news among the groups in the WOCC and their members. As it turned out, Camping News Weekly was closing. Bell took out a loan in 1969 to purchase the publication and in 1974 transformed it into the High Country News. Realizing that he could not continue to run both WOCC and HCN, he convinced the WOCC board to take out a loan and hire Keith Becker.

There was no business plan for High Country News, but practicality was never high on Tom’s list of priorities or that of his wife, Tommie. By then he had quit several different jobs, one after he told a member of the Wyoming Game and Fish Commission to go to hell. He was very clear about his priorities in 1970: “I view conservation not just as a job nor as an avocation but as a way of life and a means to survival for the human race. It is a deadly serious business in which a person must be willing to sacrifice, personally as well as economically.”

The vision

Bell provided three things: well-researched information, a vision of how to tackle the problems and often the nudge to get people to work. With the exception of The Denver Post and the Missoulian in Montana, there were no other reporters focusing on environmental issues in the region at the time. The Casper Star-Tribune of the early 1970s focused instead on discrediting the environmentalists, according to Bruce Hamilton, who later joined Bell as an editor at HCN.

“He was a catalyst for me, constantly on your case to do something. He was a buzz bomb of dedication and tenacity,” Leslie Petersen says. Petersen’s parents, Les and Alice Shoemaker, owned a dude ranch near Dubois, Wyo. The Shoemakers were alarmed about the clearcutting in the Shoshone National Forest around them and worked to protect the DuNoir area in particular, losing friends in the process in a community dependent upon the timber mill. Petersen’s father served as the second president of the WOCC Board, and she learned about broader environmental issues when she attended meetings with him and read High Country News.

Bell conveyed his vision in a letter to Wyoming Gov. Stan Hathaway in 1972, pleading for a special session of the Legislature to deal with “impending social, economic and environmental problems.” The letter suggested specific legislative initiatives.

Hathaway, however, rejected Bell’s vision, saying the energy plans did not seem imminent. Bell never forgave him and often in the High Country News, vented his wrath against Hathaway, U.S. Sen. Cliff Hansen, and other individuals who, he thought, imperiled wildlife and the state’s future.

Bell was perceived as “someone to be reckoned with, someone who knew his stuff and would not back off,” Petersen says.

“No one could threaten him. He was absolutely fearless and confrontational. He acted as if he had nothing to lose,” according to Keith Becker, who worked side by side with Bell when the WOCC and HCN shared an office. Bell was more incendiary in print than in person. “Tom was so earnest that he was able to disarm people,” Becker says.

War

Bell’s war experience shaped his perspective on risk, sacrifice and beauty. Flying as a bombardier over Italy in 1944, he was hit by shrapnel that destroyed his right eye and nearly killed him. He was told he would never see again. Later, at the age of 90, he told historian Mark Junge, “It was not as tough being an environmentalist as it was serving in World War II.”

Getting his vision back solidified his love for Wyoming and specifically for the Red Desert where he went after the war to recover from his emotional scars. “It was important to see the beautiful earth,” he said. When Junge asked what his family lived on, he said, “If I had enough money to put beans in my belly and have a roof over my head, that’s all I needed.”

His family’s and his staff’s dedication and sacrifices seem even more surprising than Bell’s. Losing the family ranch to pay HCN bills was heartbreaking for both Tom and Tommie, she said. Knowing how little money he was bringing home and how much they owed, it was she who suggested adopting three children after raising three of their own. Their courage inspired his two employees (Mary Margaret Davis and Marge Higley), who also went without salaries for six months, and the newspaper’s printer, who let printing bills slide, unpaid.

Bell himself was amazed at his readers’ loyalty and the miracle that resurrected HCN. Earlier, when he announced the closing of HCN in 1973, he had admitted that he had “few regrets.” When his readers sent donations and would not let him quit, he advertised for someone to help him with the editorial duties.

Joan Nice, a 25-year-old journalist from Colorado, arranged an interview, and he hired her on the spot, offering $300 per month. She hesitated only for a moment, saying they would have to find a job for her boyfriend bagging groceries or something. Instead, Bell hired them both, paying them $300 each. Bell, Nice and Bruce Hamilton shared editorial duties for a few months.

Then, suddenly, Bell announced he was leaving.

Move to Oregon

It turned out that Bell had something to lose after all. The 50-year-old man behind the legend was very human. He suffered from migraines and mercurial moods, twice over the years throwing the HCN layout sheets into the trash where his staff went to retrieve them. He also suffered from guilt about neglecting his family. He believed the world was going to hell, and his obligation was to move to Oregon where the climate lent itself to gardening, and he could better support his family.

When he walked out the door, he left his leadership role as well, unlike most founders of institutions. “Play with it until the string runs out,” he told his staff. He continued to contribute his “High Country” column, but he never tried to tell Joan Nice and Bruce Hamilton or subsequent staff how to edit or finance the newspaper.

Looking back, people involved in the Wyoming environmental movement at the time realize that the work took a heavy toll on many people, not just him. “We were a bunch of zealots, overdoing it,” in the words of one person. Working 60-70 hours a week for little or no pay, they acted as if they could save the world in their lifetimes. Relationships and physical health suffered. Constantly trying to raise money from the same people to fight crises destroyed friendships.

Evolution

Without Bell at the helm, the newspaper evolved into a more objective, less strident publication that focused on the environment. Bell had a fiery temper and made no attempt at objectivity, even testifying at public hearings on behalf of the readers. In Bell’s apoplectic newspaper, the sword of Damocles hung over the Clarks Fork River, sites for nuclear power plants and various other threatened areas.

Nice’s and Hamilton’s approach was different. They felt that if they laid out the facts, people would be convinced. “He was the right person to do it his way. Tom’s credentials as a native Wyomingite gave him credibility, but we were outsiders. We didn’t have the authority to speak for what Wyoming should do. Making it more objective was the only appropriate thing we could do,” Nice says.

Hamilton later left the High Country News to open a Sierra Club office in Lander. He and Nice were married and started having children and eventually left the state to work for the Sierra Club. By the time Nice left the HCN editorship in 1981, the newspaper circulation had increased to 9,000 and the paper continued to attract national attention as people such as Edward Abbey and Robert Redford visited Lander and spread the word about the paper.

Subsequent editors and financial managers continued the paper’s gradual progress toward stability, most notably converting it from a privately owned business owned by Tom Bell to nonprofit status so it could receive tax-deductible donations from individuals and foundations. In 1983, when Bell returned to Wyoming, editor Geoffrey O’Gara, the architect of this change, tried to ask Bell what he thought of the foundation. He had no interest in the details and just said, “Thanks for keeping it alive.”

In 1983, the board hired Ed and Betsy Marston to run the newspaper, and they moved it to Paonia, Colorado. High Country News had a truckload of files and photos and $7,000 in the bank, but the string never ran out and, in fact, the newspaper is thriving.

High Country News now has a budget of $3 million and more than 10 times as many paid subscribers as it had in 1974 (31,000). The website, which includes a full archive of back issues, attracts 360,000 unique visitors each month. The breadth of its coverage has continued to grow, reflecting the change in the tag line from “the environmental biweekly” to “for people who care about the West.” Bell’s other creation, the Wyoming Outdoor Council, has also thrived. Once struggling to support a half-time director, WOC now owns a building in Lander, has a staff of 12, and will celebrate its 50^th anniversary in 2017.

Until his death in Lander Aug. 30, 2016, Bell continued to fight to protect the Oregon Trail and the Red Desert. In his 90s, he was still writing angry letters to lawmakers about climate change. “Most of us mellow with age, but not Tom,” says Keith Becker. “He didn’t know how to back up, and God bless him for it.”

Looking back

Wyoming conservationists were remarkably successful in the 1970s. Some of the victories could be attributed specifically to Tom Bell. For example, U.S. Rep. Teno Roncalio wrote to Bell in 1974 about the federal coal surface mining law saying, “written landowner consent remains in the bill, and you deserve credit for that.” He personally brought national attention that eliminated illegal fencing and protected the Red Desert that he loved.

However, Tom was at the helm of High Country News for only five of its 13 years in Wyoming and about one-tenth of its full life; HCN will turn 50 in 2019. In contrast, the current publisher, Paul Larmer, has been publisher for 13 years, and the previous publishers, Ed and Betsy Marston, were publishers for 19 years.

His impact should be measured by the environmental movement that he sparked. Told recently that he left in 1974, Leslie Petersen, one of the early staffers, was surprised. “He got us all started, and then he left.” Bart Koehler, who served as the Outdoor Council’s executive director after Becker, calls Bell the Paul Revere of Wyoming. “Just as Revere was a patriot for spreading the alarm, so was Tom.”

Wyoming conservationists blocked the biggest threats of the 1970s and convinced the legislature to address not only the environmental but also the social impacts of development, as Bell had envisioned. Most of the power plants and gasification plants were never built. The Green River was never sent across the Continental Divide. The nuclear fracking plan was abandoned. The slurry pipeline was never built. Near Dubois, the DuNoir was designated a special management area, which prevented clearcutting there, and the oversized timber mill was shut down.

In 1973, environmentalists helped convince the Wyoming Legislature to pass an Environmental Quality Act, which established a Department of Environmental Quality. In 1974, Koehler and others recruited constituents to demand an Industrial Siting and Information act, which was passed by the Legislature in 1975. Also that year, Gov. Hathaway was replaced by a moderate Democrat, Ed Herschler, who ran on the slogan, “Growth on our terms;” he served for three terms.

On the walls of their offices and the pages of their publications, Tom Bell is still a constant presence at both HCN and WOC, and the staffs feel a deep loyalty. Several of them drove hundreds of miles to attend the University of Wyoming ceremony in 2016 when Bell received an honorary doctorate in absentia. Later, after he died, two of the HCN staff, in Paonia, jumped in the car again to attend his memorial in Lander.

When Bell was on his deathbed in July 2016, Joan Nice Hamilton wrote to him and said, “Thanks for believing in us.” Although he had left for Oregon shortly after they arrived, “Tom's vision—letting people know about the threats to and the glories of the Rocky Mountain West—were still the heart of the endeavor,” she says. “He was the passion behind HCN; that passion and the loyal readers were the whole reason we were there. A bunch of kids starting a newspaper would not have been significant: A lot of newspapers came and went. This one lasted because of that voice in the wilderness.”

In September, Bell’s friend John Mionczynski of Atlantic City, Wyo. walked to the top of Oregon Buttes on the Red Desert to release his ashes. Bell’s legacy lives in the legions of people who carry on his work, including Mionczynski, whose work on behalf of the Red Desert was inspired by Bell.

Marjane Ambler was one of the editors of High Country News from 1974 until 1980. In 2013, she and Lander-based journalists Geoffrey O’Gara and Sara Wiles videotaped interviews with Tom Bell, which were sent to the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, Wyo. Bell also donated his personal papers to the center. Keith Becker continued ranching and working on behalf of the environment after his tenure as WOC executive director. Leslie Petersen was president of the WOC board in 1979, was Wyoming’s Democratic candidate for governor in 2010, and served as a Teton County commissioner. Bruce Hamilton is the deputy executive director of the Sierra Club. Joan Nice Hamilton was the editor of Sierra magazine for many years. Bart Koehler devoted over 40 years to working for wilderness.

(Editor’s note: Publication of this and seven other articles on Wyoming newspapering is supported in part by the Wyoming Humanities Council and is part of the Pulitzer Prizes Centennial Campfires Initiative, a joint venture of the Pulitzer Prizes Board and the Federation of State Humanities Councils in celebration of the 2016 centennial of the prizes. The initiative seeks to illuminate the impact of journalism and the humanities on American life today, to imagine their future and to inspire new generations to consider the values represented by the body of Pulitzer Prize-winning work. For their generous support for the Campfires Initiative, the council thanks the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Pulitzer Prizes Board, and Columbia University.)

Resources

Primary Sources

• Becker, Keith. Telephone interview with author, Sept. 24, 2016.
• Bell, Tom. Interview with Mark Junge. Lander, Wyo., April 5, 2014. Wyoming State Archives. Accessed Nov. 2, 2016 at http://wyospcr.state.wy.us/MultiMedia/Display.aspx?ID=130&icon=1.
• Bell, Tom. “We’re Alive and Well, Thank you.” High Country News 5:14 (July 6, 1973): 1-4.
• Hamilton, Bruce. “Bart Koehler, Environmental Advocate.” High Country News 6:10 (May 10, 1974): 16.
• Hamilton, Bruce. Telephone interview with author, Sept. 26, 2016.
• ______________. “Tom Bell: Visionary, Advocate, Mentor, Fighter, Friend.” September 8, 2016. Accessed Nov. 2, 2016 at http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/green-life/tom-bell-visionary-advocate-mentor-fighter-friend.
• Hamilton, Joan Nice. Telephone interview with author, Sept. 26, 2016.
• Higley, Marge. “Thoughts from the Distaff Corner.” High Country News (16 March 1973): 14. Higley’s column includes the story about the choice between the boots and the newspaper.
• Koehler, Bart. Telephone interview with author, Sept. 26, 2016.
• Petersen, Leslie. Telephone interview with author, Sept. 23, 2016.

Secondary sources

• Josephy, Jr. Alvin M. “Agony of the Northern Plains: Impact on the Northern Plains of the 1971 ‘North Central Power Study.’” Audubon Magazine 75:4 (July 1, 1973): 68-99. Josephy’s article includes the map reproduced here.
• O’Gara, Geoffrey. “Saga of a High Country Newsman.” Sierra Magazine, (March/ April 1987): 72-77.

Illustrations

• The Mike McClure photos of Tom Bell and the High Country News staff, the image of the HCN front page from July 1973 and Kathy Bogan’s later illustration of Tom Bell are all from HCN files. Used with permission and thanks.
• The map accompanying Alvin Josephy’s article, “Agony of the Norhtern Plains,” cited above in more detail, ran in Audubon Magazine in July 1973. Used with thanks to the magazine and with special thanks to Bart Rea, who had a copy, and to Vince Crolla of the Casper College Western History Center, who prepared the scan.

Wagon-train emigrants got their first glimpse of the Rocky Mountains when, near Scotts Bluff in what’s now western Nebraska, Laramie Peak appeared on the horizon about 85 miles away.

A branch of the Oregon/California/Mormon Trail passed through Robidoux pass, a low opening south of the bluff. There, Antoine Robidoux, with his two American Indian wives and their families, kept a trading post and blacksmith shop. Many diarists noted Robidoux’s operation—along with the startling mountains dominated by a high, cone-shaped peak.

“Passed a blacksmith shop even it looks sociable in this wilderness, from tip of bluff. … I saw distinctly Laramie Peak and could distinguish the snow on its tops & sides, looks like a huge blue mound,” California-bound Peter Decker wrote late in May 1849—the first Gold Rush year.

“Passed this evening a trading house owned by a white man who has two Indian wives and several children,” Jackson Thomason wrote that June. “Some men can cut themselves off from the world and Society but I could not. After passing this trading house we crossed over a high ridge where I seen at a considerable distance Laramie’s Peak it being the first view of the Rocky Mountains to be seen.”

The West was changing now for the travelers, becoming drier and higher. The Platte and North Platte rivers, which they had followed through most of what’s now Nebraska and Wyoming, provided a broad, relatively level, natural roadway with ready supplies of water, forage and game.

“The scenery” from Scotts Bluff, Ansel McCall wrote in mid-June 1849, “is very beautiful, presenting to the view mountains, hills and valleys in every direction, changing the outlook entirely from that which we had been so long accustomed to, and convinced us that we were in reality approaching the Rocky Mountains, so long talked of. I do not know when I have witnessed a more beautiful sight.”

But on the western edge of the Great Plains, shortly after the emigrants passed Fort Laramie, the landscape began breaking up into a series of deepening ravines and pitched ascents. And many travelers were astonished, in late May or early June, to find the mountain still covered in snow.

“It is, at this day, covered with snow, which glitters in the sunshine like a diamond in the dark,” Dan Gelwicks wrote on May 28, 1849.

“We were at this point just opposite Laramie’s peak and near to it,” James Pritchard wrote about a week later, from the spot where the trail comes closest to the mountain that rose up about 20 miles to the southwest. “Its Snow caped summit seemed to peer to the Skys. Thus winter Stood aloft, in bold relief upon the left, beautifully reflecting the rays of the sun through the light fleeces of cloud that floated across the blue vault of heavens, while upon the right Nature was clad in all the soft, sweet, and gentle beauty of vernal bloom.”

But it was a cold spring. “Today has been a cold day throughout,” Charles Glass Gray wrote on June 13, 1849, “so as to make an overcoat, thick gloves, and flannels necessary. ... [N]o accidents occur’d though several threatenings of them, such as breaking axle trees and capsizing. For nearly all day we had a fine view of Laramie Peak from which I could not keep my eyes, render’d grander no doubt from our crawling along the prairies for so long a time and at night as it faded away I said to myself – All my troubles are forgot, gazing on this!”

But it was hard to avoid noticing the troubles of others, and hard sometimes, too, to believe one was seeing what one actually saw. “Passed several piles of baked beans and flour,” H.C. St. Clair wrote June 18, 1849. “One company throwed away 1.000 pounds of flour. We are in plain view of Laramie Peak. It appears to be 3 or 4 miles off but it is supposed to be 25 miles from the road and it is thought to be one mile high. There is something on it that looks white. Some think it is snow.”

While many emigrants found Laramie Peak awe-inspiring, the sight also dredged up anxiety as it signaled the beginning of their ascent into the mountains. From here on, the route would become more and more arduous. Laramie Peak would guide their journey for about a week. Although they would skirt the mountain itself, the peak was a towering presence that sometimes seemed to mock them as they struggled to ascend the more minor ridges nearby.

“We sometimes travel in the gorges between the hills and sometimes mount to summit when the prospect would be enchanting,” William North Steuben wrote June 15, 1849. “Right before us is Laramie Peak, one of the highest of the Rocky Mts most always in sight whether you are in the valley or on the hilltop. I cannot describe the Mts. they are so lofty, dark, rugged, dismal and hideous that they remind me of Nature in Chaos.”

Resources

Primary sources

• Decker, Peter. The Diaries of Peter Decker—Overland to California in 1849 and Life in the Mines, 1850–1851. Edited by Helen S. Griffen. Georgetown, Calif: The Talisman Press, 1966.
• Gelwicks, Daniel Webster. Diary kept by Daniel W. Gelwicks from Belleville, Illinois to the South Pass, in 1849. Typescript of MSS 71/161 c, Carton 24, Folder 2, Dale Lowell Morgan Papers, Bancroft Library.
• Gray, Charles Glass. Off at Sunrise: The Overland Journal of Charles Glass Gray [1849]. Edited by Thomas D. Clark. San Marino, Calif: The Huntington Library, 1976.
• McCall, Ansel J. The Great California Trail in 1849: Wayside Notes of an Argonaut. Bath, N.Y: Steuben Courier Printing, 1882.
• Pritchard, James A. The Overland Diary of James A. Pritchard, from Kentucky to California in 1849. Edited by Dale L. Morgan. Denver, Colo: Fred A. Rosenstock and The Old West Publishing Company, 1959.
• St. Clair, H. C. “Journal of a Tour to California [1849].” WA MSS S-1449, Beinecke Library. Typescript.
• Steuben, William N. “Memorandum Books 1849 Journal,” transcribed and edited by Harry Rutledge. Hayward, California, 1960.
• Thomason, Jackson. From Mississippi to California: Jackson Thomason’s 1849 Overland Journal. Edited by Michael D. Heaston, Introduction by Martin Harris. Austin, Texas: Jenkins Publishing Company, 1978.

Secondary sources

• Brown, Randy. Oregon-California Trails Association. WyoHistory.org offers special thanks to this historian for providing the diary entries used in this article.
• National Park Service. “Robidoux Pass,” Scotts Bluff, Nebraska, Shared Heritage Travel Itinerary. Accessed Jan. 9, 2017, at https://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/scotts_bluff/robidoux_pass.html.
• Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office. “Laramie Peak.” Emigrant Trails Throughout Wyoming. Accessed Jan. 13, 2017 at http://wyoshpo.state.wy.us/trailsdemo/laramiepeak256k.htm.

Illustrations

• The 1851 William Quesenbury sketch of Laramie Peak is from the collections of the Nebraska State Historical Society. Used with permission and thanks.
• The other two photos are by trails historian Randy Brown of Douglas, Wyo. Used with permission and thanks.

When the war broke out in Jackson Hole, most people had their money on the hometown hero to win. He had easily warded off any challengers before, and the townsfolk were dead certain he was unbeatable.

But sure enough, like many wars in the West, a newcomer appeared on the streets of Jackson Hole and said, "Not so fast."

The battle seemed endless at the time and eventually lasted 30 years. No one had seen anything like it in such a small but prosperous town, and when the dust settled and a winner finally emerged, many were shocked at the outcome.

There had been newspaper wars before, of course, but not many in the late 20th century. It was an intense, no-holds barred struggle between the Jackson Hole Guide and the Jackson Hole News. Readers had been loyal, but soon other industries began competing for their attention. The two sides fought for readers' hearts and minds, and even though it wasn't bloody, a lot of sweat and tears were shed by publishers, editors and reporters on both sides.

Unhappy with paper's coverage

In 1970, the Jackson Hole Guide was the established newspaper in the small town, nestled at the southern end of a valley between the Hoback Range and East Gros Ventre Butte. Jackson only had 2,688 year-round residents. But the town hosted hundreds of thousands of tourists each summer who spent lot of money in its shops, saloons, ski areas and restaurants.

The first newspaper in the area, the Jackson Hole Courier, began publishing in the early 1900s. The Guide was born in 1956, and Floy Tonkin and William Kirol had dual roles as owners and editors.

The Guide was unquestionably successful, but every newspaper has readers who don't like what's being published. The Guide was no exception. Unsatisfied with news coverage and convinced the community needed another voice, local residents Virginia Huidekoper and Ralph Gill started the Jackson Hole News in 1970. The first issue, on April 17, listed Norman and Jackie Lynes as editors and publishers.

Huidekoper and Marc Fischer—a local woman who bought out Gill's shares in the business soon after the newspaper launched—decided in 1973 that the venture was bigger than they had imagined and taking up all their time. They decided to sell and found the perfect buyer right in their newsroom.

A cub reporter from Chicago

Mike Sellett had been a regular contributor to the Chicago Tribune after graduating from Northwestern University. He came to Wyoming in 1965 to work for the Rawlins Daily Times, and one of his former editors later told him the Jackson Hole News needed a reporter. He was hired in 1972 and six months later he became the managing editor.

When the owners approached him about buying the News, Sellett was interested but had a seemingly insurmountable problem. The 28-year-old didn't have any money to buy it. He also didn't have any business experience and knew he would be facing "an established, extremely well-financed newspaper. I was dead in the water," he said.

The owners solved his financial dilemma when they offered to carry 90 percent of the purchase price. The deal demonstrates how much the pair wanted a local resident to take over the News.

Still needing $10,000 to complete the purchase, Sellett asked a friend, Mike Howard of Scripps-Howard publishing, to look at the financials. He told a disappointed Sellett that the News would never be able to match the deep pockets of the Guide. But Sellett turned to friends and relatives and scraped together the money.

"I don't know why I persisted ... I suppose that I had no place to go," he said.

But the new owner had no doubt that whatever happened, it would be a lively career challenge. "I wasn't walking into Bum---k, Iowa," he recalled many years later when interviewed by an author writing a book about hometown journalism. "This was already a competitive [newspaper] town."

The paper attracted a talented staff, with many members lured by the beauty of the small town and its world-class skiing and other recreation. Sellett said to survive he had to learn "how you can turn editorial excellence into dollars."

Sellett said Cammie Pyle, who had worked at the Atlantic Monthly, was responsible for the award-winning, striking layout of the News, which featured photos much larger than most newspapers.

Richard Murphy was chief photographer. In 1984 he guided the staff to a landmark achievement—the News won the prestigious National Press Photographers Association's "Best Use of Photos" award. The weekly competed against papers of all sizes for the prize, including metropolitan dailies; the next year the organization divided contestants into daily and weekly divisions. It was a point of pride for the News staff that the daily papers thought it was unfair to compete against "the little weeklies."

'Climbing bum' arrives

In 1978, Yale graduate and self-proclaimed "climbing bum" Angus Thuermer, Jr. moved to Jackson. He worked on an oil rig in the winter, but one year when that job fell through he was hired as an assistant in the News pressroom. The job he wanted, though, was in the newsroom, and when there was an opening he had a spontaneous, clever idea about how to land it.

Thuermer and Sellett lived in the same condominium complex. One morning Thuermer managed to lure Sellett's beloved golden retriever to his porch, where he adorned the pooch with a sign that warned, "Hire Angus or else." He signed it "The Phantom."

Amused, Sellett put Thuermer to work in the newsroom as a reporter covering the local education beat. That decision changed the course of the News forever: The new hire helped editorially guide the paper for more than three decades, including a long stint as its managing editor.

Both the Columbia Journalism Review and the American Journalism Review did articles about the intense competition between the Guide and News, which lasted nearly three decades. "It was one of the epic newspaper battles in the United States," Sellett said.

The publisher noted it was a rich town for news content. "We were kind of at the epicenter of all these federal agencies -- Grand Teton Park, the U.S. Forest Service, the Elk Refuge and Yellowstone National Park," he said. "We didn't cover anything outside Teton County but agencies had their headquarters in Jackson, and they were all part of our responsibility."

The competing papers also had to cover local news like school board and city council meetings. "We both had a much broader canvas--not only local stories but ones of national interest," Sellett noted. The owner said Jackson had "an educated, affluent audience. They knew first-class journalism and demanded it."

"We had to serve a schizophrenic clientele," agreed Thuermer. "People wanted to know what the local school board was doing, and they also wanted to know about the latest federal decisions that affected Yellowstone. In terms of newspapering, it was a fantastic community."

The News had a rule of thumb about its coverage of grizzly bear maulings. "It was an automatic front-page story," the editor said. "It was a no-brainer. Whenever it happened everyone was interested in it."

Respect for competitors

Sellett and Thuermer both said that the Guide was a very good newspaper that, like the News, won many state and national awards. "We always thought we were better, but they handed our asses to us several times," said Thuermer, who added that he thinks the competition made both papers better.

The publications were always seeking an edge against their rival. At one time both papers published on Thursday, but the News shifted its delivery schedule to Wednesday to offer more timely coverage of meetings held earlier in the week.

Thuermer said the Guide once raised its price from 50 cents to $1. "We decided not to follow, and they were forced to go back to 50 cents," he noted. Readers seem to have considered it money well spent, no matter how much they were charged.

Sellett said the News's decision in 1988 to begin publishing a free daily paper had a huge impact on the lively newspaper war. Several other resort towns, including Aspen and Vail, Colo., each had at least two free daily papers. Sellett liked the business model because it allowed news to be published when it was fresh, and readers no longer had to wait until Wednesday to discover what happened at a meeting the previous Thursday.

The News' free edition published mostly wire copy six times a week, and local spot news stories written on deadline. The weekly edition, which still charged for its publication, offered more in-depth articles often written about issues that received small attention in the daily. "It upped the ante, so to speak, in terms of the level of competition," Sellett said. In 1996 the Guide launched its own free daily, bringing the number of local newspapers to four.

Of the hundreds of news articles Thuermer has written, he said the 1988 fire in Yellowstone National Park is still considered the biggest story the News ever published. The entire editorial staff was involved in covering the lightning-caused fire from early August until mid-September.

The Yellowstone fires

Thuermer said he was driving to Mammoth Hot Springs, at the north end of Yellowstone Park, early that September. "I was wearing the same kind of yellow shirt the firefighters wore, plus jeans," he said. "Thuermer blended in with everyone at the camp. At 4 a.m. he found himself at the firefighters’ incident command center, where officials from every agency were getting an update on the fire and weather conditions. Included were infrared photos showing where the fires were at night.

"I hung out there drinking coffee with the bigwigs," Thuermer recalled. "They heard a grim weather forecast and these people were ashen as they listened. ... It was really an incredible scene."

But as fire officials prepared for the worst, a storm front came through and accomplished what $100 million in firefighting costs had not been able to do. One storm came in and put it all out.

It was a historic day in Yellowstone, and Thuermer was there to document and write about it for the News.

"It was the biggest story in the nation and our small staff [based 100 miles away] was able to stay on top and cover it," Sellett said. "This was before cell phones, the Internet and ways to send text and pictures back to the newsroom. It was pretty primitive from today's perspective."

He credited Thuermer with coordinating the Yellowstone fire coverage, and said his managing editor used his environmental reporting experience to help give News readers a better understanding about how the fires were affecting the ecosystem.

Wolf reintroduction

Thuermer has good memories of another major wildlife news story he began covering in the mid-1990s. The reintroduction of gray wolves to the Yellowstone ecosystem was extremely controversial, with Wyoming ranchers and state government on one side and U.S. Fish & Wildlife officials representing the federal government on the other.

He said he will never forget the sight of then-Secretary of Interior Bruce Babbitt carrying the first wolf to be put in a pen to be reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park before it would be released about six months later.

"It surprised me how much controversy that story generated," Thuermer said. "I didn't understand the deep-seated hatred for predators in Wyoming."

Building a news staff

The publisher said many of the employees at the paper came to Jackson Hole first and foremost for its abundant recreational opportunities, not jobs. He recalled that his chief photographer, Richard Murphy, was working as a carpenter when he showed Sellett some photos he had taken.

"I said, 'You have a job,'" Sellett remembered. "It was not about recruiting high-priced sophisticated journalists. We built [the staff] with the material we had."

What was Sellett like at work? "Michael was a good boss. He gave me a long leash," Thuermer said. "He had a lot of insight and a good perspective [on the world], but he had fun. He didn't kowtow to the powers that be. He was irreverent, but he was serious about news and serious about writing."

Asked when he thought his paper had turned the corner financially, Sellett said with the Guide as his competitor he was never complacent. "I knew I wasn't comfortable, but I was making enough money that we could handle a little bit of adversity," he said. "You're never sure—you’re only as good as your last paper."

Something unexpected happened in 2002 that surprised both Sellett and many readers. He had made some overtures about buying the Guide over the years, but was always rebuffed by owners Fred and Elizabeth McCabe.

After McCabe died in 1997, his widow took over the Guide and Sellett sensed she was struggling to manage it on her own. "Her editor approached me and said they would like to do something together with the News," Sellett said. "I was shocked. Fred never even talked to me once in 30 years or even acknowledged I was around."

Over a top-secret dinner at his house, Sellett said, preliminary talks began. "It all came together rather quickly," he said of the deal.

But many readers were upset when in November 2002 the merger was announced and their only choice of papers was the newly combined Jackson Hole News&Guide. "They had the perception that they had two voices and had lost one of them. But we really agreed on a lot of key issues," Sellett said. "Our editorial policies by that time were fairly close."

When the papers merged, the News was the dominant paper in town. Its circulation was 7,100, about 2,000 more copies than the Guide sold each week. Sellett said the appearance of an alternative weekly, Planet Jackson Hole, actually helped the situation. "It was perceived as restoring at least some level of competition," he explained.

Sellett decided to sell the News&Guide in 2012 and, like Huidekoper and Fisher 39 years earlier, sought a local buyer. "I didn't want to sell to a chain," he said emphatically. "I decided I would rather take less money and have a buyer who lived here and worked here instead of someone who showed up with an armored truck and then made the News part of some homogenized chain."

Wanted: A local buyer

He found his local buyer—Kevin Olson, the chief operating officer of the paper for 11 years. Sellett offered Olson and his wife Shelley the opportunity to buy the paper.

"It was important to me that the newspaper remain in local hands,” Sellett said. “Since taking over management of the newspaper, Kevin and his family planted deep roots in this valley, and he has become an outstanding leader in the business community."

Sellett said the legacy of the News&Guide and the hard-fought newspaper war was due to the efforts of hundreds of editors, reporters, photographers, salespeople, artists and production personnel who worked for the now-united publications.

“Together we tried to produce a newspaper that not only covered the news events of the week," he said, "but provided a window into the lives of the hardy souls who shaped the history of Jackson Hole as well as those who offered a vision of how this community would take control of its future.”

After the sale Thuermer agreed to stay at the News&Guide but quit about six months later. "I discovered after many years of working at a wonderful, dynamic paper with great colleagues, I found myself doing more and more administrative stuff and less journalism."

Thuermer became a reporter covering northwest Wyoming and brought to WyoFile, a public policy and news website, his institutional knowledge of his favorite beat—the environment, wildlife and conservation efforts. "I'm honored to work for WyoFile," he said of his new journalism home.

Meanwhile, Sellett retired in 2014 and now splits time between Jackson and Santa Barbara, Calif. He said he's having a happy retirement, and his tone was upbeat.

"The paper is in good hands," Sellett said. "I read it every week and I'm just glad I no longer have to worry about what to put in it next week."

Resources

• Associated Press. “Jackson Hole News, Guide Will Merge,” Billings Gazette, November 14, 2002, accessed Jan. 26, 2017 at http://billingsgazette.com/news/state-and-regional/wyoming/jackson-hole-news-guide-will-merge/article_12e56d8f-9037-5cca-bc92-14b2eb9cc993.html.
• Boner, Bradley J. “Legendary line: Forty-five years ago, a photograph documented ski mountaineering history,” Jackson Hole News&Guide, June 15, 2016, accessed Jan., 26, 2017 at http://www.jhnewsandguide.com/valley/feature/legendary-line/article_4c1c332d-06bb-57a5-b8fb-ffc00693ef0b.html.
• Roberts, Gene. Leaving Readers Behind: The Age of Corporate Journalism (University of Arkansas, 2001), 91-103.
• Stanford, Jim. “Thuermer stepping down as News&Guide editor,” JH Underground, April 24, 2014, accessed September 2016 at http://www.jhunderground.com/2014/04/24/thuermer-stepping-down-as-newsguide-editor/.
• Thuermer, Angus. “Paper Set to Change Hands,” Jackson Hole News&Guide, Dec. 19, 2012, accessed Jan. 24, 2017 at http://www.jhnewsandguide.com/news/top_stories/paper-set-to-change-hands/article_7f5abb3c-96df-57b4-b78c-f57b907f60e9.html.
• U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Decennial Census Population for Wyoming Counties, Cities. 2010, accessed December 10, 2016, http://eadiv.state.wy.us/demog_data/cntycity_hist.htm.

Illustrations

• The photo of the Tetons is from a Grand Teton National Park page on NASA’s Earth Observatory. Used with thanks.
• The photo of Jackson traffic is from the Jackson Hole Historical Society. Used with permission and thanks.
• The photo of fires in Norris Geyser Basin, Yellowstone National Park, 1988, is from the National Park Service. Used with thanks.
• The photo of Angus Thuermer is by Price Chambers. Courtesy Angus Thuermer.
• The photo of Virginia Huidekoper is from the collections of the Jackson Hole News&Guide. The photo of Mike Sellett and Liz McCabe is by Paul Bruun. Used with permission and special thanks in both cases to News&Guide photographer Brad Boner.

When it came to chasing stories, the sky was literally no limit for Jackson Hole News co-owner Virginia Huidekoper.

Huidekoper may not have been co-owner for long, but she made the most of her time at the helm and was an important contributor to the newspaper's legacy.

Mountaineer and skier Bill Briggs told her he was getting ready to become the first person to ski the Grand Teton. But after he accomplished the feat on June 15, 1971, and got back to town, no one believed him. The adventurer called Huidekoper and relayed the news.

Early the next morning Huidekoper phoned News photographer Roger LaVake and told him to get ready immediately. She fired up her Cessna 182 and flew LaVake and News reporter Cammie Pyle to the top of the Grand, where they saw Briggs' tracks carved into the southeast face of the mountain. The dramatic photo was published two weeks later on July 1, on page 12 of the News, accompanying Briggs' account of his accomplishment.

“We didn’t know it would become this sort of icon,” Huidekoper's daughter, Zaidee Fuller, said of the photo. “Although my mom had an eye for things like that.”

But 55 years later, who actually took the photo is still a mystery. The standard practice at the time was if someone paid for a shot and told the photographer when to take it, the person giving the directions was credited. Having done that, Huidekoper proudly put her name on the image.

Fuller said her mother "didn’t actually push the button. ... Nobody had the nerve to argue with her about it, including Roger. Roger used to joke, 'Well, Virginia took the picture, I just pressed the button.'"

But Briggs, the skier, recalled in a 2016 newspaper retrospective of the historic event that he was on the flight and Huidekoper, who needed both hands free so she could take the picture, turned control of the plane over to him even though he had never been a pilot in his life.

"She said, 'Put your feet on these pedals, hold onto the steering wheel, and don’t do anything,'" Briggs said, and Huidekoper took the photographs out the window.

“Roger had nothing to do with taking the picture,” the skier said. “Virginia took the picture, all Roger did was develop it.”

Pyle told News reporter Brad Boner that Briggs may have confused what happened that day with another flight. Since both Huidekoper and LaVake died in 2010, it remains a "she said, he said" story.

What matters most, though, is the famed photo that appeared in Huidekoper's paper was obtained because she knew a great news story when she saw it and nothing was going to keep her from telling it. Whoever snapped the shutter, the image the News duo took became one of the most famous photographs in ski mountaineering history.

Resources

• Boner, Bradley J. “Legendary line: Forty-five years ago, a photograph documented ski mountaineering history,” Jackson Hole News&Guide, June 15, 2016, accessed December 10, 2016 at http://www.jhnewsandguide.com/valley/feature/legendary-line/article_4c1c332d-06bb-57a5-b8fb-ffc00693ef0b.html.

Illustration

• The photo of ski tracks on the mountain is by Virginia Huidekoper, from the collections of the Jackson Hole News&Guide. Used with permission and special thanks to News&Guide photographer Brad Boner.

On June 30, 1988, lightning struck a tree in the Crown Butte region of Yellowstone National Park, in the park’s far northwest corner near where the borders of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming meet. The lightning bolt started a small forest fire, which became known as the Fan Fire. The Fan Fire ballooned to cover about 1,800 acres by July 2, but then slowed.

The Fan Fire was the first fire of that summer to erupt within Yellowstone National Park, though the Storm Creek fire had ignited about a week earlier north of the park boundary and would eventually make its way into the park proper.

Park fire experts noted the Fan Fire’s ignition and did … nothing.

Then, in rapid succession over a period of about two weeks, a series of fires broke out across Yellowstone National Park. The largest were named Fan, North Fork, Clover-Mist, Hellroaring, Storm Creek, Mink, Snake and Huck. They grew so large they were no longer fires but “complexes,” according to a 1994 report issued by the U.S. Department of the Interior. During that overheated summer of 1988, they burned about 683,000 of the park’s 2.2 million acres and about 1.2 million acres total within the greater Yellowstone area, which includes several national forests adjoining the park as well as Grand Teton National Park.

Yellowstone’s fire policy

Fire experts originally did nothing to combat the blazes because that was park policy—a policy that surprised a lot of reporters and politicians, including the president of the United States. President Ronald Reagan, roused to comment on the policy, admitted that he hadn’t known about it until September 14, after the fires had been long under way.

The understanding of fire in natural ecosystems had been growing for years prior to the Yellowstone conflagrations, and one of the legislative mandates of Yellowstone National Park is to maintain as nearly as possible “primitive ecological conditions.”

Fire is one of the most basic natural processes. In fact, many plant species within the park are fire-adapted. Some lodgepole pines, which make up about 80 percent of the park’s forests, have cones that are sealed by resin until the intense heat of fire cracks them open and releases the seeds. Fire also stimulates regeneration of sagebrush, aspen and willow.

Since the mid-1970s, park fire policy had been to allow natural fires—started by lightning or other natural causes—to burn. Human-caused fires were extinguished. The park also had an active prescribed burn program to try to reduce fuel loads—fallen trees and dried vegetation—that could contribute to catastrophic burns. In 1975, an environmental assessment was prepared which allowed natural burning on 1.7 million of the park’s 2.2 million acres.

In the years between this assessment and the 1988 fires, the policy was a quiet, uncontroversial success. Tens of thousands of lightning strikes simply fizzled. There were 140 fires, but most burned themselves out after swallowing a few acres. The average burn size was 250 acres. The largest fire during that time was 7,400 acres.

A very dry year

In 1988, as in past years, each fire was evaluated individually to determine how it related to the fire plan. The Fan Fire, for instance, a natural fire, was permitted to burn at first. In the early summer, before the Fan Fire struck, 20 lightning-caused fires had hit the park. Eleven burned themselves out, just like fires in the previous seasons. So park scientists and managers seemed justified in sticking to their fire plan.

But weather conditions in 1988 in Yellowstone Park were taking on a dimension not seen since the park was established in 1872. After a wet spring, the summer months were the driest ever recorded. Still, by July 15, only 8,500 acres had burned in the entire greater Yellowstone ecosystem. But a week later, visitors were noticing the smoke, and the national news media was starting to pay attention to the situation. Dry conditions and high winds were creating perfect conditions for massive fires.

Fires out of control

By July 21, things were spiraling out of control. Park officials decided to try to suppress all new and existing fires as resources allowed. At the time, all the fires in the park covered a total of about 17,000 acres—about 2.5 percent of the area that eventually burned.

In a paper prepared shortly after the fires for the journal Northwest Science, YNP technical writer Paul Schullery writes, “Extreme fire behavior became nearly the order of the day, as fires ran as much as 10 miles in a day, sending embers as much as a mile and a half ahead of the main fire to create dozens of ‘spot fires.’ The presence of so many spot fires, along with the rapid and wide advance of the main fires, made it impossible to fight the fires head-on without risking many lives. Hundreds of miles of fire lines were constructed, but with the spotting behavior fires routinely jumped usual barriers such as rivers and roads.”

“Standard hand- or bulldozer-built lines were no barrier at all,” Schullery continues. “Among the examples of black humor (an appropriate term, if ever there was one) with firefighters was, ‘What's black on both sides and brown in the middle?’ The answer: a bulldozer line in Yellowstone.”

At the peak of firefighting efforts, 9,500 military and civilian firefighters were engaged, using dozens of helicopters and more than 100 fire trucks to try to stop the blazes. Costs passed $120 million. Remarkably, no firefighters died fighting the fires in Yellowstone, though there were two fire-related deaths outside the park.

Students from an elementary school sent trees to firefighters to replace the ones lost. Women of Broadus, Mont., sent them homemade cookies. Chief Ranger Dan Sholly wrote the women a thank-you note: “From the speed with which they disappeared, I know they were appreciated by all of us in the fire camp and on the fireline.”

Despite the manpower, the fires continued to grow. A total of 248 fires ignited that summer, but the seven largest caused 95 percent of the damage. On July 5, the Lava fire started; July 11, the Mink and Clover fires; July 22, North Fork fire; July 23, the Clover and Mist fires join; and so on. There were eventually a total of eight fire complexes—depending on who’s counting—with every section of the park aflame.

News coverage

But if the fire line was hot, the descriptive prose was hotter still. Media reporting was often poorly informed and contradictory. The words disaster, devastating and catastrophic appeared often. The New York Times report noted, “stretches of charred, lifeless landscape left by the months of fires.”

Newspapers began covering the story in early July almost as soon as the fires ignited, while national broadcast television coverage came weeks later. The ABC and NBC television networks broadcast their first stories on July 25. CBS broadcast its first story on August 22.

Ohio State University journalism professor Conrad Smith writes in a 1991 paper, “The Yellowstone fires were more newsworthy in the west than in the east. They made the front page of the Los Angeles Times 39 times, starting on July 18 with a news brief about wildfires in the West; the front page of the Washington Post three times, starting on September 8 after the fire’s visit to the Old Faithful Geyser Complex; and the front page of the New York Times three times, starting on September 11 when the secretaries of Interior and Agriculture arrived in Yellowstone for an inspection.”

Both print and broadcast media made some serious mistakes in their coverage. For instance, on July 21, 1988, the park abandoned its “let-burn” policy and began suppressing all fires. But as late as September 1, the New York Times was still reporting that some fires were being allowed to burn. And on September 10, the paper reported on criticism by Wyoming Republican U.S. senators Alan Simpson and Malcolm Wallop of Yellowstone’s natural burn policy, despite the fact that this hadn’t been the policy since mid-July.

But that was nothing compared to an August 30 news story on ABC television featuring an interview with “Stanley Mott, director, National Park Service.” Except that the director of the National Park Service at the time was William Penn Mott, and the ABC interviewee was a tourist.

Local media did better in the assessments of coverage produced by scholars later, especially Montana’s Billings Gazette’s coverage of the economic impact on park-dependent businesses by Robert Ekey, and Wyoming’s Casper Star-Tribune’s coverage of the ecological dynamics by Andrew Melnykovich and Geoff O’Gara.

But the rest of the nation got a different story. Time captured the spirit of the coverage when its editors wrote, “The fires have ruined 1.2 million acres of Yellowstone and adjoining national forests.”

Politics

All this hyperbole quickly worked its way into the political discourse. President Reagan called the park fire policy “cockamamie.”

''It's a disaster,'' U.S. Department of the Interior Secretary Donald P. Hodel told the New York Times as he and U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Richard E. Lyng visited the park. ''I think it's devastating, and we've only seen part of it.”

Wyoming’s Sen. Wallop said the park’s 16-year-old “let-burn” policy was “absurd” and scientifically unsound. He joined with Sen. Alan Simpson in calling for the resignation of National Park Service Director Mott. Montana Democratic Sen. John Melcher told The New York Times, “They'll never go back to this policy. From now on the policy will be putting the fire out when they see the flames.”

Bob Barbee, then the superintendent of Yellowstone, was cast as the bad guy in the park fire drama. In a 2013 retrospective piece about the fires, Barbee told the New York Times,“It’s like, ‘Well, why don’t you just put it out?’ Well, why don’t you just stop the hurricane or the tornado? You don’t just put it out.”

On Sept. 11, 1988, a quarter-inch of snow fell across the greater Yellowstone area, and the fires quickly died out. Underneath that quarter-inch of snow lay the blackened carcasses of trees, bleached-white, heat-blasted soils—and deep uncertainty about post-fire future of the park. It was accepted wisdom that Yellowstone wouldn’t recover for a hundred years.

Even so, Yellowstone’s big fires were not a surprise to everyone. Paul Schullery wrote in his 1989 Northwest Science article, “Only months before the fires of 1988, a preliminary research report by Dr. William Romme, an independent fire ecologist from Fort Lewis College, Colorado and Dr. Don Despain, NPS plant ecologist, suggested that the Yellowstone area fire regime involved many small fires interspersed every 200-400 years by massive fires that swept across large portions of the park. Romme and Despain concluded that ‘another major burning cycle may begin within the next century, as extensive areas are now developing flammable late successional forests.’”

During the fires themselves, Despain achieved a level of notoriety unusual for a plant ecologist when he showed a Denver Post reporter a fire impact research plot near Ice Lake near Norris Geyser Basin. Environment writer Todd Wilkinson described the incident recently in a Jackson Hole News& Guide column published in April 2015: “The site was established to allow researchers to gauge how fire, drought and disease affect arboreal ecology. As a wildfire approached and swept across his research area, Despain playfully muttered, ‘Burn, baby, burn.’ His quote was included in [the Post’s] story, but a headline writer bannered the words as if Despain were a pyro, not caring if the entire park went up in flames. Wyoming politicians, including U.S. Sens. Malcolm Wallop and Alan K. Simpson, had a field day skewering park officials. Despain was ordered not to talk to reporters for two weeks.”

Recovery

But Despain and the other fire scientists had the last word. The recovery in Yellowstone was a slam dunk for science and the let-burn forest policy.

As little as five years after the fires, the park was recovering well. "The forest is going to be re-established. In many cases, the seedling density is greater than the original stand density," said Monica Turner of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory at a 1993 meeting in Jackson held to discuss the implications of the 1988 fire. “In many burned-over areas where mature lodgepole pines once stood,” Turner said, “the number of established seedlings is eight times as large as the original number of trees. Many lodgepole seeds require fire to open.”

The fires also put to rest the Bambi myth—that wildlife flees in panic from approaching flames. At the same 1993 conference, grizzly bear researcher Steve French said, “We didn't see a lot of stress on animals. Bison right in front of the fire line only moved out of the way very casually,” he said.

A survey French conducted of large animal deaths found more than 390 documented deaths from fire, nearly all from smoke inhalation. Of those, 333 were elk, 32 mule deer, 12 moose, nine bison and six black bears. There were no antelope, mountain lion, grizzly bear or bighorn sheep carcasses. With rare exceptions, animals saw the flames coming and simply stepped aside.

University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point professor Mark Boyce said in a talk at the conference that if he were superintendent of Yellowstone, "I would maintain fire every chance I had. I would do my best to eradicate this species”—at this, he showed a slide of Smokey Bear, the patron saint of fire suppression advertisements—“from the park."

Research findings on the ecological impacts of the Yellowstone fires indicate there were very few cases—one-tenth of one percent of the burned area—where high fire temperatures burned deep roots. The impact on park wildlife was minimal. Despite early concerns, white bark pine and aspen came back.

The Yellowstone fires were a watershed in the public understanding of fire’s impact on ecosystems. Wild-land fires have become more easily tolerated except in cases where fires threaten people’s houses and structures--an increasing problem as more people move into the “urban-wild-land interface.” But climate studies indicate that large fires will probably become more frequent around the world. In the Rocky Mountain West, there has already been an increase in the frequency and severity of wild-land fires over the last 25 years, according to a 2008 U.S. Department of the Interior report. A sophisticated, context-sensitive understanding of fire is critical for both safety and ecological reasons. The lessons from Yellowstone in 1988 should inform decisions about this coming whirlwind.

Resources

• National Park Service. The Yellowstone Fires of 1988. 2008, accessed June 24, 2015 at http://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/nature/upload/firesupplement.pdf.
• Romme, W.H. et al. “Twenty Years after the 1988 Yellowstone Fires: Lessons about Disturbance and Ecosystems.” Ecosystems. 2008. U.S. Department of the Interior: 10.1007/s10021-011-9470-6. Accessed June 24, 2015 at http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10021-011-9470-6#page-1.
• Rothermel, Richard C., Roberta A. Hartford and Carolyn H. Chase. Fire Growth Maps for the 1988 Greater Yellowstone Area Fires. 1994. U.S. Forest Service General Technical Report INT-304, accessed June 24, 2015 at http://www.fs.fed.us/rm/pubs_int/int_gtr304.pdf.
• Schullery, Paul. “Yellowstone Fires: A Preliminary Report.” Northwest Science 63, no. 1 (1989): 44-54, accessed June 24, 2015 at https://research.libraries.wsu.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/2376/1686/v63%20p44%20Schullery.PDF?sequence=1.
• Smith, Conrad. 1991, Yellowstone Media Myths: Print and Television Coverage of the 1988 Fires. In Fire and the Environment: Ecological and Cultural Perspectives. Proceedings of an International Symposium. Knoxville, Tenn. 1990, accessed June 25, 2015 via http://www.treesearch.fs.fed.us/pubs/2722 at http://www.srs.fs.usda.gov/pubs/gtr/gtr_se069/gtr_se069-section05.pdf.
• Whipple, Dan. “Nature turns massive fire at Yellowstone to its benefit.” Los Angeles Times. Oct.12, 1993, accessed June 22, 2015, at http://articles.latimes.com/1993-10-13/news/mn-45340_1_greater-yellowstone-area.
• Wilkinson, Todd. “Yellowstone fire guru ponders ’88 and now.” Jackson Hole News & Guide. April 1, 2015, accessed June 22, 2015, at http://www.jhnewsandguide.com/opinion/columnists/the_new_west_todd_wilkinson/yellowstone-fire-guru-ponders-and-now/article_2b886c94-6f04-58ea-9eb4-bfc05788a7e6.html.
• Winerup, Michael. “Lessons from the Yellowstone Fires of 1988.” New York Times. Sept. 2, 2013, accessed June 22, 2015, at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/02/booming/lessons-from-the-yellowstone-fires-of-1988.html?_r=1.

Illustrations

• The photos are from the National Park Service’s excellent web pages of photos of the 1998 Yellowtone fires. Used with thanks.

Red Fenwick couldn't believe what he saw in 1933 when he met the train that carried a motley group of Bronx youth to Canyon Junction in Yellowstone National Park.

"It was the sorriest assemblage of humans since Indian treaty days," recalled Fenwick, a foreman assigned to whip into shape the first Civilian Conservation Corps crew assigned to work in the park.

Fenwick, who later became a well-known Denver Post reporter, wrote in a 1965 column that some enrollees were already homesick, while others were clearly out of control.

"All needed a shower and shave," he remembered. "They looked as though they had walked past an army surplus supply depot after an explosion and had grabbed whatever items of clothing they fancied."

The young men took a truck to their camp where one of Yellowstone's many geysers greeted them, sending an impressive column of steam and hot water high into the sky. Fenwick remembered one young rider who excitedly told his companions, “‘Hey youse guys! Lookit dat t'ing squoiting outa d'ground. It's a geezer! Dat's wot it is--a'geezer.’"

Roosevelt’s Tree Army

Throughout Wyoming and across America, thousands of young men were also getting acquainted with their new environments. It was part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's plan during the Great Depression to provide jobs and educations for millions of unemployed youths while conserving the nation's natural resources.

The CCC went from an idea to reality in lightning speed, especially compared to modern-day federal programs. A month after his proposal to Congress, Roosevelt signed the law officially creating the Emergency Conservation Work (ECW) project on March 30, 1933. It quickly became known as the Civilian Conservation Corps, and also had a popular nickname—the "Tree Army."

By June 1,300 CCC camps had been created nationwide, and by the next month they were staffed by a total of more than a quarter-million enrollees. Initially there were 24 camps in Wyoming, each expected to house 200 men.

To join, enrollees had to be 18 to 25 years old, unmarried, unemployed and with a family on relief. The pay was low, even for the Depression. The CCC paid the enrollees $1 a day, so each earned about $30 each month. But $25 was taken from their checks and sent to their families, leaving them only $5.

"None of the men are going to do any work like that for a dollar a day," predicted Maurice Miller of Chicago, a group leader at the CCC encampment at Fort Hunt, Va.

Joseph Bosc, a Chicago clerk, said he definitely wouldn't enroll. "[It's] not for me; it's like being sold into slavery," he said.

Most of the new members of the Corps, though, didn't look at it that way. Jobs and money were scarce, and signing up was a way to help their families. Their room and board would be paid for, and they would be sent to areas of the country most had never seen before.

Not all were such willing participants, however. Precinct police captains in New York City gave some young men a choice: Sign up or go to the reformatory.

Creation of the CCC

More than 1,000 young men served in the state between 1934 and 1938. During this period age restrictions were lifted so more veterans of World War I could find work, and so was the requirement that enrollees had to be unmarried.

They constructed sewer and water systems, service roads, museums and exhibits, boat docks, phone lines, utility buildings and snowshoe cabins for patrols. They eradicated gophers, eliminated locoweed and dug garbage pits.

Major projects in Wyoming's national forests involved protecting the Colorado and Missouri River watersheds, developing recreation facilities and thinning forests. The CCC launched several wildlife protection projects, including preservation of the country's largest elk herds. The young men also transplanted beaver from overstocked areas to more favorable sites. Crews took censuses of wildlife and studied game ranges, migratory patterns and feeding habits. In several forest areas, especially in the Medicine Bow National Forest, bark beetle control was a constant battle. Blizzard relief was undertaken during the harsh winter of 1936-37.

And the men were always on call to fight forest fires, which could quickly turn deadly. Nine members of various CCC companies in the area died fighting the Blackwater Creek fire west of Cody in 1937. Five professional firefighters from the Forest Service who were supervising the work crews also perished in the blaze.

One of the most challenging CCC projects in the state was undertaken by a Gillette crew, which fought the fires burning more or less constantly in some exposed coal seams and abandoned mines. At least 17 coal fires were burning in Campbell County, many started by lightning decades before.

Some of the fires were about 1,000 feet in length along the outcrop. The CCC enrollees would either dig out the burning material and then cover the remaining exposed coal with sand or extinguish the fire by sealing it and depriving it of oxygen. By all accounts the effort was impressive—but also slow going.

Jackson Lake saw one of the largest projects undertaken by the CCC in Wyoming. A dam built by the U.S. Reclamation Service in 1916 enlarged the lake, and as it filled it flooded more land and submerged more than 8,000 acres of timber.

The stretches of dead timber around Jackson Lake created a barren and dangerous setting, and the Hoover administration began the cleanup in 1929. Roosevelt had the CCC take over the job in 1933.

“Over 100 young men spent the summer of 1934 cutting and piling some 17,000 cords of wood to be burned during the winter months," noted Historian Robert Righter. By the mid-1930s the CCC had removed the shoreline tragedy at Jackson Lake.

CCC members could serve up to four six-month hitches. Despite the demanding work, more than half re-upped at least once.

Many enrolled in camp educational programs. Camp Miller in Sublette County offered vocational courses like blacksmithing, bulldozer operation, carpentry, woodworking, cooking, vocational guidance, road construction, tractor operation and photography. Academic courses included English composition, spelling, business arithmetic, trigonometry, Latin, Spanish and citizenship.

Enrollees were also given the opportunity to take correspondence studies with the University of Wyoming, including English, mathematics, social science, biology, typing and shorthand. The University also offered special courses for CCC recruits in auto mechanics, forestry, journalism and bookkeeping.

Towns lobbied for Camps

By August 1933, 24 camps were already established in Wyoming. Seven camps were attached to the National Park Service— four in Yellowstone and three in Grand Teton. Fifteen camps were supervised by the Forest Service, including seven in Medicine Bow National Forest—at Pole Mountain, Chimney Park, Centennial, Arlington, Encampment, French Creek, and Ryan Park. There was also at least one in the Bighorn National Forest—Camp O’Connor near the subsequent Muddy Guard Station in the Buffalo Ranger District.

Because of the lack of a complete Forest Service CCC inventory, the location of seven camps during the initial year are unknown. One camp may have also been located on the Wind River Indian Reservation, still then called the Shoshone Agency, before 1937. The final Wyoming camp, GLO-1, was operated by the U.S. General Land Office, a precursor of today’s Bureau of Land Management, and located on private land near Gillette.

The number of CCC camps in Wyoming likely peaked at 32 in 1935; that number dropped to 15 camps within two years. Wyoming towns wanted more camps, not fewer, because the program provided jobs for unemployed local carpenters and other workers hired for the skilled labor required by many CCC projects. Communities located near camps also benefited economically when CCC members made weekly excursions into town. Locals lobbied their congressional representatives and the ECW director for more enrollees and more camps.

But even worthy projects promoted by commercial, business, agricultural and civic leaders were turned down. Citizens of Bridger Valley in southwestern Wyoming spent the first two years of the CCC program trying to get a camp on the Bear River in Uinta County. They needed dams built on the Green River's Black’s Fork or Smith's Fork to control flooding for approximately 200 family ranches. If the reservoirs could not be constructed, the leaders said, families would not be able to continue making a living in Bridger Valley.

The lobbying effort was led by an impressive group of officials: Fort Bridger American Legion Commander H. M. Hopkinson, Black’s Fork Water Users Association President Joseph Micheli, Uinta County Farm Bureau President Starvold Steward, Evanston Chamber of Commerce President Glen Eastman, and Van Rupe, president of the Lyman Lions Club.

Desperate for help, the coalition noted if they could not secure a camp in Uinta County, they would "settle" for one across the state line in Utah. By 1935, though, the CCC was starting to close camps, not add them. As Roosevelt's Second New Deal began, the president ordered that camps still working on their original projects be continued, but funding was not available for new ones.

Primitive conditions

In the early days of the CCC, living conditions were primitive. The men slept in cheaply made tents until they built their own camps, with the work usually supervised by out-of-work miners and carpenters from the nearest town. This immediately established good relationships between the CCC and local residents who saw a boost in their economy from both construction and visits from the men to their towns on weekends.

The first wave of CCC enrollees were given hand-me-down U.S. Army surplus uniforms and equipment from World War I. Later, they were outfitted in new spruce green uniforms.

Fenwick said the cooks at his first Yellowstone camp regularly burned food and served cold-boiled potatoes that were hated by all of the hard-working, hungry diners. "The men had plotted to stand at signal at dinner and throw the potatoes at the mess officer," Fenwick recalled. The commanding officer, a holstered .45-caliber service revolver on his hip, told them he knew about their plan.

"I warn you that I've taken just about all I can stand from you," he said. "The first man that throws a potato in that mess hall tonight will get a bullet right between his eyes. I can put it there."

The commander stood at the mess hall door throughout the entire meal. Fenwick wasn't surprised that no potato protest materialized.

CCC members had to stretch their scarce dollars. They paid for personal items like toothpaste, tobacco products, hair oil, candy and gum, which they bought at the camp's post exchange. The men bought $2 vouchers, and the money was deducted from their pay.

To make extra money, some used their pre-CCC experience or learned new skills like cooking and took jobs in nearby communities during their off hours. Leo Vaughn, who worked at a camp in Thermopolis, knew how to sew and boosted his income by sewing on buttons and mending clothes.

Leo Kimmett, who was stationed at a CCC camp in Yellowstone, asked to borrow a typewriter from the company clerk so he could address a letter. A clerk's six-month hitch in the CCC was nearly over and the camp needed someone who could type and take over his duties. Kimmett was the only one in camp who could type, so he was the obvious replacement. He didn't mind, since the job paid him an extra $6 per month and he got to work inside, away from the tough labor outdoors.

But Kimmett didn't stay in the job long. One day he accidentally told the wrong lieutenant that he was wanted on the telephone, and the officer who should have received the message chewed him out.

"Because of that lack of communication I was given a royal, typical army verbal reprimand. This hurt," Kimmett later wrote. "Coming from the gentle farming community of Powell, [Wyo.,] where such vituperation was unknown, the shock of the reprimand, unjustified in all respects, had an acute effect on me."

After a sleepless night, the next day Kimmett asked to be put back on a work crew. "I decided that to be mentally upset like this was not worth the extra $6 a month," he recalled.

Hard work at Guernsey

Two camps run by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation were set up in Guernsey State Park on the North Platte River in Platte County. Enrollees at one camp, BR-9, worked on the park's east side, while BR-10 was assigned to the area south of the 7-year-old Lake Guernsey.

Today, the CCC's work at Guernsey is considered one of the nation's best examples of how the program was used to enhance recreational opportunities and improve the landscape at a state park. Visitors still use many of the projects the BR-9 crew built, including the boat dock, the hand-drilled stone drinking fountain and picnic shelters named for Indian leaders Spotted Tail, Sitting Bull and Red Cloud.

But BR-9's most impressive accomplishment was the park's museum, which took the crew 6,100 man-hours to build. The museum is a one-of-a-kind, limestone-and-log structure known as an excellent example of the Rustic architecture movement. Its floor was quarried, cut, numbered and assembled in Thermopolis and shipped 250 miles to the park, where it was reassembled. Most of the museum's original displays are nearly untouched.

Meanwhile, Camp BR-10 built the Guernsey State Park Castle and a latrine/outhouse called the "Million Dollar Biffy." The CCC put up the latter for only $6,000; park officials have estimated it would cost $1 million today to be rebuilt. The park's Castle is a two-room picnic shelter that has enormous log supports, limestone rock walls and a massive fireplace.

The daily routine

BR-10 was operated as a strict military camp, while BR-9 was overseen by a U.S. Bureau of Reclamation superintendent, James Coffman. The work crews at both camps were divided into engineering, agricultural and landscaping units.

The schedule was the same for both—reveille at 6 a.m. sharp and breakfast precisely an hour later. A typical breakfast included bacon or ham, fruit, eggs and cereal.

Lunch was brought to crews working in the field unless they were close enough to walk to camp. The menu for supper was a large portion of roast beef, pork or chicken, potatoes and gravy, vegetables and fruit, bread, butter and jellies.

The men were required to be clean and presentable at all times, which meant clean and combed hair, brushed teeth and a shower at least once a week.

From 7:30 to 9 p.m., men could shop at the post exchange or play cards at the canteen. The recreation center had two pool tables and a pingpong table. The "lights out" order was given promptly at 10 p.m.

Friday night was reserved for entertainment, including talent shows, singing and dancing. Boxing and wrestling matches were also held. People from the local town often came to entertainment night, both as performers and just to see the show.

Guernsey State Park had a nine-hole public golf course built by the CCC, but there is no evidence that the men ever spent any time playing golf. The course was abandoned in the early 1940s.

On weekends the men at Wyoming CCC camps played pick-up baseball, often against local teams or teams from other camps. Hiking, climbing, horseshoes and basketball on dirt courts were also popular, as were trips to town where sometimes the CCC members were not on their best behavior, especially if the town had a red-light district or ignored Prohibition, still at least nominally in effect in 1933.

Kimmett recalled that after the June 1933 payday, a half-dozen boys at his Yellowstone camp spent the weekend in Gardiner, Mont. "Returning to camp early Monday morning, about three or four of the boys were rolling in their vomit on the floor of the stake truck," he wrote. "These unfortunates learned the hard way about the prevalent falsehood that rubbing alcohol became harmless when filtered through a slice of bread."

The CCC's final days

Roosevelt wanted to make the CCC permanent, but Congress wouldn't go along with him. When World War II started, lawmakers realized it needed the members of the Corps to enter the military. Congress never actually abolished the CCC, but it quit funding the program. On July 1, 1942, it approved $8 million to liquidate it.

The primary impact of the program on the state and nation was three-fold. First, its $25 per month benefit for members' families is credited with helping to jump-start the Depression economy when a spark was desperately needed. The CCC put more than 2.5 million men and 8,000 women to work nationwide.

Second, Wyoming has many one-of-a-kind structures such as the classic Guernsey State Park Museum that remain well used and popular. The CCC crews also greatly expanded the state's infrastructure. In the Bighorn National Forest alone, workers helped build Sibley and Meadowlark Dams, developed 102 acres of campground, built three fire towers, constructed 25 bridges and strung 88 miles of telephone line.

The CCC provided substantial economic help to the families in towns near the camps. Local workers who had lost their jobs were hired to build many of the larger facilities and structures at the camps. By preserving valuable timber resources, the CCC also helped keep alive the industries that communities depended upon.

An intangible but vital benefit of the CCC was the positive impact the program had on those who served. It helped thousands of young men learn construction and wildlife preservation skills, gave them an opportunity to continue their formal education and even transformed their appearance and attitude. The program changed their lives and helped make them better citizens when they returned home.

In September 1933, a convoy of CCC men was taken by truck to meet a train headed out of the park at West Yellowstone. Decades later, Denver Post columnist Red Fenwick recalled that the crews he supervised were no longer the rag-tag, insubordinate troops who began working that spring. "Uniforms were neat. Neckties were tied. There was order and discipline," he recalled. "And the men themselves were tougher, browner, heavier, more self-assured, confident and cooperative."

Resources

• Cassity, Mike. "Building Up Wyoming, Depression-Era Federal Projects in Wyoming, 1929–1943." Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office. 2013, 68-76. Accessed March 1, 2016, at http://wyoshpo.state.wy.us/pdf/BuildingUpWyoming.pdf.
• Fenwick, Red. "The Civilian Conservation Corps: They Took to the Woods--and Came Out Men."The Denver Post, Empire section, June 20, 1965.
• Kimmett, Leo. "Life in a Yellowstone Camp."Annals of Wyoming, 56 no. 1: (Spring 1984), 12-21. Accessed Feb. 17, 2016, at https://archive.org/stream/annalsofwyom56121984wyom#page/n13/mode/2up.
• Noble, Ann. "Civilian Conservation Corp." Accessed Feb. 17, 2016, at
• http://www.sublette.com/history/ccc/.
• Waring, Neil A. "Civilian Conservation Corps and the Building of Guernsey State Park: With Folktales and Stories of the Park," Guernsey, Wyo.: Old Trails Publishing, 2015.
• Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.or/wiki/Category:Civilian_Conservation_Corps_in_Wyoming. Accessed July 25, 2016. 

Illustrations

• The photos of the young CCC men playing craps and sitting on a bench with Vlasta Fisher are from the Lora Nichols Collection at the Grand Encampment Museum. Used with permission and thanks.
• The photo of The Castle at Guernsey State Park was originally published at WyomingHeritage.org, a former project of the University of Wyoming Anthropology Department and the state of Wyoming. The photo of the park looking through an archway of The Castle is by Venice Beske, from Wyoming Places. Both are used with permission and thanks.
• The rest of the photos are from Wyoming State Archives. Used with permission and thanks.

Fifty years after witnessing one of the deadliest forest fires in the nation's history, Bob Johnstone could still remember the screams of the young men at Blackwater Creek about 35 miles west of Cody, Wyo.

"We wanted to see if we could help get these [firefighters] who were trapped," recalled Johnstone, who, as an 18-year-old in the Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps, was on the Blackwater fire line. "We could hear those people below us, but we couldn't get down there to help them. ... It was a terrible thing. I hate to tell you some of the grisly things about it."

The fourth deadliest wildfire in the nation's history, the Blackwater Creek fire was started by a lightning strike in the pine-filled Shoshone National Forest on Aug. 18, 1937. The fire smoldered and crept through the ground fuels for two days before it was spotted by the owners of a local hunting camp. It covered about 2 acres; by the time it was controlled four days later it had consumed 1,700 acres.

At about the same time on Aug. 20, seven CCC enrollees returning from a work detail saw the fire crowning into the treetops and decided on their own to begin scraping a fire line at the base of the blaze. The crew's initiative spared the local men at hunting and tourist camps who normally fought forest fires in the Shoshone from having to leave their jobs during the busiest month of the year.

The CCC camp at Wapiti, about 25 miles west of Cody on the road to Yellowstone National Park, was alerted about the fire at 3:30 p.m. Within 20 minutes, 70 CCC enrollees and rangers from the camp were moving toward it. By nightfall the blaze had grown to 200 acres, and firefighters were constructing a fire line around it. Despite only light winds, the canyons pumped air to the fire and pushed spot fires ahead of the main one.

Investigators who later analyzed what happened pointed to several factors that impeded the efforts to contain the fire. There were no radios, so men had to carry notes between the various crews to relay information about where spot fires were cropping up and increasing in intensity because of adverse weather conditions.

Shifting weather

On Aug. 21, weather observers in Idaho told the Riverton, Wyo., weather office that a storm front with strong winds was moving into the Blackwater Creek area. That vital information was given to U.S. Forest Service managers at the Wapiti ranger station. But the lack of radios prevented the station from telling firefighters about the dangerous weather coming their way.

Poor phone communication was another problem. Investigators later determined it, too, probably played a role in the deaths of several firefighters who found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time when the fire went out of control. The Ten Sleep CCC camp in the Bighorn National Forest, far away across the Bighorn Basin, was ordered to send about 50 CCC enrollees and Forest Service personnel to Blackwater Creek, to arrive no later than 8 a.m. the next morning. But there was an unexplained three-hour delay between the attempted phone call notification and when it was received.

By daybreak 120 men were working the fire, but the Ten Sleep crew was nowhere in sight. The Ten Sleep CCC enrollees were meant to serve as fresh reinforcements for those who had been battling the fire since the previous night. But the new men, who traveled more than 180 miles over rough roads in the dark, did not reach the fire until about 11:30 a.m. They were given a quick meal, outfitted with hand tools and marched toward the east fire line, which was being constructed in a canyon that had numerous ravines and moderate to steep slopes with a gradient of 20 to 60 percent.

The fire was blowing in a northeasterly direction, overtopping Trail Ridge to burn in green timber on the other side. Prevailing winds made this area the fire's “hot spot." The forest was dense and mature with heavy fuel loads from dead trees with dead limbs extending to the ground. The situation provided a fuel ladder for fire to leap easily into the treetops.

Fire investigators later speculated that if they had arrived on schedule, the Ten Sleep crew members could have already extended the fire line past this treacherous area when the fire turned deadly and trapped them.

Inexperienced firefighters, rough terrain

The CCC members from the Ten Sleep camp were all Texans with little experience fighting fires. Three months before they were transferred to Wyoming, they had been in their home state helping create a park, establishing bridle paths and stocking lakes with fish. Their new Forest Service supervisors, however, were all experienced firefighters ready to guide them in their Cowboy State assignment.

Forest Ranger Urban Post and Junior Forester Paul Tyrrell led the way for the CCC party, with Ranger Al Clayton and Foreman James Saban taking the rear. They crossed a draw with a small trickle of water where Post detailed one man to remain and build a small dam to impound water for the backpack pumps. Because of the rough climb ahead, the men were told to carry their backpack pumps only half-full.

By 12:40 p.m., aerial observers reported seeing several spot fires near the east and west fire lines. It was 90 degrees, with the relative humidity at only 6 percent. Despite these tinderbox conditions, Ranger Post later recalled he was still optimistic they could get the relatively small fire under control. The fire was barely smoking, and his men were in good spirits. All they had to do, he thought, was extend the fire line to connect with a natural firebreak created by a rocky ridge to the northeast.

Ranger Post left six men to assist Clayton, who only had one firefighter with him, then led his 40-man crew east up a ridge. Clayton and his crew continued to suppress small fires that were spotting over fire lines started earlier by a Bureau of Public Roads crew.

From his higher vantage point Post could see more spot fires below. Clayton saw them too and his small crew quickly went to work to put them out. Recognizing the potential hazard, Clayton wrote a note to Post and gave it to a CCC enrollee to deliver.

The note read, "Post, We are on the ridge in back of you and I am going down to the spot in the hole. It looks like [the fire] can carry on over the ridge east and north of you. If you can send any men, please do so, since there are only eight of us. Clayton."

But the note seeking reinforcements didn't reach Post until it was too late for Clayton and his men. The dry weather front approached at 3:30 p.m., and steady 30 mile-per-hour winds blew from the southwest. Fifteen minutes later, the wind shifted abruptly to the west, causing increased crowning, with the fire leaping from treetop to treetop, and even more spot fires. Gusts reached 45 mph and whipped the flames into a raging firestorm racing east up ravines and gullies, trapping Clayton and his crew. The 45-year-old ranger and six of his men died, and another later succumbed to his injuries in the hospital.

“We have no safer place”

Post’s crew found themselves in an equally dangerous spot. If they were to save themselves, they had only one option: Abandon the fire line, find an escape route and run for their lives. When the wind suddenly pushed the fire back toward the southwest, Post ordered his crew to head northeast to a ridgeline, where they took cover on a rocky outcropping as fire swept over the ridge. They moved around to avoid each successive wave of heat and fire, but soon the rocks below them grew unbearably hot. Their flesh blistered and their clothing caught on fire.

"The heat is terrific, and it seems unbearable, but we have no safer place," Post later wrote about the terrifying ordeal. "If this is the end, we must take it here."

"Tops of the trees swung in the strong wind which was coming up through the basin, spot fires developed between the large spot fire and the main fire, and the wind had reached our line almost at once, and the large fire was a furnace immediately," Post recalled. "... Some of us wait for Tyrrell and the last ones out. The smoke is thick, the air is hot; we hurry up the ridge. Heavy tools are left behind. We take lady shovels, Pulaskis and canteens – we may need them for our own protection." A Pulaski is a tool used for constructing firebreaks that combines an axe and an adze in one head.

Post and his foreman, James Saban, ordered their CCC crew to stay down, but some panicked and refused to remain low while others sat up to say prayers. The 24-year-old Tyrrell bravely pinned three men to the ground, shielding them from the heat. But five other men decided to risk running into the flames, hoping to reach safety on the other side. It was a horrible choice: Four did not make it alive–Billy Lea, a Bureau of Public Roads crewman, and CCC enrollees Clyde Allen, Ernest Seelke and Rubin Sherry. The fifth man did survive but he was badly burned.

Since no one in Clayton's crew survived, their actions as the firestorm swept through the area are unknown. One fire inspector speculated Clayton may have taken some of the men with him to check a spot fire, while the rest waited for the requested reinforcements from Post's crew that were never sent. Once he discovered the danger ahead, Clayton may have tried to lead them back up a gulch toward a streambed, but based upon where the ranger's body was found he probably did not make it before fire overtook the entire crew.

Altogether, the fire killed 15 firefighters–all eight in Clayton’s crew and seven in Post’s unit. Ten CCC enrollees, all Texans between 17 and 20 years old; one was their foreman. Three of the deceased worked for the Forest Service and one was an employee of Wyoming’s Bureau of Public Roads. Thirty-eight more men were burned, many of them badly.

Recovering bodies

By 5 p.m. the worst of the fire was over, but the smoke was so thick the survivors in Post's crew who could walk stayed in place for nearly three more hours before leaving the site.

In the morning hours of Aug. 22, the bodies of Clayton and six of his men were found within 30 feet of each other. Sixty feet away rescuers found CCC enrollee Roy Bevens, who was badly burned but clinging to life. "God, how lucky I am to be alive!" he told the men who evacuated him to Cody, but he later died of his severe injuries at the hospital.

The solemn scene of the bodies Clayton's crew being taken from the forest was recorded by a Cody news reporter. "Seven pack-horses, each with angular forms wrapped in canvas and lashed to the saddles, filed slowly out of the wooded ravine and stopped at the cars," the journalist wrote. "Over a hundred wide-eyed, ashen-gray youngsters, just ready to go to the fire line, pushed forward, drawn by a chilling magnetism to see what their former comrades looked like."

What they witnessed that day stayed with the men, who were haunted by the deaths. In 1987, on the 50th anniversary of the Blackwater fire, CCC firefighter Lloyd Hull described that horrific afternoon. "It baked everybody below [the tree-top fire]. The heat was so intense," Hull remembered. "You knew it was happening. There was no 'figure' to it. We knew it."

Hull was part of the team that searched for bodies and helped the injured. So was 17-year-old Vernon Pitt, a just-discharged CCC enrollee from Cody who volunteered to stay and help.

"There was no way they could get out," Pitt said. "It was a pretty sad deal. Them boys was all young boys."

Morris Simpers, superintendent of the CCC's Cody camp, said when Clayton's body was discovered it appeared remarkably unscathed. Then he described how the ranger's woolen clothing crumpled into ashes when it was touched.

"Clayton's men could have walked to safety within seven minutes," Simpers later told the Billings Gazette. "That shows how fast the fire came up."

Ten of the casualties were young members of the CCC. The five others killed were employed by the U.S. Forest Service. Thirty-eight other men were injured. Putting out the fire took a back seat to the search for victims, but afterward fresh crews numbering up to 500 attacked the fire. It was officially contained three days later on Aug. 24, and the final firefighting crew was disbanded a week afterward.

Changes in firefighting

The Blackwater Creek Fire is a distant memory in wildfire history, but it led to an important change in the way forest fires would be fought in the future. David P. Godwin of the U.S. Forest Service's Division of Fire Control investigated the fire and determined the foremen and supervisors admirably performed their duties and were not to blame for the tragedy. It was beyond their control.

But Godwin questioned delays in the travel times of firefighting units, particularly the one dispatched from Ten Sleep. The investigator speculated that if they had arrived as scheduled, the Texans who left the Ten Sleep camp would not have been deployed where they were when the fire blew up. In his report Godwin noted in that scenario they may very well have survived unharmed.

Godwin ultimately concluded units needed to be on the scene much earlier, and two years after the Blackwater fire he authorized funds to carry out parachute jumping experiments linked to fire suppression. The federal government's smokejumper program, initially tested in Winthrop, Wash., and at two locations in Montana, was born.

On the second anniversary of the Blackwater Creek fire, 500 local residents helped dedicate a 71-foot-long stone monument, which contains the names of all the men who were killed or injured. It is located 38 miles west of Cody on U.S. Highway 14/16, near the junction of Blackwater Creek and the North Fork of the Shoshone River.

Two smaller monuments, accessible only by hiking or horseback on a 12-mile-round-trip trail, were built by CCC crews. One is located at the renamed "Clayton Gulch," and the second is at "Post Point," which fittingly marks the spot where Ranger Post and his men sought refuge. Post received the nation's first forest-fighting medal for leading his men to safety.

Clayton, meanwhile, was honored in a lengthy 1937 poem, "Alfred G. Clayton, Requiescat in Peace." It is credited to "L.C. Shoemaker and Roosevelt." The poem concludes:

"A hero? Oh no! just a ranger
Who answered unquestioned the call;
Whose motto -- like ours -- was service;
Who gave to 'The Service' his all.
And a promise we give to his loved ones,
That as long as rangers shall ride,The name of Alfred G. Clayton
Will still be remembered with pride."

Killed in the Blackwater Fire:

• Alfred G. Clayton, Ranger South Fork District, Shoshone National Forest, age 45.
• James T. Saban, CCC Technical Foreman - Ten Sleep Camp F-35 (former Forest Ranger on Medicine Bow and Chippewa National Forests), age 36.
• Rex A. Hale, Junior Assistant to the Technician, Shoshone National Forest; from the Wapiti CCC camp, age 21.
• Paul E. Tyrrell, Junior Forester, Bighorn National Forest (Foreman), died Aug. 26 at hospital, age 24.
• Billy Lea, Bureau of Public Roads Crewman, originally from Oregon, died later at hospital.
• Civilian Conservation Corps Enrollees: Ten Sleep Camp F-35 in the Bighorn National Forest; Company 1811 -- 3 months earlier came from Bastrop area of Texas, ages 17 to 20 years:
• John B. Gerdes of Halletsville, TX
• Will C. Griffith of Bastrop, TX
• Mack T. Mayabb of Smithville, TX
• George E. Rodgers of George, TX
• Roy Bevens of Smithville, TX, died later at Cody hospital.
• Clyde Allen of McDade, TX
• Ernest Seelke of LaGrange, TX
• Rubin D. Sherry of Smithville, TX
• William Whitlock of Austin, TX, died later at Cody hospital.
• Ambrocio Garza of Corpus Christi, TX, died later at Cody hospital.

Resources

• Always Remember website. “1937 08/21 WY15-Fatality Blackwater CCC.” Accessed May 15, 2016 at http://www.wlfalwaysremember.org/incident-lists/255-blackwater.html. Includes the list of the deceased, reproduced here.
• Forest Army: Remembering the Civilian Conservation Corps. “Death on the Fireline: The Blackwater Fire of 1937.” Accessed May 15, 2016 at http://forestarmy.blogspot.com/2007/08/death-on-fire-line-blackwater-fire-of.html.
• Howard, Tom. “CCC Reunion: 'Never Forget Fire.’” Billings Gazette, June 29, 1987.
• Kaufman, Erle. “Death in Blackwater Canyon.” American Forests, November 1937, 534-540, 538-539. Accessed June 21, 2016 at http://www.fireleadership.gov/toolbox/staffride/downloads/lsr5/lsr5_death_in_blackwater_nov1937.pdf. Good article published just three months after the fire, with photos of the Blackwater Creek terrain. If document does not load, copy and re-paste url directly into address window.
• Perry, Dave. “The Fatal Blackwater Fire.” Riverton Ranger, June 30, 1987
• Wikipedia. “Blackwater Fire of 1937.” Accessed June 29, 2016 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackwater_fire_of_1937
• For Further Reading and Research
• Gabbert, Bill. “Blackwater Fire of 1937 Remembered.” Wildfire Today, May 15, 2012. Accessed June 30, 2016 at http://wildfiretoday.com/2012/05/15/blackwater-fire-of-1937-remembered/.
• Gabbert, Bill. “Commemoration of the 75^th Anniversary of the Blackwater Fire.” Wildfire Today, August 17, 2012. Accessed June 30, 2016 at http://wildfiretoday.com/2012/08/17/commemoration-of-the-75th-anniversary-of-the-blackwater-fire/.

Illustrations

• The photos of the firefighters monument and of the burned firefighters in hospital were both produced by Hoskins Studio, of Cody, probably in the late 1930s and are now in the collections of the Park County Archives. Used with permission and thanks.
• Archives staffers caution that the photo of the burned men and their nurse was identified by its donor as being of firefighters injured in the Blackwater Fire, but the print itself contains no information on the back that would make that identification more certain.
• The aerial photo of the Blackwater Fire is from the U.S. Forest Service. The U.S. Forest service map and graphic about the Blackwater Fire was reproduced on Wildfire Today. Used with thanks.
• The advertisement for backpack water pumps for firefighters was published alongside the 1937 Erle Kauffman article in American Forests, cited and linked in the bibliography above. Used with thanks.
• For 30 more Forest Service photos of the Blackwater Fire and its aftermath, click here.

Mrs. Robert C. Morris of New York is an authority on Western fishing. ... In the Winter she lives on Fifth Avenue, and goes to the opera, and rides in her limousine, and does the other things that city women do; in the Summer she is off to the Rockies to fish, ride the mountain trails, camp, and fish again (New York Times, May 12, 1918).

A wealthy New York socialite seemed an unlikely candidate to spearhead one of the earliest efforts to establish a standard trail system in Yellowstone National Park. But Alice Morris was no stranger to the park. By 1917, she had come to the Yellowstone country each summer for many years, camping, fishing and riding horses.

From Army to Park Service

When Morris came to Yellowstone – “America’s Wonderland” – the park was struggling through a difficult transition. In 1883, the U.S. Army took over management of the park, which was suffering from vandalism, poaching and poor administration. The Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Cavalry managed the park until 1916, when President Woodrow Wilson signed the National Park Service Act. The last soldiers left Fort Yellowstone in October, turning over management to the National Park Service. The first Park rangers were 22 discharged Army men.

The transition did not go smoothly. Local communities wanted the Army back, and politicians blocked funding for the civilian force. Army management made a temporary return, but when the United States entered World War I, troops were needed in Europe. Congress reluctantly provided non-military funding for the park in July 1918.

Getting around

The original road system was built by the competent Army Corps of Engineers. One of the earliest park superintendents, Philetus W. Norris, devised a system of circular loop roads to connect the natural wonders. During his tenure from 1877-1882, workers completed about 104 miles of today’s 140-mile Grand Loop Road.

The Army then took over administration. Lieutenant Dan C. Kingman concentrated on improving the hastily built roads, set park road standards, and built several substantial bridges. Norris and other pre-Army superintendents also began laying out a system of foot and horseback trails to access the park’s attractions and to patrol the backcountry. These early trails often followed existing American Indian routes, game trails, or, simply, paths of least resistance.

The military, charged with controlling poaching and wildfires, established regular patrols that used existing roads and trails. Gradually new trails were added to the park system. Starting in about 1890, the Army built patrol cabins for shelter during the winter months. These so-called snowshoe cabins were strategically located throughout the park and were eventually connected by trails.

Fire control was a major concern after the Great Fire of 1910 (“the Big Blowup”), which burned over 3 million acres of forest in Washington, Idaho and Montana, and killed at least 85 people. The Army began building new trails that served a dual purpose—tourism and fire prevention. Many of the trails were designated as “firelanes.”

By 1917, about 400 hundred miles of trails were in common use, including 280 miles classified as firelanes. Milton P. Skinner, a geologist intimately familiar with the park, suggested an additional 521 miles of new trails. In 1916, cars began streaming into the park, and it became imperative to separate horseback travel from auto traffic.

“I had long known the Park”

Although Alice Morris was a world traveler and could afford to visit any destination, she chose Yellowstone National Park. For several summers she stayed on a homestead claimed in 1913 by G. Milton Ames along Slough Creek just north of the park. “Lady Morris,” as she was known, first stayed in a tent, later a log cabin accompanied by her cook, Estelle. Morris kept five ponies and a colt on the homestead and often traveled into the park.

Usually, she left her husband in New York. Robert Clark Morris was born into a prominent New England family. He graduated with a law degree from Yale. In 1890, he married Alice Parmelee, age 17, and soon established a law practice in New York City. He and Alice were active in civic, social and political affairs. In 1896 they sailed to Japan, where they visited Yokohama, Tokyo, Kyoto, and Nara. She subsequently wrote an illustrated book, Dragons and Cherry Blossoms, about the adventure. This thin volume displayed her writing skills, which she would one day put to good use in her reports on the Yellowstone trails.

An invitation

Alice must have been a notable sight during her visits to Yellowstone, exploring the park on horseback. In 1917, at age 44, she was invited by the Park Service to undertake a study of the trails. That summer, she covered 1,500 miles on horseback, mapping and blazing a system of trails.

She described her adventures to a reporter in a New York Times article that ran February 10, 1918. She related her daily regimen of waking at 5 AM, riding all day working out a route across a variety of terrains, sometimes through deep snow, and swimming the horses through rivers. She concluded her long days around a campfire, making notes of the day’s journey. “Work? Of course it was work,” she said. “But it was the most stimulating kind of work you can imagine.”

Two reports

As a result of that summer’s explorations, she compiled two official reports. The first,“Notes on Trail Study in Yellowstone Park” (1917), provided park officials with specific recommendations, including suggestions for trail connections and complete marking of the trails. Her subsequent report, “Map and Description of the Trails in and about Yellowstone Park” (1918) was an eloquent essay on the beauty and wildness Yellowstone offered tourists willing to travel the back country. Her observations included colorful descriptions of wildlife, flora and geysers.

Her 1917 report recommended three circular trails. One, she urged, should connect the principal hotels; the second would be a series of trails radiating like spokes from the hotels for short trips; her third recommendation proposed an outer loop through the wilderness to the borders of the park, based on existing firelanes. The report listed all the trails she rode and her recommendations for specific improvements, shortcuts or new trails.

She advised that trail specifications be followed and used as a basis for construction and inspection of new trails:

Trails should be cut 6 ft. wide through timber, and graded 3 ft. wide on all side hills, and through rough ground. Also that overhanging branches be removed from trees. Small stumps and snags should be cut below the level of the ground, if possible, and the trail should be reasonably free from sharp turns, sudden declivities and loose stones. All trails to be constructed should be run out with a hypsometer [an instrument for measuring height or altitude] or some such simple instrument and staked, in order to establish an even grade. Recommended that the maximum grade on any trail constructed be 10 per cent, very few grades being over 8 per cent.

…It is suggested that on this trail work there be appointed a Trail Master, whose business it should be to plan and superintend work on all trails in order that the system of trails may present a uniform appearance. The existing trails give an unpleasant impression of dissimilarity of method of construction.

Appreciative of her summer’s labors, Superintendent Lindsley graciously wrote Alice: “The manner in which you have handled this important problem of our National Park, and the completeness and charm of expression of your reports and notes, is a joy. And best of all, to my mind, you have made the whole scheme perfectly a practicable one, and I hope that you can be the one to see it carried eventually to completion, and enjoyed and appreciated by the public.”

“The fishing – Oh, the fishing!”

The unusual combination of socialite and explorer had begun to catch the public’s eye. Morris was interviewed by a New York Times reporter for an article that appeared on May 12, 1918. Answering his questions about fly fishing, she scoffed at any fisherman who would sink to using worms. “The keenest joy in fishing,” she observed, “was luring a trout that you’ve never been able to catch…But when you get him, you are satisfied… It has been a battle of wits, a tussle of strategy, and you’ve won! That’s fishing!”

Fishing remained one of Alice Morris’s greatest passions. She exclaimed in the Times article, “The fishing—Oh, the fishing in the Yellowstone!—is such fishing as the passionate angler dreams of….The day’s ride along the trails finds always a jewel-like lake in the mountains, or a crystal sparkling stream, at the edge of which to make camp when evening falls.”

“This unique splendor”

Alice Morris expected that her longer, more impressionistic 1918 report, along with 32 photos, would be published by the National Park Service. However, this author was unable to locate any record of an officially published version. The 1918 report survives in the Yellowstone National Park archives. This second report provides the basis of this article and will be quoted at length. She began by explaining the urgent necessity of her explorations. The introduction of the automobile had made travel much easier, she wrote, but many feared a loss of the park’s “primitive charm” would result.

To…make public the information that would establish the Yellowstone National Park more firmly than it ever had been before as the people’s wonderland – a unique and marvelous thing to see, a safe and simple place to visit, a delightful, picturesque, magnificent country to ride through and camp in and enjoy – the National Park Service of the Department of the Interior asked me to map the trails and bridle paths…The motor cars travel over a small part of the park’s great area. Into all the magnificence of the wilderness, otherwise inaccessible, go the trails.

Of course, Alice Morris lived in a world far removed from today’s. Present-day park management of some 4 million visitors per year would have been beyond her imagination.

“Harmless, good-natured” bears

Though Alice Morris was an experienced backcountry traveler, her attitudes towards safety on pack trips seem naïve today:

It is safe in spite of black bears and mountain elk, of precipitous canyons and rushing rivers. It is so safe that women and children may set out with a pack-train. The pack-train is of course accompanied by a guide, and all the Yellowstone guides are well-known and experienced men…As for the wild animals that roam the hills…they simply pay no attention to him at all. Now and then a great black bear will come lumbering out of the forest and cross the bridle-path. His big clumsy body may halt its swinging gait as he hears the pack-train’s approach; his wistful, humourous [sic] face may turn gravely for a moment toward the intruders in his domain; but after all he is used to them; they are harmless; they are not worth more than an instant’s attention; he ambles on. And the horses, by no means disturbed, keep on their way. … The grizzly bears are made of different stuff. They seek no compromise in their ancient enmity. They have their homes – the few that are in the Park – in remote fastnesses high up in the hills. Man almost never meets them; he never wants to.

Morris did not record any incidents involving bears during her horseback rides through the park that summer of 1917. Only the summer before, however, a large grizzly attacked and killed a teamster, Frank Welch, who was sleeping under his wagon. His was the first documented death from grizzly attack in Yellowstone National Park.

The “bear problem” started after two large hotels opened in the park in 1891 and developed large waste dumps. Emboldened by these dumps, bears gradually lost their fear of humans and started begging from tourists along the park roads. Visitors tended to underestimate the risk, approaching the bears to feed or photograph them.

From 1931 to 1969, an average of 46 people per year were injured by black bears. Only 8 people have been killed by grizzly bears in Yellowstone National Park during its 146-year history. Eventually, the dangerous combination of garbage dumps and tourists became evident. By 1973, the dumps were permanently closed, and many problem bears were transplanted to remote areas.

“The whole park is a flower garden”

Alice observed that “the flowers grow, wild and luxuriant, as they grow in primeval lands,” and singled out a few as objects of her particular affection. Lupine, pale lavender to deep purple and blue, was the dominant flower growing in masses on the hillsides; the gentian was “…a clear blue fringed flower that…remains characteristically the Yellowstone’s own.” She was especially charmed by columbine and Indian paintbrush, which changed to a large, gracefully formed flower of deep magenta or crimson in the high peaks.

Morris admitted that the auto tourist could now visit most of the “spectacular wonders” of the park, but only those who traveled the trails by pack-train could linger in their own favorite places for as long as they chose, even all summer if they liked. “Everyone knows that there are geysers there,” she wrote; “almost everyone knows that there are petrified forests; few Americans, I think, understand the untouched natural beauty and interest even in little things that lie in this American wonderland.”

Magic fountains

Despite the fact that Alice Morris considered the geysers an obvious Yellowstone attraction, she devoted several pages of her report to their description. Although geologists classified and explained the geyser phenomena in great detail, Morris related to the simple “wonder and delight” of the tourist in seeing them. “These great bursts of silver beauty from the earth are so mysterious, so splendid, so curiously varied.” Many of the names she used are still in use today:

Here is Black Warrior, whose fountain play never ceases, and the indolent lovely majestic Giantess that rests from five to forty days! The explosive Minute Man sends his silver shower into the air for fifteen, twenty, thirty seconds, and then stops. The Giant plays for precisely one hour at a time. And there is the exquisite little Jewel, whose magic fountain is never more than twenty feet high, whereas the Giant, the highest stream of all, sends forth a gleaming misted tower with a minimum of 200 and a maximum of 250 feet. The Fan is unlike most of the other geysers in that it throws its water at an angle instead of vertically. Castle Geyser, with a gush of seventy-five feet or so, has built itself an impressive crater from which it takes its name. The Beehive is a creation of simple artistry – a slender column of water that rises to a height of 200 feet from a small beehive mound. The Great Fountain’s basin is strangely and pleasingly ornamented, and its volume of water is extraordinarily large.

In her 1918 report, Alice Morris called the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone “one of the great natural wonders of the world”:

It is a place not only of beauty and majesty of line, but of magnificent color – so magnificent, so varied, that it is as if a single artist has spilled his gorgeous tint upon the rocks. Leaving its quiet valley, the river tumbles first over the Upper Falls and then on to the Lower Falls, where it is truly a queen in its flowing robes of silver as it dashes in glory down what is perhaps the most beautiful waterfall in the world.

“Into all the magnificence of the wilderness, otherwise inaccessible, go the trails”

The nuts and bolts of Alice’s 1918 report were the trail-by-trail descriptions. Portions of this segment of her 1918 trail study were printed in the “Yellowstone National Park: Rules and Regulations” issued in 1920. However, as stated earlier, it does not appear that her 1918 report was ever printed in its entirety as an official park pamphlet.

The recommendations

Correspondence between Alice Morris and Superintendent Lindsley in February and March 1918 indicate how seriously he took her recommendations concerning the park trail system. In regard to her 1917 report, Lindsley stated that “I only wish there were room for all of it in our little booklet on park information which is distributed by the thousands each summer. I have already recommended that your Trail Notes be added to that circular, and trust it may not be too late to have it done for the season of 1918.”

In a letter dated February 15, Lindsley stressed the necessity of cutting out and marking the north boundary line of the park and the west line of the park from the northwest corner, “as this is a favorite hunting country in the fall and there is some doubt as to the location of the line on the part of hunters.” He also recommended heavy rock work on the trail north of the Yellowstone River.

Lindsley requested a map from Morris, as well as cost estimates for conducting the work, based on three (possibly four) crews of four men each and four pack horses in the field; a map and cost figures were attached to his letter in park files, indicating her response. Her agenda for trail work was much more ambitious than Lindsley mentioned in his letter. She also calculated the number of days needed for each project to be completed.

She attached two appendices, one of which provided for improvement of Uncle Tom’s Trail from the canyon rim to the shore of the river. “Many people persist in using this trail in its present dangerous condition in spite of sign at its head and warnings duly given. Steps can be cut in rock, iron hand-rails provided, and earth part widened, relocated, and re-graded.”

Many of Alice’s recommendations were later incorporated by the Park Service as funding and other priorities allowed. One of her suggestions for a new trail has become today’s Trail Creek Trail, which follows the north and east sides of Heart Lake, then continues east along the south shores of the South and Southeast Arms of Yellowstone Lake to connect with the Thorofare Trail. Milton P. Skinner also recommended this route in his 1917 report. He stated that “a fair game trail covers most of the route.” Superintendent Albright agreed with them both and recommended that it be added to the trail system in his 1919 and 1920 “Report of the Superintendent.” The trail was finally constructed during the years 1934-1936.

In the same area, she recommended constructing what has become today’s Snake River or Snake River Cutoff Trail. She also suggested the construction of the Elephant’s Back Trail at the north end of Lake Yellowstone, which was subsequently built in 1928, as well as what is today’s Buffalo Fork Trail at the north end of the park. This trail was finally designated on park maps in 1937.

Down the rabbit hole

As for the rest of Alice’s life, after her 1917 summer of trail-breaking and subsequent articles, little is known about her. The Slough Creek homestead, her summer home for many years, was sold in 1918 and became a part of the Silver Tip Ranch, a guest ranch with a rustic lodge and polo field. Alice Morris ceased her summer visits to the homestead, and her name is not mentioned in a history of the Silver Tip Ranch from 1922-1947, written by A. Conger Goodyear.

No evidence has been found of any further association between Alice Morris and Yellowstone National Park. After G. Milton Ames sold his property in 1918, Alice Morris stayed with Mrs. Joe B. Duret, wife of “Frenchy” Duret, on a nearby homestead. Her visit in June 1921 was mentioned in a local newspaper: “Mrs. Duret looks after the comforts of a number of tourists every year at her place on Slough Creek on the Cooke City Road, where she will entertain this year, Mrs. Robert Morris, wife of a prominent New York lawyer, who arrived in Livingston Wednesday from the east.”

The remainder of Alice Morris’s life is a mystery. In the 1920s, she and Robert C. Morris were divorced. The couple never had any children. After the divorce, her name vanished from the society pages of the New York Times. Robert C. Morris remarried, but his second wife died only 17 months later. He passed away in 1938, leaving one-quarter of his estate to Alice. At that time, Alice had not remarried, and she resided in Palm Springs, California.

Did Alice Morris ever return to Yellowstone National Park after committing so much time and energy to the development of its trail system? Further research may cast new light on her later life, but for now this dynamic woman from New York City deserves recognition for her contributions to Yellowstone’s backcountry trails. In her report, she added:

I had long known the Park… and had literally chosen it as in all the world the most interesting, enjoyable goal for summer journeyings. Certainly, too, the earth knows no place more beautiful, just as it knows no place that is at all like the Yellowstone National Park.

Resources

Primary Sources

• Anderson, George S. Report of the Superintendent of the Yellowstone National Park to the Secretary of the Interior, 1892. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1892.
• Anderson, George S. Report of the Superintendent of the Yellowstone National Park to the Secretary of the Interior, 1895. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1895.
• Hale, Elaine Skinner. “A Brief History of the Slough Creek Wagon Road,” typewritten 13-page manuscript dated 19 June 2006. On file at Branch of Cultural Resources, Yellowstone Center for Resources, Yellowstone National Park.
• National Park Service. Yellowstone National Park: Rules and Regulations, 1920. “Trails in and About Yellowstone National Park”, by Mrs. Robert C. Morris. Accessed Nov. 1, 2016 at https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/brochures/1920/yell/sec4.htm.
• Yellowstone National Park Archives, Pre-National Park Service Collection, Letter Box 72, Item No. 113: Roads and Trails, 1912-1918; letter report dated November 15, 1916, from Chester A. Lindsley, Acting Supervisor to the Superintendent of National Parks, Washington, D.C. concerning statistics for roads and trails in Yellowstone National Park.
• Yellowstone National Park Archives, Pre-National Park Service Collection, Item No. 113: Roads & Trails, 1912-1918, “June 1917, Suggested Addition to System of Trails in Yellowstone National Park with Advantages of the Trails Mentioned, Present Condition of Trails where Old Trails Exist, and Estimated Cost of Necessary Work” by Milton P. Skinner, Geologist, 13 pages.
• Yellowstone National Park Archives, Pre-National Park Service Collection, Item No. 113: Roads & Trails, 1912-1918. Folder 342, five page letter dated November 20, 1917, from Major John W.H. Schulz, District Engineer, Corps of Engineers, to the Chief of Engineers, U.S. Army, Washington, D.C. concerning trails in Yellowstone National Park.
• Yellowstone National Park Archives, Pre-National Park Service Collection, Letter Box 72, Folder: Notes on Trail Study in Yellowstone Park, 1917, by Alice P. Morris, File No. 332.4; Yellowstone Trails by Alice P. Morris, 1918.
• Yellowstone National Park Archives, Pre-National Park Service Collection, Letter Box 72, File No. 332.4; letters dated February 15 and March 14, 1918, from C.A. Lindsley, Superintendent Yellowstone National Park, to Alice Morris, concerning Yellowstone National Park trails and suggested improvements.
• “Yellowstone Trails Blazed by New York Woman.” The New York Times Magazine, 10 February 1918, p. 7.
• “From Fifth Avenue She Turns to Fly-Fishing.” The New York Times, 12 May 1918.
• Mrs. Robert C. Morris of New York at her camp, Mammoth Hot Springs, Yellowstone Park, Wyoming.” Photograph and caption, The New York Times, 16 August 1914.
• “Local News.” The Park County News, Livingston, Montana, 28 June 1921. Reference to Mrs. Joe B. Duret and summer visit of Mrs. Robert Morris.
• “Bear Killed and Ate Mont. Trapper.” The Cody Enterprise, Cody, Wyoming, 28 June 1922, p. 1.
• U.S. Forest Service. “The 1910 Fires.” U.S. Forest Service History. Forest History Society 2012. Accessed Nov. 1, 2016 at http://www.foresthistory.org/ASPNET/Policy/Fire/FamousFires/1910Fires.aspx.

Secondary Sources

• Culpin, Mary Shivers. The History of the Construction of the Road System in Yellowstone National Park, 1872-1966. Historic Resource Study, Vol. 1, No. 5. Denver: National Park Service, Rocky Mountain Region, 1994.
• Egan, Timothy. The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America. New York, New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2009.
• Haines, Aubrey L. The Yellowstone Story, Volumes 1 and 2. Niwot, Colorado: University Press of Colorado, 1996.
• No Author. “Robert Clark Morris, 1869-1938.” The New York Community Trust, New York, NY. http://www.nycommunitytrust.org/Portals/0/…/BioBrochures/Robert%20Clark%20Morris.pdf.
• Whithorn, Doris. Twice Told on the Upper Yellowstone, Volume 2. Published by Doris Whithorn, Livingston, Montana, 1994.
• Whittlesey, Lee H. Death in Yellowstone: Accidents and Foolhardiness in the First National Park. Second Edition. Lanham, Maryland: Roberts Rinehart Publishers, 2014.

Illustrations

• The photos of Alice Morris on her horse, the cabin on Slough Creek and the cook, Estelle, are from the Yellowstone Gateway Museum of Park County, Livingston, Montana, all now in the authors’ collection as well. Used with thanks.
• The map of Yellowstone trails that Alice Morris prepared for her 1918 report to the Department of the Interior is from the Pre-National Park Service Collection, Yellowstone National Park Archives, now in the authors’ collection. The photos the Trail Creek Trail bridge, tourists riding the Howard Eaton Trail and the tourist above the Yellowstone River, are all from Box L-8, 1934 Fire Trails, Yellowstone National Park Archives and are now in the authors’ collection as well. Used with thanks.
• The photos of the steps to the foot of the Lower Yellowstone Falls and the waterfall itself are by the authors, 2009. The photo of the Blue Sapphire Pool is from 2016, also by the authors. Used with thanks.

In 1973 in Lander, Wyo., a father faced a difficult choice: Buy rubber boots to get his daughter through the Wyoming snows? Or continue pouring family funds into his newspaper and its quixotic mission—saving Wyoming? High Country News Publisher and Editor Tom Bell must have chosen the boots.

Bell announced in the March 2, 1973 edition that he was closing the newspaper, which he had launched just four years earlier. His wife, Tommie, and he had put $30,000 into its operation; he had drawn a salary in 1971 and 1972 that totaled only $910.97, he said. He had three little children at home, all adopted. He still owed $7,500 on a bank note from when the paper was first launched. He said he had few regrets about giving up.

High Country News still lives, however, 43 years later. After the 1973 announcement, pledges and commitments flooded in; readers sent in small checks and appealed to their philanthropic friends. In the July 6, 1973, issue, he announced a “miracle”: They had received $29,467.75, and he paid off the bank loan.

Why did this small newspaper with only 2,608 subscribers inspire such a dramatic response? When asked to remember those days, Wyomingites told Wyohistory.org that they credit both the man and the significance of the threats the region faced at that time.

The threats

The most significant threat was coal development. In earlier decades, most of the coal was mined underground in Wyoming, but by the early 1970s, huge strip mines were being proposed along with power plants and synthetic fuel plants that would transform the rural region into what Bell and his supporters saw as an industrialized colony. Some called it a National Sacrifice Area. The North Central Power Study, a joint government-industry effort published in 1971, predicted construction of 42 power plants on the Northern Plains. While the six major Western coal states would produce only 9,000 megawatts of coal-fired electricity in 1972, the study predicted that the northern states would produce five times that much by 1980 and 200,000 megawatts per year by the year 2020.

Government and industry looked to the Northern Plains to solve the nation’s energy crisis and proposed ambitious projects. Near Pinedale, Wyo., the Atomic Energy Commission wanted to use 100 nuclear bombs underground to frack tight shale beds to release natural gas. Along the Green River in southwestern Wyoming, developers proposed diverting water across the Continental Divide to feed the giant coal-fired power plants. Another plan called for tapping precious groundwater and mixing it into a coal slurry that would be shipped to Arkansas.

At the same time, ranchers were shooting and poisoning hundreds of eagles to protect their livestock. Pronghorns were suffering slow deaths, tangled in illegal barbed-wire fences on public lands in the Red Desert, fences that also excluded the public from those lands. The Forest Service was allowing huge, 1,000-acre clear cuts of timber that denuded hillsides, filled rivers with topsoil and could not be sustained.

The High Country News covered all of these issues, and despite its small circulation, enjoyed an outsized influence. Reading about the North Central Power Study in HCN, the editor of Science News called Bell to confirm what he read: The numbers could not be right. When Bell referred him to the study itself, the editor ran a front page story on it. Wyoming’s lone congressman, U.S. Rep. Teno Roncalio, was on a first-name basis not only with Bell but also with his office manager, Mary Margaret Davis.

Dick Prouty, environmental reporter for the Denver Post, recognized early the importance of the High Country News when the big energy companies began quoting it. “They respected the reporting there, and we all started using it for ideas,” Prouty said. The paper’s “miracle” was covered by the Los Angeles Times. Audubon magazine sent historian Alvin Josephy to investigate the threats and ran his in-depth analysis of the North Central Power Study, “Agony of the Northern Plains,” in its July 1, 1973, issue.

The man

Tom Bell was born in Wyoming, and so was the High Country News. Their indigenous roots served them well in an era when ranchers and mining interests tried to tie the fledgling environmental movement to outsiders. No one could question Bell’s credentials. He didn’t just wear jeans, cowboy boots and a cowboy hat. He hunted, lived on a ranch—until he had to sell it to save the newspaper—trapped and, when he was a student at the University of Wyoming after World War II, started the rodeo club there. His father was a coal miner.

Tom had staked uranium claims with his fellow teachers, later selling the uranium stock to subsidize HCN. It was his passion, however, that ignited a movement in Wyoming. Small in stature, he seemed to have a gargantuan presence.

Many people shared his desire to save Wyoming, but the Northern Plains had no environmental movement in the 1960s, only isolated organizations with differing priorities and no paid staff. In 1967 Bell started the Wyoming Outdoor Coordinating Council, now called the Wyoming Outdoor Council.

Though he did not intend to start an environmental newspaper, Bell needed a forum for sharing news among the groups in the WOCC and their members. As it turned out, Camping News Weekly was closing. Bell took out a loan in 1969 to purchase the publication and in 1974 transformed it into the High Country News. Realizing that he could not continue to run both WOCC and HCN, he convinced the WOCC board to take out a loan and hire Keith Becker.

There was no business plan for High Country News, but practicality was never high on Tom’s list of priorities or that of his wife, Tommie. By then he had quit several different jobs, one after he told a member of the Wyoming Game and Fish Commission to go to hell. He was very clear about his priorities in 1970: “I view conservation not just as a job nor as an avocation but as a way of life and a means to survival for the human race. It is a deadly serious business in which a person must be willing to sacrifice, personally as well as economically.”

The vision

Bell provided three things: well-researched information, a vision of how to tackle the problems and often the nudge to get people to work. With the exception of The Denver Post and the Missoulian in Montana, there were no other reporters focusing on environmental issues in the region at the time. The Casper Star-Tribuneof the early 1970s focused instead on discrediting the environmentalists, according to Bruce Hamilton, who later joined Bell as an editor at HCN.

“He was a catalyst for me, constantly on your case to do something. He was a buzz bomb of dedication and tenacity,” Leslie Petersen says. Petersen’s parents, Les and Alice Shoemaker, owned a dude ranch near Dubois, Wyo. The Shoemakers were alarmed about the clearcutting in the Shoshone National Forest around them and worked to protect the DuNoir area in particular, losing friends in the process in a community dependent upon the timber mill. Petersen’s father served as the second president of the WOCC Board, and she learned about broader environmental issues when she attended meetings with him and read High Country News.

Bell conveyed his vision in a letter to Wyoming Gov. Stan Hathaway in 1972, pleading for a special session of the Legislature to deal with “impending social, economic and environmental problems.” The letter suggested specific legislative initiatives.

Hathaway, however, rejected Bell’s vision, saying the energy plans did not seem imminent. Bell never forgave him and often in the High Country News, vented his wrath against Hathaway, U.S. Sen. Cliff Hansen, and other individuals who, he thought, imperiled wildlife and the state’s future.

Bell was perceived as “someone to be reckoned with, someone who knew his stuff and would not back off,” Petersen says.

“No one could threaten him. He was absolutely fearless and confrontational. He acted as if he had nothing to lose,” according to Keith Becker, who worked side by side with Bell when the WOCC and HCN shared an office. Bell was more incendiary in print than in person. “Tom was so earnest that he was able to disarm people,” Becker says.

War

Bell’s war experience shaped his perspective on risk, sacrifice and beauty. Flying as a bombardier over Italy in 1944, he was hit by shrapnel that destroyed his right eye and nearly killed him. He was told he would never see again. Later, at the age of 90, he told historian Mark Junge, “It was not as tough being an environmentalist as it was serving in World War II.”

Getting his vision back solidified his love for Wyoming and specifically for the Red Desert where he went after the war to recover from his emotional scars. “It was important to see the beautiful earth,” he said. When Junge asked what his family lived on, he said, “If I had enough money to put beans in my belly and have a roof over my head, that’s all I needed.”

His family’s and his staff’s dedication and sacrifices seem even more surprising than Bell’s. Losing the family ranch to pay HCN bills was heartbreaking for both Tom and Tommie, she said. Knowing how little money he was bringing home and how much they owed, it was she who suggested adopting three children after raising three of their own. Their courage inspired his two employees (Mary Margaret Davis and Marge Higley), who also went without salaries for six months, and the newspaper’s printer, who let printing bills slide, unpaid.

Bell himself was amazed at his readers’ loyalty and the miracle that resurrected HCN. Earlier, when he announced the closing of HCN in 1973, he had admitted that he had “few regrets.” When his readers sent donations and would not let him quit, he advertised for someone to help him with the editorial duties.

Joan Nice, a 25-year-old journalist from Colorado, arranged an interview, and he hired her on the spot, offering $300 per month. She hesitated only for a moment, saying they would have to find a job for her boyfriend bagging groceries or something. Instead, Bell hired them both, paying them $300 each. Bell, Nice and Bruce Hamilton shared editorial duties for a few months.

Then, suddenly, Bell announced he was leaving.

Move to Oregon

It turned out that Bell had something to lose after all. The 50-year-old man behind the legend was very human. He suffered from migraines and mercurial moods, twice over the years throwing the HCN layout sheets into the trash where his staff went to retrieve them. He also suffered from guilt about neglecting his family. He believed the world was going to hell, and his obligation was to move to Oregon where the climate lent itself to gardening, and he could better support his family.

When he walked out the door, he left his leadership role as well, unlike most founders of institutions. “Play with it until the string runs out,” he told his staff. He continued to contribute his “High Country” column, but he never tried to tell Joan Nice and Bruce Hamilton or subsequent staff how to edit or finance the newspaper.

Looking back, people involved in the Wyoming environmental movement at the time realize that the work took a heavy toll on many people, not just him. “We were a bunch of zealots, overdoing it,” in the words of one person. Working 60-70 hours a week for little or no pay, they acted as if they could save the world in their lifetimes. Relationships and physical health suffered. Constantly trying to raise money from the same people to fight crises destroyed friendships.

Evolution

Without Bell at the helm, the newspaper evolved into a more objective, less strident publication that focused on the environment. Bell had a fiery temper and made no attempt at objectivity, even testifying at public hearings on behalf of the readers. In Bell’s apoplectic newspaper, the sword of Damocles hung over the Clarks Fork River, sites for nuclear power plants and various other threatened areas.

Nice’s and Hamilton’s approach was different. They felt that if they laid out the facts, people would be convinced. “He was the right person to do it his way. Tom’s credentials as a native Wyomingite gave him credibility, but we were outsiders. We didn’t have the authority to speak for what Wyoming should do. Making it more objective was the only appropriate thing we could do,” Nice says.

Hamilton later left the High Country News to open a Sierra Club office in Lander. He and Nice were married and started having children and eventually left the state to work for the Sierra Club. By the time Nice left the HCN editorship in 1981, the newspaper circulation had increased to 9,000 and the paper continued to attract national attention as people such as Edward Abbey and Robert Redford visited Lander and spread the word about the paper.

Subsequent editors and financial managers continued the paper’s gradual progress toward stability, most notably converting it from a privately owned business owned by Tom Bell to nonprofit status so it could receive tax-deductible donations from individuals and foundations. In 1983, when Bell returned to Wyoming, editor Geoffrey O’Gara, the architect of this change, tried to ask Bell what he thought of the foundation. He had no interest in the details and just said, “Thanks for keeping it alive.”

In 1983, the board hired Ed and Betsy Marston to run the newspaper, and they moved it to Paonia, Colorado. High Country News had a truckload of files and photos and $7,000 in the bank, but the string never ran out and, in fact, the newspaper is thriving.

High Country News now has a budget of $3 million and more than 10 times as many paid subscribers as it had in 1974 (31,000). The website, which includes a full archive of back issues, attracts 360,000 unique visitors each month. The breadth of its coverage has continued to grow, reflecting the change in the tag line from “the environmental biweekly” to “for people who care about the West.” Bell’s other creation, the Wyoming Outdoor Council, has also thrived. Once struggling to support a half-time director, WOC now owns a building in Lander, has a staff of 12, and will celebrate its 50^th anniversary in 2017.

Until his death in Lander Aug. 30, 2016, Bell continued to fight to protect the Oregon Trail and the Red Desert. In his 90s, he was still writing angry letters to lawmakers about climate change. “Most of us mellow with age, but not Tom,” says Keith Becker. “He didn’t know how to back up, and God bless him for it.”

Looking back

Wyoming conservationists were remarkably successful in the 1970s. Some of the victories could be attributed specifically to Tom Bell. For example, U.S. Rep. Teno Roncalio wrote to Bell in 1974 about the federal coal surface mining law saying, “written landowner consent remains in the bill, and you deserve credit for that.” He personally brought national attention that eliminated illegal fencing and protected the Red Desert that he loved.

However, Tom was at the helm of High Country News for only five of its 13 years in Wyoming and about one-tenth of its full life; HCN will turn 50 in 2019. In contrast, the current publisher, Paul Larmer, has been publisher for 13 years, and the previous publishers, Ed and Betsy Marston, were publishers for 19 years.

His impact should be measured by the environmental movement that he sparked. Told recently that he left in 1974, Leslie Petersen, one of the early staffers, was surprised. “He got us all started, and then he left.” Bart Koehler, who served as the Outdoor Council’s executive director after Becker, calls Bell the Paul Revere of Wyoming. “Just as Revere was a patriot for spreading the alarm, so was Tom.”

Wyoming conservationists blocked the biggest threats of the 1970s and convinced the legislature to address not only the environmental but also the social impacts of development, as Bell had envisioned. Most of the power plants and gasification plants were never built. The Green River was never sent across the Continental Divide. The nuclear fracking plan was abandoned. The slurry pipeline was never built. Near Dubois, the DuNoir was designated a special management area, which prevented clearcutting there, and the oversized timber mill was shut down.

In 1973, environmentalists helped convince the Wyoming Legislature to pass an Environmental Quality Act, which established a Department of Environmental Quality. In 1974, Koehler and others recruited constituents to demand an Industrial Siting and Information act, which was passed by the Legislature in 1975. Also that year, Gov. Hathaway was replaced by a moderate Democrat, Ed Herschler, who ran on the slogan, “Growth on our terms;” he served for three terms.

On the walls of their offices and the pages of their publications, Tom Bell is still a constant presence at both HCN and WOC, and the staffs feel a deep loyalty. Several of them drove hundreds of miles to attend the University of Wyoming ceremony in 2016 when Bell received an honorary doctorate in absentia. Later, after he died, two of the HCN staff, in Paonia, jumped in the car again to attend his memorial in Lander.

When Bell was on his deathbed in July 2016, Joan Nice Hamilton wrote to him and said, “Thanks for believing in us.” Although he had left for Oregon shortly after they arrived, “Tom's vision—letting people know about the threats to and the glories of the Rocky Mountain West—were still the heart of the endeavor,” she says. “He was the passion behind HCN; that passion and the loyal readers were the whole reason we were there. A bunch of kids starting a newspaper would not have been significant: A lot of newspapers came and went. This one lasted because of that voice in the wilderness.”

In September, Bell’s friend John Mionczynski of Atlantic City, Wyo. walked to the top of Oregon Buttes on the Red Desert to release his ashes. Bell’s legacy lives in the legions of people who carry on his work, including Mionczynski, whose work on behalf of the Red Desert was inspired by Bell.

Marjane Ambler was one of the editors of High Country News from 1974 until 1980. In 2013, she and Lander-based journalists Geoffrey O’Gara and Sara Wiles videotaped interviews with Tom Bell, which were sent to the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, Wyo. Bell also donated his personal papers to the center. Keith Becker continued ranching and working on behalf of the environment after his tenure as WOC executive director. Leslie Petersen was president of the WOC board in 1979, was Wyoming’s Democratic candidate for governor in 2010, and served as a Teton County commissioner. Bruce Hamilton is the deputy executive director of the Sierra Club. Joan Nice Hamilton was the editor of Sierra magazine for many years. Bart Koehler devoted over 40 years to working for wilderness.

(Editor’s note: Publication of this and seven other articles on Wyoming newspapering is supported in part by the Wyoming Humanities Council and is part of the Pulitzer Prizes Centennial Campfires Initiative, a joint venture of the Pulitzer Prizes Board and the Federation of State Humanities Councils in celebration of the 2016 centennial of the prizes. The initiative seeks to illuminate the impact of journalism and the humanities on American life today, to imagine their future and to inspire new generations to consider the values represented by the body of Pulitzer Prize-winning work. For their generous support for the Campfires Initiative, the council thanks the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Pulitzer Prizes Board, and Columbia University.)

Resources

Primary Sources

• Becker, Keith. Telephone interview with author, Sept. 24, 2016.
• Bell, Tom. Interview with Mark Junge. Lander, Wyo., April 5, 2014. Wyoming State Archives. Accessed Nov. 2, 2016 at http://wyospcr.state.wy.us/MultiMedia/Display.aspx?ID=130&icon=1.
• Bell, Tom. “We’re Alive and Well, Thank you.” High Country News 5:14 (July 6, 1973): 1-4.
• Hamilton, Bruce. “Bart Koehler, Environmental Advocate.” High Country News 6:10 (May 10, 1974): 16.
• Hamilton, Bruce. Telephone interview with author, Sept. 26, 2016.
• ______________. “Tom Bell: Visionary, Advocate, Mentor, Fighter, Friend.” September 8, 2016. Accessed Nov. 2, 2016 at http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/green-life/tom-bell-visionary-advocate-mentor-fighter-friend.
• Hamilton, Joan Nice. Telephone interview with author, Sept. 26, 2016.
• Higley, Marge. “Thoughts from the Distaff Corner.” High Country News (16 March 1973): 14. Higley’s column includes the story about the choice between the boots and the newspaper.
• Koehler, Bart. Telephone interview with author, Sept. 26, 2016.
• Petersen, Leslie. Telephone interview with author, Sept. 23, 2016.

Secondary sources

• Josephy, Jr. Alvin M. “Agony of the Northern Plains: Impact on the Northern Plains of the 1971 ‘North Central Power Study.’” Audubon Magazine 75:4 (July 1, 1973): 68-99. Josephy’s article includes the map reproduced here.
• O’Gara, Geoffrey. “Saga of a High Country Newsman.” Sierra Magazine, (March/ April 1987): 72-77.

Illustrations

• The Mike McClure photos of Tom Bell and the High Country News staff, the image of the HCN front page from July 1973 and Kathy Bogan’s later illustration of Tom Bell are all from HCN files. Used with permission and thanks.
• The map accompanying Alvin Josephy’s article, “Agony of the Norhtern Plains,” cited above in more detail, ran in Audubon Magazine in July 1973. Used with thanks to the magazine and with special thanks to Bart Rea, who had a copy, and to Vince Crolla of the Casper College Western History Center, who prepared the scan.

In the summer of 1862, a large train of 80 wagons was making its way west through mountains in what’s now western Wyoming when serious troubles led to the deaths of two women and their infants within a matter of days.

The grave of one of the mothers, 32-year-old Elizabeth Paul, remains today on the Lander Trail on La Barge Creek in the mountain country of the Salt River Range, Bridger-Teton National Forest.

Elizabeth Mortimore Paul was born in Indiana in 1829, the oldest daughter and second child of Thomas Plymworth Mortimore and Martha (Patsy) Alice Mortimore (née Deshil). Early in the 1830s the Mortimore family moved from Indiana to Wapello County, Iowa, where they eventually became acquainted with the family of Joseph and Mary Paul, Virginians who had moved to Indiana about 1830 and then to Iowa in 1845. Their son Thomas was had been born in Monroe County, Va., now West Virginia, in 1828.

Thomas Paul and Elizabeth Mortimore were married in 1849. Thomas was, like his father Joseph, a farmer and Methodist minister. By 1862, Elizabeth and Thomas were parents of six children: Louisa, age 12; Mary, 10; Isaac, 9; Harriet, 8; Patsy Alice, 5, and Lucinda, age 2. Another son, named Joseph Plymworth Paul for his two grandfathers, was born in 1859 but lived for less than a year.

In 1862, the families of Joseph and Thomas Paul and other relatives joined a company determined to move to the vicinity of Walla Walla in Washington Territory. They left home on April 24. Joseph Paul was selected captain of the outfit, of which a roster survives.

When all the contingents had assembled, the company consisted of 88 men, 69 women, and 86 children under the age of 18. They had 52 ox-drawn wagons, 315 head of cattle, 38 saddle horses, 14 mules, and 38 milk cows, for a total of 404 head of stock. As they headed west, others joined them, and by July 10 it was a train of 80 wagons, 334 people, and 532 head of stock.

There were worries about possible Indian attacks, so companies had come together for mutual protection. By then the overall captain of the wagon train was John K. Kennedy, also from Mahaska County, Iowa. Because of its size or perhaps because of the incompetence and its captain, the company had many problems, especially with stampeding cattle.

When the Pauls left home Elizabeth Paul was pregnant with her eighth child. Apparently, it was a troubled pregnancy. Diarists with the company say they were often delayed because of sickness in the train. There were other pregnant women in the company, but Elizabeth Paul is specifically mentioned on July 5: “We laid in camp until one o’clock on account of Thomas Paul’s wife being sick. She was better at noon so we hitched up.”

On July 16: “The party which was sick is able to travel this morning so we moved on once more.” Again on July 24, “Stayed in camp on account of sickness in the company.” The entries of the last two days may well refer to Elizabeth Paul. By this time many teams in the company, tired of the trouble and delays, had moved on.

Death in childbirth

On the night of July 25, the company’s cattle stampeded twice, and then again on the night of July 26. The next morning, July 27, 1862, Elizabeth Paul died giving birth to her eighth child, a girl.

Diarist Hamilton Scott wrote: “We remained in camp all day. Thomas Paul’s wife died about nine o’clock this morning. She died in childbirth. She has left an infant. She has been very poorly for some time. We buried her this evening under a large pine tree and put a post and railing fence around her grave.” Thomas Paul named the baby Elizabeth.

The Pauls’ oldest child, Louisa, believed six decades later that the last of these stampedes had something to do with her mother’s death: “Father being on guard at the time caused Mother a great deal of worry, and the excitement causing premature confinement she died the next day. … The baby lived but a week, and was buried a week later after Mother’s death. The ladies made up some verses and put them on a board which they placed at the head of Mother’s grave. The men made paling and put it all around her grave.”

Diarist Jane Gould’s company caught up to the Kennedy train on July 28, when she wrote: “Came past a camp of thirty-six wagons who have been camped for some time here in the mountains, they have had their cattle stampeded four or five times, there was a woman died in their train yesterday, she left six children and one of them only two days old, poor little thing it had better died with its mother, they made a good picket fence around the grave.”

Henry Judson, another emigrant from Iowa, came by on July 29: “We pass this afternoon a beautiful grave made in an opening in the forest & directly beneath a fine fir tree—Twas made on the 27^th inst (only 2 days ago) & was enclosed in a picket yard of hewn timber—a board set into a notch sawed into the tree informed us that the grave contained the remains of Mrs. Elizabeth Paul—aged 32 years—beneath some kind friend had pinned a paper on which were written 3 beautiful & appropriate verses & which I regret very much I had not time to copy.”

James McClung was a member of the Paul company and in his diary entry of July 27, he included the three stanzas of the verse left at the grave: “Elizabeth Wife of Thomas Paul died and was buried this afternoon near the foot of the mountain aged 32 years 7 months and 27 days this is a day of sorrow indeed.”

The first stanza was a well-known early 19th century epitaph:

Friends and physytions could not save

This mortal lovely body from the grave

Nor can the grave confine it here

When God commands it to appear

For tho it was her lot to die

Hear among the mountains high

Yet when gabriels trump shall sound

Among the blessed she will be found

And while she rests beneath this tree

May holy angels watch and see

That naught disturbs her peaceful day

Until the dawning of the day

On July 29, after gathering up all but four of their lost cattle, the company moved on. In the next few days they traveled through Star Valley, entered the mountains again after crossing what’s now the Wyoming-Idaho state line and camped the evening of Aug. 1 near Lane’s Creek.

“[G]ot through the mountains today,” a diarist wrote that evening. Their troubles were far from over, however.

A stampede and more deaths

The next day, Aug. 2, they experienced another devastating stampede. Twenty-five teams ran away, and several people were badly injured. Mrs. Nancy Townsend attempted to jump from her run-away wagon, but hampered by her advanced pregnancy, she wasn’t able to clear the wagon. She was run over by its heavy wheels and badly crushed. The next day she suffered a miscarriage, and she and the baby died soon after. Nancy Townsend, wife of Samuel Townsend, was 21.

On the night of Aug. 2, the week-old infant, Elizabeth Paul, died. She was buried at noon the next day, about the time Nancy Townsend passed away. Jane Gould wrote: “We passed by the train I have just spoken of, they had just buried the babe of the woman who died a few days ago, and were just digging grave for another woman that was run over by the cattle and wagons when they stampeded yesterday. She lived twenty-four hours. She gave birth to a child a short time before she died; the child was buried with her. She leaves a little two-year old girl and a husband, they say he is nearly crazy with sorrow."

The graves of Nancy Townsend and child, and that of Elizabeth Paul’s infant, are a mile or two east of Gray’s Lake on the Lander Trail, but the exact sites are now lost. The grave of mother Elizabeth Paul, however, still survives.

Julius Merrill was there on Aug. 15, 1864, and wrote: “Passed a grave enclosed by a picket fence, painted white. A lovelier spot I never saw. There was an opening of perhaps, half an acre, with one large shady pine near the center. Under this lone tree was the grave. The beauty of the place and the care bestowed upon the remains of the woman cause us all to look at it.” The gravesite has much the same appearance today. The original pine tree still stands over the grave.

Thomas Paul went on to Washington Territory and settled on Dry Creek, six miles north of Walla Walla, and married again to Susan Zaring (née Ellis) in 1863. They had four more children. Thomas Paul died in 1904 and is buried in Mountain View Cemetery in Walla Walla.

Resources

Sources

• “Another Pioneer Dead.” The Evening Statesman, Walla Walla, WA. vol. XXXI, no. 168. September 29, 1904, p. 1, col. 3.
• Estes, Louisa J. “Reminiscences Of Mrs. Louisa J. Estes At Age 75 Of Her Trip Across The Plains Over The Old Oregon Trail By Ox Team In 1862.” typescript by Pauline E. Thompson. Cage 676, Box 3. Pauline E. Thompson Collection. Chapter 5, “My Genealogy.” Six pages. 1994. Washington State University Library, Pullman, WA.
• Find a Grave. “Nancy J. Townsend.” findagrave.com, accessed April 25, 2017 at https://findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GSln=Townsend&GSiman=1&GScnty=210&GRid=133924027&
• Find a Grave. “Thomas Plemworth Mortimore.” Findagrave.com, accessed April 25, 2017 at https://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=42554781
• Gould, Jane Augusta Holbrook. The Oregon & California Trail Diary of Jane Gould in 1862. Ed. by Bert Webber. Medford, OR: Webb Research Group, 1997.
• Iowa, Mahaska County. Cedar Township. 1860. U. S. Census.
• Judson, Henry M. Diary, 1862. MS 953, Nebraska State Historical Society. Typescript, 137 pages.
• McCarley, Jayne. Roots Web. “Reconstruction of Roster of 1862 Kennedy Company, John Knox Kennedy, Capt.” Pat Packard and Marjorie Ellis Miles. Additions and corrections by Ella Jane Allison McCarley. Originally published April 1993. vol. 36, no. 2. Yakima Valley Genealogical Society. Accessed April 25, 2017 via www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~orgenweb/ReconstructionofRosterof1862-2.doc.
• McClung, James Scott. Diary and Letters, 1862. Mss 1508, Oregon Historical Society. Transcribed by Richard L. Rieck.
• Merrill, Julius. Bound for Idaho: The 1864 Trail Journal of Julius Merrill. Edited by Irving R. Merrill. Moscow, Idaho, University of Idaho Press, 1988.
• Scott, Hamilton. A Trip across the Plains in 1862. Mss 596, Oregon Historical Society. Typescript, 10 pages.
• Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office. “Elizabeth Paul Grave.” Emigrant Trails Across Wyoming. Accessed April 25, 2017 at http://wyoshpo.state.wy.us/trailsdemo/elizabethpaul.htm.

Illustrations

• Both photos are by the author. Used with permission and thanks.

No logging, no grazing—even no trespassing? The Yellowstone Timber Land Reserve, the first land to be set aside in what evolved into today’s National Forest system, had a distinctly different character from its successors. Here’s why.​

In 1883, when Arnold Hague arrived in Yellowstone, the 11-year-old national park was at a crossroads. The Northern Pacific Railroad had just completed its tracks across southern Montana, and railroad officials intended to market Yellowstone as a tourist pleasure resort. The conflict inherent in the national park idea—between promoting the enjoyment of natural wonders today and preserving them for tomorrow—was about to get its first big test.

Arnold Hague in Yellowstone

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) appointed Hague to head its efforts to study geysers, especially their relation to ancient volcanoes. Hague knew the subject well, having studied volcanoes in the Pacific states and Guatemala. He’d graduated from Yale, studied in Germany and worked in China. The son of a Baptist clergyman from an old New England family, Hague had become a scientist at an exciting time: Charles Darwin’s theories were expanding the frontiers of science just as European cultures were expanding to little-known lands.

Hague returned to the Yellowstone area for seven straight summers, with a growing field of study. He was well-traveled, with far-ranging interests. For example, he was the first to chronicle flecks of gold in the Stinkingwater Mining Region, at the confluence of Needle Creek and the South Fork of the Shoshone River southwest of present Cody, Wyo.

William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody then patented these claims, and with Eastern investors sought for 20 years to develop mines in the district. The USGS in 1899 published Hague’s study—it covered more than 3,000 square miles—as a book and atlas titled “Geology of the Yellowstone National Park,” still praised by geologists almost a century later as one of the most in-depth Yellowstone studies ever performed.

But Hague’s interests extended beyond geology. In particular, he was concerned about protecting and preserving Yellowstone at a time when the park was threatened by expanding concessionaires, big-game hunters and railroads.

When these special interests sought inappropriate uses—hotels too close to natural features, lax enforcement of hunting regulations, or a railroad through the Lamar Valley—Hague fought against them. To influence federal policies, he was often joined by William Hallett Phillips, a Washington, D.C., lawyer appointed as a “special agent” for Yellowstone by the Interior Department.

Hague loved Yellowstone’s scenery: mountains, sunsets and wild animals. Having frequently followed elk trails, he believed that elk “have an appreciation of the picturesque and the grand.” But he rarely couched conservation arguments in sentimental terms. He frequently spoke of how both the Missouri and the Columbia river systems had their sources in Yellowstone National Park.

Pushing for an expanded Yellowstone

In an 1883 letter to U.S. Sen. George Graham Vest of Missouri, Hague noted that New York State’s quest to provide uniform water flow in the Hudson River necessitated complicated and expensive efforts to buy or control the Adirondack forests where the streams began. He suggested expanding Yellowstone’s borders to secure similar protections before private settlers arrived.

The idea of expanded park borders was not new. In 1882 Gen. Phillip Sheridan had proposed expanding the park 40 miles east and 10 miles south. George Bird Grinnell, the famed writer and conservation activist, highlighted the plan in his Forest and Stream magazine. Early in 1883, Sen. Vest sponsored an extension bill, which failed to pass. (A revised, successful bill improved park protections without changing its boundaries.) Hague’s scientific credentials and vast onsite knowledge could aid the cause.

Hague proposed expanding southward by eight rather than 10 miles (to the 44^th parallel, near the north end of today’s Jackson Lake, thus excluding the Tetons) to avoid conflicts with potential mines or summer grazing lands. For similar reasons, his proposal for expansion went only 30 miles east. Briefly, he even flirted with rationalizing the park’s northern and western boundaries to match those of the Wyoming Territory.

Vest included Hague’s recommendations in four bills through the 1880s. They all failed, largely due to opposition from railroads wanting to build across the park’s northeast corner from Gardiner to Cooke City. But during the debates, Hague, Phillips of the Interior Department, Grinnell the conservationist writer and others also highlighted the wildlife benefits of an expanded preserve. These benefits took on increasing importance as concern rose through the 1880s about disappearing wildlife populations elsewhere in the West.

Advocates of expansion also started collecting their arguments about watersheds and habitat under the category of protecting forests. Forests, which provided the wildlife habitat and watershed protection, were at risk of being cleared for agriculture or cut down to provide timber for mines or charcoal for kilns. Without better protections for Yellowstone and its environs, Grinnell wrote, “Anyone was at liberty to cut down the forest, kill the game or carry away natural curiosities.”

Because of their work on behalf of Yellowstone, Hague and Phillips became the only two non-hunters ever elected full members of the influential Boone and Crockett Club. The elite sportsmen’s club, brainchild of Grinnell and Theodore Roosevelt, sought to influence federal policy on behalf of wildlife the same way the Audubon Society did for birds. The club represented the seed of Roosevelt’s conservation philosophy, which was to sprout so effectively during his presidency. In the club’s early days, one of the conservation leaders its members most admired was Arnold Hague.

Creation of the Yellowstone Timber Land Reserve

Other leaders at the time highlighted the nationwide benefits of forests, and the risks of wantonly cutting them down. Given how the clearcut forests of northern Wisconsin and Michigan had soon fallen prey to erosion and fire, should some forested lands in the West be held as public reservations?

Although in general the U.S. government wanted to give away the public domain to homesteaders, many congressmen at the time feared large corporations would assemble timber monopolies from formerly public lands. In this line of thinking, forest reserves could represent a Jeffersonian ideal. They could aid homesteaders by making small-scale timber cutting available to middle-class settlers, while ensuring watershed health.

Although bills with this goal failed in the 1880s, one did succeed in 1891. The key passage, known as Section 24, was a last-minute rider attached to a bill making broad reforms in public-land law.

Section 24 permitted the president to set aside timbered portions of the public domain as public reservations. However, it didn’t indicate what the purpose of these reservations should be, nor how they should be used, administered or funded.

President Benjamin Harrison signed the bill on March 3, 1891. Late the following week, Hague and Phillips discovered Section 24. Hague realized that it could accomplish his aims of expanding Yellowstone’s boundaries. On March 16, he took the idea to Secretary of the Interior John W. Noble. Noble asked Hague and Phillips to draft a proclamation to create the first Forest Reserve with the exact same boundaries Hague had proposed to Sen. Vest eight years earlier. President Harrison signed the proclamation on March 30, 1891, creating the 1.2-million-acre Yellowstone Timber Land Reserve.

Why isn’t Hague better known as its creator? Because he understood politics and was more interested in results than fame. On April 4, he wrote to Grinnell with information to be used in a Forest and Stream editorial lauding what would become known as the Forest Reserve Act of 1891. Hague wrote, “[Y]ou had better give the Secretary of the Interior a little taffy for his seeing the necessity for this thing.” Grinnell obliged; although his article mentioned Hague, it concluded that “too much credit cannot be given” to Noble.

This was the world’s first forest reserve to be set aside by a democratic government. But it wasn’t really a victory for “forestry” as we know it today. Instead, Hague and his allies often described the reserve as, effectively, an adjunct to the world’s first national park.

As Grinnell wrote, since people would be prohibited from living there, it would be easy later to transfer these lands to the park. In an 1898 essay (reprinted in the 1903 book Our National Parks), famed naturalist John Muir wrote that Yellowstone “was to all intents and purposes enlarged” by the reserve. His interpretation, however, proved overly optimistic.

Failures of the early forest reserves

In the same way that the U.S. Constitution arose out of years of frustration with the Articles of Confederation—an early attempt to translate idealistic principles to governance, with numerous practical failures—so too did the U.S. Forest Service arise out of the Forest Reserves. The period 1891–1905 saw a long struggle to effectively articulate a vision and management philosophy for administering federal forest lands.

After creating the Yellowstone Timber Land Reserve, President Harrison established additional forest reserves in Colorado, New Mexico and Oregon. He eventually preserved 13 million acres, and his successor, Grover Cleveland, added 25 million more.

But though Congress, perhaps unintentionally, had ceded to the president the authority to create reserves, it refused to decide how to manage them. And without guidance from Congress, no activity was allowed at all in the reserves. No homesteading, no logging, no mining, no grazing, no hunting—no trespassing! “Trespassing on the public lands within these forest reserves will not be tolerated under any pretext,” read one government communication. These lands were reserved from use, and so nobody was allowed onto them.

Unsurprisingly, the Forest Reserve Act didn’t provide any budget to manage the reserves, or suggest any penalties for trespass or depredations, so in most reserves the regulations were toothless. But the Yellowstone reserve was placed under the authority of the Army, which was then managing the adjacent national park, and Army officials could extend ranger patrols to the east and south.

The following year the Army built a ranger cabin at Polecat Creek, near today’s Flagg Ranch south of the park’s boundary. But by 1894 the superintendent was complaining that the added regions were too remote, too large, too rugged, and too frequented by hunting parties to be effectively policed with his limited manpower. Likewise, an official report in 1897 noted that at least 100 prospectors and 25 ranchers were spending the summer in the forest reserve, all of them hunting, in areas too remote to patrol without increased budgets.

In other regions, clashes over forest reserve policies were more severe. In Colorado, homesteaders and stockgrowers expressed outrage at the loss of their “rights.” They also feared that the far-off Interior Department might sell off timber to an Eastern monopolist, a result that would have been the opposite of the law’s intention.

In Oregon, opposition to the vast Cascade Range Forest Reserve arose primarily from sheep ranchers and miners denied access to grazing or mining on public lands. Ironically, the fate of timber in the reserves was a lesser issue—perhaps because the remote, high-elevation stands were not seen as commercially viable, or perhaps because large timber companies hoped that federal regulation would stabilize the market and reduce competition.

In a further irony, the authors of Section 24 had likely intended to permit grazing and small-scale logging on the reserves. But the section’s confusing language and lack of follow-up led to public opposition to the law.

The National Forest Commission

To remedy the stalemate, federal leaders asked the National Academy of Sciences to appoint a blue-ribbon commission to help resolve the fate of the reserves. Critics of the commission—such as Bernhard Fernow, who ran the advisory-only Division of Forestry in the federal Department of Agriculture—said that its summer-long tour of Western forests would be little more than a junket. But its fans hoped that it could do what Congress had yet failed to: figure out a policy for forest conservation, and spur legislation accomplishing that policy.

The commission’s chair was botanist Charles Sprague Sargent, head of Harvard University’s Arnold Arboretum and publisher of Garden and Forest magazine. Its secretary was a young forestry graduate—at 31, half the average age of the other commissioners—named Gifford Pinchot. Also on board: Gen. Henry L. Abbot of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, a veteran of Western railroad surveys; Alexander Agassiz, curator at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology; Yale professor William H. Brewer, who was also California’s state botanist; John Muir, in an unofficial advisory capacity since he wasn’t the sort of person to join committees; and Arnold Hague.

Hague’s reputation and experience made him one of the nation’s leading experts on forest reserves. In fact, Hague and Pinchot were assigned to make a preliminary report and recommendation before the commission began its tour.

In 1896, the commissioners toured the Black Hills, Yellowstone, northwestern Montana, Oregon’s Cascades, California’s Sierra, the Grand Canyon, New Mexico and Colorado. They traveled mostly by train, and not always together: Pinchot took a side-trip to examine Montana’s Bitterroot Range, and Muir took a long break to visit Alaska. They returned to the East with numerous recommendations for new forest reserves.

But they still had little agreement on how to manage the reserves. For example, Pinchot believed in the emerging discipline of forestry, maximizing the efficiency of timber production as if trees were agricultural crops capable of a sustained yield. In contrast to that resource-based approach, Sargent and Muir tended to think of trees and forests in more holistic, perhaps more sentimental, terms. Sargent and Abbot favored military management; Pinchot, Brewer and Hague argued for civilian control.

Muir was fanatically opposed to sheep grazing (he memorably referred to sheep as “hoofed locusts”). Sargent expected political opposition to whatever they recommended; Pinchot fulminated at Sargent’s lack of political will.

The result: The commission recommended 13 new reserves totaling 21 million acres. They hurried through the recommendation process so that President Cleveland could create the reserves in the month before he left office. Cleveland issued the proclamation creating the new reserves on Washington’s Birthday, February 22, 1897.

Among the newly set-aside lands was the 892,440-acre Teton Forest Reserve south of Yellowstone. Hague’s original Yellowstone Timber Land Reserve remained intact, with its lands 30 miles east and eight miles south of the park boundary. But the Teton Reserve added another 15–20 miles southward, including the Teton Range and the northern half of Jackson Hole.

Problems and promise

That recommendation demonstrated both the problems and the promise of the Forest Reserve system. The problems: Hague had withheld the Teton Reserve lands from the original Yellowstone Timber Land Reserve because he knew that demands for grazing and mineral development made them poor candidates to become part of Yellowstone National Park. Furthermore, given the combination of the open lands of Jackson Hole, the effects of past forest fires and the lands above timberline, perhaps only 40 percent of the Teton Forest Reserve was actually forested.

Worst of all, as of the proclamation, the commission still had not decided the purpose of forest reserves. So these lands, like the 12 other new reserves, became off limits to use. As a result, Cleveland’s proclamation created a serious backlash in Western states.

Congressmen quickly drafted language restoring all forest reserves to the public domain—and attached it as a rider to the basic bill funding the entire government. Cleveland, on his last day in office, used a pocket veto to kill the bill, threatening a government shutdown. The new president, William McKinley, had to call an extra session of Congress. Now the entire forest movement was in jeopardy.

Amid intense lobbying on all sides, Congress found a compromise. First, it suspended the 13 new reserves for nine months, allowing thousands of acres to be transferred to private ownership. Second, it established purposes for the reserves, and gave the Interior Department authority to regulate their use, in a law now often known as the Forest Management Act (or Organic Act) of 1897.

As interpreted by the increasingly powerful Gifford Pinchot, permissible uses included timber harvests, dams, and grazing by cattle and (much to Muir’s dissatisfaction) sheep. With uses permitted, Western commercial interests became increasingly willing to accept new reserve acreages.

In 1902, the Yellowstone and Teton Reserves were greatly expanded. (They were also reorganized, with lands south of the park consolidated in the Teton Forest Reserve and lands east of the park renamed the Yellowstone Forest Reserve. In subsequent years, the lands would be repeatedly reorganized and renamed.)

Yet the fact that reserves were no longer extensions of national parks also demonstrated their potential. Through the first decade of the new century, after Roosevelt ascended to the presidency in 1901, Roosevelt and Pinchot continued to clarify the utilitarian philosophy of the “multiple use” system—and greatly expanded the nationwide scope of protected lands.

In 1907, to reflect the fact that these lands were no longer “reserved” from use, the reserves were renamed national forests. America found a vital role for these forests, complementary to that of national parks.

In today’s Shoshone and Bridger-Teton National Forests, which administer the lands Hague once arranged to be set aside, tourist demands are much reduced compared to the adjacent national park—and so are regulations on hunting, fishing, camping, hiking, grazing, and logging. But they remain public lands, protected from residential or commercial development, regulated to promote watershed and ecosystem health, and accessible to all.

They play essential roles in the lives of Wyomingites and in the ecosystem of greater Yellowstone. The process of fleshing out those roles began with Arnold Hague.

Resources

Primary Sources

• Grinnell, George Bird. “A New Forest Reserve,” unsigned editorial, Forest and Stream, April 9, 1891, p. 1. Vol 36, p. 225, accessed May 22, 2017 at https://books.google.com/books?id=XkghAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA225&dq=“A+New+Forest+Reserve,”+Forest+and+Stream,+April+9,+1891,&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiEl5ueqrbTAhVY-GMKHaChDVcQ6AEIIjAA#v=onepage&q=“A%20New%20Forest%20Reserve%2C”%20Forest%20and%20Stream%2C%20April%209%2C%201891%2C&f=false.
• Hague, Arnold et. al. "Geology of the Yellowstone National Park,"USGS Monograph 32, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1899–1904.
• Iddings, Joseph P. “Biographical Memoir of Arnold Hague.” National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoirs 9 (1920): 21-38, accessed May 22, 2017 at http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/h....
• Muir, John. Our National Parks. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1903, p. 39.
• “Report of the Secretary of the Interior.” Congressional Serial Set, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1897, p. 796, accessed May 22, 2017 at https://books.google.com/books?id=q1IrAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA796&lpg=PA796&dq=stinking+water+mining+region&source=bl&ots=8p7WtBG89k&sig=7T1q3cnHezeh2qJ2CTHkHsxhVL8&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwje0fbIw7PTAhWCqlQKHaraCwQQ6AEIPDAH#v=onepage&q=stinking%20water%20mining%20region&f=false.

Secondary Sources

• “Arnold Hague.” American National Biography Online. February 2000. Accessed May 22, 2017 at http://www.anb.org/articles/13/13-00675.html.
• Bartlett, Richard A. Yellowstone: A Wilderness Besieged (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985), p. 142.
• Daugherty, John et. al. A Place Called Jackson Hole: A Historic Resource Study of Grand Teton National Park. Chapter 17: Conservationists.  Grand Teton National Park and Grand Teton Natural History Association, 1999, accessed May 22, 2017 at https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/grte2/hrs17.htm.
• Ellis, Richard J. The Development of the American Presidency. New York: Routledge, 2012, p. 295, accessed May 23, 2017 at https://books.google.com/books?id=BcYBCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA295&lpg=PA295&dq=washington%27s+birthday+reserves+pocket&source=bl&ots=bTX6k7F_Lw&sig=Pcv2C3jS3o7EVIT2VuLwc4DsWxo&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiUlJ62_4TUAhXHlFQKHVIzCXcQ6AEIKDAC#v=onepage&q=washington's%20birthday%20reserves%20pocket&f=false.
• Haines, Aubrey L. The Yellowstone Story. Vol. 2. University Press of Colorado, 1977. pp. 94–99
• Rydell, Kiki Leigh, and Mary Shivers Culpin. Managing the “Matchless Wonders”: A History of Administrative Development in Yellowstone National Park, 1872–1965. Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming: National Park Service, Yellowstone Center for Resources, YCR-2006-03, 2006, pp. 36-37.
• Rakestraw, Lawrence. A History of Forest Conservation in the Pacific Northwest, 1891-1913. New York: Arno Press, 1979; Forest History Society, 2009, accessed May 22, 2017 at http://www.foresthistory.org/aspnet/publications/region/6/rakestraw_thesis/contents.htm.  See especially Section 2.
• Steen, Harold K., ed. The Origins of the National Forests: A Centennial Symposium.  The Origins of the National Forests: A Centennial Symposium, Forest History Society, 1992. Accessed May 22, 2017 at http://www.foresthistory.org/Publications/Books/Origins_National_Forests/contents.htm. This comprehensive collection, especially sections 8, 18, 20 and 21, provides the major source for this article.
• Williams, Gerald W., and Char Miller. “At the Creation: The National Forest Commission of 1896-97.” Forest History Today, Spring/Fall 2005, pp. 32-40.

Archives and collections

• The Park County Historical Archives in Cody has a Shoshone National Forest History file with several clippings and memoirs, including a discussion of Arnold Hague on the Stinkingwater.
• Hague and others were mentioned in Wyoming newspapers; you can search on their names at http://newspapers.wyo.gov/.

For further reading

• “A Plan to Save the Forests.” The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine. Volume 49, pp. 626-634. An 1895 symposium on the reserves, with contributions from Sargent, Pinchot, Muir, Roosevelt, Yellowstone superintendent George Anderson, and others.
• Allan, Esther B. “History of Teton National Forest.” Jackson, Wyo.: Bridger-Teton National Forest, 1973, pp. 107-120, accessed May 22, 2017 at https://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/fseprd534131.pdf. Many great details and reminiscences of Jackson Hole and the Teton Forest Reserve, although weak on context.
• Brandegee, Townshend Stith. The Teton and Yellowstone Park (southern Part) Forest Reserves, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1899. A descriptive account, by a botanist assessing timber.
• Cleveland, Grover. "Proclamation 394—Withdrawl [sic] of Lands for the Teton Forest Reserve, Wyoming." February 22, 1897. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, accessed May 22, 2017 at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=70861.
• Ise, John. The United States Forest Policy. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1920.
• Miller, Char. Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2001.
• Steen, Harold K.. The U.S. Forest Service: A History, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004.
• Worster, Donald. A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Illustrations

• The photo of Eagle Creek Meadows in the Shoshone National Forest is by Ralph Maughan, from Panoramio. Used with thanks.
• The photo of U.S. Senator George Vest is from the Biographical Directory of the US Congress. Used with thanks.
• The 1892 General Land Office map of the Yellowstone Timber Land Reserve is from Wyoming Places. Used with permission and thanks.
• The drawing of Arnold Hague, originally published in Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography, 1892, is from Wikimedia. Used with thanks.
• The photo of Charles Sprague Sargent, first published in The World’s Work, 1901, is from Wikimedia. Used with thanks.
• The 1900 GLO map of the Teton Forest Preserve is from Wyoming Places. Used with permission and thanks.
• The 1902 photo of John Muir is from the Library of Congress. Used with thanks.
• The 1907 photo of President Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot on the steamer Mississippi is from the Library of Congress. Used with thanks.

A.A. Anderson’s favorite self-description was “artist-hunter.” In his autobiography he wrote, “The two ruling passions of my life have always been hunting and painting.” But Anderson, who founded the Palette Ranch west of Meeteetse, Wyoming Territory, in the 1880s, played other roles, too: Rancher, conservationist, author, publisher, philanthropist, world traveler, patron of aviation, and celebrity networker.

And the best window into this man and the challenges of his times may come from his brief, controversial time as a forester—as superintendent of the Yellowstone Forest Reserve from 1902–05.

Artist, hunter and hobnobber

Abraham Archibald Anderson was born in Hackensack, N.J., in 1846. Little is known about his early life. He was one of 10 children; his father was a civil engineer turned pastor in the Dutch Reformed Church. Anderson received a good high school education but apparently didn’t attend college or fight in the Civil War; he claimed to have briefly studied medicine and succeeded in the dry goods and manufacturing business. According to his autobiography, when he sold a painting for $800, presumably in the mid-1870s, he decided to sail to Paris to study art.

Probably a contributing factor in that decision was his 1876 marriage to heiress Elizabeth Milbank. Her fortune gave him freedom to pursue his passions. They had a long marriage; Elizabeth pursued her own passions, mostly in New York City where she was a noted philanthropist. Their daughter, Eleanor A. Campbell, became a medical doctor and founded a successful low-income health clinic on the Lower East Side; their son died in childhood.

But the public self-image that Anderson stewarded rarely featured his family. Instead he called himself “independently wealthy,” which was probably fair by the standards of his day. He used that wealth to spend several years in Paris, studying under top names in the pre-Impressionist era. He once won a gold medal at a Paris salon. He eventually gained particular acclaim as a portraitist; his 1890 portrait of Thomas Edison hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC.

But Anderson was perhaps more notable for his social network. He bought a mansion on the Boulevard du Montparnasse and used it to establish the American Art Association of Paris, a center of expatriate life. Prominent Americans visiting Paris would stop by; sometimes Anderson painted their portraits and often he became a friend. He knew Mark Twain, for example, and claimed to have served as Edison’s Parisian interpreter.

To pursue his other passion, hunting, Anderson traveled to frontier Wyoming. During his first visit, probably in the 1880s, the Bighorn Basin was sparsely inhabited; the towns of Cody, Powell, Basin and Meeteetse did not yet exist. For years after Anderson decided to buy a ranch on the upper Greybull River, it was a two- or three-day trek from the nearest railhead at Red Lodge, Mont.

But Anderson was drawn to these easternmost foothills of the mountains southeast of Yellowstone National Park because they featured abundant wildlife. They served as winter range for elk herds that summered in the park. And with elk, of course, came Anderson’s arch-nemesis, the grizzly bear. He claimed to have killed 39 in his lifetime, including four on a single day.

At the Palette Ranch—where the colors included reds and russets of the riverside cliffs, spring greens of grasses or autumn yellows of cottonwoods, the whites of the snowcapped Absaroka peaks, and the blue of the never-ending sky—Anderson built a European-style hunting lodge. Its huge living room featured tapestries, fur rugs, hunting trophies, and a stone fireplace that could fit four-foot logs. The guest room boasted silk sheets and a crystal mantelpiece from Japan. The grounds included a swimming pool and small golf course as well as a painting studio.

He built another studio far out in the mountains. At the remote studio he would sometimes paint from nude models, and today the river there is still known as Warhouse Creek, presumably a more printable approximation of what some area cowboys believed was really going on. Today that studio, located inside Washakie Wilderness in the Shoshone National Forest, is on the National Register of Historic Places.

The upper crust

Although Anderson was a unique character, his establishment of the Palette Ranch reflected a wider trend: wealthy hunters as western pioneers. Most famously Theodore Roosevelt (another friend of Anderson’s) spent large portions of the years from 1884 to 1887 in North Dakota.

Likewise, Anderson’s upper-Greybull neighbor Otto Franc was born a German nobleman. These aristocrats wanted to hunt the West’s extraordinary wildlife. They became interested in conservation as they saw declining game populations threaten their pastime.

Anderson was “perhaps the most influential individual in bringing eastern aristocracy to this corner of Wyoming,” wrote Robert E. Bonner in William F. Cody's Wyoming Empire: The Buffalo Bill Nobody Knows. Anderson continued to introduce prominent members of his social network to northwest Wyoming well into the 20th century.

For example, in 1908 he invited his friend William Robertson Coe to the Palette Ranch for a hunt. Delighted with the trip (they killed four grizzlies and two elk) Coe purchased area property from William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody the following year. Coe, whom the New York Times described as a “sportsman and racehorse owner” in a notice of his marriage, later became a major Wyoming philanthropist; the William Robertson Coe Library at the University of Wyoming bears his name and the family remains prominent in Wyoming politics and philanthropy.

In 1913 Anderson hosted Prince Albert of Monaco; after their successful hunt at the Palette Ranch, Buffalo Bill joined them for a second expedition near Pahaska Tepee just east of Yellowstone Park, which was so well publicized that it may be the most famous hunt in Wyoming history.

Especially in early years, eastern aristocrats sought to have an impact on conservation in the West. Roosevelt, for example, co-founded the Boone and Crockett club in New York in 1887. He hoped it would do for animals what the Audubon Society did for birds: advocate for laws that would benefit their habitat.

Similarly, Anderson was a charter member of the Camp Fire Club, formed in 1897 to “further the interests of hunting and conservation.” Designed to be less hoity-toity than Boone and Crockett, less focused on social standing, the Camp Fire Club has ended up with a lower historical profile. But its members included noted conservationists such as Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot, who later founded the U.S. Forest Service, and William Hornaday, founder of the Bronx Zoo. The club also played a role in protecting American bison, Alaskan fur seals and Glacier National Park. A.A. Anderson served as the organization’s president for its first decade.

Wahb, the bear Anderson couldn’t kill

In Paris, Anderson had met another American artist-hunter married to an heiress. Ernest Thompson Seton would soon achieve fame as an author-illustrator of children’s books about nature, and as a co-founder of the Boy Scouts. In Paris, Seton was frustrated that the establishment came to prefer Impressionism to his realistic, sometimes lurid paintings of bears and wolves. Anderson was equally dismissive of Impressionism, and by 1895 both men had left Paris for the New York area.

Seton too was active in the Camp Fire Club (he would eventually succeed Anderson as president), and in 1897 the club’s Recreation magazine asked him to do a series of articles on wildlife in Yellowstone. Seton brought his wife Grace to Yellowstone; Anderson, wife Lizzie, and perhaps daughter Eleanor met them near today’s Roosevelt Lodge in the northeastern quarter of the park for several days of fishing and camping.

The Setons had so much fun that they returned to Wyoming the following autumn. Anderson met them in Jackson Hole with two men and a 16-horse pack train. They camped their way back to the Palette, tracking elk, hunting antelope, and enduring a three-day snowstorm. Along the way, and during their subsequent sojourn at the ranch, Anderson continually told tales of a glorious, gigantic bear that he called Wahb (supposedly Shoshone for “white bear”).

Wahb had menaced area cattle herds for years, consistently eluding the guns and traps of Anderson and his neighbors. And at least in Anderson’s stories, Wahb was everywhere: Wahb must have made the 14-inch track that Grace saw on the Upper Wiggins Fork north of Dubois, “big enough for a baby’s bath tub,” she wrote. Wahb could well have been the gigantic bear Ernest had seen the previous summer while hiding in a garbage pit behind Yellowstone’s Fountain Hotel. Grace wrote, “I had heard so many tales of this monster that when I gazed upon his track I felt as though I were looking at the autograph of a hero.”

Over the next year Seton consolidated and embellished those stories into perhaps his best-known book, Biography of a Grizzly. It was a story told from Wahb’s perspective—and, despite the factual-sounding title, clearly invented.

Seton dedicated the book to Anderson. But there’s no record of how Anderson reacted to its sentimentalized, anthropomorphized portrait of a bear that lived with dignity and died of natural causes. To Anderson, bears were enemies, and needed to be personally vanquished. In 1915, a full 17 years after Seton’s visit, Anderson finally killed a bear he believed to be Wahb—and announced his triumph in a front-page article in a Cody newspaper.

The Yellowstone Forest Reserve

A major early victory of the aristocratic sportsmen was the 1891 creation of the world’s first national forest, the Yellowstone Timber Land Reserve. The Yellowstone reserve and a host of other forest reserves established the following decade generally lacked organization and purpose, however. They were governed out of the often-corrupt General Land Office of the Department of Interior, and had minimal on-site staff. The Yellowstone reserve, for example, did not get a superintendent until 1898—and that man, a political appointee named A.D. Chamberlain, rarely left Cody or even his hometown of Evanston to spend time on the reserve itself.

As a preservationist, Anderson was concerned. To him, the purpose of a reserve was to preserve wildlife habitat. Yet without enforcement of its regulations, people treated it like other not-yet-homesteaded government land: they cut trees, grazed cattle and sheep, and even built cabins and tended crops. Anderson had particular disdain for sheepmen. Their herds overgrazed the range, and, he believed, they frequently set forest fires.

In 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt reorganized and expanded the northwest Wyoming forest reserves. Roosevelt then appointed Anderson general superintendent of four divisions (Absaroka, Shoshone, Wind River and Teton) on the newly named Yellowstone Forest Reserve. According to Anderson, it was all Anderson’s idea, and he even helped Roosevelt draw lines on the map for the reserve’s boundaries.

This was three years before the establishment of the U.S. Forest Service. Rangers, hired for their outdoor skills, usually lacked any background in forestry or range management, and received little training. They were generally expected to police grazing and timber cutting, improve trails, eject squatters, settle disputes, and put out fires. They also did a great deal of paperwork on timber and grazing permits. In the winter, when Anderson was in New York, applications had to be routed through him there.

Furthermore, although Anderson was working for his friend (and fellow Camp Fire Club member) Gifford Pinchot, organizational structures and missions were still poorly defined. Thus Anderson got to put his own imprint on operations. For example, he had his rangers appointed assistant Wyoming state game wardens, without pay, to give them more authority in dealing with poachers. He implemented a military structure with rangers ranking from privates to lieutenants. Anderson designed a military-style uniform and insisted that rangers wear it. In print he was always known as “A.A. Anderson”; to friends he was apparently “Abram” or “Triple-A”; but from this point forward he enjoyed being called “Colonel.”

Anderson was superintendent during construction of what is known today as the nation’s oldest ranger station, in Wapiti, Wyo, about 20 miles west of Cody. However, that distinction is not nearly as impressive as it sounds: It was the first station to be constructed with government funds. Rangers across the country used many, often improvised, structures as home base. For example, in Sunlight Basin, northwest of Cody in 1903, ranger Jesse W. Nelson took over an old illegal homesteader’s cabin. Other rangers built structures without government funds. (They had to supply their own horses, bedrolls and other equipment, so building their own cabins would have seemed consistent with the terms of the job.)

Anderson’s other accomplishments included a boundary survey of the reserve, anti-rustling enforcement, and banning hunting on the reserves by Native Americans. (Anderson was sympathetic to natives. He later wrote, “Our treatment of the Indians is a blot on American history.” But on the reserves his primary concern was the health of wildlife populations, and American Indians, from his point of view, killed too many antelope.) He also claimed to have reduced demand for illegally killed elk by helping to convince the Elks Clubs, the nationwide Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, to abolish elk eyeteeth as an official emblem.

Unpopular permits

In the big picture, however, he saw his accomplishments primarily in terms of grazing. Early rangers confirmed Anderson’s fears of overgrazing. For example, C.N. Woods, working south of the Greybull River, reported that his unit “was very heavily stocked with sheep … Sometimes we rode for miles without finding enough grass on which to [graze horses overnight at a] camp.” On one occasion, Anderson claimed, he learned that 60,000 sheep from Utah were trespassing on the reserve, guarded by 40 armed sheepherders. He assembled 65 rangers and drove them off.

Although Anderson believed that regulating out-of-state sheep would improve conditions for locals, many locals disagreed. After all, Anderson was implementing a permit system that also restricted locals’ grazing on public lands. They opposed any reductions in sheep, any regulation of the open range. Once upon a time, grazing on these lands had been free; then it required a free permit; in this era the government began charging fees for the permits. Anderson became the local face of this unpopular policy.

In his autobiography, Anderson wrote, “When the reserve was first organized every paper in Wyoming except one—and that one I owned—attacked me most severely.” As evidence of the irrationality of those attacks, he cited a quote from Meeteetse’s Big Horn County News (Meeteetse was part of Big Horn County until 1909): “Mr. Anderson can, by a single stroke of his diamond-bedecked hand, put out of existence that noble animal that clothes his unclean body.” Anderson further claimed that sheepmen threatened his life, and that they may have set a 1902 fire that nearly burned down his ranch.

Bigger forces at play

In northwest Wyoming, it was easy to see these dramatic events as related to the outsized personalities of Anderson and his antagonists. But in truth all of these people were caught amid larger forces. For example, Anderson was correct that wildlife populations were declining—but merely putting an end to overgrazing on the reserves wasn’t going to be enough to reverse that trend. The bigger problem was the development of Wyoming’s frontier, including the loss of winter range and increased hunting pressures, which had combined to create an unsustainable situation for wildlife.

Sheepmen, meanwhile, were correct that grazing fees and restrictions threatened their livelihoods. But the bigger problem was scarcity: There wasn’t enough free range to support them all indefinitely. Their communities were unsustainable.

Even the forest reserves were unsustainable. Gifford Pinchot believed that all the fees and paperwork would create a system by which forest stewardship could pay for itself. Progressives such as Pinchot and Roosevelt saw a great deal of waste in private enterprise, including timber management. They believed this waste could be eliminated by efficiencies such as putting limits on grazing and timber cutting, organizing in Anderson’s military style and preventing forest fires. It took several years for them to accept the failure of that vision; in some ways Pinchot never quite did.

Finally, amid all of these limits and unsustainabilities, Anderson’s forestry career played out in the middle of violent class struggles across the West. In Idaho, the 1899 Coeur d’Alene riots led to the 1905 assassination of former governor Frank Steunenberg. In Colorado, a series of miners’ strikes in 1903–04 were particularly violent. In Wyoming in 1902, Tom Horn was convicted of murder in association with assassinations of small ranchers. In the Bighorn Basin particularly, it was a time of heated violence between cattle and sheep interests, culminating in the Spring Creek raid of 1909.

If there were limits to wildlife habitat, grazing lands or timber—and if complicated corporate or government entities were required to oversee the exploitation of Wyoming’s resources—then who would control and who would benefit from this newly closed frontier? Capital or labor? Rancher or homesteader? Cattle or sheep? Private citizen or government authority? Wyoming resident or eastern aristocrat?

Anderson in trouble

In the years 1903–05, popular opinion turned increasingly against Anderson’s role in the forest reserve. Much of it was opposition to the reserves themselves: their inherent curtailment of homesteading and grazing. Part of it was due to what opponents saw as Anderson’s egotistical, imperious style. But Anderson the “hunter-artist” was also in a unique position regarding the preservation/conservation divide.

Today we often associate that divide with naturalist John Muir, favoring preservation of scenery in national parks, versus Gifford Pinchot, favoring sustained yield of timber and other resources in national forests (the successor to forest reserves). But those two men did not invent the divide; indeed, it may be better represented by the rift between by A.A. Anderson and the residents of northwest Wyoming. Anderson wanted to preserve habitat and scenery. The residents wanted to graze their livestock, cut timber and establish and maintain their homesteads.

Atwood C. Thomas, the business manager of the Big Horn County News in Meeteetse, painted Anderson as a rich outsider who wanted to lock up public lands for the private benefit of his wealthy friends. In an Oct. 21, 1905, story titled “Anderson Protects Private Game Preserve,” for example, the News quoted rangers who said that Anderson had ordered them to frighten elk away from local hunters near the Palette Ranch. And when Anderson’s eastern friends come to visit, the rangers said, they were instructed to shoo the elk toward the hunters.

That same month the News highlighted a line from a nearby newspaper, the Basin Rustler: “It seems the animus behind the forest reserve policy is the creation of immense game preserves where the idle rich may come to shoot elk and deer.” And from the Cody Enterprise: “If America is for Americans, why preserve vast areas of public domain for wild beasts, and a few sportsmen, and deprive a lot of good Christian Americans of the opportunity of making a home for themselves and families.”

The News promoted a petition calling for Anderson’s removal. It got at least 15 other newspapers to editorialize in favor of the petition. In lonely support of Anderson was the Meeteetse Standard, the newspaper he owned.

Anderson ousted

In some ways you could see this as an old-fashioned newspaper war, with opposing publications taking opposing sides on a hot local issue. Such conflicts were common enough; 16 years later Caroline Lockhart and Len Leander Newton would engage in a delicious one in Cody.

But if this was a war, the combatants’ lineups didn’t match well. Thomas of the Big Horn County News was a state senator and literally a town founder—he’d surveyed and platted the Meeteetse townsite in 1896. His editor, F. H. Barrow, went on to a lengthy career in Wyoming journalism.

By contrast, the Meeteetse Standard was never prominent enough to even be indexed by today’s Wyoming Newspaper Project; its only meaningful appearance in the Library of Congress database is as the source of a poem later reprinted in another paper: “But of country life he soon grew tired / There wasn’t much to see. / Says he: ‘I’ll find a lively town’ / He now resides in Meeteetse.” The News asserted that Anderson subsidized the Standard’s operating expenses just because he was rich and wanted a newspaper to spout his views.

In late 1905 the political pressure associated with the petition grew. The Interior Department reassigned Anderson from “special superintendent” to “inspector”—but critics charged that he continued to run the reserve as if it were his. Finally, on Dec. 15, 1905, Thomas received a telegram from J.A. Breckons, an assistant to Wyoming’s U.S. Sen. Francis Warren in Washington, D.C.: “Reliable information has been received here that an indefinite furlough has been given Forest Inspector (formerly Superintendent) A.A. Anderson, of the Yellowstone forest reserve.”

The News printed it under a headline, in lurid red, taking up almost half the front page. “Anderson OUSTED: Victory for the People.”

Two weeks later Anderson submitted a letter of resignation, citing his need to go abroad with his sick wife. He didn’t mention any controversies, and said he appreciated the support of Gifford Pinchot. But the News reminded readers of “his unfair treatment of old-time settlers, while showing favors to intimate and influential friends in the matter of letting them use the reserve for grazing lands.”

The preservation/conservation divide had claimed a victim: Anderson had failed to reconcile his love for wildlife habitat with the democratic needs of Wyoming’s citizens. He paid for that failure with his job. Of course he was rich enough not to need a job—but Wyoming and the nation might have benefitted if he’d found a way to bridge that gap.

Aftermath

Anderson lived a long and productive life before dying in 1940 at age 93. He continued to hunt in Wyoming with aristocratic friends. He authored a rather self-serving autobiography. He became fascinated by aviation, and applied his money and networking to the new field. Perhaps most memorably, he commissioned the acclaimed Bryant Park Studios building in New York City, where he and Elizabeth lived in a penthouse apartment described by The New York Times as “one of the most beautiful in the country” until the end of their lives.

But his particular role in the Yellowstone Forest Reserve has an interesting coda. The month after his resignation, Anderson sued the Big Horn County News for libel. His lawyer, Orin Woods of Basin, sought $10,000. The News was represented by W.L. “Billy” Simpson of Cody, father of future Wyoming Gov. Milward Simpson and grandfather of future U.S. Sen. Al Simpson and his brother, Pete, longtime Wyoming legislator, educator and university development officer.

The suit dragged on for almost 18 months. Finally in June 1907, came an announcement: “Sale of the Big Horn County News, a weekly newspaper published here, to A. A. Anderson, a New York artist and friend of Chief United States Forester Gifford Pinchot, involves the withdrawal of a $10,000 suit for defamation of character which Anderson some time ago brought against the News.”

Attorney Woods took over as the newspaper’s manager. Anderson’s Meeteetse Standard, Woods said, would soon move to Greybull (in fact it apparently shut down). “We have no ulterior or hidden motive,” Woods said. “We believe that it is a good business venture, and that is all.” Anderson himself did not comment. He was off on his next adventure in Alaska.

Primary sources

• Anderson, A.A. Experiences and Impressions (Freeport: Books for Libraries Press, 1933). The privately printed autobiography deserves some skepticism.
• Pinchot, Gifford. Breaking New Ground (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1947; Washington: Island Press, 1988). Does not mention Anderson but discusses views of early forestry, especially p. 121.
• Seton, Grace Gallatin, A Woman Tenderfoot (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1900).
• Thompson, Ernest Seton, “Elkland,” Recreation 7 (1897), 199. [Before 1900, he published under his birth surname Thompson, using Seton as a middle name. Later he reversed the names, and that’s how he’s generally known. Thus in the text he’s Ernest Thompson Seton, but in this reference he’s Ernest Seton Thompson.]
• Newspapers in Meeteetse and Cody regularly wrote about Anderson; researchers can search on his name at http://newspapers.wyo.gov/. See especially:
  • “Anderson Ousted,” Big Horn County News, December 10, 1905, p. 1.
  • “’Wab,’ Wisest of Bears, Falls Victim to Anderson’s Rifle After Many Years of Defiance,” Park County Enterprise, September 22, 1915, p. 1. [Seton’s book established the spelling of “Wahb.” But Anderson or the Enterprise here used an alternate.]
• USDA Forest Service and Cody Lions Club, “Shoshone National Forest: Golden Anniversary,” August 1941. This booklet at the Park County Historical Archives contains several reminiscences by early forest rangers.

Secondary sources

• Allan, Esther B. “History of Teton National Forest.” Jackson, Wyo.: Bridger-Teton National Forest, 1973, pp. 107-120, accessed July 3, 2017, at https://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/fseprd534131.pdf. Relies on Anderson’s autobiography as validated by unspecified Forest Service records.
• Anderson, H. Allen. The Chief: Ernest Thompson Seton and the Changing West (College Station, TX: Texas A&M Univ. Press, 1986) is a good biography with some discussion of A.A. Anderson.
• Bonner, Robert E. William F. Cody's Wyoming Empire: The Buffalo Bill Nobody Knows (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007) covers Anderson in relation to Buffalo Bill.
• Burns, Emily C., “Revising Bohemia: The American artist colony in Paris, 1890-1914,” in Susan Waller and Karen L. Carter, Foreign Artists and Communities in Modern Paris, 1870-1914: Strangers in Paradise, Ashgate Publishing, 2015.
• Clayton, John, Wonderlandscape: Yellowstone National Park and the Evolution of an American Cultural Icon (New York: Pegasus, 2017) has a chapter on Ernest Thompson Seton in Wyoming, including his interactions with Anderson.
• Daugherty, John et. al., A Place Called Jackson Hole: A Historic Resource Study of Grand Teton National Park. Chapter 17: Conservationists. Grand Teton National Park and Grand Teton Natural History Association, 1999. Brief discussions of Anderson’s forestry from a Jackson Hole perspective.
• Dearinger, David Bernard, Paintings and Sculpture in the Collection of the National Academy of Design: 1826-1925 (Hudson Hills, 2004), pp. 16-17.

Archives and collections

• Anderson’s papers are at the American Heritage Center in Laramie: https://rmoa.unm.edu/docviewer.php?docId=wyu-ah05630.xml
• Yellowstone National Park also has a small collection of Anderson papers, as described here: https://www.nps.gov/yell/blogs/lost-to-history-a-a-anderson.htm
• A.A. Anderson vertical file, McCracken Research Library, Buffalo Bill Center of the West, Cody Wyoming. The McCracken also has a copy of a limited-edition book by Robert Eldon Harvey, The Art of Abraham Archibald Anderson, 1870–1940 (Stamford, CT: The Ashforth Company, 2007).

For further reading

• Anderson is in the Wyoming Outdoor Hall of Fame: https://wgfd.wyo.gov/Get-Involved/Outdoor-Hall-of-Fame/Abraham-Archibald-Anderson
• Anderson’s painting studio in the Washakie Wilderness is on the National Register of Historic Places, and recently underwent architectural study. http://wyoarchaeo.state.wy.us/index.php/learn/wyoming-archaeology-awareness-month/project-a-day/63-september-8-anderson-lodge
• Jeremy M. Johnston provides background in the introduction to a recent reissue: Ernest Thompson Seton, Jeremy M. Johnston (ed.), and Charles R. Preston (ed.), Wahb: The Biography of a Grizzly (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015). Johnston’s article “On the Trail of a Bear Named Wahb” describes Anderson’s ranch and his relationships with Seton and the giant grizzly Wahb.
• For Anderson’s genealogy, including his deceased son, see: http://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=GET&db=geer%5Ffamily%5Ftree&id=I473203
• The legend of Warhouse Creek is discussed (although not well documented) at http://www.wyomingtalesandtrails.com/cody4.html
• For the legacy of the Camp Fire Club, see: https://www.campfirefund.org/camp-fire-club-legacy/
• A fascinating history of the Bryant Park studios: http://daytoninmanhattan.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-1901-beaux-arts-studios-80-west.html

AA’s article from Annals, 1927

• http://www.foresthistory.org/ASPNET/Publications/region/2/yellowstone/YellowstoneForestReserve.htm
• AHW item: https://www.historicwyoming.org/historicplacesblog/aa-anderson-lodge

Illustrations

• The 1913 photo of A.A. Anderson and others at Camp Monaco, the photo of the Palette Ranch lodge and the photo of Anderson’s studio on Warhouse Creek are all from the Park County Archives. Used with permission and thanks.
• The photo of A.A. Anderson on horseback is No. PN.89.106.21000.01 from the Jack Richard Collection at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West. Used with permission and thanks.
• Anderson’s portrait of Thomas Edison hangs at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. This image is from Wikipedia. Used with thanks.
• The image of the Big Horn County News front page on Dec. 10, 1905, is from the Wyoming Newspapers website. Used with thanks.

Red Fenwick couldn't believe what he saw in 1933 when he met the train that carried a motley group of Bronx youth to Canyon Junction in Yellowstone National Park.

"It was the sorriest assemblage of humans since Indian treaty days," recalled Fenwick, a foreman assigned to whip into shape the first Civilian Conservation Corps crew assigned to work in the park.

Fenwick, who later became a well-known Denver Post reporter, wrote in a 1965 column that some enrollees were already homesick, while others were clearly out of control.

"All needed a shower and shave," he remembered. "They looked as though they had walked past an army surplus supply depot after an explosion and had grabbed whatever items of clothing they fancied."

The young men took a truck to their camp where one of Yellowstone's many geysers greeted them, sending an impressive column of steam and hot water high into the sky. Fenwick remembered one young rider who excitedly told his companions, “‘Hey youse guys! Lookit dat t'ing squoiting outa d'ground. It's a geezer! Dat's wot it is--a'geezer.’"

Roosevelt’s Tree Army

Throughout Wyoming and across America, thousands of young men were also getting acquainted with their new environments. It was part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's plan during the Great Depression to provide jobs and educations for millions of unemployed youths while conserving the nation's natural resources.

The CCC went from an idea to reality in lightning speed, especially compared to modern-day federal programs. A month after his proposal to Congress, Roosevelt signed the law officially creating the Emergency Conservation Work (ECW) project on March 30, 1933. It quickly became known as the Civilian Conservation Corps, and also had a popular nickname—the "Tree Army."

By June 1,300 CCC camps had been created nationwide, and by the next month they were staffed by a total of more than a quarter-million enrollees. Initially there were 24 camps in Wyoming, each expected to house 200 men.

To join, enrollees had to be 18 to 25 years old, unmarried, unemployed and with a family on relief. The pay was low, even for the Depression. The CCC paid the enrollees $1 a day, so each earned about $30 each month. But $25 was taken from their checks and sent to their families, leaving them only $5.

"None of the men are going to do any work like that for a dollar a day," predicted Maurice Miller of Chicago, a group leader at the CCC encampment at Fort Hunt, Va.

Joseph Bosc, a Chicago clerk, said he definitely wouldn't enroll. "[It's] not for me; it's like being sold into slavery," he said.

Most of the new members of the Corps, though, didn't look at it that way. Jobs and money were scarce, and signing up was a way to help their families. Their room and board would be paid for, and they would be sent to areas of the country most had never seen before.

Not all were such willing participants, however. Precinct police captains in New York City gave some young men a choice: Sign up or go to the reformatory.

Creation of the CCC

More than 1,000 young men served in the state between 1934 and 1938. During this period age restrictions were lifted so more veterans of World War I could find work, and so was the requirement that enrollees had to be unmarried.

They constructed sewer and water systems, service roads, museums and exhibits, boat docks, phone lines, utility buildings and snowshoe cabins for patrols. They eradicated gophers, eliminated locoweed and dug garbage pits.

Major projects in Wyoming's national forests involved protecting the Colorado and Missouri River watersheds, developing recreation facilities and thinning forests. The CCC launched several wildlife protection projects, including preservation of the country's largest elk herds. The young men also transplanted beaver from overstocked areas to more favorable sites. Crews took censuses of wildlife and studied game ranges, migratory patterns and feeding habits. In several forest areas, especially in the Medicine Bow National Forest, bark beetle control was a constant battle. Blizzard relief was undertaken during the harsh winter of 1936-37.

And the men were always on call to fight forest fires, which could quickly turn deadly. Nine members of various CCC companies in the area died fighting the Blackwater Creek fire west of Cody in 1937. Five professional firefighters from the Forest Service who were supervising the work crews also perished in the blaze.

One of the most challenging CCC projects in the state was undertaken by a Gillette crew, which fought the fires burning more or less constantly in some exposed coal seams and abandoned mines. At least 17 coal fires were burning in Campbell County, many started by lightning decades before.

Some of the fires were about 1,000 feet in length along the outcrop. The CCC enrollees would either dig out the burning material and then cover the remaining exposed coal with sand or extinguish the fire by sealing it and depriving it of oxygen. By all accounts the effort was impressive—but also slow going.

Jackson Lake saw one of the largest projects undertaken by the CCC in Wyoming. A dam built by the U.S. Reclamation Service in 1916 enlarged the lake, and as it filled it flooded more land and submerged more than 8,000 acres of timber.

The stretches of dead timber around Jackson Lake created a barren and dangerous setting, and the Hoover administration began the cleanup in 1929. Roosevelt had the CCC take over the job in 1933.

“Over 100 young men spent the summer of 1934 cutting and piling some 17,000 cords of wood to be burned during the winter months," noted Historian Robert Righter. By the mid-1930s the CCC had removed the shoreline tragedy at Jackson Lake.

CCC members could serve up to four six-month hitches. Despite the demanding work, more than half re-upped at least once.

Many enrolled in camp educational programs. Camp Miller in Sublette County offered vocational courses like blacksmithing, bulldozer operation, carpentry, woodworking, cooking, vocational guidance, road construction, tractor operation and photography. Academic courses included English composition, spelling, business arithmetic, trigonometry, Latin, Spanish and citizenship.

Enrollees were also given the opportunity to take correspondence studies with the University of Wyoming, including English, mathematics, social science, biology, typing and shorthand. The University also offered special courses for CCC recruits in auto mechanics, forestry, journalism and bookkeeping.

Towns lobbied for Camps

By August 1933, 24 camps were already established in Wyoming. Seven camps were attached to the National Park Service— four in Yellowstone and three in Grand Teton. Fifteen camps were supervised by the Forest Service, including seven in Medicine Bow National Forest—at Pole Mountain, Chimney Park, Centennial, Arlington, Encampment, French Creek, and Ryan Park. There was also at least one in the Bighorn National Forest—Camp O’Connor near the subsequent Muddy Guard Station in the Buffalo Ranger District.

Because of the lack of a complete Forest Service CCC inventory, the location of seven camps during the initial year are unknown. One camp may have also been located on the Wind River Indian Reservation, still then called the Shoshone Agency, before 1937. The final Wyoming camp, GLO-1, was operated by the U.S. General Land Office, a precursor of today’s Bureau of Land Management, and located on private land near Gillette.

The number of CCC camps in Wyoming likely peaked at 32 in 1935; that number dropped to 15 camps within two years. Wyoming towns wanted more camps, not fewer, because the program provided jobs for unemployed local carpenters and other workers hired for the skilled labor required by many CCC projects. Communities located near camps also benefited economically when CCC members made weekly excursions into town. Locals lobbied their congressional representatives and the ECW director for more enrollees and more camps.

But even worthy projects promoted by commercial, business, agricultural and civic leaders were turned down. Citizens of Bridger Valley in southwestern Wyoming spent the first two years of the CCC program trying to get a camp on the Bear River in Uinta County. They needed dams built on the Green River's Black’s Fork or Smith's Fork to control flooding for approximately 200 family ranches. If the reservoirs could not be constructed, the leaders said, families would not be able to continue making a living in Bridger Valley.

The lobbying effort was led by an impressive group of officials: Fort Bridger American Legion Commander H. M. Hopkinson, Black’s Fork Water Users Association President Joseph Micheli, Uinta County Farm Bureau President Starvold Steward, Evanston Chamber of Commerce President Glen Eastman, and Van Rupe, president of the Lyman Lions Club.

Desperate for help, the coalition noted if they could not secure a camp in Uinta County, they would "settle" for one across the state line in Utah. By 1935, though, the CCC was starting to close camps, not add them. As Roosevelt's Second New Deal began, the president ordered that camps still working on their original projects be continued, but funding was not available for new ones.

Primitive conditions

In the early days of the CCC, living conditions were primitive. The men slept in cheaply made tents until they built their own camps, with the work usually supervised by out-of-work miners and carpenters from the nearest town. This immediately established good relationships between the CCC and local residents who saw a boost in their economy from both construction and visits from the men to their towns on weekends.

The first wave of CCC enrollees were given hand-me-down U.S. Army surplus uniforms and equipment from World War I. Later, they were outfitted in new spruce green uniforms.

Fenwick said the cooks at his first Yellowstone camp regularly burned food and served cold-boiled potatoes that were hated by all of the hard-working, hungry diners. "The men had plotted to stand at signal at dinner and throw the potatoes at the mess officer," Fenwick recalled. The commanding officer, a holstered .45-caliber service revolver on his hip, told them he knew about their plan.

"I warn you that I've taken just about all I can stand from you," he said. "The first man that throws a potato in that mess hall tonight will get a bullet right between his eyes. I can put it there."

The commander stood at the mess hall door throughout the entire meal. Fenwick wasn't surprised that no potato protest materialized.

CCC members had to stretch their scarce dollars. They paid for personal items like toothpaste, tobacco products, hair oil, candy and gum, which they bought at the camp's post exchange. The men bought $2 vouchers, and the money was deducted from their pay.

To make extra money, some used their pre-CCC experience or learned new skills like cooking and took jobs in nearby communities during their off hours. Leo Vaughn, who worked at a camp in Thermopolis, knew how to sew and boosted his income by sewing on buttons and mending clothes.

Leo Kimmett, who was stationed at a CCC camp in Yellowstone, asked to borrow a typewriter from the company clerk so he could address a letter. A clerk's six-month hitch in the CCC was nearly over and the camp needed someone who could type and take over his duties. Kimmett was the only one in camp who could type, so he was the obvious replacement. He didn't mind, since the job paid him an extra $6 per month and he got to work inside, away from the tough labor outdoors.

But Kimmett didn't stay in the job long. One day he accidentally told the wrong lieutenant that he was wanted on the telephone, and the officer who should have received the message chewed him out.

"Because of that lack of communication I was given a royal, typical army verbal reprimand. This hurt," Kimmett later wrote. "Coming from the gentle farming community of Powell, [Wyo.,] where such vituperation was unknown, the shock of the reprimand, unjustified in all respects, had an acute effect on me."

After a sleepless night, the next day Kimmett asked to be put back on a work crew. "I decided that to be mentally upset like this was not worth the extra $6 a month," he recalled.

Hard work at Guernsey

Two camps run by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation were set up in Guernsey State Park on the North Platte River in Platte County. Enrollees at one camp, BR-9, worked on the park's east side, while BR-10 was assigned to the area south of the 7-year-old Lake Guernsey.

Today, the CCC's work at Guernsey is considered one of the nation's best examples of how the program was used to enhance recreational opportunities and improve the landscape at a state park. Visitors still use many of the projects the BR-9 crew built, including the boat dock, the hand-drilled stone drinking fountain and picnic shelters named for Indian leaders Spotted Tail, Sitting Bull and Red Cloud.

But BR-9's most impressive accomplishment was the park's museum, which took the crew 6,100 man-hours to build. The museum is a one-of-a-kind, limestone-and-log structure known as an excellent example of the Rustic architecture movement. Its floor was quarried, cut, numbered and assembled in Thermopolis and shipped 250 miles to the park, where it was reassembled. Most of the museum's original displays are nearly untouched.

Meanwhile, Camp BR-10 built the Guernsey State Park Castle and a latrine/outhouse called the "Million Dollar Biffy." The CCC put up the latter for only $6,000; park officials have estimated it would cost $1 million today to be rebuilt. The park's Castle is a two-room picnic shelter that has enormous log supports, limestone rock walls and a massive fireplace.

The daily routine

BR-10 was operated as a strict military camp, while BR-9 was overseen by a U.S. Bureau of Reclamation superintendent, James Coffman. The work crews at both camps were divided into engineering, agricultural and landscaping units.

The schedule was the same for both—reveille at 6 a.m. sharp and breakfast precisely an hour later. A typical breakfast included bacon or ham, fruit, eggs and cereal.

Lunch was brought to crews working in the field unless they were close enough to walk to camp. The menu for supper was a large portion of roast beef, pork or chicken, potatoes and gravy, vegetables and fruit, bread, butter and jellies.

The men were required to be clean and presentable at all times, which meant clean and combed hair, brushed teeth and a shower at least once a week.

From 7:30 to 9 p.m., men could shop at the post exchange or play cards at the canteen. The recreation center had two pool tables and a pingpong table. The "lights out" order was given promptly at 10 p.m.

Friday night was reserved for entertainment, including talent shows, singing and dancing. Boxing and wrestling matches were also held. People from the local town often came to entertainment night, both as performers and just to see the show.

Guernsey State Park had a nine-hole public golf course built by the CCC, but there is no evidence that the men ever spent any time playing golf. The course was abandoned in the early 1940s.

On weekends the men at Wyoming CCC camps played pick-up baseball, often against local teams or teams from other camps. Hiking, climbing, horseshoes and basketball on dirt courts were also popular, as were trips to town where sometimes the CCC members were not on their best behavior, especially if the town had a red-light district or ignored Prohibition, still at least nominally in effect in 1933.

Kimmett recalled that after the June 1933 payday, a half-dozen boys at his Yellowstone camp spent the weekend in Gardiner, Mont. "Returning to camp early Monday morning, about three or four of the boys were rolling in their vomit on the floor of the stake truck," he wrote. "These unfortunates learned the hard way about the prevalent falsehood that rubbing alcohol became harmless when filtered through a slice of bread."

The CCC's final days

Roosevelt wanted to make the CCC permanent, but Congress wouldn't go along with him. When World War II started, lawmakers realized it needed the members of the Corps to enter the military. Congress never actually abolished the CCC, but it quit funding the program. On July 1, 1942, it approved $8 million to liquidate it.

The primary impact of the program on the state and nation was three-fold. First, its $25 per month benefit for members' families is credited with helping to jump-start the Depression economy when a spark was desperately needed. The CCC put more than 2.5 million men and 8,000 women to work nationwide.

Second, Wyoming has many one-of-a-kind structures such as the classic Guernsey State Park Museum that remain well used and popular. The CCC crews also greatly expanded the state's infrastructure. In the Bighorn National Forest alone, workers helped build Sibley and Meadowlark Dams, developed 102 acres of campground, built three fire towers, constructed 25 bridges and strung 88 miles of telephone line.

The CCC provided substantial economic help to the families in towns near the camps. Local workers who had lost their jobs were hired to build many of the larger facilities and structures at the camps. By preserving valuable timber resources, the CCC also helped keep alive the industries that communities depended upon.

An intangible but vital benefit of the CCC was the positive impact the program had on those who served. It helped thousands of young men learn construction and wildlife preservation skills, gave them an opportunity to continue their formal education and even transformed their appearance and attitude. The program changed their lives and helped make them better citizens when they returned home.

In September 1933, a convoy of CCC men was taken by truck to meet a train headed out of the park at West Yellowstone. Decades later, Denver Post columnist Red Fenwick recalled that the crews he supervised were no longer the rag-tag, insubordinate troops who began working that spring. "Uniforms were neat. Neckties were tied. There was order and discipline," he recalled. "And the men themselves were tougher, browner, heavier, more self-assured, confident and cooperative."

Resources

• Cassity, Mike. "Building Up Wyoming, Depression-Era Federal Projects in Wyoming, 1929–1943." Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office. 2013, 68-76. Accessed March 1, 2016, at http://wyoshpo.state.wy.us/pdf/BuildingUpWyoming.pdf.
• Fenwick, Red. "The Civilian Conservation Corps: They Took to the Woods--and Came Out Men."The Denver Post, Empire section, June 20, 1965.
• Kimmett, Leo. "Life in a Yellowstone Camp."Annals of Wyoming, 56 no. 1: (Spring 1984), 12-21. Accessed Feb. 17, 2016, at https://archive.org/stream/annalsofwyom56121984wyom#page/n13/mode/2up.
• Noble, Ann. "Civilian Conservation Corp." Accessed Feb. 17, 2016, at
• http://www.sublette.com/history/ccc/.
• Waring, Neil A. "Civilian Conservation Corps and the Building of Guernsey State Park: With Folktales and Stories of the Park," Guernsey, Wyo.: Old Trails Publishing, 2015.
• Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.or/wiki/Category:Civilian_Conservation_Corps_in_Wyoming. Accessed July 25, 2016. 

Illustrations

• The photos of the young CCC men playing craps and sitting on a bench with Vlasta Fisher are from the Lora Nichols Collection at the Grand Encampment Museum. Used with permission and thanks.
• The photo of The Castle at Guernsey State Park was originally published at WyomingHeritage.org, a former project of the University of Wyoming Anthropology Department and the state of Wyoming. The photo of the park looking through an archway of The Castle is by Venice Beske, from Wyoming Places. Both are used with permission and thanks.
• The rest of the photos are from Wyoming State Archives. Used with permission and thanks.

Fifty years after witnessing one of the deadliest forest fires in the nation's history, Bob Johnstone could still remember the screams of the young men at Blackwater Creek about 35 miles west of Cody, Wyo.

"We wanted to see if we could help get these [firefighters] who were trapped," recalled Johnstone, who, as an 18-year-old in the Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps, was on the Blackwater fire line. "We could hear those people below us, but we couldn't get down there to help them. ... It was a terrible thing. I hate to tell you some of the grisly things about it."

The fourth deadliest wildfire in the nation's history, the Blackwater Creek fire was started by a lightning strike in the pine-filled Shoshone National Forest on Aug. 18, 1937. The fire smoldered and crept through the ground fuels for two days before it was spotted by the owners of a local hunting camp. It covered about 2 acres; by the time it was controlled four days later it had consumed 1,700 acres.

At about the same time on Aug. 20, seven CCC enrollees returning from a work detail saw the fire crowning into the treetops and decided on their own to begin scraping a fire line at the base of the blaze. The crew's initiative spared the local men at hunting and tourist camps who normally fought forest fires in the Shoshone from having to leave their jobs during the busiest month of the year.

The CCC camp at Wapiti, about 25 miles west of Cody on the road to Yellowstone National Park, was alerted about the fire at 3:30 p.m. Within 20 minutes, 70 CCC enrollees and rangers from the camp were moving toward it. By nightfall the blaze had grown to 200 acres, and firefighters were constructing a fire line around it. Despite only light winds, the canyons pumped air to the fire and pushed spot fires ahead of the main one.

Investigators who later analyzed what happened pointed to several factors that impeded the efforts to contain the fire. There were no radios, so men had to carry notes between the various crews to relay information about where spot fires were cropping up and increasing in intensity because of adverse weather conditions.

Shifting weather

On Aug. 21, weather observers in Idaho told the Riverton, Wyo., weather office that a storm front with strong winds was moving into the Blackwater Creek area. That vital information was given to U.S. Forest Service managers at the Wapiti ranger station. But the lack of radios prevented the station from telling firefighters about the dangerous weather coming their way.

Poor phone communication was another problem. Investigators later determined it, too, probably played a role in the deaths of several firefighters who found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time when the fire went out of control. The Ten Sleep CCC camp in the Bighorn National Forest, far away across the Bighorn Basin, was ordered to send about 50 CCC enrollees and Forest Service personnel to Blackwater Creek, to arrive no later than 8 a.m. the next morning. But there was an unexplained three-hour delay between the attempted phone call notification and when it was received.

By daybreak 120 men were working the fire, but the Ten Sleep crew was nowhere in sight. The Ten Sleep CCC enrollees were meant to serve as fresh reinforcements for those who had been battling the fire since the previous night. But the new men, who traveled more than 180 miles over rough roads in the dark, did not reach the fire until about 11:30 a.m. They were given a quick meal, outfitted with hand tools and marched toward the east fire line, which was being constructed in a canyon that had numerous ravines and moderate to steep slopes with a gradient of 20 to 60 percent.

The fire was blowing in a northeasterly direction, overtopping Trail Ridge to burn in green timber on the other side. Prevailing winds made this area the fire's “hot spot." The forest was dense and mature with heavy fuel loads from dead trees with dead limbs extending to the ground. The situation provided a fuel ladder for fire to leap easily into the treetops.

Fire investigators later speculated that if they had arrived on schedule, the Ten Sleep crew members could have already extended the fire line past this treacherous area when the fire turned deadly and trapped them.

Inexperienced firefighters, rough terrain

The CCC members from the Ten Sleep camp were all Texans with little experience fighting fires. Three months before they were transferred to Wyoming, they had been in their home state helping create a park, establishing bridle paths and stocking lakes with fish. Their new Forest Service supervisors, however, were all experienced firefighters ready to guide them in their Cowboy State assignment.

Forest Ranger Urban Post and Junior Forester Paul Tyrrell led the way for the CCC party, with Ranger Al Clayton and Foreman James Saban taking the rear. They crossed a draw with a small trickle of water where Post detailed one man to remain and build a small dam to impound water for the backpack pumps. Because of the rough climb ahead, the men were told to carry their backpack pumps only half-full.

By 12:40 p.m., aerial observers reported seeing several spot fires near the east and west fire lines. It was 90 degrees, with the relative humidity at only 6 percent. Despite these tinderbox conditions, Ranger Post later recalled he was still optimistic they could get the relatively small fire under control. The fire was barely smoking, and his men were in good spirits. All they had to do, he thought, was extend the fire line to connect with a natural firebreak created by a rocky ridge to the northeast.

Ranger Post left six men to assist Clayton, who only had one firefighter with him, then led his 40-man crew east up a ridge. Clayton and his crew continued to suppress small fires that were spotting over fire lines started earlier by a Bureau of Public Roads crew.

From his higher vantage point Post could see more spot fires below. Clayton saw them too and his small crew quickly went to work to put them out. Recognizing the potential hazard, Clayton wrote a note to Post and gave it to a CCC enrollee to deliver.

The note read, "Post, We are on the ridge in back of you and I am going down to the spot in the hole. It looks like [the fire] can carry on over the ridge east and north of you. If you can send any men, please do so, since there are only eight of us. Clayton."

But the note seeking reinforcements didn't reach Post until it was too late for Clayton and his men. The dry weather front approached at 3:30 p.m., and steady 30 mile-per-hour winds blew from the southwest. Fifteen minutes later, the wind shifted abruptly to the west, causing increased crowning, with the fire leaping from treetop to treetop, and even more spot fires. Gusts reached 45 mph and whipped the flames into a raging firestorm racing east up ravines and gullies, trapping Clayton and his crew. The 45-year-old ranger and six of his men died, and another later succumbed to his injuries in the hospital.

“We have no safer place”

Post’s crew found themselves in an equally dangerous spot. If they were to save themselves, they had only one option: Abandon the fire line, find an escape route and run for their lives. When the wind suddenly pushed the fire back toward the southwest, Post ordered his crew to head northeast to a ridgeline, where they took cover on a rocky outcropping as fire swept over the ridge. They moved around to avoid each successive wave of heat and fire, but soon the rocks below them grew unbearably hot. Their flesh blistered and their clothing caught on fire.

"The heat is terrific, and it seems unbearable, but we have no safer place," Post later wrote about the terrifying ordeal. "If this is the end, we must take it here."

"Tops of the trees swung in the strong wind which was coming up through the basin, spot fires developed between the large spot fire and the main fire, and the wind had reached our line almost at once, and the large fire was a furnace immediately," Post recalled. "... Some of us wait for Tyrrell and the last ones out. The smoke is thick, the air is hot; we hurry up the ridge. Heavy tools are left behind. We take lady shovels, Pulaskis and canteens – we may need them for our own protection." A Pulaski is a tool used for constructing firebreaks that combines an axe and an adze in one head.

Post and his foreman, James Saban, ordered their CCC crew to stay down, but some panicked and refused to remain low while others sat up to say prayers. The 24-year-old Tyrrell bravely pinned three men to the ground, shielding them from the heat. But five other men decided to risk running into the flames, hoping to reach safety on the other side. It was a horrible choice: Four did not make it alive–Billy Lea, a Bureau of Public Roads crewman, and CCC enrollees Clyde Allen, Ernest Seelke and Rubin Sherry. The fifth man did survive but he was badly burned.

Since no one in Clayton's crew survived, their actions as the firestorm swept through the area are unknown. One fire inspector speculated Clayton may have taken some of the men with him to check a spot fire, while the rest waited for the requested reinforcements from Post's crew that were never sent. Once he discovered the danger ahead, Clayton may have tried to lead them back up a gulch toward a streambed, but based upon where the ranger's body was found he probably did not make it before fire overtook the entire crew.

Altogether, the fire killed 15 firefighters–all eight in Clayton’s crew and seven in Post’s unit. Ten CCC enrollees, all Texans between 17 and 20 years old; one was their foreman. Three of the deceased worked for the Forest Service and one was an employee of Wyoming’s Bureau of Public Roads. Thirty-eight more men were burned, many of them badly.

Recovering bodies

By 5 p.m. the worst of the fire was over, but the smoke was so thick the survivors in Post's crew who could walk stayed in place for nearly three more hours before leaving the site.

In the morning hours of Aug. 22, the bodies of Clayton and six of his men were found within 30 feet of each other. Sixty feet away rescuers found CCC enrollee Roy Bevens, who was badly burned but clinging to life. "God, how lucky I am to be alive!" he told the men who evacuated him to Cody, but he later died of his severe injuries at the hospital.

The solemn scene of the bodies Clayton's crew being taken from the forest was recorded by a Cody news reporter. "Seven pack-horses, each with angular forms wrapped in canvas and lashed to the saddles, filed slowly out of the wooded ravine and stopped at the cars," the journalist wrote. "Over a hundred wide-eyed, ashen-gray youngsters, just ready to go to the fire line, pushed forward, drawn by a chilling magnetism to see what their former comrades looked like."

What they witnessed that day stayed with the men, who were haunted by the deaths. In 1987, on the 50th anniversary of the Blackwater fire, CCC firefighter Lloyd Hull described that horrific afternoon. "It baked everybody below [the tree-top fire]. The heat was so intense," Hull remembered. "You knew it was happening. There was no 'figure' to it. We knew it."

Hull was part of the team that searched for bodies and helped the injured. So was 17-year-old Vernon Pitt, a just-discharged CCC enrollee from Cody who volunteered to stay and help.

"There was no way they could get out," Pitt said. "It was a pretty sad deal. Them boys was all young boys."

Morris Simpers, superintendent of the CCC's Cody camp, said when Clayton's body was discovered it appeared remarkably unscathed. Then he described how the ranger's woolen clothing crumpled into ashes when it was touched.

"Clayton's men could have walked to safety within seven minutes," Simpers later told the Billings Gazette. "That shows how fast the fire came up."

Ten of the casualties were young members of the CCC. The five others killed were employed by the U.S. Forest Service. Thirty-eight other men were injured. Putting out the fire took a back seat to the search for victims, but afterward fresh crews numbering up to 500 attacked the fire. It was officially contained three days later on Aug. 24, and the final firefighting crew was disbanded a week afterward.

Changes in firefighting

The Blackwater Creek Fire is a distant memory in wildfire history, but it led to an important change in the way forest fires would be fought in the future. David P. Godwin of the U.S. Forest Service's Division of Fire Control investigated the fire and determined the foremen and supervisors admirably performed their duties and were not to blame for the tragedy. It was beyond their control.

But Godwin questioned delays in the travel times of firefighting units, particularly the one dispatched from Ten Sleep. The investigator speculated that if they had arrived as scheduled, the Texans who left the Ten Sleep camp would not have been deployed where they were when the fire blew up. In his report Godwin noted in that scenario they may very well have survived unharmed.

Godwin ultimately concluded units needed to be on the scene much earlier, and two years after the Blackwater fire he authorized funds to carry out parachute jumping experiments linked to fire suppression. The federal government's smokejumper program, initially tested in Winthrop, Wash., and at two locations in Montana, was born.

On the second anniversary of the Blackwater Creek fire, 500 local residents helped dedicate a 71-foot-long stone monument, which contains the names of all the men who were killed or injured. It is located 38 miles west of Cody on U.S. Highway 14/16, near the junction of Blackwater Creek and the North Fork of the Shoshone River.

Two smaller monuments, accessible only by hiking or horseback on a 12-mile-round-trip trail, were built by CCC crews. One is located at the renamed "Clayton Gulch," and the second is at "Post Point," which fittingly marks the spot where Ranger Post and his men sought refuge. Post received the nation's first forest-fighting medal for leading his men to safety.

Clayton, meanwhile, was honored in a lengthy 1937 poem, "Alfred G. Clayton, Requiescat in Peace." It is credited to "L.C. Shoemaker and Roosevelt." The poem concludes:

"A hero? Oh no! just a ranger
Who answered unquestioned the call;
Whose motto -- like ours -- was service;
Who gave to 'The Service' his all.
And a promise we give to his loved ones,
That as long as rangers shall ride,The name of Alfred G. Clayton
Will still be remembered with pride."

Killed in the Blackwater Fire:

• Alfred G. Clayton, Ranger South Fork District, Shoshone National Forest, age 45.
• James T. Saban, CCC Technical Foreman - Ten Sleep Camp F-35 (former Forest Ranger on Medicine Bow and Chippewa National Forests), age 36.
• Rex A. Hale, Junior Assistant to the Technician, Shoshone National Forest; from the Wapiti CCC camp, age 21.
• Paul E. Tyrrell, Junior Forester, Bighorn National Forest (Foreman), died Aug. 26 at hospital, age 24.
• Billy Lea, Bureau of Public Roads Crewman, originally from Oregon, died later at hospital.
• Civilian Conservation Corps Enrollees: Ten Sleep Camp F-35 in the Bighorn National Forest; Company 1811 -- 3 months earlier came from Bastrop area of Texas, ages 17 to 20 years:
• John B. Gerdes of Halletsville, TX
• Will C. Griffith of Bastrop, TX
• Mack T. Mayabb of Smithville, TX
• George E. Rodgers of George, TX
• Roy Bevens of Smithville, TX, died later at Cody hospital.
• Clyde Allen of McDade, TX
• Ernest Seelke of LaGrange, TX
• Rubin D. Sherry of Smithville, TX
• William Whitlock of Austin, TX, died later at Cody hospital.
• Ambrocio Garza of Corpus Christi, TX, died later at Cody hospital.

Resources

• Always Remember website. “1937 08/21 WY15-Fatality Blackwater CCC.” Accessed May 15, 2016 at http://www.wlfalwaysremember.org/incident-lists/255-blackwater.html. Includes the list of the deceased, reproduced here.
• Forest Army: Remembering the Civilian Conservation Corps. “Death on the Fireline: The Blackwater Fire of 1937.” Accessed May 15, 2016 at http://forestarmy.blogspot.com/2007/08/death-on-fire-line-blackwater-fire-of.html.
• Howard, Tom. “CCC Reunion: 'Never Forget Fire.’” Billings Gazette, June 29, 1987.
• Kaufman, Erle. “Death in Blackwater Canyon.” American Forests, November 1937, 534-540, 538-539. Accessed June 21, 2016 at http://www.fireleadership.gov/toolbox/staffride/downloads/lsr5/lsr5_death_in_blackwater_nov1937.pdf. Good article published just three months after the fire, with photos of the Blackwater Creek terrain. If document does not load, copy and re-paste url directly into address window.
• Perry, Dave. “The Fatal Blackwater Fire.” Riverton Ranger, June 30, 1987
• Wikipedia. “Blackwater Fire of 1937.” Accessed June 29, 2016 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackwater_fire_of_1937
• For Further Reading and Research
• Gabbert, Bill. “Blackwater Fire of 1937 Remembered.” Wildfire Today, May 15, 2012. Accessed June 30, 2016 at http://wildfiretoday.com/2012/05/15/blackwater-fire-of-1937-remembered/.
• Gabbert, Bill. “Commemoration of the 75^th Anniversary of the Blackwater Fire.” Wildfire Today, August 17, 2012. Accessed June 30, 2016 at http://wildfiretoday.com/2012/08/17/commemoration-of-the-75th-anniversary-of-the-blackwater-fire/.

Illustrations

• The photos of the firefighters monument and of the burned firefighters in hospital were both produced by Hoskins Studio, of Cody, probably in the late 1930s and are now in the collections of the Park County Archives. Used with permission and thanks.
• Archives staffers caution that the photo of the burned men and their nurse was identified by its donor as being of firefighters injured in the Blackwater Fire, but the print itself contains no information on the back that would make that identification more certain.
• The aerial photo of the Blackwater Fire is from the U.S. Forest Service. The U.S. Forest service map and graphic about the Blackwater Fire was reproduced on Wildfire Today. Used with thanks.
• The advertisement for backpack water pumps for firefighters was published alongside the 1937 Erle Kauffman article in American Forests, cited and linked in the bibliography above. Used with thanks.
• For 30 more Forest Service photos of the Blackwater Fire and its aftermath, click here.

Mrs. Robert C. Morris of New York is an authority on Western fishing. ... In the Winter she lives on Fifth Avenue, and goes to the opera, and rides in her limousine, and does the other things that city women do; in the Summer she is off to the Rockies to fish, ride the mountain trails, camp, and fish again (New York Times, May 12, 1918).

A wealthy New York socialite seemed an unlikely candidate to spearhead one of the earliest efforts to establish a standard trail system in Yellowstone National Park. But Alice Morris was no stranger to the park. By 1917, she had come to the Yellowstone country each summer for many years, camping, fishing and riding horses.

From Army to Park Service

When Morris came to Yellowstone – “America’s Wonderland” – the park was struggling through a difficult transition. In 1883, the U.S. Army took over management of the park, which was suffering from vandalism, poaching and poor administration. The Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Cavalry managed the park until 1916, when President Woodrow Wilson signed the National Park Service Act. The last soldiers left Fort Yellowstone in October, turning over management to the National Park Service. The first Park rangers were 22 discharged Army men.

The transition did not go smoothly. Local communities wanted the Army back, and politicians blocked funding for the civilian force. Army management made a temporary return, but when the United States entered World War I, troops were needed in Europe. Congress reluctantly provided non-military funding for the park in July 1918.

Getting around

The original road system was built by the competent Army Corps of Engineers. One of the earliest park superintendents, Philetus W. Norris, devised a system of circular loop roads to connect the natural wonders. During his tenure from 1877-1882, workers completed about 104 miles of today’s 140-mile Grand Loop Road.

The Army then took over administration. Lieutenant Dan C. Kingman concentrated on improving the hastily built roads, set park road standards, and built several substantial bridges. Norris and other pre-Army superintendents also began laying out a system of foot and horseback trails to access the park’s attractions and to patrol the backcountry. These early trails often followed existing American Indian routes, game trails, or, simply, paths of least resistance.

The military, charged with controlling poaching and wildfires, established regular patrols that used existing roads and trails. Gradually new trails were added to the park system. Starting in about 1890, the Army built patrol cabins for shelter during the winter months. These so-called snowshoe cabins were strategically located throughout the park and were eventually connected by trails.

Fire control was a major concern after the Great Fire of 1910 (“the Big Blowup”), which burned over 3 million acres of forest in Washington, Idaho and Montana, and killed at least 85 people. The Army began building new trails that served a dual purpose—tourism and fire prevention. Many of the trails were designated as “firelanes.”

By 1917, about 400 hundred miles of trails were in common use, including 280 miles classified as firelanes. Milton P. Skinner, a geologist intimately familiar with the park, suggested an additional 521 miles of new trails. In 1916, cars began streaming into the park, and it became imperative to separate horseback travel from auto traffic.

“I had long known the Park”

Although Alice Morris was a world traveler and could afford to visit any destination, she chose Yellowstone National Park. For several summers she stayed on a homestead claimed in 1913 by G. Milton Ames along Slough Creek just north of the park. “Lady Morris,” as she was known, first stayed in a tent, later a log cabin accompanied by her cook, Estelle. Morris kept five ponies and a colt on the homestead and often traveled into the park.

Usually, she left her husband in New York. Robert Clark Morris was born into a prominent New England family. He graduated with a law degree from Yale. In 1890, he married Alice Parmelee, age 17, and soon established a law practice in New York City. He and Alice were active in civic, social and political affairs. In 1896 they sailed to Japan, where they visited Yokohama, Tokyo, Kyoto, and Nara. She subsequently wrote an illustrated book, Dragons and Cherry Blossoms, about the adventure. This thin volume displayed her writing skills, which she would one day put to good use in her reports on the Yellowstone trails.

An invitation

Alice must have been a notable sight during her visits to Yellowstone, exploring the park on horseback. In 1917, at age 44, she was invited by the Park Service to undertake a study of the trails. That summer, she covered 1,500 miles on horseback, mapping and blazing a system of trails.

She described her adventures to a reporter in a New York Times article that ran February 10, 1918. She related her daily regimen of waking at 5 AM, riding all day working out a route across a variety of terrains, sometimes through deep snow, and swimming the horses through rivers. She concluded her long days around a campfire, making notes of the day’s journey. “Work? Of course it was work,” she said. “But it was the most stimulating kind of work you can imagine.”

Two reports

As a result of that summer’s explorations, she compiled two official reports. The first,“Notes on Trail Study in Yellowstone Park” (1917), provided park officials with specific recommendations, including suggestions for trail connections and complete marking of the trails. Her subsequent report, “Map and Description of the Trails in and about Yellowstone Park” (1918) was an eloquent essay on the beauty and wildness Yellowstone offered tourists willing to travel the back country. Her observations included colorful descriptions of wildlife, flora and geysers.

Her 1917 report recommended three circular trails. One, she urged, should connect the principal hotels; the second would be a series of trails radiating like spokes from the hotels for short trips; her third recommendation proposed an outer loop through the wilderness to the borders of the park, based on existing firelanes. The report listed all the trails she rode and her recommendations for specific improvements, shortcuts or new trails.

She advised that trail specifications be followed and used as a basis for construction and inspection of new trails:

Trails should be cut 6 ft. wide through timber, and graded 3 ft. wide on all side hills, and through rough ground. Also that overhanging branches be removed from trees. Small stumps and snags should be cut below the level of the ground, if possible, and the trail should be reasonably free from sharp turns, sudden declivities and loose stones. All trails to be constructed should be run out with a hypsometer [an instrument for measuring height or altitude] or some such simple instrument and staked, in order to establish an even grade. Recommended that the maximum grade on any trail constructed be 10 per cent, very few grades being over 8 per cent.

…It is suggested that on this trail work there be appointed a Trail Master, whose business it should be to plan and superintend work on all trails in order that the system of trails may present a uniform appearance. The existing trails give an unpleasant impression of dissimilarity of method of construction.

Appreciative of her summer’s labors, Superintendent Lindsley graciously wrote Alice: “The manner in which you have handled this important problem of our National Park, and the completeness and charm of expression of your reports and notes, is a joy. And best of all, to my mind, you have made the whole scheme perfectly a practicable one, and I hope that you can be the one to see it carried eventually to completion, and enjoyed and appreciated by the public.”

“The fishing – Oh, the fishing!”

The unusual combination of socialite and explorer had begun to catch the public’s eye. Morris was interviewed by a New York Times reporter for an article that appeared on May 12, 1918. Answering his questions about fly fishing, she scoffed at any fisherman who would sink to using worms. “The keenest joy in fishing,” she observed, “was luring a trout that you’ve never been able to catch…But when you get him, you are satisfied… It has been a battle of wits, a tussle of strategy, and you’ve won! That’s fishing!”

Fishing remained one of Alice Morris’s greatest passions. She exclaimed in the Times article, “The fishing—Oh, the fishing in the Yellowstone!—is such fishing as the passionate angler dreams of….The day’s ride along the trails finds always a jewel-like lake in the mountains, or a crystal sparkling stream, at the edge of which to make camp when evening falls.”

“This unique splendor”

Alice Morris expected that her longer, more impressionistic 1918 report, along with 32 photos, would be published by the National Park Service. However, this author was unable to locate any record of an officially published version. The 1918 report survives in the Yellowstone National Park archives. This second report provides the basis of this article and will be quoted at length. She began by explaining the urgent necessity of her explorations. The introduction of the automobile had made travel much easier, she wrote, but many feared a loss of the park’s “primitive charm” would result.

To…make public the information that would establish the Yellowstone National Park more firmly than it ever had been before as the people’s wonderland – a unique and marvelous thing to see, a safe and simple place to visit, a delightful, picturesque, magnificent country to ride through and camp in and enjoy – the National Park Service of the Department of the Interior asked me to map the trails and bridle paths…The motor cars travel over a small part of the park’s great area. Into all the magnificence of the wilderness, otherwise inaccessible, go the trails.

Of course, Alice Morris lived in a world far removed from today’s. Present-day park management of some 4 million visitors per year would have been beyond her imagination.

“Harmless, good-natured” bears

Though Alice Morris was an experienced backcountry traveler, her attitudes towards safety on pack trips seem naïve today:

It is safe in spite of black bears and mountain elk, of precipitous canyons and rushing rivers. It is so safe that women and children may set out with a pack-train. The pack-train is of course accompanied by a guide, and all the Yellowstone guides are well-known and experienced men…As for the wild animals that roam the hills…they simply pay no attention to him at all. Now and then a great black bear will come lumbering out of the forest and cross the bridle-path. His big clumsy body may halt its swinging gait as he hears the pack-train’s approach; his wistful, humourous [sic] face may turn gravely for a moment toward the intruders in his domain; but after all he is used to them; they are harmless; they are not worth more than an instant’s attention; he ambles on. And the horses, by no means disturbed, keep on their way. … The grizzly bears are made of different stuff. They seek no compromise in their ancient enmity. They have their homes – the few that are in the Park – in remote fastnesses high up in the hills. Man almost never meets them; he never wants to.

Morris did not record any incidents involving bears during her horseback rides through the park that summer of 1917. Only the summer before, however, a large grizzly attacked and killed a teamster, Frank Welch, who was sleeping under his wagon. His was the first documented death from grizzly attack in Yellowstone National Park.

The “bear problem” started after two large hotels opened in the park in 1891 and developed large waste dumps. Emboldened by these dumps, bears gradually lost their fear of humans and started begging from tourists along the park roads. Visitors tended to underestimate the risk, approaching the bears to feed or photograph them.

From 1931 to 1969, an average of 46 people per year were injured by black bears. Only 8 people have been killed by grizzly bears in Yellowstone National Park during its 146-year history. Eventually, the dangerous combination of garbage dumps and tourists became evident. By 1973, the dumps were permanently closed, and many problem bears were transplanted to remote areas.

“The whole park is a flower garden”

Alice observed that “the flowers grow, wild and luxuriant, as they grow in primeval lands,” and singled out a few as objects of her particular affection. Lupine, pale lavender to deep purple and blue, was the dominant flower growing in masses on the hillsides; the gentian was “…a clear blue fringed flower that…remains characteristically the Yellowstone’s own.” She was especially charmed by columbine and Indian paintbrush, which changed to a large, gracefully formed flower of deep magenta or crimson in the high peaks.

Morris admitted that the auto tourist could now visit most of the “spectacular wonders” of the park, but only those who traveled the trails by pack-train could linger in their own favorite places for as long as they chose, even all summer if they liked. “Everyone knows that there are geysers there,” she wrote; “almost everyone knows that there are petrified forests; few Americans, I think, understand the untouched natural beauty and interest even in little things that lie in this American wonderland.”

Magic fountains

Despite the fact that Alice Morris considered the geysers an obvious Yellowstone attraction, she devoted several pages of her report to their description. Although geologists classified and explained the geyser phenomena in great detail, Morris related to the simple “wonder and delight” of the tourist in seeing them. “These great bursts of silver beauty from the earth are so mysterious, so splendid, so curiously varied.” Many of the names she used are still in use today:

Here is Black Warrior, whose fountain play never ceases, and the indolent lovely majestic Giantess that rests from five to forty days! The explosive Minute Man sends his silver shower into the air for fifteen, twenty, thirty seconds, and then stops. The Giant plays for precisely one hour at a time. And there is the exquisite little Jewel, whose magic fountain is never more than twenty feet high, whereas the Giant, the highest stream of all, sends forth a gleaming misted tower with a minimum of 200 and a maximum of 250 feet. The Fan is unlike most of the other geysers in that it throws its water at an angle instead of vertically. Castle Geyser, with a gush of seventy-five feet or so, has built itself an impressive crater from which it takes its name. The Beehive is a creation of simple artistry – a slender column of water that rises to a height of 200 feet from a small beehive mound. The Great Fountain’s basin is strangely and pleasingly ornamented, and its volume of water is extraordinarily large.

In her 1918 report, Alice Morris called the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone “one of the great natural wonders of the world”:

It is a place not only of beauty and majesty of line, but of magnificent color – so magnificent, so varied, that it is as if a single artist has spilled his gorgeous tint upon the rocks. Leaving its quiet valley, the river tumbles first over the Upper Falls and then on to the Lower Falls, where it is truly a queen in its flowing robes of silver as it dashes in glory down what is perhaps the most beautiful waterfall in the world.

“Into all the magnificence of the wilderness, otherwise inaccessible, go the trails”

The nuts and bolts of Alice’s 1918 report were the trail-by-trail descriptions. Portions of this segment of her 1918 trail study were printed in the “Yellowstone National Park: Rules and Regulations” issued in 1920. However, as stated earlier, it does not appear that her 1918 report was ever printed in its entirety as an official park pamphlet.

The recommendations

Correspondence between Alice Morris and Superintendent Lindsley in February and March 1918 indicate how seriously he took her recommendations concerning the park trail system. In regard to her 1917 report, Lindsley stated that “I only wish there were room for all of it in our little booklet on park information which is distributed by the thousands each summer. I have already recommended that your Trail Notes be added to that circular, and trust it may not be too late to have it done for the season of 1918.”

In a letter dated February 15, Lindsley stressed the necessity of cutting out and marking the north boundary line of the park and the west line of the park from the northwest corner, “as this is a favorite hunting country in the fall and there is some doubt as to the location of the line on the part of hunters.” He also recommended heavy rock work on the trail north of the Yellowstone River.

Lindsley requested a map from Morris, as well as cost estimates for conducting the work, based on three (possibly four) crews of four men each and four pack horses in the field; a map and cost figures were attached to his letter in park files, indicating her response. Her agenda for trail work was much more ambitious than Lindsley mentioned in his letter. She also calculated the number of days needed for each project to be completed.

She attached two appendices, one of which provided for improvement of Uncle Tom’s Trail from the canyon rim to the shore of the river. “Many people persist in using this trail in its present dangerous condition in spite of sign at its head and warnings duly given. Steps can be cut in rock, iron hand-rails provided, and earth part widened, relocated, and re-graded.”

Many of Alice’s recommendations were later incorporated by the Park Service as funding and other priorities allowed. One of her suggestions for a new trail has become today’s Trail Creek Trail, which follows the north and east sides of Heart Lake, then continues east along the south shores of the South and Southeast Arms of Yellowstone Lake to connect with the Thorofare Trail. Milton P. Skinner also recommended this route in his 1917 report. He stated that “a fair game trail covers most of the route.” Superintendent Albright agreed with them both and recommended that it be added to the trail system in his 1919 and 1920 “Report of the Superintendent.” The trail was finally constructed during the years 1934-1936.

In the same area, she recommended constructing what has become today’s Snake River or Snake River Cutoff Trail. She also suggested the construction of the Elephant’s Back Trail at the north end of Lake Yellowstone, which was subsequently built in 1928, as well as what is today’s Buffalo Fork Trail at the north end of the park. This trail was finally designated on park maps in 1937.

Down the rabbit hole

As for the rest of Alice’s life, after her 1917 summer of trail-breaking and subsequent articles, little is known about her. The Slough Creek homestead, her summer home for many years, was sold in 1918 and became a part of the Silver Tip Ranch, a guest ranch with a rustic lodge and polo field. Alice Morris ceased her summer visits to the homestead, and her name is not mentioned in a history of the Silver Tip Ranch from 1922-1947, written by A. Conger Goodyear.

No evidence has been found of any further association between Alice Morris and Yellowstone National Park. After G. Milton Ames sold his property in 1918, Alice Morris stayed with Mrs. Joe B. Duret, wife of “Frenchy” Duret, on a nearby homestead. Her visit in June 1921 was mentioned in a local newspaper: “Mrs. Duret looks after the comforts of a number of tourists every year at her place on Slough Creek on the Cooke City Road, where she will entertain this year, Mrs. Robert Morris, wife of a prominent New York lawyer, who arrived in Livingston Wednesday from the east.”

The remainder of Alice Morris’s life is a mystery. In the 1920s, she and Robert C. Morris were divorced. The couple never had any children. After the divorce, her name vanished from the society pages of the New York Times. Robert C. Morris remarried, but his second wife died only 17 months later. He passed away in 1938, leaving one-quarter of his estate to Alice. At that time, Alice had not remarried, and she resided in Palm Springs, California.

Did Alice Morris ever return to Yellowstone National Park after committing so much time and energy to the development of its trail system? Further research may cast new light on her later life, but for now this dynamic woman from New York City deserves recognition for her contributions to Yellowstone’s backcountry trails. In her report, she added:

I had long known the Park… and had literally chosen it as in all the world the most interesting, enjoyable goal for summer journeyings. Certainly, too, the earth knows no place more beautiful, just as it knows no place that is at all like the Yellowstone National Park.

Resources

Primary Sources

• Anderson, George S. Report of the Superintendent of the Yellowstone National Park to the Secretary of the Interior, 1892. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1892.
• Anderson, George S. Report of the Superintendent of the Yellowstone National Park to the Secretary of the Interior, 1895. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1895.
• Hale, Elaine Skinner. “A Brief History of the Slough Creek Wagon Road,” typewritten 13-page manuscript dated 19 June 2006. On file at Branch of Cultural Resources, Yellowstone Center for Resources, Yellowstone National Park.
• National Park Service. Yellowstone National Park: Rules and Regulations, 1920. “Trails in and About Yellowstone National Park”, by Mrs. Robert C. Morris. Accessed Nov. 1, 2016 at https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/brochures/1920/yell/sec4.htm.
• Yellowstone National Park Archives, Pre-National Park Service Collection, Letter Box 72, Item No. 113: Roads and Trails, 1912-1918; letter report dated November 15, 1916, from Chester A. Lindsley, Acting Supervisor to the Superintendent of National Parks, Washington, D.C. concerning statistics for roads and trails in Yellowstone National Park.
• Yellowstone National Park Archives, Pre-National Park Service Collection, Item No. 113: Roads & Trails, 1912-1918, “June 1917, Suggested Addition to System of Trails in Yellowstone National Park with Advantages of the Trails Mentioned, Present Condition of Trails where Old Trails Exist, and Estimated Cost of Necessary Work” by Milton P. Skinner, Geologist, 13 pages.
• Yellowstone National Park Archives, Pre-National Park Service Collection, Item No. 113: Roads & Trails, 1912-1918. Folder 342, five page letter dated November 20, 1917, from Major John W.H. Schulz, District Engineer, Corps of Engineers, to the Chief of Engineers, U.S. Army, Washington, D.C. concerning trails in Yellowstone National Park.
• Yellowstone National Park Archives, Pre-National Park Service Collection, Letter Box 72, Folder: Notes on Trail Study in Yellowstone Park, 1917, by Alice P. Morris, File No. 332.4; Yellowstone Trails by Alice P. Morris, 1918.
• Yellowstone National Park Archives, Pre-National Park Service Collection, Letter Box 72, File No. 332.4; letters dated February 15 and March 14, 1918, from C.A. Lindsley, Superintendent Yellowstone National Park, to Alice Morris, concerning Yellowstone National Park trails and suggested improvements.
• “Yellowstone Trails Blazed by New York Woman.” The New York Times Magazine, 10 February 1918, p. 7.
• “From Fifth Avenue She Turns to Fly-Fishing.” The New York Times, 12 May 1918.
• Mrs. Robert C. Morris of New York at her camp, Mammoth Hot Springs, Yellowstone Park, Wyoming.” Photograph and caption, The New York Times, 16 August 1914.
• “Local News.” The Park County News, Livingston, Montana, 28 June 1921. Reference to Mrs. Joe B. Duret and summer visit of Mrs. Robert Morris.
• “Bear Killed and Ate Mont. Trapper.” The Cody Enterprise, Cody, Wyoming, 28 June 1922, p. 1.
• U.S. Forest Service. “The 1910 Fires.” U.S. Forest Service History. Forest History Society 2012. Accessed Nov. 1, 2016 at http://www.foresthistory.org/ASPNET/Policy/Fire/FamousFires/1910Fires.aspx.

Secondary Sources

• Culpin, Mary Shivers. The History of the Construction of the Road System in Yellowstone National Park, 1872-1966. Historic Resource Study, Vol. 1, No. 5. Denver: National Park Service, Rocky Mountain Region, 1994.
• Egan, Timothy. The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America. New York, New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2009.
• Haines, Aubrey L. The Yellowstone Story, Volumes 1 and 2. Niwot, Colorado: University Press of Colorado, 1996.
• No Author. “Robert Clark Morris, 1869-1938.” The New York Community Trust, New York, NY. http://www.nycommunitytrust.org/Portals/0/…/BioBrochures/Robert%20Clark%20Morris.pdf.
• Whithorn, Doris. Twice Told on the Upper Yellowstone, Volume 2. Published by Doris Whithorn, Livingston, Montana, 1994.
• Whittlesey, Lee H. Death in Yellowstone: Accidents and Foolhardiness in the First National Park. Second Edition. Lanham, Maryland: Roberts Rinehart Publishers, 2014.

Illustrations

• The photos of Alice Morris on her horse, the cabin on Slough Creek and the cook, Estelle, are from the Yellowstone Gateway Museum of Park County, Livingston, Montana, all now in the authors’ collection as well. Used with thanks.
• The map of Yellowstone trails that Alice Morris prepared for her 1918 report to the Department of the Interior is from the Pre-National Park Service Collection, Yellowstone National Park Archives, now in the authors’ collection. The photos the Trail Creek Trail bridge, tourists riding the Howard Eaton Trail and the tourist above the Yellowstone River, are all from Box L-8, 1934 Fire Trails, Yellowstone National Park Archives and are now in the authors’ collection as well. Used with thanks.
• The photos of the steps to the foot of the Lower Yellowstone Falls and the waterfall itself are by the authors, 2009. The photo of the Blue Sapphire Pool is from 2016, also by the authors. Used with thanks.