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"A Blank Spot on the Map": Aldo Leopold, Wilderness, and U. S. Forest Service Recreational Policy, 1909-1924 Author(s): Paul S. Sutter Source: The Western Historical Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Summer, 1998), pp. 187-214 Published by: on behalf of Western Historical Quarterly, Utah State University The Western

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"A BLANK SPOT ON THE MAP": ALDO LEOPOLD,

WILDERNESS, AND U. S. FOREST SERVICE RECREATIONAL POLICY, 1909-19241

PAUL S. SUTTER

Though it was built upon a long tradition of wilderness thought, Aldo Leopold's wilderness idea was highly contingent, rooted in the Forest Service milieu, and tied to contemporary technological cultural developments. This paper proposes that Leopold advocated wilderness preservation to counter environmental changes wrought by these developments.

A LDO LEOPOLD WAS, to borrow from the frontier vocabulary of which he was so fond, a pioneer in the cause of wilderness preservation. Through his writings and initiatives within the Forest Service, he pushed forward the cause of wilderness preservation like no other person of his time, at least until Robert Marshall began his crusade for wilderness areas in the late 1920s. James Gilligan, in his influential dissertation on the development of Forest Service wilderness policy in the West, canonized Leopold as the "Father of the National Forest Wildemess System."2 Though this conclusion has elicited some challenges, most notably Donald Baldwin's defense of Arthur Carhart's claim to the title, the idea of wilderness preservation is considered among Leopold's unique contributions to American conservation.3

PAUL SUTTER is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Virginia. He thanks Donald Worster, Curt Meine, Nina Leopold-Bradley, and Charlie Luthin.

1 At the conclusion of his essay titled "The Green Lagoons," Aldo Leopold asked the rhetorical question: "Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?" A Sand County Almanac, (1949; reprint, New York, 1987), 141-49.

2 James P. Gilligan, "The Development of Policy and Administration of Forest Service

Primitive and Wilderness Areas in the Western United States" (Ph.D. diss., University of Michi- gan, 1953), 82.

3 Donald Baldwin, The Quiet Revolution: The Grass Roots of Today's Wilderness Preserva- tion Movement (Boulder,.1972).

Western Historical Quarterly 29 (Summer 1998): 187-214. Copyright ? 1998, Western History Association.

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Leopold's wilderness idea was, however, a highly contingent one, rooted in the Forest Service milieu in which he was based at the time and tied directly to prominent technological and cultural developments during the years surrounding World War I. Wilderness was not an idea waiting to be found, a pure Platonic form whose shadow flickered away for eons before it was deciphered correctly.4 Rather, it was the creation of a concerned and intellectually creative individual responding to the circumstances in which he found himself. This essay, then, is an attempt to come to terms with the conditions that led Leopold to conclude, by the early 1920s, that a particular type of

preservation should be undertaken in the national forests of the American West.

Leopold was the first to use the term wilderness to describe such preservation; it was

largely his use of the term that earned him his pioneer status. But what exactly did he mean by wilderness, and what was new about the idea? What qualities was he seeking to preserve, and why did he perceive the need for such preservation when he did? At a time when some are criticizing the wilderness idea for its many obfuscations, the an- swers to these questions seem more important than ever.5

Greater attention to this crucial early period in Leopold's wilderness advocacy reveals a more complex, ambiguous notion of wilderness, an idea aimed at particular contemporary phenomena. Specifically, Leopold was preoccupied with the prolifera- tion of the automobile, rampant road-building, and a quantitative and qualitative boom in recreational demands made on public lands. Though scholars like Susan Flader and Curt Meine have recognized the importance of these phenomena, they have not treated them with sufficient depth.6 Moreover, recent critics of the wilderness idea-most

notably William Cronon-have argued that the wilderness idea has come to function as something of an opiate among environmentalists, diverting their attention from

quotidian and proximate problems to a distinct, recreational nature. The trouble with

4 Environmental philosophers and some intellectual historians have tended to treat the

growth of environmental sentiment, and Leopold's thought in particular, in overly progressive terms as a slow movement from misconception to truth or as the unfolding of an ethical sequence. See J. Baird Callicott, In Defense of the Land Ethic: Essays in Environmental Philosophy (Albany, 1989); Max Oelschlaeger, The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology (New Ha- ven, 1991); Roderick Nash, Wilderess and the American Mind (1967; 2d ed., New Haven, CT, 1973). Curt Meine, Susan Flader, and Bryan Norton are more sensitive to the incremental nature of Leopold's intellectual development. See Curt Meine, Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work (Madison, 1988); Susan Flader, Thinking Like a Mountain: Aldo Leopold and the Evolution of an Ecological Atti- tude toward Deer, Wolves, and Forests (1974; reprint, Madison, 1994); Bryan Norton, Toward Unity Among Environmentalists (New York, 1991), 58.

5 William Cronon has offered the most influential recent critique of the wilderness idea in, "The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature," in Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York, 1995), 69-90. A excerpted copy of this article, along with responses by Thomas Dunlap, Michael Cohen, and Samuel Hays, appeared in Environmental History 1 (January 1996): 29-55. For a series of responses by wilderness activists, see Wild Earth 6 (Winter 1996/97), Special Issue, "Opposing Wilderness Deconstruction."

6 Meine, Aldo Leopold, 144-45, 194-97; Flader, Thinking Like a Mountain, 14, 16, 42, 79-80 and "Aldo Leopold and the Wilderness Idea," Living Wilderess 43 (December 1979): 4-8.

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Paul S. Sutter

the wilderness ideal, according to this argument, is that it gives us too little guidance in solving the much more complex problems involved in formulating healthy working and living relationships with the natural world.

Cronon's argument is an important and compelling one, but is the culpability with the wilderness idea? Or more to the point, does Cronon focus on one particular version of the wilderness idea at the expense of other more subtle formations?7 Cronon assumes that Americans forged and finished the wilderness idea in the decade around the turn of the century, and that its primary purpose was to preserve a pristine nature for America's leisure class. Wilderness, as Cronon sees it, was and is a sort of consumer ideal. Yet careful attention to Leopold's crafting of a wilderness policy reveals that he actually shared many of Cronon's concerns. For Leopold, wilderness was a land desig- nation designed in large part to save portions of the natural world from the juggernaut of modern recreation and automobile access.8 Leopold, in other words, agreed with the essence of Cronon's critique: In the early twentieth century modern Americans were in the process of crafting a dysfunctional, leisure-based relationship with nature. Leopold saw wilderness preservation as a way of saving large portions of the landscape from the crassitudes of that process. It was to stem the growth of road-building, the spread of automobility, and the recreational development of the natural world that Aldo Leopold first suggested the need for wilderness preservation in the national forests of the West. And, though he added scientific and ethical rationales to his defense of wilderness in the 1930s and 1940s, his idea of wilderness always retained, at its core, a recreational aesthetic. Where John Muir had railed against the producers who sought to transform nature into raw materials, Aldo Leopold criticized consumer trends that distinguished his era.

In June 1913, Aldo Leopold left the Southwest for his hometown of Burlington, Iowa, to recuperate from a case of nephritis.9 Though his absence was relatively brief, the Forest Service problems to which he returned one and one-half years later were different, in subtle ways, from the ones that had prevailed during the agency's first decade. Notably, recreation emerged as a prominent issue. Leopold had moved to the Southwest in 1909, fresh from Yale's forestry school, where he had imbibed and ab- sorbed the scientific and civic principles of Progressive forest conservation. Between 1909 and 1913, the young forester Leopold had cruised, mapped, wired, measured, and

7 In "The Trouble with Wilderness" Cronon works with an idea of wilderness that is the product of an earlier era. He assumes that this idea works for subsequent eras, that there was and is one wilderness idea that is constant from Frederick Jackson Turner to Dave Foreman. In another piece, from Uncommon Ground, Richard White argues that recreational ideas about na- ture have disabled many environmentalists from thinking critically and constructively about prob- lems of work and nature. See Richard White, "'Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?': Work and Nature," in Uncommon Ground, ed. Cronon, 171-85.

8 For whatever reason, Cronon does not discuss Aldo Leopold, Bob Marshall, or other integral figures in the intellectual and political history of wilderness preservation.

9 Meine, Aldo Leopold, 125.

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rationalized the remote forests of the Southwest, forests whose resources awaited their call to national service. Foresters waited with them. Though there was little market demand for public timber, foresters, trained on the assumption of timber scarcity, chomped at the bit to begin their practice of sustained-yield forestry.'0

Foiled agronomic designs marked the first decade of the Forest Service's exist- ence. The growing national forests contained approximately 20 percent of the nation's remaining standing timber, but contributed only a little more than 1 percent of the nation's yearly cut." The Forest Service had failed to achieve Gifford Pinchot's dream of aggressively regulating private forestry practices, and its own timber resources lan- guished. Visions of waste haunted Forest Service officials. Ripe timber stood uncut, maturing and dying before it could be put to use. Fires, particularly those that ravaged inaccessible areas, stole away with potentially precious timber. Insects and disease also took their share of this public resource. All of these depredations mocked foresters' goals of efficient management.'2

The trigger itch that foresters felt also emanated from the fiscal requirements of national forestry and the vagaries of the market. The national forests were supposed to be self-supporting, with timber and other revenues paying for their administration. But with high start-up costs and little demand for national forest timber, forest super- visors found it difficult to pay their bills. Accusations of market tampering further undermined the ability of public forestry to support itself. When public foresters did sell their timber, the private sector accused them of lowering prices by further glutting an already crowded market. Adequate private supplies and decreasing market demand thwarted efforts to get the timber out of the national forests.'3 All foresters could do

10 The biographical information from this paragraph is taken from Meine, Aldo Leopold, 87-123. David Clary identifies timber famine as the guiding fear of professional foresters in this era, as well as in subsequent eras. See David Clary, Timber and the Forest Service (Lawrence, 1986), 3-93. For the late nineteenth- century roots of the specter of timber scarcity, see Donald J. Pisani, "Forests and Conservation, 1865-1890," Journal of American History 72 (September 1985): 340- 59.

1 The national forests were growing in two ways: there were physical additions to the system, and there were, as foresters quickly pointed out, annual net increases in board feet within the forests due to tree growth. Statistics from U. S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Yearbook of the Department of Agriculture (Washington, DC, 1912), 58.

12 These concerns are particularly evident in the annual USDA, "Forest Service" sec- tions of the "Report[s] of the Secretary," Yearbook of the Department of Agriculture (Washington, DC, 1910-1915).

13 The rate at which private operations were liquidating their forests-a rate that a glutted market and low prices actually may have accelerated-meant that timber famine remained an ever-present, if unfulfilled, concern among foresters. See Harold K. Steen, The U. S. Forest Service: A History (Seattle, 1976), 95-6. For a vivid picture of deforestation in the late nineteenth century, see Michael Williams, Americans and their forests: A historical geography (New York, 1989). Another excellent source on the Forest Service during this period, is John Ise, The United States Forest Policy (New Haven, 1920).

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Paul S. Sutter

was plan for the day when their timber would be needed. In general, this meant sur-

veying and taking inventory of forest resources and outfitting the national forests with an administrative infrastructure of roads, trails, and telephone lines, mostly in the name of fire access.14 Lacking the desired fighting orders, Leopold and his colleagues bided their time with reconnaissance and surveillance, processes that effectively opened the forests of the West to recreationists.1 They also adopted a more localized notion of their public mission. In many cases, neighborly relations became the stand-in for an agenda of national reform.

The permanent public reservation of lands in the American West has rarely occurred without some expression of local concern. Visions of an activist federal gov- ernment providing effective stewardship have always clashed with the slightly more venerable homesteading tradition, in which public land ownership was but a whistlestop on the way to privatization. But in the early 1900s, there were more concrete problems that the formation of western national forests presented to nearby residents. National forests kept a great deal of land off the tax rolls, limiting the revenues of local govern- ments. National forests also had to absorb numerous traditional uses and perceived rights-particularly grazing claims-that predated national forest status. Finally, many westerners saw these public reservations as physical obstacles to the West's economic growth.16 Foresters generally were responsive to these concerns. National forests shared revenues with localities in lieu of lost property taxes and gave liberal (often free) ac- cess to resources, like timber, for local consumption. The Forest Service also set up a system of permits to accommodate, with some necessary reforms in practice, pre-exist- ing and other requested uses. Without a national timber market to serve, and under certain pressures to be neighborly, foresters devoted considerable time to local use issues. Leopold's early experiences on the Apache National Forest in Arizona and the Carson National Forest in New Mexico confirmed these trends. Before 1915, the West's national forests, though federally owned and charged with a national mission, were little more than regulated local commons.'7 But emerging patterns of recreational use,

14 This picture of the National Forests is drawn from a number of sources. See Clary, Timber and the Forest Service, particularly 3-93; Meine, Aldo Leopold, 87-123; USDA, "Forest Service" section of the "Report of the Secretary," Yearbook of the Department of Agriculture, 1910- 1915, for 1911, see 94-5; for 1912 see 58; and the "Annual Report[s] of the Forester" in Annual Report of the Department of Agriculture (Washington, DC, 1910-1915).

15 Meine, in Aldo Leopold, makes a strong case that these administrative activities con- tributed to Leopold's early sense of the disappearance of wilderness in the Southwest. "Like his father before him who sold the barbed wire that subdued the plains," Meine concluded, "Aldo Leopold was part of a historical irony, taming the very wilderness he most loved. Escudilla was still there, of course, and the White Mountain plateau, and the Mogollon Rim, and the breaks of the Blue. Their absolute wildness, however, was gone: mapped, measured, confined to reservations, shot by a set-gun, rifled from a rimrock, broken and put to bit on a dusty street in Springerville" (p. 105).

16 Ise, The United States Forest Policy, 254-98. 17 Meine, Aldo Leopold, 87-123.

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spurred in part by publicity and automobility, soon challenged this localism by intro- ducing a new and perplexing national mission.

While Leopold recuperated in Burlington, John Muir lost his beloved Hetch Hetchy Valley to San Francisco water interests in one of the most scrutinized episodes in con- servation history.18 The Hetch Hetchy episode defined a split between preservationists and conservationists that has framed conservation history ever since. And, as Roderick Nash and others have rightly pointed out, Hetch Hetchy was a pyrrhic victory for the forces who saw nature as only a store of resources. National debate over the reservoir stirred strong preservationist passions among some of the nation's citizens. Within a few years, the national parks got their bureaucracy and the clout of an organized lobby, and embarked on a massive publicity effort of their own. The creation of the National Park Service in 1916 stands as an important watershed in the official recognition of scenic preservation as a legitimate form of land use.19 But it also coincided with the growth of a national zeal for outdoor recreation, a phenomenon that forced some to question the adequacy of park preservation. With Stephen Mather at the helm of the Park Service, park preservation quickly came to mean development and use of a differ- ent sort: the outdoor recreation age had arrived, altering the very terms of the debate over preservation and use on federal lands.20

In the mid-1910s, the national parks were still few and far from the centers of population. The national forests, on the other hand, were extensive and (particularly with the advent of the Weeks Act of 1911, which appropriated funds for the purchase of eastern national forests) closer to population centers. Moreover, they allowed hunt- ing, fishing, and other activities that the Park Service either prohibited or strictly regulated. Increased automobile ownership conspired with a growing grid of adminis- trative roads and trails to produce a rapid increase in recreational access to national forests. Automobiles brought picnickers, campers, hikers, and sporting enthusiasts into the national forests in large numbers.

Car-camping emerged in the mid-teens as a rustic and less expensive alternative to the genteel resorts of the railroad age. Initially, auto-campers resorted to the rural

18 Good sources on Muir's life and the Hetch Hetchy episode include Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind; Stephen Fox, The American Conservation Movement: John Muir and His Legacy (Madison, 1985); Michael Smith, Pacific Visions: California Scientists and the Environment, 1850-1915 (New Haven, 1987).

19 Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 180-81; Meine, Aldo Leopold, 144-45; Alfred Runte, National Parks: The American Experience, (1979; 2d ed., Lincoln, 1987), 83-5; John Miles, Guardians of the Parks: A History of the National Parks and Conservation Association (Wash- ington, DC, 1995), 10-5; Marguerite S. Shaffer, "See America First: Tourism and National Iden- tity, 1905-1930" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1994), and "'See America First': Re-Envision- ing Nation and Region through Western Tourism," Pacific Historical Review 65 (November 1996): 559-81.

20 A nice profile of Mather's activities is Richard West Sellars, "Manipulating Nature's Paradise: National Parks Management under Stephen T. Mather, 1916-1929," Montana The Magazine of Western History 43 (Spring 1993): 2-13.

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roadsides for their recreation. But landowners and local governments, growing tired of having their land strewn with litter and their property used as a wayside rest stop, delimited access to roadsides and the rural landscape.21 One result was that munici- palities developed free auto-camps, often built and maintained by civic boosters keen to entice potentially lucrative tourist traffic. Another outcome was a heavy reliance on public lands for such recreation. As automobile touring became immensely popu- lar, national forests provided excellent resting spots for the travel-weary. Hiking enthusiasts, who had long relied on rural roads as their primary routes, found it in- creasingly difficult to coexist with automobiles. As a result, hikers turned to isolated areas for their recreation.22 National forests fit the bill perfectly. Finally, as Leopold noticed, the growing number of hunters and fishers, and their increased mobility, im- pelled private landowners to post against trespass much of the rural landscape, thereby forcing sportsmen onto public lands.23

The automobile and improved roads thus contributed to increased recreational use of the national forests in two ways: they provided a significant number of Ameri- cans with rapid transportation and access to these public lands at the same time that they encouraged the privatization of the roadside and rural lands. These visitors repre- sented a new user constituency that raised questions about the role of national forests that many foresters were unprepared to answer.

In 1914, Aldo Leopold returned West to a Forest Service on the brink of a con- frontation with the outdoor recreation age. After a nine-month stint in the Office of Grazing, Leopold was assigned by Arthur Ringland to oversee the district's new work on fish and game, recreation, and publicity. The position itself, in large part a reaction to emerging uses and demands, heralded a new direction in Forest Service policy. Leopold almost certainly looked at the position as an opportunity to devote his ener- gies to developing and implementing a game policy for the national forests of the

21 For a discussion of autocamping and some of these issues of roadside use, see Warren Belasco, Americans on the Road: From Autocamp to Motel, 1910-1945 (Cambridge, MA, 1979). Other treatments of the relationship between automobiles and rural dwellers include Michael Berger, The Devil Wagon in God's Country: The Automobile and Social Change in Rural America (Hamden, CT, 1979); Joseph Interrante, "You Can't Go to Town in a Bath-tub: Automobile Movement and the Reorganization of Rural American Space, 1900-1930," Radical History Review 21 (Fall 1979): 151-68; Reynold Wik, Henry Ford and Grass-Roots America (Ann Arbor, 1972); Paul S. Sutter, "Paved With Good Intentions: Good Roads, the Automobile, and the Rhetoric of Rural Improvement in Kansas Farmer, 1890-1914," Kansas History 18 (Winter 1995-1996): 284- 99.

22 The most prominent example of the automobile coming into conflict with hikers occurred during the 1920s and 1930s in Appalachia. I discuss this issue at greater length in my dissertation, "Driven Wild: The Intellectual and Cultural Origins of Wilderness Advocacy during the Interwar Years" (Ph.D. diss., University of Kansas, 1997).

23 Aldo Leopold, "Wild Lifers vs. Game Farmers: A Plea for Democracy in Sport," in The River of the Mother of God, and Other Essays by Aldo Leopold, ed. Susan Flader and J. Baird Callicott (Madison, 1991), 66.

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Southwest.24 Recreational trends and duties, however, effectively divided Leopold's attention.

Leopold's first major assignment in his new position was to visit the Grand Can- yon, then a national monument administered by the Forest Service, and report on recreational conditions there. The result was "Grand Canyon Working Plan: Uses, Information, Recreational Development," a December 1916 report co-authored with Tusayan National Forest Director Don P. Johnston (with illustrations by noted land-

scape architect Frank Waugh). The major concern of Leopold and Johnston was that

unplanned, private, commercial development threatened to undermine the recreational and scenic values of the area. They cited abuses: "discourteous treatment by business

permittees"; "offensive sights and sounds such as electric advertising signs, megaphones, soliciting, etc."; unsanitary conditions; unfair business practices; views blocked by es- tablishments like the photographic studio of Emory and Ellsworth Kolb (who had

recently begun showing moving pictures of the canyon to augment their trade in prints, postcards, and other simulacra); and dangerous conditions, including the unfortunate rage for rolling stones and other large objects down into the canyon.25

Though the Grand Canyon had been a popular tourist destination for a number of decades, visitation increased rapidly in the mid-teens.26 The Leopold-Johnston report cited an average visitation of about 25,000 people a year (380,000 total) since 1900, though they noted that the canyon had received one hundred thousand of these visi- tors in 1915 alone. This was largely due to the "See America First" campaigns and other promotional efforts launched to coincide with travel to the Panama Pacific ex-

positions in San Francisco and San Diego. Indeed, one of the highlights of the San Francisco Exposition was a scale model of the Grand Canyon, built and displayed by the Santa Fe Railroad, which advertised both the scenic values of the canyon and the Santa Fe Railroad's role in getting people there.27 The Santa Fe was not the only party profiting from increased visitation. Livery services, souvenir shops, campgrounds, and hotels all took advantage of lax Forest Service permitting rules. More disturbing than the activities of these permittees, however, were those people who had used mining claims to gain a stranglehold over prime spots on the South Rim. The most egregious

24 Meine, Aldo Leopold, 135-37 and Flader, Thinking Like a Mountain, 10-1. 25 Meine, Aldo Leopold, 144-46; Aldo Leopold and Don Johnston, "Grand Canyon

Working Plan: Uses, Information, Recreational Development," December 1916, series 10, sub- series 11, folio 1, Aldo Leopold Papers, University of Wisconsin Archives, Madison, WI (cited hereafter as LP).

26 For primary accounts of early tourist experiences at the Grand Canyon, see Paul Schullery, ed., The Grand Canyon: Early Impressions (Boulder, 1981).

27 There was also a scale model of Yellowstone at the exposition, provided by the Union Pacific Railroad and complete with functioning geysers, that served to advertise the Santa Fe. Michael Smith, Pacific Visions, 187; Shaffer, "See America First," 168-70; another source on the Pan-Pacific Expositions is Robert W. Rydell, All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at Ameri- can International Expositions, 1876-1916 (Chicago, 1984), 208-33.

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Paul S. Sutter

offender was Ralph Cameron, later a Republican senator from Arizona, who managed to cobble together numerous claims totaling thousands of acres. For many years, Cameron controlled the Bright Angel Trail, the main route to the Canyon bottom, and charged a toll for its use.28 Along with stresses from increasing numbers of visitors, Forest Service policies that facilitated private commercial development of public lands-including these mineral claims-contributed to the chaotic scene described in the report. Indeed, those policies of permit were beginning to have national implica- tions as recreational users reinterpreted the Forest Service mission.

Leopold and Johnston sought to resolve the growing conflict between scenic ap- preciation and the provision of conveniences-between national interest in the area and local efforts to profit from that interest-through strict regulation, zoning, and the establishment of business standards. Without resorting to Forest Service or mo-

nopoly control of concessions, Leopold and Johnston insisted that commerce on the Canyon rim be guided by a spirit of public service rather than by one of private gain.29 Though unwilling to move beyond regulation, both men recognized and expressed concern over the commercial developments that accompanied increased interest in the West and its federally-owned treasures. Commercial tourism had come to the rim as a filial extension of broader economic culture, providing novel challenges to the maintenance of the Grand Canyon as a public space.30

The Grand Canyon was an exceptional case for the Forest Service, which was unaccustomed to dealing with such sights-or such extensive tourist development. In 1919, the Grand Canyon became a national park, its administration transferred to an agency prepared to handle such issues. But the phenomena that Leopold observed on the canyon rim were manifesting themselves in less boisterous ways in the region's other forests. The holding pattern in which foresters found themselves made facilitat- ing recreational developments seem like a sensible interim activity, particularly in terms of revenue. Such developments also fit cleanly within the scheme of allowing permitted access for local use. Few imagined that recreation would become such a national (indeed, nationalistic) phenomenon, as it had on the canyon rim, or that it

28 For Cameron's history, see Robert Shankland, Steve Mather of the National Parks (1951; 3d. ed., New York, 1970), 227-42.

29 There is nothing particularly new to these objections to the commercial crowding out the natural. The battle for the view at Niagara Falls was the most important of a number of predecessors. See Elizabeth McKinsey, Niagara Falls: Icon of the American Sublime (New York, 1985) and John Sears, Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1989), 12-30.

30 Of all Leopold scholars, Curt Meine has treated Leopold's work at the Grand Can- yon most thoroughly. Meine clearly understood the outdoor recreation boom that shaped the Canyon's commercialism as of 1915. "The Canyon," Meine concluded, ". .. was feeling the initial effects of the changes in American society: more wealth, more leisure time, and, above all, more mobility." See Meine, Aldo Leopold, 145. I agree with Meine on this point, though I have added some detail to this picture. Where I differ from Meine is in my attention to the mechanics of per- mitting such use.

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would grow to rival timber extraction as a highest use-but two pieces of federal legis- lation opened the national forests to even greater recreational use, raising just such a specter.

The first was the Term Permit Act (or Term Occupancy Act) of 4 March 1915.31 Since its inception, the Forest Service had allowed the construction of summer cabins and other sorts of resort development on its lands, though the short-term nature of the permits and the tacit understanding that natural resource needs could thwart their renewal had kept development sparse and simple.32 The Term Permit Act increased the potential duration of recreational permits to up to thirty years with options for renewal, which in turn encouraged more permanent development and greater capital investment in the national forests. In a sense, it provided for recreational homestead- ing, though without the prospect of gaining title to the land.33 The result was a rapid increase in the construction of summer homes, municipal and private camps, resorts, and hotels in the national forests. By the mid-twenties, permits for summer homes had quadrupled, and the rate of growth for other developments was not far behind.34 Na- tional forests located near sizable urban populations saw the greatest increase in such use. The Angeles National Forest, located in the San Gabriel mountains to the north

31 Information on the act appears in USDA, The Use Book: A Manual of Information about the National Forests (Washington, DC, 1918), 145-47. The Use Book was the pocket manual used by foresters in the field for quick reference regarding almost all Forest Service policies. See also William Tweed, Recreation Site Planning and Improvements in the National Forests, 1891-1942 (Washington, DC, 1981), 3. Though Meine's Aldo Leopold briefly mentions this piece of legisla- tion, it is only in relation to describing Leopold's duties (pp. 156-57). As I show later in the essay, this piece of legislation, and the building that it spurred, was absolutely essential to Leopold's growing conception that wilderness needed to be saved.

32 Many of the earliest permits were for the development of sanitaria and spas located near mineral springs. See USDA, "Report of the Secretary," in Yearbook of the Department of Agri- culture (Washington, DC, 1913), 50.

33 There were those who advocated that such recreational development be carried out under homesteading principles, with land rights actually reverting to permittees after a certain period of residence. But this idea was rejected because of the potential for land speculation that might have resulted. See USDA, "Report of the Forester," in Annual Report of the Department of Agriculture (Washington, DC, 1916), 176.

34 Summer homes, camps, resorts, hunting shacks, and other sorts of development pre- dated this act, though it is difficult to get a clear sense of the scale of the development. Forest Service annual reports lumped recreational permits with all other special uses. In 1916, a year after the Term Permit Act, Chief Forester Graves reported that there were 2,118 permits for resi- dence sites out of a total of 19,289 permits in effect that year. See USDA "Report of the Forester," in Annual Reports of the Department of Agriculture (Washington, DC, 1917): 176. By 1924, there were 8,349 cabins and residences and 724 camps, resorts, and hotels (the latter up from 359 in 1917) according to a report by E. A. Sherman. See E. A. Sherman, "Outdoor Recreation on the National Forests," 3, in folder "1925-26, 30-3, 36, 40, National Forests-Recreational uses," box 72, Society of American Foresters Collection, Forest History Society, Durham, NC. As of 1930, there were 1,201 hotels and 10,770 summer homes. See Jesse Steiner, Americans At Play: Recent Trends in Recreation and Leisure Time Activities (New York, 1933), 41. Steiner's was one of a num- ber of monographs commissioned by Herbert Hoover's Research Committee on Recent Social Trends.

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and west of Los Angeles, had 1,329 permits for summer residences and resorts in effect as of 30 June 1920. These included a 23-acre municipal camp, run by the city of Los Angeles, that contained 61 cabins for use by its residents.35 Though the Angeles was perhaps an exceptional case, summer cabins, camps, and resorts soon dotted many national forests, and almost all of them were owned and operated by parties other than the Forest Service.36

Among Leopold's duties as head of recreational policy was the oversight of such development in the national forests of the Southwest. He surveyed areas for cabin and resort development in an attempt to bring some semblance of order to recreational use. Prior to and immediately following the Term Permit Act, most cabin and resort development had been haphazard. People located on a site of their choice, applied for a permit, and built. As the pace of development increased, many of the most desirable locations became crowded with cabins. This was particularly true of stream-sides and lake-fronts, where vacationists vied with each other for prime spots, and where con- cessionaires were quick to supply services. The need for order drew foresters into this process. In May 1916, Leopold jotted down some "Notes on the Lake Mary Public Use Area" that provide a glimpse at what was a fairly characteristic pattern.

Lake Mary, only ten miles east of Flagstaff, had become a popular destination for the city's growing population. In response, Leopold drew up a plan that provided vari- ous sorts of access to the lake. He suggested limiting development of residences to the south shore and reserving the north shore for campers who might otherwise get crowded out. There was already a roadhouse at one end of the lake that rented cottages and row boats, and sold such products as horsefeed, gasoline, bait, and foodstuffs. The propri- etors also operated a dance hall. Aside from planning cabin and camp sites, Leopold mentioned the need for constructing a seven-mile road to make the entire lake acces- sible and suggested the wisdom of advertising the lake's charms to the residents of Flagstaff. He seemed to have few concerns about such developments, though he did give campers a nod by reserving areas for them. Moreover, Leopold was careful to mention the continued availability of the area's timber resources, though he attached a throw-away line that may have alerted foresters to potential incompatibilities between recreation and silviculture. "It goes without saying however," Leopold in- toned, "that no further cutting within sight of the lake should be allowed."37 This was a restriction that seemed more at home in the national parks.

Though a number of historians have portrayed Forest Service recreational devel- opment as a response to an organized and active National Park Service-and in the minds of some top administrators, such an institutional rivalry was a powerful rationale for action-it seems more appropriate to see this new Forest Service interest

35 Tweed, Recreation Site Planning and Improvements, 3. 36 Ibid., 3-4. Tweed points out that many of those who built individual residences

formed cooperative associations to provide common facilities. 37 Aldo Leopold, "Notes on the Lake Mary Public Use Area," 20 May 1916, series 10,

sub-series 11, folder 4, box 2, LP.

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in recreational development as essentially reactionary.38 Most Forest Service officials, particularly those in the field, realized that they had little choice but to provide for visitors who were coming of their own volition. Term permit development was one method for providing for these visitors. The Forest Service also engaged in fairly cur- sory campsite development, again mostly as a defensive measure. Rapidly increasing recreational use created sanitation problems and fire hazards. To protect themselves, foresters developed campgrounds, with fire pits and toilets, in the most heavily used areas. The public learned to take advantage of the many openings that Forest Service

policy provided for recreational use and development. In the absence of aggressive silviculture, recreational development and use provided needed revenue and reaffirmed foresters' roles as guardians of a useful public resource. And existing patterns of use encouraged foresters to institute guiding policies for development even though many remained skeptical of embracing a recreational mission.

The beauty of the permit system was that it allowed foresters to treat recreational

development as they would any other special use-as a secondary and largely inciden- tal development that, though permissible, did not force them to reconsider the prior- ity of silviculture.39 But the rapid growth in recreational development distinguished it from other special uses, and did in fact signal a diversion from silviculture. Aldo Leopold's plea for the trees ringing Lake Mary was but one sign that recreational development and silviculture would clash. Moreover, the term permit system eventually undermined itself by allowing for the privatization and overdevelopment of some of the best recre- ational areas. Crucially, this system worked within the older homesteading mentality that public lands were there to be privatized; though foresters had seen fit to protect resources against private exploitation, they had not extended the same considerations to recreational areas. To those who saw recreational access to the national forests as a public good, this trend towards privatization was troubling.

A series of Federal Aid Highway acts, the first of which came in 1916, also had a pronounced effect on National Forest recreation.40 The 1916 act, the first significant appropriation of federal money for road-building, provided $75 million over ten years for road development throughout the United States. Of this $75 million, the Forest Service received the disproportionate sum of $10 million, or $1 million a year for ten years. Additional appropriations in 1919 and 1921 further increased federal funding for roads. The 1921 act distinguished between two types of roads within the national

38 For examples of the rivalry, see Hal K. Rothman, "'A Regular Ding-Dong Fight': Agency Culture and Evolution in the NPS-USFS Dispute, 1916-1937," Western Historical Quar- terly 20 (May 1989): 141-62. See also Swain, Federal Conservation Policy, 1921-1933 (Berkeley, 1963), 21; Steen, The U. S. Forest Service: A History, 158-61.

39 Historians have not, I think, appreciated this distinction between sponsoring and directing recreational development and permitting recreational development. But this distinction is a vital one, for it reveals a more ambivalent mood among foresters when it came to recreational development.

40 The best source on early federal highway policy is Bruce E. Seely, Building the Ameri- can Highway System: Engineers as Policy Makers (Philadelphia, 1987), 46-65.

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forests: forest development roads, designed specifically for administrative purposes like fire control, received an additional $5.5 million while forest highways, designed to

augment state road systems and connect local communities, received an additional $9.5 million. These funding levels represented a huge increase over previous years, and both types of roads improved public access to the National Forests. For their part, the Forest Service and the Department of Agriculture viewed these road improve- ments as a way of increasing their administrative control of forest lands, of reducing the isolation of communities in and around national forests, of linking these commu- nities to an emergent postal system, and of helping localities with small tax bases pay for modern road improvements. But it should also be noted that "Good Roads" boost- ers quickly latched onto these initiatives as ways of building tourist infrastructures.41 Building upon the small base of administrative roads and trails created during the previous decade or so, this new round of road improvement was one of the reasons that National Forest visitation increased from three million people in 1917 to about 11 million in 1924.42

In general, the 1910s and 1920s were a time of fairly aggressive road improvement throughout the nation, as automobile production increased and as the federal govern- ment took a more active role in planning and developing the nation's automobile infrastructure. In most cases, increased road funding went to improving and coordi- nating existing road systems. An exception to this rule, however, was in the national forests, where road-building had a truly transformative impact after 1916.43 Forest Service roads increased from a few thousand miles in 1916 to over 120,000 by 1935. About one-fifth of this mileage was in the form of forest highways.44 One result was a revolution in access for those seeking recreation and prime sites for recreational

41 USDA, "Report of the Forester," Annual Reports of the Department of Agriculture (Washington, DC, 1925), 41-4. See also Gilligan, "The Development of Policy," 73-4.

42 Gilligan, "The Development of Policy," 95. For a spirited discussion on how the new federal appropriations were going to revolutionize the national forests, see 0. C. Merrill in "Open- ing Up the National Forests by Road Building," Yearbook of the Department of Agriculture (Wash- ington, DC, 1917), 521-29. Though appropriations began rolling in after the first act in 1916, U. S. involvement in World War I postponed much road-building until after the war.

43 Craig W. Allin makes this argument in The Politics of Wilderess Preservation (Westport, CT, 1982), 63-5.

44 In "Opening Up the National Forests by Road Building," 0. C. Merrill stated that the Forest Service had built or improved (or both) only 2,000 miles of road between its inception in 1905 and 1916; see Merrill, "Opening Up the National Forests," 522. James Gilligan maintains that, as of 1907, the national forests contained less than 5,000 miles of road (presumably the 2,000 Merrill referred to brought the total up to somewhere around 7,000 miles by 1916); see Gilligan, "The Development of Policy and Administration," 63. The annual "Report[s] of the Forester" provide breakdowns of yearly road appropriations as well as mileage of roads constructed and maintained. The "Report of the Forester" for 1935 lists 20,924 miles of forest highways and 100,024 miles of forest development roads for a total mileage of 120,948-a significant increase from the 5,000 in 1907. This 1935 figure, of course, reflects much of the frenetic activity in the national forests that resulted from the enactment of New Deal conservation and work initiatives; see "Report of the Forrester, 1935," 36.

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development. These dramatic road improvements, along with other concurrent devel- opments-the Term Permit Act, the creation of the National Park Service, "See America First" sloganeering, and other publicity generated as Europe was closed to American tourists during World War One, and the substantial and rapid rises in outdoor recreation that came with automobility-made the mid-teens an important watershed in the recreational development of the public lands in general and national forests in particular.

Though most foresters continued to cling to sustained yield timber production as their guiding ethos, increased recreational activity encouraged a number of official efforts to survey the recreational potential of the national forests. The primary ques- tion that foresters faced was whether the Forest Service itself should construct and administer public recreational facilities or continue to rely on their permitting policies. Until about 1920, almost all recreational development came as the result of

private (or municipal) initiative.45 In 1917, the Forest Service took an unprecedented step when it hired Frank Waugh, a professor of landscape architecture at Massachu- setts Agricultural College (now the University of Massachusetts), to complete a recre- ational survey for all Forest Service lands.46 It was the first move in a short-lived affair between foresters and landscape architects.47

Waugh's report, Recreation Use on the National Forests (1918), painted a vivid picture of the ubiquity of recreational activity on the national forests. He mentioned "the large number of camps" created in the national forests for automobile tourists, the popular picnic grounds near urban areas, and the "several hundred" communities of summer vacationists. This heavy use led Waugh to argue that it was time for the Forest Service to see recreation as a primary use, the equal of timber production, grazing, and watershed protection. In his mind, this did not mean a radical reorientation of the Forest Service mission. In only a few cases, Waugh maintained, would recreational use of forest lands be the exclusive use. But this conclusion did imply that the Forest Service itself would assume a direct role in developing the recreational resources of their lands. As a landscape engineer, Waugh also emphasized the connections be- tween recent urban developments in the areas of parks, recreation, and playgrounds and the possibilities of extending those uses, under federal guidance, onto the national forests.48 Indeed, Waugh's other major conclusion was that the Forest Service hire

45 Tweed, Recreation Site Planning and Improvements, 2-3.

46 Waugh had collaborated with Leopold and Johnston on the Grand Canyon report. 47 Tweed, Recreation Site Planning and Improvements, 6-7; Steen, The U. S. Forest Ser-

vice, 120; Meine, Aldo Leopold, 159.

48 For trends in the development of urban parks and recreation, see Paul Boyer, The Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920 (Cambridge, MA, 1978); Galen Cranz, The Politics of Park Design: A History of Urban Parks in America (Cambridge, MA, 1982); John Kasson, Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (New York, 1978); Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar, The Park and the People: A History of Central Park (New York, 1994).

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landscape engineers, professionals trained in recreational and aesthetic design, to plan such uses of the national forests.49

The Forest Service was hesitant to take Waugh's recommendations to heart. His conclusions meant looking at the forests as a different sort of resource. Moreover, the Park Service made noises about recreation being their responsibility, and many forest- ers were unwilling either to get into such a conflict or take on new responsibilities.50 To some, the Term Permit Act and road and trail building were trends that promised only to complicate their jobs and further populate the forests with aesthetes who grew queasy at the thought of logging or other extractive uses. Why, then, should they go one step further and get directly involved? Thus, Waugh's two major contentions- that foresters treat recreation as a primary use, and that they hire landscape architects to plan for this use-were tough ones for many foresters to stomach. And, as the expe- rience of Arthur Carhart illustrated, the Forest Service, though willing to flirt, ulti- mately refused to commit to recreational planning and development in any substan- tial way.

In 1918, Assistant Forester for Lands E. A. Sherman decided to accept Waugh's logic and pursue the hiring of landscape architects. A couple of districts had expressed an interest in having a landscape architect on staff.51 Fortuitously, Arthur Carhart, who had received a landscape architecture degree from Iowa State College in 1916, had just been discharged from the armed services and was seeking employment. Carhart was assigned to District Two, which at the time comprised the Rocky Mountains and the Northern Plains states (including Minnesota's Superior National Forest). Recre- ational use of Colorado's national forests had increased rapidly as towns and cities on the Front Range grew, and as more farmers on the Plains got automobiles and good roads to drive them on. Sherman told Carhart to report to the district office in Denver to begin work on 1 March 1919.52

49 Frank Waugh, Recreation Uses on the National Forests, (Washington, DC, 1918); Tweed, Recreation Site Planning and Improvements, 6-7; Meine, Aldo Leopold, 159-60. Again, though Meine briefly mentions Waugh's report, he does not draw out the distinctions between Waugh's suggestions and Leopold's later proposals.

50 For a full rendition, see Baldwin, The Quiet Revolution, 63-70.

51 True to Pinchot's initial vision, much of the Forest Service's administration remained at the district level. Though the Washington office sent out many directives, districts were gener- ally given flexibility in implementation. This was the case with recreational development and would later be the case with wilderness designation. See Steen, The U. S. Forest Service, 76-7; and Rothman, "'A Regular Ding-Dong Fight,"' 143.

52 Tweed, Recreation Site Planning and Improvements, 7-10. Baldwin, The Quiet Revolu- tion, is a detailed treatment of Carhart's activities during the late teens and early twenties. Corre- spondence with Sherman and other district foresters can be found in the Arthur Carhart Papers, Denver Public Library, Denver, CO (hereafter CP). For later examples of evidence that farmers were using the national forests in Colorado, see F R. Johnson, "Farmers Numerous in Throng of Motorists that Camp in Forests," Yearbook of the Department of Agriculture (Washington, DC, 1930), 247-9, and F V. Horton, "Camps in the National Forests Attract Farm Folks Seeking Rec- reation," Yearbook of the Department of Agriculture (Washington, DC, 1932), 121-22.

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Carhart's first piece of work was a tourist trail up Pike's Peak, a peak with a long history as an attraction.53 Then he began his first extensive recreation plan, this one for the San Isabel National Forest, in south-central Colorado. In two written plans for the area, Carhart wove a vision of a vast recreational space with roads, trails, camp- grounds, cabins, and resorts. He even suggested the possibility of building an electric trolley system to move people through the forest. His vision was of a national forest thoroughly dedicated to recreation, and developed to provide uniform public access and enjoyment without the commercial distractions.54 Carhart was the first person to provide such a comprehensive recreational plan for a national forest, and by relying on a private organization for financial support, he was able to complete much of the de- velopment.55 Like the Leopold and Johnston report on the Grand Canyon, Carhart's recreational plan for the San Isabel was strongly rooted in a particular conception of the public good. His plan provided few opportunities for private development, adver- tising, or profit, and those commercial facilities that might spring up would be under pressure to adhere to specific business standards. Another related goal of the plan was to assure that certain common practices, like the "promiscuous spotting of summer homes," did not monopolize the most important public attractions.56

Like Leopold, Carhart was also responsible for supervising developments under the Term Permit Act. In 1919, the same year that his reports on the San Isabel ap- peared, Carhart visited Trapper's Lake in Colorado's White River National Forest to lay out sites for several hundred summer homes and to plan a through road around the lake. The lake's relative isolation, even today, is a testament to the reach of the auto- mobile and improved roads as well as to the pervasive demand for summer residences during the teens.57 While completing the survey, Carhart struck on the idea that litter- ing the lakeshore with summer homes would compromise its natural beauty. But what further irked Carhart was that this compromise resulted in a form of restricted access.

53 For more on the Pike's Peak area, see Anne Farrar Hyde, An American Vision: Far Western Landscape and National Culture, 1820-1920 (New York, 1990) and Earl Pomeroy, In Search of the Golden West: The Tourist in Western America (New York, 1957).

54 Tweed, Recreation Site Planning and Improvements, 7-10. For the specifics of his plans, see Arthur Carhart, "General Working Plan: Recreational Development of the San Isabel Na- tional Forest, Colorado," December 1919, and "Recreation Plan, San Isabel National Forest, Colorado," box 2, C. P.

55 For Carhart's accomplishments on the San Isabel, see Tweed, Recreation Site Planning and Improvements, 8-10 and Robert W. Cermak, "In the Beginning: The First National Forest Recreation Plan," Parks and Recreation 9 (November 1974): 27-33. The San Isabel Public Recre- ation Association, based in Pueblo, CO, played an important part in realizing much of Carhart's vision. Carhart provided similar plans for portions of the Pike and Umcompahgre National Forests in Colorado and for the Superior National Forest in Minnesota.

56 Carhart, "General Working Plan," 59.

57 The 1996 Rand-McNally Road Atlas reveals that Trapper's Lake, due north of 1-70 and Glenwood Springs, is accessible from three directions, but all involve considerable drives on dirt roads (Skokie, IL, 1996), 16-7.

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As a result, he proposed that no summer homes or hotels be developed along the lake's shore. Instead, he argued, they should be kept at a distance of at least half a mile, with trails connecting them to a lake that remained undeveloped and thus truly public. Carl Stahl, Carhart's supervisor, accepted the suggestion. It was this act of preserva- tion that Donald Baldwin claimed as the first application of the wilderness idea.58

While a one-half mile strip around a lake may not conform to more grandiose notions of wilderess, Carhart recognized that the rapidly multiplying private goals of recreationists threatened the public nature of Forest Service lands, and marred some of its best scenery. By defining his preservation proposal in opposition to recreational development, Carhart shared with Leopold what would be a cornerstone of the latter's argument for wilderness preservation in the early 1920s. In his various memoranda on Trapper's Lake, however, Carhart never used the term "wilderness." He was concerned mostly with preserving and protecting "natural scenic beauty" from "the presence of man-made structures" and from "monopolization."59 Though Aldo Leopold would pro- pose something more sweeping than restraining development in the immediate vicin- ity of scenic areas, he and Carhart shared common concerns about the threats posed to the public nature of the national forests' recreational resources either by private, or commercial development, or by both.60

Not long after his successful effort to preserve the shoreline of Trapper's Lake, Arthur Carhart and Aldo Leopold crossed paths. On 6 December 1919, on his way home from a Forest Service meeting in Salt Lake City, Leopold stopped at the District Two office to visit with Carhart. The two spent the entire day discussing what Carhart had done for Trapper's Lake and how that policy might be applied elsewhere. Leopold, who apparently had been entertaining preservationist notions for a while, almost cer- tainly was stimulated by the meeting to be vocal about his own visions.61 A few days after their meeting, Carhart jotted down some of his thoughts on the idea of preserva- tion of areas within the National Forests and sent them to Leopold. In his "Memoran- dum to Mr. Leopold," Carhart again stressed the theme of scenic monopolization through private development and its threat to public access. Indeed, one of the memorandum's major themes was that, by continuing to rely on permitted use and refusing to get more involved in recreational development, the Forest Service was shirking its duty to the public. There was a limit, Carhart pointed out, to the number of lakeshores and other scenic areas in the National Forests. For Carhart, the essential questions were, "how far shall the Forest Service carry or allow to be carried man made improvements in scenic territories, and whether there is not a definite point where all

58 Baldwin, The Quiet Revolution, 29-42.

59 Arthur Carhart, "Memorandum to Mr. Leopold, District 3," 10 December 1919, series 10, sub-series 11, folder 2, box 2, LP. A copy of the memorandum also exists in CP, box 1.

60 Carhart shared what Meine referred to as "Leopold's progressive disdain for the mo- nopolization of nature's wonders." See Meine, Aldo Leopold, 177-78.

61 Ibid.

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such developments ... shall stop."62 The Forest Service, according to Carhart, needed to permanently reserve certain scenic portions of its domain before many of its hold-

ings were similarly developed. As Leopold read Carhart's memorandum, he must have realized that the two of

them, despite their like-mindedness, had fundamental differences. Leopold was a for- ester by training and a hunter-naturalist by avocation. He was less interested in the

landscape architect's notions of scenic beauty; though not immune to nature's charms, he came to understand how modern technologies and easy access shaped the ways in which people appreciated nature. Scenery was the goal of tourists; he wanted more from outdoor recreation. As a hunter, he was keenly aware of the ways in which the

dynamic technological duo of the automobile and more efficient firearms had made

hunting a modem activity and, in combination with road development, had opened even the most remote areas to modem hunters. For Leopold, the modem American's fervor for outdoor recreation was suspect. Even the types of development that Carhart had proposed for the San Isabel seemed to promise access without appreciation. More

importantly, these developments were quickly delimiting the options of those who

sought outings in areas free from such amenities. Finally, Leopold was still wedded to

forestry culture and the idea of responsible resource use. For these and other reasons, Aldo Leopold's 1921 proposal to preserve a large section of the Gila National Forest

diverged in important ways from Carhart's vision of preservation. Where Carhart sought to preserve scenic areas for public enjoyment (and to protect these areas from the encroachment of recreational developments that, in other areas, he avidly promoted), Leopold sought to preserve an environment for a different sort of recreational experi- ence.63

Despite what he accomplished in the San Isabel National Forest and at Trapper's Lake-somewhat contradictory successes given the aggressive development involved in the former plan and the resistance to such development that marked the latter

plan-Carhart grew frustrated with the lack of financial and moral support from the Forest Service. As recreational activity swelled in the region's forests, Carhart felt overburdened. Where he saw a need for landscape planning, most Forest Service offi- cials were content to build a few fire pits and toilets, continue to issue permits, and, with a little benign guidance, let recreationists fend for themselves.64 Large appropria- tions for recreational development were not forthcoming from Congress. Moreover, as Carhart sensed, the experiment of mixing the visions of a landscape architect with the priorities of professional foresters had not yielded satisfactory results for either side. To

62 Carhart, "Memorandum to Mr. Leopold, District 3," CP. 63 David Backes explores the contradictions between Carhart's preservationist visions

and his pro-development plans in "Wilderness Visions: Arthur Carhart's 1922 Proposal for the Quetico-Superior Wilderness," Forest and Conservation History 35 (July 1991): 128-37.

64 These frustrations are clear in a series of letters between Carhart and Sherman, many of which were reprinted as an appendix to Baldwin, The Quiet Revolution, 273-83.

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Carhart, the foresters seemed oblivious to the social and aesthetic needs of American citizens; to the foresters, Carhart seemed insensitive to the priority of silviculture. After numerous pleas for more funding and personnel, Carhart resigned his position in 1923.65

What had Aldo Leopold been up to while Waugh and Carhart were urging the Forest Service to embrace recreation? After muddling through the remainder of 1917 as a member of a forestry corps depleted by wartime demands, Leopold left the Forest Service and took a position as secretary of the Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce. Leopold saw the position with the chamber as an opportunity to serve his community and his country while also furthering game conservation and other projects for civic improvement. But Leopold quickly grew disillusioned with the chamber and the mod- em temper it represented. Many of Leopold's suggestions, such as including organized labor in the chamber and preserving the area's Hispanic heritage, were dismissed by civic leaders more interested in Americanism and profit.66 But more disturbing to Leopold was his impression that these boosters were trying to build prosperity in the region through a very different relationship with the land, one which treated it as tourist bait rather than as the basis for a sound local economy.67 As he saw the region's distinct heritage being submerged beneath the crass veneer of an increasingly nation- alized economic culture, he came to appreciate that the cultural role of nature was similarly threatened. Leopold sprinkled indictments of the Southwest's civic boosters, with their thirst for tourist and federal dollars, throughout his writings of the early 1920s. Indeed, he later identified them as accomplices in the destruction of what he called wilderness.

Leopold left the chamber of commerce in mid-1919 and returned to the Forest Service in the position of chief of operations for District Three.68 Between 1919 and 1923, he filed a series of inspection reports that provide a glimpse of the region's forests and their administration. During the course of these inspections, Leopold came to focus on two distinct themes or concerns. The first was grazing and its relationship with erosion in the fragile Southwest. The problem of erosion in the region, he argued, had less to do with overstocked ranges and brush fires, the factors usually implicated by conventional Forest Service wisdom, than with the concentration of grazing along watercourses. By the early 1920s, Leopold was already using the term "ecology" and making fairly sophisticated ecological observations about grazing and other impacts

65 Tweed, Recreation Site Planning and Improvements, 12 and Baldwin, The Quiet Revolu- tion, 125-28.

66 Meine, Aldo Leopold, 165-67. 67 In a 1923 speech to the Ten Dons, an Albuquerque civic group, Aldo Leopold merci-

lessly disassembled the booster spirit and its assumptions. The speech is reprinted as "A Criticism of the Booster Spirit," in The River of the Mother of God, ed. Flader and Callicott, 98-105.

68 Meine, Aldo Leopold, 175.

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on the southwestern landscape.69 The other prominent theme was recreational use of these forests. In certain cases, Leopold made connections between the two, suggesting that the ecological damage from grazing adversely affected the recreational values of certain areas.70 The case Leopold made for preserving wilderness, however, addressed these issues only peripherally. It was not such ecological concerns that led Leopold to advocate a wilderness policy.

Aldo Leopold's first explicit statement about the need to preserve what he called "wilderness" came in a 1921 article published in the Journal of Forestry. The article's title, "The Wilderness and Its Place in Forest Recreational Policy," made Leopold's primary concern clear.71 He began, like Waugh and Carhart before him, by making the case that recreational use of the national forests had become, in many places, the highest use to which such lands could be put. This fact, he continued, raised the ques- tion of whether a policy of industrial development should continue to guide all Forest Service actions, or whether the forests ought to be looked at in a slightly different way, as repositories of other sorts of resources. But Leopold devoted most of the article to making a further distinction. The question he posed was "whether the principle of highest use does not itself demand that representative portions of some forests be pre- served as wilderness."72 Leopold continued:

That such a question actually exists, both in the minds of some foresters and of [sic] part of the public, seems to me to be plainly implied in the recent trend of recreational use policies [perhaps an allusion to Carhart's policy at Trapper's Lake] and in the tone of sporting and outdoor maga- zines. Recreational plans are leaning towards the segregation of certain areas from certain developments, so that having been led into the wil- derness, the people may have some wilderness left to enjoy. Sporting magazines are groping toward some logical reconciliation between getting back to nature and preserving a little nature to get back to. Lamentations over this or that favorite vacation ground being "spoiled

69 Flader, Thinking Like a Mountain, 17-8. Flader and others cite Leopold's 1923 essay, "Some Fundamentals of Conservation in the Southwest," as his ecological coming-out. The essay is reprinted in Flader and Callicott, eds., The River of the Mother of God, 86-97. In this same book see Leopold's essay, "Grass, Brush, Timber, and Fire in Southern Arizona," 114-22.

70 For examples of these connections, see Leopold's inspection reports of the Tajique District, Manzano National Forest (1920) folder 3, the Gila National Forest (1922) folder 9, and the Manzano National Forest (1923) folder 11, in series 10, sub-series 11, box 3, L. P.. Also, in the autumn of 1922, Leopold took a trip to the Colorado River Delta, a trip that gave him some ap- preciation for the recreational values that inhered in an area that, ecologically, was relatively undisturbed. See Meine, Aldo Leopold, 207-9. Leopold recounted this trip, from the perspective of some years, in his essay, "The Green Lagoons," reprinted in A Sand County Almanac, 141-49.

71 Aldo Leopold, "The Wilderness and Its Place in Forest Recreational Policy," Journal of Forestry 19 (November 1921): 718-21. Reprinted in Flader and Callicott, eds., The River of the Mother of God, 78-81.

72 Flader and Callicott, eds., The River of the Mother of God, 78. Italics mine.

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by tourists" are becoming more and more frequent. Very evidently, we have here the old conflict between preservation and use, long since an issue with respect to timber, water power, and other purely economic resources, but just now coming to be an issue with respect to recreation.73

This last sentence was critical. Leopold here made a deeper distinction that was cru- cial to his notion of wilderness. Leopold's first distinction-that between recreational versus industrial use-is an easy one to fix on as the essential innovation of his argu- ment.74 Clearly, Leopold was interested in seeing national forests used for recreation, a relatively novel idea at the time. But this was not what Leopold meant by wilderness. What Leopold meant by wilderness was preservation from certain forms of administra- tive and recreational development-particularly road-building and various forms of term permit development. Indeed, the problem that Leopold sought to solve was that the Forest Service had, in many cases, been too generous to those seeking recreational access. For Leopold, wilderness was a new preservationist norm to counter the con- sumerist trends of outdoor recreationists and the land agencies and boosters who catered to them.

Leopold quickly acknowledged that the seemingly radical nature of this sugges- tion lay, in part, in his use of the term wilderness. "It is quite possible," he warned, "that the serious discussion of this question will seem a far cry in some unsettled regions, and rank heresy to some minds." To counter such fears, Leopold provided a definition of wilderness and a sense of the scope of his suggestion. "By 'wilderness,"' he said, "I mean a continuous stretch of country preserved in its original natural state, open to lawful hunting and fishing, big enough to absorb a two-weeks pack-trip, and kept devoid of roads, artificial trails, cottages, or other works of man." Here, in a nutshell, were Leopold's hopes: to preserve areas for recreational experiences-in this case, pack- trips-that were devoid of the very recreational developments that had, over the course of the previous decade, transformed large portions of the national forests. With the threats to wilderness clearly identified, Leopold proceeded to argue for wilderness as a minority right. "The majority undoubtedly want all the automobile roads, summer hotels, graded trails, and other modern conveniences that we can give them," Leopold admitted, painfully aware of how an agglomeration of consumer preferences could work a new sort of tyranny of the majority. "But a very substantial minority, I think, want just the opposite."75 This theme of minority rights would remain a central part of wilderness advocacy in the decades to come. And again, the minority right Leopold argued for was not simply the right to use the national forests for recreation; indeed, this was already the majority's demand. He argued for the right to enjoy large stretches of country that lacked the very modern recreational conveniences he so often

73 Ibid., 78-9.

74 In his chapter on Leopold in Wilderness and the American Mind, Roderick Nash sees Leopold's early wilderness argument as little more than a case for recreational use, see 182-99.

75 Flader and Callicott, eds., The River of the Mother of God 79-80.

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mentioned as antithetical to wilderness-roads, motorized transport, hotels, cottages, and graded trails. To understand Leopold's wilderness proposal-and Carhart's plan for Trapper's Lake for that matter-one must move beyond the simple dichotomy of preservationists versus utilitarian conservationists and appreciate how thoroughly con- cerned with recreational development early wilderness advocacy was. Though not all of his contemporaries would understand his argument in these terms, and though Leopold did mention the importance of keeping areas in their natural states, Aldo

Leopold's earliest wilderness proposals were fundamentally about saving landscapes from the popularity of automobility, outdoor recreation, and the improvements that accompanied both.

Leopold ended his 1921 article by suggesting that an area surrounding the head- waters of the Gila River, in the Gila National Forest, was a prime candidate for the type of preservation he had in mind. The region was relatively undeveloped and such a designation would provide "no economic loss." The only current economic use of the area was grazing, and Leopold concluded that "the cattle ranches would be an asset from the recreational standpoint because of the interest that attached to cattle grazing under frontier conditions."76 This acceptance of grazing, though perhaps a pragmatic and diplomatic choice given the article's intended audience, indicated the extent to which the exclusion of roads and modern developments was paramount in Leopold's vision of wilderness. Grazing, though potentially damaging in other ways, was not a substantial threat to wilderness as he then defined it.

In the aftermath of this initial foray into advocacy, Leopold set himself the task of preparing concrete plans for designating the Gila as a wilderness area. In May and June of 1922, he toured the Gila as part of his inspection duties. The report he produced that October was a benchmark in two respects. First, Leopold made his strongest argu- ment yet for "the overgrazing of the watercourse or canyon bottom itself' as the primary source of erosion in the Southwest. Second, as a supplement to his "General Inspec- tion Report," Leopold appended a "Report on the Proposed Wilderness Area." In his formal proposal for wilderness status, Leopold shifted his emphasis.77

Leopold suggested two potential names for the preserved area: the "Gila Wilder- ness Area" and the "Gila National Hunting Ground." His stated objective was "to preserve at least one place in the Southwest where pack-trips shall be the 'dominant play.'"78 He justified the need for such an area by citing the extent to which other

76 Ibid., 81.

77 Aldo Leopold, "General Inspection Report of the Gila National Forest, May 21-June 27, 1922," and appended to this report, "Report on the Proposed Wilderness Area," 2 October 1922, series 10, sub-series 11, folder 9, box 3, LP. For quote on grazing see Leopold, "General In- spection Report," 13 (emphasis is Leopold's). See also Meine, Aldo Leopold, 198-201.

78 Aldo Leopold, "Report on the Proposed Wilderness Area," 1. Leopold, of course, was an avid hunter, and I have neglected this aspect of his advocacy for reasons of space and previous coverage. For a general look at Leopold as hunter and game manager, see Meine, Aldo Leopold, and Flader, Thinking Like a Mountain.

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suitable areas in the region had been opened to automobile travel. He later recalled that, as of 1909, when he first arrived in the Southwest, there had been perhaps six areas in the region with wilderness qualities similar to the Gila, but they had all been so rapidly divided as to pique his interest in seeing at least one area remain free of roads.79 In describing the function of the preserve, Leopold leaned almost exclusively on its provision for the needs of pack-trip hunters. He predicted that what timber resources there were in the area would be prohibitively expensive to get at. Moreover, he sweetened his proposal by suggesting that such preservation might be more akin to traditional Forest Service stewardship. "Is it not possible," Leopold queried, "that an untouched reserve of stumpage for a possible national emergency might be a good thing?"80 Though he prized inviolability more than this comment suggests, his argu- ment may have appealed to certain foresters-or perhaps a side of foresters-who saw in wilderness designation a way of stemming recreational developments at a time when, with silviculture dormant, such developments threatened to redefine the Forest Ser- vice mission.81 Leopold was not unconcerned with industrial uses like timber extrac- tion, mining, grazing, and waterpower, but to him such developments were not the major threats to national forest wilderness at that particular moment in history. Road- building and recreational developments were.82

The goal of this official wilderness proposal, as Leopold made clear, was to halt plans to outfit the Gila with roads, summer homes, hotels, and hunting lodges.83 Graz- ing would continue, though efforts would be made to "take in slack or reduce to a very conservative stocking."84 In light of his prognosis of the region's erosion problems,

79 See Leopold, "Wilderness in the Southwest," series 10, sub-series 2, folder 1, box 9, LP.

80 Leopold, "Report on the Proposed Wilderness Area," 1. 81 Indeed, Chief Forester William Greeley encouraged Leopold to publish his 1921

article. When Greeley issued, in 1926, the first directive encouraging district foresters to set aside areas as wilderness, he was careful to explain, in defining wilderness, that such designations were primarily designed to thwart road and recreational developments, and that they could be overrid- den if and when there was a need for timber. See W. B. Greeley, "Wilderness Recreation Areas," Service Bulletin 10 (18 October 1926): 1-3.

82 In the aftermath of World War II, as dam-building and the cutting of timber in the West's public lands assumed staggering new proportions, wilderness advocates tended to redefine their goals, focusing anew on producer trends. See Paul Hirt, A Conspiracy of Optimism: Manage- ment of the National Forests Since World War Two (Lincoln, 1994) and Mark Harvey, A Symbol of Wilderness: Echo Park and the American Conservation Movement (Albuquerque, 1994).

83 In "Report on the Proposed Wilderness Area," Leopold concluded that: "No addi- tional permits for any but grazing purposes to be given. This excludes permanent improvements like summer homes, hunting lodges, hotels, etc." (p. 2). Based on this prescription, Meine, in Aldo Leopold, concluded that: "The plan hardly provided for a 'pure' wilderness" (p. 201). This is cer- tainly true if by "pure" wilderness we mean the more current definition of an area prohibitive of all economic uses. But that was not how Leopold defined wilderness at the time. My point is only that, by labeling Leopold's early advocacy as impure, it is easy to miss the fact that there were very good reasons why he formulated the wilderness idea as he did.

84 Leopold, "Report on the Proposed Wilderness Area," 2.

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Leopold also suggested ridge salting and water developments in the Gila, to steer live- stock out of the canyon bottoms and watercourses. As he defined it during this period, wilderness had much more to do with the absence of roads than the absence of what he called "industrial uses." Indeed, it was this quality that made wilderness, at least in this early incarnation, a distinctly Forest Service idea.85 But unlike his 1921 article, where he took a few swipes at the pro-development tenor of the Park Service, this official proposal was marked by an absence of such critical words. Indeed, Leopold's emphasis on hunting may well have served to distinguish wilderness from park preser- vation without criticizing the National Park Service or infringing upon their recre- ational niche.

In a memorandum written somewhere in the chronological vicinity of his Gila Wilderness proposal, Leopold expounded on his broader plans for "a wilderness area program." The memo, clearly intended for friendly eyes, was an attempt to define what he meant by wilderness and how he and others might effectively advocate its preservation. Leopold laid out a number of characteristics of wilderness as he saw it. Wilderness was "an area publically owned and permanently dedicated to public use for some distinctive form of outdoor recreation or study requiring primitive means of sub- sistence and travel in a wild environment."86 Two aspects of this definition stand out. First, Leopold insisted on the public nature of wilderness-that by protecting areas from privatized forms of recreational development, wilderness designation was a way of keeping large portions of the national forests open to all. Those who later charged that Leopold's wilderness proposals were elitist failed to understand this point.87 Sec- ondly, Leopold premised his definition less on an area's ecological state (though "wild"ness was important to him), than on how one traveled through and lived within its confines. In these terms, true wilderness preservation required that significant acre- age (perhaps the clearest difference between his vision and Carhart's) be kept free from improved roads, automobiles, and other moder conveniences.

85 In contrast, Park Service officials, who cringed at the thought of any sort of indus- trial use, had few qualms about striating their holdings with modem roads and incorporating a variety of tourist services. In his 1921 article, Leopold was critical of the Park Service for this very reason.

86 Leopold said that the memo was an attempt to define wilderness "in the hope that we can arrive at something which can in due time be presented to the public as representing the opinion of those in favor of wilderness areas." Aldo Leopold, "A Wilderness Area Program," (about 1922?), series 10, sub-series 6, folder 4, box 16, LP.

87 There were a number who charged Leopold with such elitism, though these charges came mostly after 1924. See Manly Thompson, "A Call From the Wilds," Service Bulletin 12 (14 May 1928): 2-3, copy found in series 10, sub-series 4, folder 22, box 8, LP.; Howard Flint, "Wasted Wilderness," American Forests and Forest Life 32 (July 1926): 407-10. Part of the problem was that, during the early decades of the twentieth century, the term "wilderness" was still very much asso- ciated with the big game hunters of Teddy Roosevelt's ilk, who could afford to outfit themselves and pay guides. Wilderness trips seemed extravagant. That Leopold often discussed wilderness in the context of pack-trip hunting compounded the perception that his motives were elitist, despite his consistent attempts to prove otherwise.

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In his 1921 article, Leopold had spoken of an area that could absorb a two-weeks' pack-trip. In this memo, he suggested areas between 250,000 and one million acres in size. The areas would exclude all "motor roads and motors" and all "cottages, hotels, and permanent improvements"; trails, telephone lines, and cabins for administrative purposes and fire control would be allowed, however. "Timber cutting and grazing under forestry principles," Leopold continued, "are allowable (except if within a park) provided no permanent roads accompany them, and provided that precautions to pro- tect recreational values are observed." Nowhere is Leopold clearer that extractive uses, under circumscribed conditions, could be compatible with the type of preservation he proposed. In Leopold's mind, the crisis he was addressing was one of access and devel- opment, and only rarely were timber or grazing interests the forces behind such drives at this time. It was roads, and the modern commercial developments that used them as a vector, that were destroying the wild character of the Southwest.88

Leopold ended this brief manifesto by suggesting that such wilderness areas might be set aside throughout the United States. Large wilderness areas in the West could be augmented by smaller areas in the Midwest, South, and East. Finally, as a somewhat separate category, Leopold called for the preservation of "relatively small areas suffi- cient to preserve a sample of virgin conditions" in each state. These smaller areas, though open to some recreation, were primarily for scientific study. Indeed, he pointed out that the idea was not his, but had been "recommended by the American Ecologi- cal Society." Though somewhat confused about their name, Leopold clearly knew that there was a different movement afoot to preserve what ecologists refer to as "natural conditions," a movement formed by the recently-founded Ecology Society of America. And though Leopold seems to have known of ecologists' arguments for the preserva- tion of natural conditions-arguments based on a successional model and generally focused on distinctive areas of climax vegetation-such considerations got little play in his early arguments for wilderness.89

88 Leopold, "A Wilderness Area Program." The memo is typed, though there is a hand-

written note to "Locke" at the top. This, in all likelihood, was S. B. Locke, a forest examiner with the Forest Service, who would play a crucial role in pointing out the severe over-browsing prob- lems by deer on the Kaibab Plateau. See Meine, Aldo Leopold, 240-41 and Flader, Thinking Like a Mountain, 87. It is unclear whether Leopold meant this memo for Locke only, or whether he sent out other copies in an attempt to get a discussion going.

89 Leopold, "A Wilderness Area Program," 2-3. The Ecological Society of America (ESA) was formed in 1915 at an informal meeting of ecologists in Columbus, Ohio. In 1917, the ESA created a Committee on the Preservation of Natural Conditions and charged it with assem- bling a list of "typical areas which ought to be preserved in various parts of the country." This effort culminated in the publication of the magisterial Naturalist's Guide to the Americas in 1926. By the late 1940s, a splinter group formed the Ecologist's Union, which then became the Nature Conservancy. The ESA model of preserving small, distinctive areas remains the core of the Na- ture Conservancy's preservationist program. See Victor Shelford, "Notes and Comment: The Or- ganization of the Ecological Society of America," Ecology 19 (January, 1938): 164-66; and Victor Shelford, ed., Naturalist's Guide to the Americas (Baltimore, 1926).

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In 1924, with his wilderness proposal for the Gila inching its way toward fruition, Aldo Leopold accepted a position with the Forest Service's Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin. This move marked a distinct juncture in his career. He left the

open spaces of the Southwest to return to his native Midwest, a landscape less spec- tacular, more productive, and much more thoroughly transformed by human labor. Yet it was in the year or two after his move to Madison that Leopold's most significant flurry of wilderness articles appeared.90 They stressed a number of themes-two in

particular stand out. First, Leopold saw a need to protect a "frontier" environment from the spread of modernity, especially from improved roads and the automobile.91 In

railing against "the Great God Motor" and "that Frankenstein which our boosters have builded, the 'Good Roads Movement,"' Leopold argued for wilderness as a form of historic preservation.92

His other concern was epistemic. The few unknown and unexplored areas that existed in the West were disappearing rapidly, but not because they were needed to fulfill the nation's resource requirements. Had this been the case, it might have been easier for Leopold (the forester) to stomach. These areas were compromised to facili- tate an automotive invasion-to feed the hunger many Americans felt for a contact with nature that was mediated by machines and modern conveniences. The result was that the few blank spots on the map-those symbolic areas of mystery not yet signified by roads or modern comforts-were disappearing under the onslaught of an unsustain- able pattern of recreational use. The impulse to explore the wild lands of the West under these modern conditions impelled the domestication of the region's few remain- ing uncharted areas. Some of the region's leading citizens, smelling a new motherlode, encouraged this process. By preserving wilderness, Leopold sought to provide Ameri- cans with a form of recreation that would not consume its own resource base. He also hoped to preserve an environment, devoid of mechanization and convenience, that

90 In 1925 alone, Leopold published five articles on wilderness. See, Aldo Leopold, "Conserving the Covered Wagon," Sunset Magazine 54 (March 1925): 21, 56; "The Pig in the Parlor," USFS Bulletin 9 (8 June 1925): 1-2; "The Last Stand of the Wilderness," American Forests and Forest Life 31 (October 1925): 599-604; "Wilderness as a Form of Land Use," The Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics 1 (October 1925): 398-404; "A Plea for Wilderness Hunting Grounds," Outdoor Life 56 (November 1925): 348-50. "Conserving the Covered Wagon," "The Pig in the Parlor," and "Wilderness as a Form of Land Use" were all reprinted in The River of the Mother of God, ed. Flader and Callicott. The title essay from that collection was also about wilder- ness. Written in 1924, "The River of the Mother of God" was rejected by the Yale Review but does appear in Flader and Callicott, eds., The River of the Mother of God, 123-27.

91 Coincidentally, one of his neighbors in Madison was the eminent historian and fron-

tier theorist Frederick Jackson Turner. It is unclear whether this association affected Leopold's arguments. See Meine, Aldo Leopold, 244.

92 Aldo Leopold, "The River of the Mother of God," The River of the Mother of God, ed. Flader and Callicott, 126-27.

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demanded a deeper form of appreciation defined by the labor and knowledge required to survive its rigors.

Aldo Leopold's wilderness idea was not a romantic escape from the politics of resource use; more modestly, it sought to correct the most destructive elements of an outdoor recreation boom that was premised on such escapist trends. Propelled by a growing consumerism, a potent new technological development in the automobile, and infrastructural improvements newly funded at the federal level, Americans began constructing a new, leisure-based relationship with the natural world during the years surrounding World War I. Though some, like William Cronon, have suggested that the wilderness ideal was at the heart of this new relationship, Aldo Leopold clearly saw wilderness differently. Wilderness, as Aldo Leopold conceived it in the early 1920s, may not have been a solution to the problem of a nation that, in his words, was "grow- ing away from the soil."93 He would spend the next quarter-century trying to craft just such a solution. But wilderness was a solution to a nation bent on opening up and developing the few remaining undeveloped portions of the federal estate for modem recreational ends. More specifically, it was a solution to some problems, like the ubiq- uity of term permit developments and federally funded road-building, that were par- ticular to the western national forests during this era.

Foresters were unwitting accomplices in this process. Though they resisted efforts by the likes of Frank Waugh and Arthur Carhart to get them to take the nation's embrace of outdoor recreation more seriously, they allowed recreational uses to take hold in forests whose timber was not yet needed. Their acceptance of a permitted, quasi-private direction for recreational development eventually drove critics like Waugh and Carhart to challenge the extent to which foresters were protecting the national forests as public spaces. But the solutions that Waugh and Carhart proposed involved similar sorts of recreational development, albeit with a different guiding spirit. In other words, Carhart and Waugh solved the problem of the privatization of recreational opportunities by pushing public programs that were equally destructive of wilderness; only areas of scenic value were saved from this development. Wilderness preservation, as Aldo Leopold envisioned it, was both a solution to this privatizing trend enabled by the Term Permit Act and a rejection of the option that the Forest Service aggressively develop public recreational facilities. Wilderness was a public recreational resource that needed no development. Ironically, what many have seen as a radical proposal may have been somewhat attractive to foresters. The wilderness idea, though not with- out its vocal critics in the Forest Service, allowed foresters to stem the growth of recre- ational development that threatened the priority of silviculture and permitted them to distinguish their preservationist norm from that of the National Park Service, whose leaders were engaged in the very sorts of development, and promotion of tourism and automobility, that Leopold sought to oppose. Indeed, in a limited sense, the Forest

93 Aldo Leopold, "Criticism of the Booster Spirit," in The River of the Mother of God, ed. Flader and Callicott, 103.

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Service quickly adopted Leopold's wilderness proposal on both the district and national levels.94

Over one and one-half decades after Aldo Leopold first proposed that the Forest Service preserve wilderness areas, he published his most biting and thorough critique of modem outdoor recreation and the type of relationship with the natural world it encouraged. "Conservation Esthetic," which first appeared in Bird-Lore in 1938 and was subsequently reprinted in A Sand County Almanac, was Leopold's most trenchant statement on the irony that defined conservation during the interwar years-that a growing cultural fascination with and appreciation of the natural world was one of the gravest threats to it. "It is the expansion of transport," Leopold proffered at the conclu- sion of the piece, "without a corresponding growth of perception that threatens us with qualitative bankruptcy of the recreational process. Recreational development is a job not of building roads into lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind."95 It was primarily this "qualitative bankruptcy of the recre- ational process," particularly as it manifested itself in the national forests of the West during the teens and early twenties, that led Aldo Leopold to propose wilderness pres- ervation.

94 Greeley, "Wilderness Recreation Areas," 1-3." Indeed, in 1926, William Greeley, head of the Forest Service, began a policy discussion that culminated in Regulation L-20, the Forest Service's first official mechanism for setting aside wilderness areas within the national for- ests. This same issue of the Service Bulletin contained comments from a number of other important voices on this subject, and revealed a wide variety of opinion on, and understandings of, the wil- derness idea. Two years later, Manly Thompson issued a prominent critique of the wilderness policy. See Thompson, "A Call from the Wilds," 2. On Regulation L-20, see Gilligan, "The De- velopment of Policy," 104-6 (and Appendix A, in which he reprints the regulation's text).

95 Aldo Leopold, "Conservation Esthetic," Bird-Lore 40 (March-April 1938): 101-9. Reprinted in A Sand County Almanac (New York, 1949), 176-77.

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