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Crater Lake |
National
Park
National Park Service
U.S. Department of the Interior |
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Photo by Steve Mark.
With this handwritten executive order, President
Grover Cleveland in 1886 withdrew from the public domain ten townships
that would form the nucleus for Crater Lake National Park in
1902.
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Crater Lake:
The Campaign to Establish a National Park in Oregon
by Steve Mark
TEN TOWNSHIPS AND THE GOLDEN
ARROW
William Gladstone Steel: Crater Lake's foremost
advocate. Courtesy Oregon Historical Society #23267.
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The long campaign to establish Crater Lake National
Park began at Fort Klamath in 1885. There two vacationers from Portland,
William Gladstone Steel and J.M. Breck, met an army captain named
Clarence E. Dutton who had been detailed to accompany University of
California geologist Joseph LeConte on a summer trek to examine the
volcanic phenomena in the region. The four men followed a wagon road
leading from Fort Klamath to Jacksonville by way of Annie Spring. On the
other side of the Cascade Divide they turned north along a blazed trail
that ran along a creek later named for Dutton. After climbing and
climbing, the men at last reached their goal, and stood upon the caldera
rim enraptured by the beauty of Crater Lake.
Making Crater Lake a national park seems to have been
first discussed at their campsite in what is now Rim Village, but the
idea became Steel's primary focus for the next seventeen years. He
stopped in Roseburg on his way home to discuss the idea with Oregon
Congressman Binger Hermann, and began organizing a petition drive. The
public support Steel wanted came with no difficulty and by the beginning
of 1886, the petition had arrived in Washington, D.C. The petitioners
sought to have the president withdraw the lands surrounding Crater Lake
from settlement and from land claims arising from mining or timber
values while Congress considered the merits of establishing a national
park. [1]
President Grover Cleveland ordered that ten townships
of unsurveyed public domain adjacent to the lake be withdrawn from all
forms of entry on February 1, 1886. This reservation was larger and
slightly different from the actual park boundaries set in 1902. Only two
townships wide, the withdrawal stretched from Union Peak in the south to
well beyond Mount Thielsen. It simply represented a guess at what might
be suitable for a national park, but the administration wanted to avoid
infringing on the Fort Klamath Military Reservation to the south and the
Klamath Indian Reservation to the east.
Crater Lake and its surroundings needed to be
examined in greater depth, so Dutton headed a government-sponsored
expedition during the summer of 1886. He needed civilian assistance for
the procurement of boats and supplies, so Steel landed that job (he and
Breck had hauled a canvas vessel to Crater Lake in 1885) and oversaw
construction of three boats in Portland. The largest, Steel named the
"Cleetwood" because of a dream he had had while traveling. In the dream,
his deceased father joined Steel and both of them saw the heavens. As
Steel's father waved his hands above his head and told his son to look,
the sky became filled with golden arrows, called "cleetwood" in the
dream. [2]
1886 expedition members row the Cleetwood on
Crater Lake. Photo courtesy National Park Service.
Ropes and muscle had to be used to slide a boat down
the steep slope to the lake in 1903. Photo courtesy National Park
Service.
Steel put the completed boats on a rail car in July
1886 and took the train to Ashland. From there, Steel and an expedition
of thirty-five men loaded the boats on wagons and made their way to
Crater Lake by way of Fort Klamath. Most in the party were soldiers, but
some were United States Geological Survey personnel.
While some of the expedition's members began mapping
the topography around Crater Lake, others took on the challenge of
measuring the lake's depths. They had to use triangulation to pinpoint
the boat's position on the water, so as the two fixed points they used
their camp (later called Rim Village) as one, and the Watchman (so named
for the party of engineers stationed on the summit to receive signals)
as the other. The great depths recorded by the party astounded the men,
and they soon realized that Crater Lake was the deepest fresh water body
in the United States. Several measurements (the party took 168 readings
over a three-week span) exceeded 1,500 feet, with the deepest at an
incredible 1,996 below the surface. This reading stood as official until
soundings taken in 1958 established the maximum depth at 1,932 feet.
[3]
This so-called "Cleetwood Expedition" generated
considerable publicity in Oregon and elsewhere, but seemed to have
little effect on Congress. Bills introduced by the Oregon delegation in
1886 and 1887 died in committee because of considerable opposition. The
issue was not Crater Lake's worthiness, nor even the exploitation of
natural resources, but the fear of many in Congress that national parks
threatened to become a drain on the Treasury. It did not help that the
administration of Yellowstone during this time had become so problematic
that it required Army intervention.
Alternatively, bills introduced in 1888, 1889, 1891,
and 1893 would have conveyed Crater Lake to the state of Oregon in much
the same way that Yosemite Valley had been given to California in 1864.
These bills died, too, amid suspicions among House members that
legislation providing for a state park would simply bring about the
momentum needed to make Crater Lake a future national park. [4]
Steel opposed the state park bills and worried that
Cleveland's withdrawal could be reversed by a future president on the
advice of his secretary of the interior. To buy time, Steel wanted a
more permanent form of withdrawal. This would keep Crater Lake National
Park, when finally established by congressional act, from being
compromised by speculators having title to lands that should belong to
the people. He had become a convert to the cause of forestry by 1889,
and, with the help of a friend in Salem, started to think in terms
encompassing the entire Cascade Range in Oregon.
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William Steel led the fight not only to preserve
Crater Lake, but to establish federal protection for the entire Cascade
Range, as outlined in this 1898 map that appeared in the Oregonian.
This Cascade Range Forest Reserve formed part of what became the
Mount Hood, Willamette, Deschutes, Umpqua, Rogue River, and Winema
national forests.
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THE JUDGE AND A FOREST
RESERVE
Judge John Waldo: Encourage Steel to seek protection
for the Cascades. Courtesy Oregon Historical Society
#64412.
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With efforts to establish a national park around
Crater Lake effectively stymied by 1889, Steel began looking for other
ways to gain the protection he sought for this area. An acquaintance of
his, Judge John B. Waldo, advised Steel as early as 1885 that he ought
to petition for reservation of the entire Cascade Range in Oregon.
Although Steel opted for only ten townships around Crater Lake at first,
he remained open to a more ambitious reservation once a national
movement to retain federal ownership of forest lands gained momentum in
the late 1880s. [5]
A member of an Oregon pioneer family that settled
east of Salem in 1843, Waldo served as chief justice of the state
Supreme Court from 1884 to 1886, and won one term as state
representative in 1888. He loved the mountains, avidly read Thoreau, and
spent much of each summer in the wildest and most remote parts of the
Cascades. During the summer of 1888, for example, Waldo and his
companions made the first recorded journey along the crest between Mount
Jefferson and Mount Shasta. They made the trip because Waldo intended to
have the legislature ask Congress for a huge "public reserve or park."
It was to encompass twelve miles on each side of the Cascade Divide and
run along the entire length of the range in Oregon. Settlement and
logging would be prohibited and other uses regulated so that water
supplies, game, and recreation could be perpetuated for all time. [6]
This memorial of 1889 met defeat in the state Senate,
so it never left Salem. Congress did, however, pass legislation in 1891
allowing the president to proclaim "forest reserves" from any land still
in the public domain that had trees or was covered with undergrowth. The
Oregon Alpine Club, headed by Steel, now became the leading proponent of
establishing forest reserves in Oregon. Their first success came in
1892, when the Bull Run Forest Reserve was created to protect Portland's
water supply. It took another year before President Cleveland acted to
establish the nation's largest reserve.
The Cascade Range Forest Reserve came into being
(along with a much smaller reserve near Ashland) on September 28, 1893,
and encompassed 4.5 million acres that later formed the basis for
several national forests. Within its boundaries was the earlier Crater
Lake reservation made during Cleveland's first term in office. [7]
Steel saw the new reserve as a way to buy time for
his national park proposal, in that the proclamation was more permanent
than the 1886 withdrawal often townships. Congress, however, still had
not appropriated any funds nor provided direction in the management of
forest reserves. Unregulated sheep grazing on the reserves represented
an immediate threat in the eyes of many forestry advocates They saw the
animals as responsible for denuding forest cover and thereby degrading
the forests capacity to store water for agriculture and municipal use.
Many herders burned large areas to improve forage, impairing visibility
for months at a time and contributing to the loss of prime timber. When
the Secretary of the Interior issued an order prohibiting grazing on the
reserve in 1894, the sheep owners attempted to fight back through the
Oregon delegation in Congress. The delegation led an effort to severely
reduce the Cascade Range reserve while some sheepmen openly defied the
secretary's order.
Sheep graze in a fragile high country meadow in this
early 1900 photo. Damage from grazing and "range improvement" fires led
national park advocates to seek legal protection for Crater Lake, and
the forests and watersheds of the high Cascades. Photo courtesy
Jeff LaLande.
Things came to a head in 1896, when Steel spent most
of six months in Washington, D.C., orchestrating a lobbying campaign in
defense of the reserve. After some close calls, the reserve emerged
intact, so Steel returned to Oregon in June with the intention of
leading a trip to promote interest in Crater Lake. He wanted to bring
the Mazamas, a Portland-based mountain climbing group Steel started in
1894, to Southern Oregon for an ascent of Mount McLoughlin and some
extended camping at what later became known as Rim Village. In early
August a deputy U.S. marshal was sent to Crater Lake to arrest
sheepherders who had brought some 2,000 sheep into the area. This
resulted in four sheep owners having to appear in federal court, where
charges were dropped in view of the judge's warning to keep sheep away
from Crater Lake thereafter. [8]
The Mazamas gathering that August was important in
several ways. Fay Fuller, as one of the Mazamas, had the honor of
christening the ancient volcano whose remnant caldera held Crater Lake.
The mountain that the Klamath Indians called gi was, Fuller named
after the climbing clubwhich in turn had taken its name from the
Spanish word for mountain goat. Secondly, Steel had prevailed upon
several government scientists to conduct various studies of the proposed
park area. The investigators presented their findings to the campers
throughout the week (the first formal interpretation at Crater Lake) and
subsequently published research papers in the annual journal of the
Mazamas. This volume served not only as a record of the trip, but was
also intended as the first guidebook for visitors to Crater Lake.
Steel had to cut short his time with the club members
because he had to meet a special forest commission arriving by train in
Medford and deliver the members to Crater Lake. The controversy over
federal forests had by now prompted Cleveland to appoint a body to make
recommendations about the number of reserves and their future
management. Steel naturally thought it critical to discuss the fate of
both the Cascade Range reserve and Crater Lake with the commission. He
walked from Rim Village to the train depot in less than three
days, and arranged for wagons to transport the commissioners back to Rim
Village. The weather had turned wet and misty by the time they arrived
at the rim, but Steel convinced commission members John Muir and a young
forester named Gifford Pinchot to join him in camping at the lake shore
for one night hoping to reach Wizard Island the next day. Rain and rough
water canceled the boat trip, though Steel appeared to have succeeded in
obtaining the commission's support for retaining the forest reserve and
establishing a national park at Crater Lake. [9]
The commission's final report recommended retaining
existing forest reserves and adding some new ones, but remained silent
on the issue of national park status for Crater Lake. In June of 1897,
Congress passed legislation giving a degree of permanence to the
reserves and provided funds for their management. They provided a
somewhat utilitarian direction, allowing the location of mineral claims
and authorizing uses such as logging and grazing at the interior
secretary's discretion. The Secretary drew up regulations to implement
the legislation, and included a provision banning sheep from the area
near Crater Lake. This conveyed some of the protection Steel desired,
but he worried about a clause in the new law allowing the president to
reduce, modify, or eliminate forest reserves at any time.
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A NATIONAL PARK IN THE STATE OF
OREGON
Once Congress began appropriating money for managing
the forest reserves in 1898, staff hired by the General Land Office (the
Bureau of Land Management's forerunner) could patrol them. Trespass
grazing consequently ceased in the area around Crater Lake, but the few
forest reserve rangers hired for that summer had several competing
demands on their time. Their priorities also included preventing
wildfires (a stand replacement fire that started north of Fort Klamath
grew to 18,000 acres in September 1898 and gave Grayback Ridge its name)
and locating the reserve's actual boundaries on the ground.
J.S. Diller: the geologist who first unraveled the
story of how Crater Lake came to be. Courtesy National Park
Service.
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Mapping efforts in the vicinity of Crater Lake ran
ahead of other areas in the forest reserve, mainly due to the U.S.
Geological Survey having begun work during the Cleetwood Expedition of
1886. Geologist Joseph Diller can be credited with taking the Crater
Lake topographic sheet to publication in 1898 because it helped to
illustrate his study of how volcanic forces shaped the area around Mount
Mazama. Among the things Diller discovered in compiling the map was that
the ten townships reserved in 1886 did not extend far enough east to
encompass all of Crater Lake. He and others agreed that the boundaries
needed reworking, so subsequent bills aimed at establishing a national
park were redrafted to reflect the dimensions of the USGS Crater Lake
map. On it were features Diller thought directly related to Mount
Mazama's climatic eruption and the geological story of Crater Lake. He
deleted Diamond Lake and Mount Thielsen in favor of including all of
Mount Scott, then went far enough south to encompass such features as
Union Peak, the Pinnacles, and most of Annie Creek Canyon. [10]
Thomas Tongue, a congressman from Astoria, introduced
a new bill containing the reworked boundaries in January 1898.
Supporters took heart when the House Committee on Public Lands issued a
favorable report on the proposed legislation. The report, titled
"National Park in the State of Oregon," consisted of testimonials by
former Congressman Hermann (at that time chief of the General Land
Office), as well as Diller and the other scientists who had assembled at
Crater Lake in 1896. The bill went no further, however, because of
opposition from some key congressmen who still saw national parks in
places such as Crater Lake as a continual drain on the Treasury, with
little hope for any real return on the government's investment.
Enactment of legislation establishing Mount Rainier National Park on
March 2, 1899, did not presage action on the Crater Lake measure. Tongue
introduced another bill in the House, identical to the previous one in
December 1899. Tongue's bill and another introduced in the Senate by the
Oregon delegation three months later, again went nowhere. [11]
Wizard Island looms in this 1910 Park Service lantern
slide. Steel named the island on his first visit to the lake in 1885.
Steel also planted the first fish in Crater Lake in 1888, and served as
the park's second superintendent from 1913-1916. He died in Medford in
1934, and was buried in Siskiyou Memorial Park wearing his Park Service
uniform. Photo courtesy Naitonal Park Service.
Gifford Pinchot: Theodore Roosevelt's forestry
advisor. Courtesy Jeff LaLande.
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Only when Theodore Roosevelt arrived in the White
House in 1901 did the stars start to align. That December, Tongue
introduced House Resolution 4393, worded identically to the bill he
brought to the House almost four years earlier. The same report from the
Department of the Interior accompanied it as in the previous three
tries, but this time Steel acted on Tongue's advice to work up a
petition and secure additional testimonials on Crater Lake. Steel
collected 4,000 signatures on the petition by March and solicited
endorsements from prominent figures, both in and out of government. As
might be expected, the replies he received from John Muir and Gifford
Pinchot differed, since their views about the use of the forest reserves
had openly diverged over sheep grazing in 1897. (Pinchot believed in
carefully regulated grazing, while Muir opposed it under all
circumstances.) Oddly enough, Muir was noncommittal about Crater Lake's
suitability as a national park. Pinchot, by contrast, expressed great
enthusiasm to Steel. He also became a critical ally for the bill in his
role as the new president's leading advisor on conservation and public
lands.
Pinchot went to Roosevelt about the Crater Lake bill,
and the president had a word with the House speaker, who objected to
letting the bill out of committee for debate on the house floor. This
kept the bill alive to be debated, but Tongue still had to negotiate
with congressmen who could block any further progress. The House passed
it on April 19, but with an amendment that allowed the location and
working of mining claims. Three of the bill's six sections were deleted,
though none of these (appointment of deputy marshals, payment of court
costs, and authorization to deploy troops) constituted crucial sticking
points. The House version was referred to the Senate committee on April
21, and its members reported favorably on it later that month. Passage
of HR 4393 by the Senate came May 9, without debate or amendments. It
became law on May 22, 1902, when Roosevelt signed the bill. [12]
Steel wrote to the president the day after Senate
passage in order to obtain the pen Roosevelt later used in signing the
bill. Pinchot, Diller, and Tongue also received letters from Steel
expressing his gratitude for their part in the long campaign to
establish Crater Lake as a national park. Almost a century later it
stands alone in Oregon, even though national park proposals involving at
least ten other areas within the state have been made at one time or
another. Those efforts have so far failed for a variety of reasons, with
perhaps the most important one being timingthough the story of how
Crater Lake National Park came to be also includes no small amount of
perseverance and good fortune.
During a visit to the park in 1931, former Park
Superintendent William Steel, right, examines the lake-sounding device
used in 1886. Photo courtesy Naitonal Park Service.
Steve Mark is the park historian for Crater Lake National Park and
Oregon Caves National Monument.
ENDNOTES
1. Harlan Unrau, Administrative History,
Crater Lake National Park. Oregon, Vol. 1 (Denver: USDI-NPS,
1988), pp. 27-30.
2. "Surveying Boats," The Portland News, 28
June 1886.
3. J.S. Diller, The Geology of Crater
Lake National Park, U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper
No. 3 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1902), pp.
47-48.
4. Unrau, Pp. 36-38
5. Gerald W. Williams, "John B. Waldo and William G.
Steel: Forest Reserve Advocates for the Cascade Range of Oregon," in
Harold K. Steen, ed., Origins of the National Forests (Durham,
N.C.: Forest History Society, 1992), pp. 314-315.
6. Jeff LaLande, "A Wilderness Journey with Judge
John B. Waldo, Oregon's First Preservationist," Oregon Historical
Quarterly 90:2 (Summer 1989), pp. 117-166.
7. Unrau, pp. 46-53.
8. Williams, pp. 321-327.
9. Stephen R. Mark, "Seventeen Years to Success: John
Muir, William Gladstone Steel, and the Creation of Yosemite and Crater
Lake National Parks," Mazama 72:13 (1990), p. 10; see also
articles in Mazama1:2 (October 1897), pp. 139-238.
10. Diller, p. 5.
12. Mark, pp. 11-12; Unrau, pp. 98-111.
This article first appeared in Southern Oregon Heritage
Today, January 2001, Vol. 3 No. 1, published by the Southern Oregon Historical
Society.
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