1 . Exclude sheep from specified areas about Mount Hood and Crater Lake.
2. Limit the sheep to be grazed in the reserve to a specified number, based on the number customarily grazed there.
3. Issue five-year permits allowing an owner to graze on a specified tract, limiting the number of sheep to be grazed on that tract, and giving the owner the exclusive grazing right.
4. Require as a condition of each permit that the owner use every effort to prevent and to extinguish fires on his tract, and report in full the cause, extent, and other circumstances connected with each fire.
5. Reserve the right to terminate a permit immediately if convinced that an owner is not showing good faith in the protection of the forests.
6. In the allotment of tracts secure the cooperation of the wool-growers association of Crook, Sherman, and Wasco counties through a commission of three stockmen, who shall receive written applications for range, adjudicate them, and make recommendations, these recommendations to be reviewed by the forest officer and finally passed upon by the Secretary of the Interior.
7. Ask the county associations to bear the expenses of the commission.
8. Charge the cost of administration of the system to the owners in the form of fees for the permits.
9. If the woolgrowers decline to accept and to cooperate in the proposed system, exclude sheep absolutely from the reserve.
10. If after five years’ trial of the system forest fires continue unchecked, exclude sheep thereafter from the reserve.
Relative to the area around Crater Lake and Mount Hood that he wished to see closed to sheep grazing, Colville stated:
The first step toward a satisfactory system of sheep-grazing regulations in the Cascade Reserve is to provide absolute protection for those places which the people of the State require as public resorts or for reservoir purposes. The grandeur of the natural scenery of the Cascades is coming to be better known. Even before the forest reserve was created a movement was on foot to have the Mount Hood region and the Crater Lake region set aside as national parks, and since the reserve was created the eminent desirability and propriety of the earlier movement has been clearly recognized, both in the continued efforts of the people to keep sheep from grazing in these regions and in the concession in the petition of the sheep owners that if the Cascade Reserve as a whole be abolished the Crater Lake and Mount Hood regions be maintained as smaller and separate reserves on which sheep be not allowed to graze. . . .
In terms of how much land should be included in the closed area at Crater Lake, he recommended:
After going twice carefully over the ground at Crater Lake and consulting with various men well informed on the subject, especially Capt. O.C. Applegate, of Klamath Falls, I question whether a better area can be adopted than that covered by the special Crater Lake contour map, published by the United States Geological Survey, which extends from longitude 122° to 122° 15′, and from latitude 42° 50′ to 43° 04′. At present no sheep are grazed in the vicinity of Crater Lake, but for a few years up to and including 1896 a small amount of summer grazing was carried on in the watershed of Anna Creek and that of the upper Rogue River. [37]
In 1899 some of the recommendations of the Colville study were implemented. Upon the recommendation of the General Land Office the Secretary of the Interior approved permits to graze a limited number of sheep within restricted areas of the Cascade Range Forest Reserve. [38]
While the sheepherding controversy continued in the reserve Crater Lake received increasing attention in national periodicals. The thrust of these articles was for greater protection of the reserve and national park designation for Crater Lake. One such article appeared in the February 17, 1898, issue of Nature. The author described the scenic beauty and relative inaccessibility of the lake:
Crater Lake is situated nearly in 43° N. and 122° W. It may be reached from several stations on the railway between Portland, Oregon, and San Francisco, by roads, usually bad, and as yet there is no house of any kind near its shore. Leaving the Southern Pacific Railway at Medford, one may reach it by 85 miles of road up the Rogue River valley. From Ashland a road of 95 miles must be traversed; but the best road–one which is practicable for bicycles–is from Ager, Cal., past the deserted Fort Klamath, a distance of 116 miles. The whole country is covered with dense coniferous forest. In approaching the lake, there is a steep climb for about three miles; then the forest-clad mountain slope gives place to a nearly level plateau, carpeted in autumn with flowers, across which one walks a few hundred yards with nothing to see, until suddenly a precipice of 900 feet yawns at one’s very feet, and deep below the dazzling blue water of Crater Lake spreads far and wide. The weird grandeur of the scene accounts to the full for the superstitious awe with which the Indians of the district regard the lake. [39]
