I remember that summer of ’31 that William Gladstone Steel, who was commissioner of Crater Lake National Park, was celebrating his birthday. I believe it was his 77th birthday. He was going to hike up to Garfield Peak and his daughter was quite concerned about it and was determined he wasn’t going to hike up alone. She went to Superintendent Solinsky and explained the situation. Solinsky asked me to accompany the Judge up to Garfield Peak. I had listened to the Judge give talks in the community Building (9) about his early days in Crater Lake. It was on that hike up to Garfield Peak that I got a lot of very interesting information about his early days. I didn’t realize at that time the extent of his connection to Mount Hood. I read about that later in Jack Grauer’s book that he was the founder of the Mazamas.
I knew that he had been born and reared on a farm in Kansas and that he came to Portland as a young man. He’d heard about this lost lake. He was bound and determined to find that lake. The first white man to find it was Hillman, who the story went had heard about this blue lake up in the mountains. He was riding a mule and came upon the rim. He went to sleep on the mule, woke up and there was the lake right in front of him. Judge Steel had heard all these stories. So he went to Crater Lake.
At that time Crater Lake was a part of the public domain. It was open to any kind of activity. People could go up there and stake out a claim, a mining claim, or a timber claim. Of course, the timber wasn’t like the timber lower down in the mountains. But Crater Lake was really up there, what I would always call naked and unashamed. It had no means of support to protect it as a beautiful area. So Judge Steel then became very instrumental in going to Congress and he spent most of his own money going to Washington, D.C., to plead the case of protecting Crater Lake and making it into a national park, because there had been the precedent of Yellowstone. He had trouble sometimes getting home from Washington because he didn’t have much money. He spent his own money during all this activity of getting Congress to set it aside, particularly to get the President to set it aside. The first boundaries that were described, according to what he told me, were by township, ranger, and section. Somehow, it didn’t fully include Crater Lake. They found this out so the boundaries had to be changed to include all of Crater Lake.
