To try and balance out the staff?
Exactly. It became obvious, even though Colorado Monument had been around for a long time and it really didn’t have the numbers [of historic resources] perhaps, where you could justify a historian. Bryce Canyon, a fairly old park, but again it didn’t have as much human history as a place like Crater Lake.
I was just going to ask you about Crater Lake in particular. It seemed that, with all the turnover over the years, you didn’t have anybody here that had been here, like so many of these natural areas where a person often plays that role of historian.
That’s absolutely true. As Carolyn, my secretary, commented at one time, she thought that the minute I transferred out of Crater Lake the big turnover of the past would stop (31). I laughed and said no. A lot of people might have thought that, but that isn’t the way. . .Crater Lake is destined to be that type of a park. We can improve things, through housing and offices and equipment and stuff like that, but you’re not really going to eliminate that. You’re going to have a rapid turnover because of the living conditions. They’re so horrible.
We have to start chronicling, which you are doing very well, the history of a park and how it evolved. I think now that we’ve established that within Crater Lake, I think that will continue. I know that other old line natural areas contacted me, oh, gosh, several of them, about how in the world did I ever pull it off to get an historian in there. And how did I see it and why, the same type of questions you’re asking. So I think that we are going to see those, if they haven’t already occurred, in other natural areas.
Was the backlog of project work a factor? It seemed like, before you showed up, very little had been put on paper.
Crater Lake had just been allowed to go to hell, you know, in a word. We had to do things, and obviously, we needed to start looking at the total resource. We talked a while back about the travesty of the Wilderness Act, and some of these things that constantly threaten good park management. That’s not an assist to park management. That’s an enemy to be fought. Those we really have to watch carefully. Had there been a historian on board at the time that Superintendent Rouse, I think it was, decided to destroy all the back woods patrol cabins, that never would have happened (32). There would have been somebody saying, “Hey, wait a minute there, superintendent, you can’t do that.” So you do have to have the protection of a person with a historical bent. It comes to mind. Bryce Canyon, as a park, located as it was in a limestone area, actually had a limestone cave in it. It wasn’t much of a cave, but it was a cave. It was a true natural feature of Bryce Canyon. And some superintendent decided that, gee, that thing could be a safety hazard and filled the damn thing up with tons and tons and tons of rock. So here’s this park, as a natural heritage, and to some extent the history of the park, and it’s destroyed. So you can’t always trust superintendents.
