INTRODUCTION
“Every line on the map is Wendell Wood’s reference to the idea that all protected areas are the product of hard fought political struggles. For the most part, the history of conservation in Oregon has reflected national trends, especially where it pertains to the reservation and management of federal lands that cover roughly 52 percent of the state. Most of this acreage is open to commodity use (logging, mining, grazing, agriculture) on a regulated, but supposedly sustainable, basis. This is part of “multiple use management, something which also includes recreation, wildlife, watersheds, and other values. There are places, however, where conflict can arise over what should be the predominate use of an area–particularly when its perceived character could be compromised by commodity production.
Citizen involvement in conservation as an area of public policy has largely centered on where to restrict commodity uses on federal lands. This began as early as 1885 in Oregon, when a Portland resident named William Gladstone Steel initiated a campaign to establish Crater Lake National Park. Congress finally passed legislation designating the park 17 years later, but not before Steel and other conservationists had succeeded in convincing President Grover Cleveland to proclaim the nation’s largest “forest reserve which embraced most of the Cascade Range in 0regon (1). This reserve was vehemently attacked by commodity interests and members of Oregon’s congressional delegation in the mid 1890s because restrictions on settlement, sheep grazing, and lumbering were similar to those in a national park. Steel organized the mountaineering club he founded in 1894, the Mazamas, to defend the reserve and made it the base for lobbying efforts at home and in Washington, D.C. In the end it emerged intact, but not before concessions were made in Congress to allow commodity use of the reserve on a regulated basis. Subsequent proclamations created other reserves around the state and, by 1907, most of what is now national forest land in Oregon had been withdrawn from the public domain (2).
Since 1905 the national forests have been administered by the U.S. Forest Service, a bureau lodged in the Department of Agriculture. Eleven years later Congress created another agency, the National Park Service, and placed it within the Department of the Interior. Both organizations saw recreation as at least part of their mission. Consequently, the Forest Service spent much of the 1920s and 1930s trying to fend off NPS attempts to effect transfer of the most spectacular national forest land and make it part of National Park System units. One Forest Service tactic aimed at avoiding such transfers was initiated in 1929, and took the form of administratively designated “primitive areas which were later called “wilderness” (3).
