The Whitewater Baldy Complex

Extrinsic versus Intrinsic Resource Management

The Whitewater Baldy Complex

Where the deer and the cattle (once) roam(ed)

By Stephen L. Wilmeth

            Rancher Terrell Shelley saw the single snag burning on the Mogollon Baldy ridgeline on May 9. It was not man caused. It was started by lightning. Terrell reported the fire to the Forest Service.

            For several days, the snag continued to smolder. It could be seen from Rain Creek Mesa above the Shelley headquarters. In the ensuing days, it even weathered a dusting of snow which fell around the mountain’s 10,778 foot summit.

            Mr. Shelley warned the Forest Service not to be lulled into complacency. The dry winds that continued to blister the country could and would push that fire in all directions.

The Gila Forest Service’s SO had been forewarned. The Forest Supervisor, the Fire Control Officer, and the Dispatcher all received notification of the pending problem.   

            By May 18 the fire was 2,775 acres. By month’s end, it had exploded to 217,000 acres and was the largest fire in New Mexico history. By Friday, June 8, it was in excess of 270,800 acres and growing at the rate of 11 square miles per day.

It was a modern day holocaust.

            The Beginning

            In 1884, Peter McKindree (P.M.) and Emily Jane Shelley, arrived from Texas at the same place Terrell lives today. They tied their horses to trees and Emily Jane prepared the first meal at what would become the 916 Ranch. Mrs. Shelley, a cowboy, and the Shelley’s four children listened to the prayer P.M. offered.

            Fifteen years later in 1899, the United States Congress included all the land north from the Shelley headquarters as part of what was then called the Gila Forest Reserve. New Mexico Territory was not yet a state, the United States Forest Service was not established in its familiar name, but the power of government was felt in the far corners of the western frontier. That relationship would never be similar to those where private enterprises interacted with private ownership.

            A major factor of the relationship was the nature of government policy implementation. With the official establishment of the Forest Service in 1905, such policy formulation was a major task. The actual legislative mandate for the agency was very simplistic. The agency was founded on the premise “to secure favorable conditions of water flows and a continuous supply of timber for the citizens of the United States”.

            In 1910, devastating wildfires would alter the primary mission of the young agency. Five million acres of American forests burned. Three million acres burned in a Washington, Idaho, and Montana monster fire complex that Forester Edward Stahl described as a “Red demon from Hell!” Smoke from that complex looked like fog banks as far away as Nova Scotia and New England.

            The political fallout was enormous. It was estimated that 7.5 billion board feet of lumber was converted into smoke.

            Attempting to mitigate the fallout, Secretary of Interior Richard Ballinger and respected forester and Yale Professor, Herman Chapman, preached the rationale reminder that fire is naturally occurring and is part of the natural order. It had to be managed appropriately.

Congress responded with typical political damage control and pledged to protect American lives forever more! They found support in the personality of a future Father of American Forestry, Gifford Pinchot, and his Chief Forester Graves. Pinchot worked diligently to discredit arguments for natural fire. He staked his agency’s existence on its ability to defeat it!

Through mission creep and the advancement of policy in the shadow of Congressional politics, the agency elevated fire control into equal footing with the original mission mandates.

The New Direction

Meanwhile the policy tools being conceptualized by the agency bureaucrats were being installed. Those Washington inventions were predicated not so much on what ranchers could do, but what they couldn’t do.

For example, by the turn of the century the Gila was being inundated by wild cattle accumulating in part by what the market wouldn’t accept. Calves, heifers, cows, and bulls suffered from the absence of market demand. The demand was for mature steers.

That situation was made untenable by the Forest Service prohibition of fencing.  The construction of allotment fencing was prohibited.

 As a result, administrative boundaries were policed by manpower. In the Gila, that required literally tons of double ought horseshoes to accomplish what could have been accomplished by fencing. Every Shelley descendent remembers the stories of the men always being gone. They were ‘in camp’ in the mountains or they were ‘working cattle’ in the mountains.

That realization counters the rote conventional wisdom argument early day Gila ranchers overgrazed the country. Forage adjacent to water sources may have been overgrazed, but a major component of the problem was driven by the inability to deal with feral cattle by policy imposed by the Forest Service itself.

That problem was solved in part in 1916 with the introduction of the Stock Raising Homestead Act. It was then that fencing was approved and prescribed, but administrative foot dragging held the process up until about 1922.  

The Holocaust

Forest Service Chief, Tom Tidwell, surveyed the then 400 square miles of devastation in the Whitewater Complex earlier this week. His latest phraseology of how his agency is now ‘managing the resource’ was interesting.

“If folks could actually see how rugged the terrain is, how steep these canyons are, how much fuel is there, the size of the timber and how inaccessible it is, I think they would quickly understand,” he said.

Understand what, Mr. Tidwell?

Perhaps the citizens devastated historically by Mr. Tidwell’s agency deserve some clarification. Perhaps they need just a simple reminder of the truths they know too well.

With the Forest Service Progressive mission drift toward no cattle, no complexity of grazing (sheep and goats), no timber industry, no thinning, no mechanical or herbicide removal, and only conditional controlled burning, a curious thing happens:  Fuel buildup occurs, timber matures, duff accumulates, and catastrophic fires result.

The seeds of the agency’s now expansive extrinsic management philosophies were sewn the year fencing projects began. In 1922, Aldo Leopold was in the Gila. One morning when he topped the western ridge of Black Mountain horseback and looked south into the Gila drainage, he claimed to have had a grand epiphany. He conceptualized the idea of administrative wilderness.

Little did he know the very spot he claimed to have had his epiphany now stands directly in the path of the Whitewater Baldy Fire. His brainchild was not new. Its origin was actually biblical, but it must assume much of the blame of this modern day conflagration.  

 Leopold would have heard the Shelleys use the wilderness reference in their speech. It was what they called the land north of what they referred to as ‘the high ridge’.

Mr. Leopold would use his influence, orchestrate an administrative maneuver, and create the Gila Wilderness on that land from the regional level. The year was 1924.

In 1944, the extrinsic narrative of designated Wilderness had crept into the psyche of too many Forest Service administrators. Agency officials seized an opportunity that would have implications on the mission of wilderness henceforth. They evicted the Shelleys from their historical range.

Peter’s son, Tom, received the notice. It read, “The range lying east of Shelley Canyon and the main ridge running from the Gila River to Shelley Peak just west of Turkey Creek and the range lying north of the same ridge from Shelley Peak to 74 Mountain and the Forest boundary, has been eliminated from the Mogollon Creek Allotment as non-usable range.”

Sixty years of heritage was eliminated with a stroke of the pen without recourse, without discussion, and without prior notice. The rationale used for the eviction was the poor condition of the Mogollon front where cattle impacted the range. The very range the Shelleys were evicted from had not had cattle in numbers since the throes of the Depression and the subsequent settlement of Peter’s estate! Those cattle had been sold in order to survive those catastrophic economic calamities.

The Forest Service had caught wind the Shelleys were contemplating restocking and they were not about to allow a cow back onto administratively designated Wilderness!

Tonight

As the fire settled in for the night this was written, a curious but dramatically profound observation was discovered. The fire had stabilized along the demarcation of what the Shelleys referred to as the ‘high ridge’. What is the implication?

That line is exactly where cattle were and are still allowed to reach following the eviction of the first family of Wilderness in 1944.

Fact … south of that line deer and cattle still roam, and north of the line… they don’t exist this night. It is a desolate, man made, smoldering, lifeless, wilderness holocaust.

Stephen L. Wilmeth is a rancher in southern New Mexico. He is also a descendent of Peter Shelley. “If Terrell Shelley was the sovereign steward of Shelley historical range … it would not be blackened moonscape tonight.”