Wilderness Act or … Debacle?

50 years of Deceit

 Wilderness Act or … Debacle?

It didn’t start with Leopold

By Stephen L. Wilmeth

            The snapshots before the Wilderness Act was signed in 1964, and, now, fifty years later are not becoming.

            In the spring of 1885, the ranching families on Mogollon Creek got word that Geronimo and his band were headed their direction. After a sleepless night with the hounds “back and forth barking dismally”, the Indian fighter, George White, saddled his horse and rode up the creek cutting sign. Far up the valley, he spied an Indian who had caught and was riding a Shelley sorrel gelding they called “Dutch”. He was leading another of their horses, “Coly”, who wanted nothing to do with the situation. Coly was seen rearing and flailing the air with his front feet.

            Reporting what he saw back at the 916 headquarters, Peter Shelley’s first inclination was to hunt the Indian and kill him. Further discussion resulted in concern for their families and the decision was made to load the wagon and strike for the Gila River where safety in numbers was more likely.

            The tale of that trip to “the river” appeared in another story, but they arrived safely and, with the arrival of “Buffalo soldiers” from Ft. Bayard, their encounter with Geronimo ended without bloodshed.

            A story in a chapter of history was archived, and the allure of the Gila’s mystique only grew.

            Wayfarer cometh

            More history was written by 1922 when the arrival of the environmental wayfarer, Aldo Leopold took place. That year was a bad fire year and he and forest supervisor, Fred Winn, made an appearance in the McKenna Park District to the fire crews. What the locals thought of their token mingling might be gleaned from the response of the famous Gila forester, Henry Woodrow. Asked one morning what the gathered crew should do, Mr. Woodrow suggested not so subtly they go talk to “the bosses” to find out. The two were long gone when rains finally put the fires out.

            Woodrow’s assignments continued. He worked the Granny Mountain trail from Little Creek to a point above the Sapillo on the Gila River. No help was offered by the brass. They had more important administrative tasks to perform.

            That theme was commonplace as was the misguided bungling of suppressing every fire. Even prior to the 1910 era megafires that institutionalized the total suppression policy of the Forest Service, the agency was putting out fires. Prior to 1899 when the Gila was named a forest reserve, fires were either allowed to burn or were managed by ranchers like Peter Shelley who simply shaped them to minimize risk to home or improvements. The therapeutic affects of the fires were well known and welcomed. Those lessons had long been learned from living and working on the land.

            When Henry Woodrow was assigned his first duty in May of 1909, though, that was exactly what he was told to do. “All the instructions I had was to go up there and look out for fires, and put them out,” he wrote.

            A next major managerial peccadillo can be observed in the agency’s unwillingness to fence the forest boundaries much less allotment demarcations. Woodrow wrote in 1912 about the difficulty of managing feral cattle on the forest as a result. The area in his reference was the country occupied by Shelley, W.P. Doyle, and Frank Jones. Those ranchers were doubly impacted by the mess. They couldn’t keep feral cattle off because there were no fences. They couldn’t sell them because there was no market for cows, bulls, and calves (only mature steer cattle that could travel were marketable), and they couldn’t kill them. Respectable managers could not kill something that was perhaps owned by someone else. Large numbers of unclaimed cattle became an issue. The agency bureaucracy wouldn’t allow corrective action for another 10 years … six years after Congress passed a law ordering fencing be done.

            Truth and consequences

            The Gila has been described as an idealistic island whereby a sea of civilization has flowed around it without encroaching upon it. Such words sound good and impart a story book theme, but to dismiss the lives and devotion of those who made it home is shortchanging their worth and historical significance.

Obviously, such an observation had to have been made by another wayfarer who never staked his or her life on any outcome. In reality, the Gila was a crossroads of characters that created a backdrop of human drama matched only by the magnificence of its physical presence. Starting with Geronimo or even the Mimbrenos before him, the stage was set. The story of the Gila is the immensity of the juxtapositions of nature, of man, and the fascinating drama of the interactions.

Each component was credited with an impact. The Indians, the ranchers, the sheepmen, the loggers, the miners, the hunters, and the characters of arbitrage were all players of record and outcome. They contributed and their footprints remain in stories, in practices and in physical remains of their existence.

The wayfarers never lingered long enough to understand such complexity. They used their unnatural authority, made broad brush assumptions of what they saw, and equated the grandeur to only the physical aspect. They were wrong and they remain wrong to this day.

Leopold even hijacked the name and the underpinnings of the word, WILDERNESS.

Every indication now suggests its use and implication came from Peter Shelley. Its origin came from his Bible. In the Gila vernacular, its implication was a reversal of how Leopold crafted the agency’s administrative wilderness model in 1926. It was a wilderness defined by the presence of characters that lived within its reaches, but retreated to their enclaves of permanence without possessing it. In the Leopold parlance, it became the act of possessing it for the purpose of venturing into it in order to renew a natural kinship.

The problem is mankind cannot have the luxury of the latter without the contributions and the security afforded by the former. Anybody who has lived with first hand experience with the Gila is tied inexorably to the drama of its human-nature relationships. The initial steps always came from man made contributions of access and a degree of safety. The allure was elevated in experiences, memories, stories and intrigue that didn’t exist in a vacuum with nature alone. It was the combination and even Leopold defined the human element.

Before his borrowed term “wilderness” was coined for the solitude of the experience, he described it as “the exclusive domain of the mounted man”. It was quite obvious he was summarily taken by the immensity of it all. He enlarged his own primordial awakening as the “aristocracy of space based upon transport”. He had begun a self appointed ascension toward bureaucratic stewardship. It thrilled him!

What he couldn’t fathom and the majority will never understand is wilderness cannot be transposed into some per capita rationing of metaphysical paradise. The more it is shared and worshipped the more it is threatened and diminished.

What he really saw existed only for a short period of time. He arrived in the Gila during the intermediate step between the raw, unforgiving and cruel natural system and the state that formed a balance with enough safety and access to allow elitists like him to enter. He assumed it was the way it always was, but, by no means, was that the truth.

What he did was to start the process that began the systematic destruction of the social structure that made his venture possible.

 Wilderness, the modern trophy hunt

Leopold’s theorem of declining per capita rationing warrants consideration. It remains a factor in the relentless pursuit of designated wilderness, but it must be revealed as the inevitable mechanism of destruction of the resource it professes to protect. The process has become a trophy hunt of grand proportions … secular sport, campus charade, pagan charity, and abstract extravaganza.

 Leopold criticized trophy hunting recreationists in derisive sermon form to the modern wilderness worshipers. Read his words:

 “To enjoy, he (the trophy recreationist) must possess, invade, appropriate!”

Sounds like the kettle calling the skillet black doesn’t it? We have learned there are now 98,480,000 acres of federal lands being managed as wilderness or lands with wilderness characteristics, and millions more acres are being proposed for same. Implicit in this cavalcade of frenzied excess, too many Americans have been run over by roughshod bureaucrats and so called “land administrators with a sharp eye and an ecological mind” for the gain of saving these “last great places”.

The truth can be revealed in a much diminished scope. The wilderness as Leopold saw may exist … but it exists in questionable abundance on federal lands.

            Stephen L. Wilmeth is a rancher from southern New ‘Mexico. “If the Wilderness Act had been written by Henry Woodrow rather than another Leopold clone, Howard Zahniser … America would indeed have something to celebrate on the 50^th anniversary of its signing.”