GIFFORD PINCHOT
And so when, a decade ago, the tall, pleasant-voiced young man from the far East, now known throughout the United States as Gifford Pinchot, the national forester, appeared in the West, and suggested to the stockmen that they were ruining the country by over-grazing, they laughed him to scorn.
He told the mining and sawmill men that through reckless and extravagant methods of lumbering they were bringing on a timber famine by great strides; he characterized their whole policy as one of utter disregard for the future of the country; and he demanded forcible and immediate action on the part of the Federal authorities. These pioneers had seen uncounted millions of buffalo melt away because no one took enough interest in the matter to stop the wanton waste. They had seen great billowy prairies, once knee-deep in the most splendid covering of grass and vegetation, grazed down until they were hardly more than dust heaps; and mountains that were clothed with magnificent forests swept bare—first by the woodsman's ax and later by forest fires that burned each year millions and millions of feet of the finest timber a country ever possessed, while no one raised a hand even to quench the fire because "it was only government land."
The Fight against the "Pinchot Policies"
These hard-headed, adventurous Western pioneers, indignant at the thought of any curtailment of their freedom; resentful of interference in what they were pleased to call their "inalienable right" to do as they pleased with the country they had conquered; utterly regardless of its future, and thinking but of the present and their own selfish interests, arose in their wrath and protested vigorously against what they called the "Pinchot policies" of the government.
That the writer, then a range cattle-raiser in Arizona, was one of the first to feel the effects of the new forest policy gives him all the more right to speak as he does of these things; that he joined with loud tongue and bitter pen in the general denunciation of the "Pinchot policies" makes it all the more a pleasure to him now to defend and explain them in so far as he can.
Although there had been a small start toward forest preservation, it was not until Mr. Pinchot was placed at the head of the movement in 1898 (six years after the first reserve was made), and organized and reconstructed the force of officials, that we really had any national forest policies worth mentioning.
His enemies first attacked his motives. He was a "notoriety seeker," a "political adventurer" looking for personal advancement. To their surprise they found that he showed not the slightest disposition to exploit himself; that, having millions at his command, he could expect to gain nothing financially by his course; and that he was absolutely devoid of any political ambitions.
They then took another point of attack. "He is an Eastern swell who knows nothing of forests, or the West and its needs. By what right does he tell us how to use the public lands?"