Progressive era (part i)  (Page 19/19)

These acts of Congress did not denote the authority tasked with administering the reserved lands and thus in 1897 Congress passed the Forest Management Act providing the Department of the Interior with the authority to regulate the use of reserved lands. The Bureau of Reclamation was created in 1902 to deal with the reality of water issues west of the Mississippi, in which the water tables were considerably lower than east of the Mississippi River. The federal government managed irrigation and other projects designed to best help Americans successfully settle the West. Once the irrigation projects were completed then the federal government would once again open the lands for settlement under the provisions of the 1863 Homestead Act.

In 1903 the federal government created the first national wildlife refuge, located in Florida, to help preserve and protect indigenous species. Two years later Congress created the U.S. Forest Service (originally under the Department of the Interior) and tasked that organization to manage the lands placed under reserve by the aptly named Reserve law of 1891. (Later the federal government will adopt the phrase “national forests” in place of “national reserves.”) Finally, Congress created the National Park Service in 1916, tasked with the management of all national parks (such as Mount Rainier in Washington, established in 1899), battlefields (such as Bear Paw Battlefield near Chinook, Montana), and monuments (such as the Alibates Flint Quarries in Texas).

“Conservation movement” and Hech-Hechy

(1890-1910).

One of the lesser-known events during the Progressive era was known as the “Conservation movement.” In its infancy, and certainly viewed with more “progressive” twenty-first century eyes, the conservation movement of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries might appear to be backward. Probably the two most important names attached to this reform were President Theodore Roosevelt and his Secretary of the Interior, Gifford Pinchot.

Pinchot began his federal career as the head of the Division of Forestry within the Department of Agriculture in 1898. Roosevelt, being quite concerned about conservation and the West, appointed Pinchot to investigate reports of the federal government leasing federal lands to ranchers. In 1904, Pinchot’s influence in the Roosevelt administration resulted in Pinchot wrestling control of the national forests away from the Department of the Interior. A few years later Pinchot’s attempt to gain control of all national parks, monuments, forests, and battlefields failed, and in the backlash a new, permanent oversight of the National Parks Service was created under the auspices of the Department of the Interior.

The Roosevelt-Pinchot team’s most prolific battle was over the damming (and the potential consequences) of a strip of land in California known as Hetch Hetchy. Following the 1906 earthquake, the city of San Francisco sought to dam part of Yosemite in order to create a man-made lake to be used as a fresh water supply. Roosevelt and Pinchot favored the project, while people such as John Muir (who created the Sierra Club in 1892) opposed destroying what he equated as a natural cathedral or temple. Interestingly enough, both Pinchot and Roosevelt were friends with Muir earlier in their careers. The federal government won and an act of Congress authorized the construction of a dam that partially flooded the Yosemite Valley.

The creation of Yosemite National Park and the flooding of the valley did not happen without its critics, to include the untold numbers of Americans and Indians who relied on game, water, and timber from Yosemite for their survival. Many of those people refused to adhere to artificial lines drawn in maps and thus they continued to hunt game on the park, fell trees on the park, and seek their fresh water sources from within the park. The US military was initially tasked with the park's security but by 1916 the federal government created the National Park Service to manage all aspects of these national resources, to include keeping people from hunting or taking other resources from within the boundaries of the park.

End of Part I