Old Missoula

Forest Reserves to National Forests – 1907

Are National Forest Now

District Inspector E. A. Sherman has returned from Washington where he and his wife spent the winter. As soon as possible Mr. Sherman will have two rooms fitted up as headquarters and tho (sic) he will be out of the city a great deal there will be some one in the office all the time. There six district inspectors in the United States and they are directly under and responsible to Chief of the Forest Bureau Pinchot. The inspectors have nothing to say about the manner in which the forest supervisors act In (sic). Mr. Sherman’s territory, which contains the greatest amount of national forest and includes Montana, northern Idaho and northern Wyoming and comprises a total of over 32,000,000 acres. He will have four assistants, who are Paul G. Redite, F. A. Silcox, George H. Cecil and C. H. Adams. Mr. Cecil will arrive about the 15^th of the month and comes from Wyoming where he has been in charge of national forests. Mr. Adams has been and is now in Deer Lodge, but will arrive soon.

One of the most important changes made in the Washington forestry bureau during the winter was the name of forest reserves to national forests. As the timber in the forests were sold and all the land used, nothing being reserved the name was not appropriate and so it was changed to national forest, so all of the land formerly called forest reserves will be known as National forest, Bitter Root National Forest, Hellgate National Forest, etc.

The above article appeared in The Missoula Herald on May 3, 1907

 

E. A. Sherman came to Missoula in 1905 from Hamilton where he was publisher of the Ravalli County Republican newspaper. He was a graduate of Iowa State Agricultural College. He was the first supervisor of the Bitter Root Forest with headquarters in Missoula and later became the district inspector in charge of what became Region 1. He later went to Washington D. C. as assistant forester in charge of lands.

Sherman gave credit to Bitter Root forest ranger N. E. (Than) Wilkerson – see below – in a letter when he wrote to Mr. Wilkerson upon his retirement in 1928. He stated that “on my first field trip up the East Fork of the Bitter Root with you, I didn’t know a yellow pine from a Douglas fir. You generously and painstakingly undertook my education in tree botany and woodcraft.” (see Daily Missoulian 7/16/1950)

 

Deed for First Forest Service Cabin Is Given

Log Building and Plot of Land Transferred to U. S. After 42 Years

Hamilton, Nov. 19. – A little cabin built of pine logs, the first ever constructed for the administration of a public forest in the United States, was the property of the United States again today after more than 42 years.

A move to restore the plot of land and the cabin, now excluded from national forest boundaries, was initiated by the Hamilton Lions club, led by C. A. Smithey and E. L. Cole.

The club raised a subscription fund in a long-time campaign and yesterday the deed to .732 of an acre of land near Alta went from Peter B. Bennett to G. M. Brandborg, representing the Bitter Root national forest of the U. S. Forest Service. The transaction involved a comparatively small sum of money it was said.

Mr. Brandborg said the Forest Service will make the plot of land into a model campground and will rehabilitate the log cabin, which was built in the spring of 1899.

N. E. (Than) Wilkerson, retired forest ranger living in Hamilton, was builder of the cabin, with the assistance of another ranger, H. C. Tuttle. Wilkerson tells an interesting story of that little woods “government building”:

“The Bitter Root was one of the first forests created. The proclamation was signed February 22, 1897. The forest was in Montana and Idaho, but didn’t include much in Montana, just the country south of the base line in Ross Hole and west of the range line between Ranges 21 and 22. Later, unappropriated lands in Range 21, north, were added.

“It was not until 1898 that the service was actually established on the Bitter Root, when four men were put on the force. They were Pope Catlin, and a Mr. Veeder of Missoula, Ed Buker and Ben Lancaster of Stevensville. They rode horseback and patrolled the country around Stevensville. That was all the service there was in 1898.”

Forest records show that J. B. Weber of Topeka, Kan., was the first supervisor of the Bitter Root, and he was located at Hamilton after his appointment in the spring of 1899. J. B. Collins was state superintendent and was located at Missoula, having charge of all forests in Montana. So in the spring of 1899 there were eight rangers appointed. Buker and Lancaster, Stevensville; William H. McCoy and Frank H. Overturf, Darby; H. M. Butler, Al Osborne, H. C. Tuttle and Wilkerson, who had tent stations at various upper Bitter Root forest points. Wilkerson is the only one of these early foresters now living.

Wilkerson and Tuttle built the cabin at Alta, and it was on July 4 that they hoisted the first flag, one that Wilkerson himself purchased, he recalls. They had completed the shake-roofed, dirt-covered shelter in June, he said.

In 1903, all the Montana forests were placed under supervision of Major F. A. Fenn, supervisor of the Clearwater at Kooskia, Idaho.

It was in 1904 that E. A. Sherman, afterward a national figure in the service, left his newspaper office in Hamilton to become the Bitter Root supervisor by appointment. Sherman, like the other pioneers of the service, knew the shelter of the little Alta cabin many times in his horseback rides over the region.

Major Fenn, long a beloved figure in the Northwest and “Ed” Sherman were outstanding in their zeal for forest protection.

 

The above article appeared in The Daily Missoulian on November 20, 1941.

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