repairing mountains: restoration, ecology, and wilderness in twentieth-century utah

Repairing Mountains: Restoration, Ecology, and Wilderness in Twentieth-Century UtahAuthor(s): Marcus HallSource: Environmental History, Vol. 6, No. 4 (Oct., 2001), pp. 584-610Published by: Forest History Society and American Society for Environmental HistoryStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3985256 .

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Repairing Mountains Restoration, Ecology, and Wilderness in Twentieth-Century Utah

Marcus Hall

By some accounts, students are departing from their environmental history courses with greater senses of gloom and despair. After all, decline, not progress, prevails in the stories told about humans changing the land. Alan Taylor describes classic environmental histories as three-step sequences of 1) initial abundance, 2) transforming settlers, and 3) a legacy of diminished nature., But such histories do not tell the entire tale. Perhaps the most glaring absence to this narrative is the sequel of residents seeking to repair and restore former natures. The wolves in Yellowstone, the waters of Lake Erie, the air above London are today more healthy or more abundant than in decades past. While historians have made progress in understanding how and why people degraded the environment, it seems imperative that they pay more attention to how people sought to restore it. E. 0. Wilson declares that our twenty-first century will become "the era of restoration in ecology." Yet centuries past have long seen people struggling to rejuvenate, rebuild, and recreate previous environments. Seem- ingly something new, the endeavor of restoration has a rich and complicated past.2

In the late nineteenth century, few places displayed a greater legacy of diminished nature than the mountains of Utah. Although alpine areas across the American West showed the effects of too much grazing, logging, and mining, Utah's mountains may have been hit hardest. A i888 forestry survey of the Rocky Mountains warned that "the forest interests of Utah are in a more precarious condition than those of the other parts of the region." In 1904, wildlife expert Henry Fairfield Osborn told the Boone and Crockett Club that northeastern Utah's Uinta Mountains are "the most thoroughly devastated country I know of." When Osborn first visited this area in 1877, he saw "a wild natural region ... a perfect flower garden." But since then, he witnessed a land that "has felt the full force of the sheep curse." Conditions in central Utah may have been even worse. There, the alpine meadows of the Wasatch Plateau were so heavily grazed that local townsfolk counted sheep herds from the mountain foot ten miles away by the plumes of dust trailing each herd. In describing the Wasatch Plateau's pastures, a 19i2 U.S. Forest Service report declared tiat "range more extensively abused by bad management ... probably did not occur." Modern analysts Jeanne Kay and Craig Brown believe that Utah's newcomers - mosty eastern Americans and northern



Repairing Mountains 585

Europeans -"had virtually no prior experience with the low capabilities and regen- erative powers of desert and semi-arid mountain lands." Dan Flores suggests that even tight cooperation among Utah's Mormons could not prevent excessive consumption of timber and grass.3

Most Utah residents at first assumed that spontaneous natural processes would restore the land. But they soon realized that their degraded mountainsides did not recuperate very much or very fast. In the Wasatch Plateau, the mythic grasses that once brushed a horse's belly never reappeared. Large areas of pine, spruce, and fir that were logged out or burned out never did grow back but remained as sagebrush or alder fading into aspen. Even after the Manti Forest Reserve was established over most of the Wasatch Plateau in 1903, when the federal government first limited livestock grazing and timber cutting, alpine vegetation did not recover as expected. When destructive flash floods continued to rush down from these mountains, sometimes more frequently than before, the Forest Service established a research station in one of the plateau's most flood-prone canyons. Opened in 1912, the Great Basin Experi- ment Station's central mission was to find effective ways to restore stability and productivity to the West's denuded mountain watersheds. Over the next fifty years, station investigators came to believe that what had once grown on the mountain was better than any other vegetational cover that might replace it. In central Utah, the Forest Service had set out on a grand experiment of environmental restoration.4

In 1907, when Manti National Forest rangers began reforesting parts of the Wasatch Plateau, and five years later when pioneer range scientist Arthur Sampson and his assistants began regrassing some of its meadows, these managers restored by a process much like gardening, or perhaps farming. They tilled the mountainside, planted exotic species, and established tree plantations. But fifty years later, Sampson's followers restored desirable traits by a process that might be called "naturalizing": when- ever possible, they scattered native seeds within established biological ranges, hoping to conserve soils even more than to grow forage. Manti Forest managers first restored according to human expectations; later they restored according to natural constraints. Initially, they favored cultural remedies to fix a land not recovering on its own; fifty years later they promoted remedies more like those they observed in nature. These restorationists began naturalizing instead of gardening, once they decided that nature, not culture, had more power to repair degraded land. Not just in Utah but across the western U.S. and North America, more and more restorationists believed that land should include greater degrees of wildness. Their restored landscapes soon reflected this new goal of"rewilding." Utah's restorationists at first left indelible traces and human artifacts on the mountain, but by mid-century they were designing their alterations to better reflect and recreate a wild mountain. The restoration of Utah's mountainsides is a microcosm of how greater numbers of Americans were promoting nature rather than culture on their land.

The Wasatch Plateau

Extending south from the southern peaks of the Wasatch Mountains, the Wasatch Plateau is slightly taller and broader than most other mountain ranges that cross



586 Environmental History

Utah's deserts. From the occasional promontory on this rolling, eighty-mile plateau, side-canyons wind down to the valley floors on either side, with the eastern drainages eventually joining the Colorado River, and the western drainages flowing towards evaporation in the Great Basin's great expanse. Because the Wasatch Plateau's western escarpment drops faster than the eastern side, so does each of its western canyons- and so does the water that drains them. Where each of the dozen western canyons opens onto the broad Sanpete Valley, Mormon immigrants constructed villages; the larger settlements of Manti, Ephraim, and Mount Pleasant mark the larger rivers that have provided life but that after thunderstorms have sometimes unleashed death. The most dangerous floods in the American West resulted not from melting snow but from brief, summer downpours.

On August i6, 1889, the first of Sanpete County's recorded floods raged through Manti, killing one boy. Twenty-seven residents surveyed in 1910 agreed that no floods occurred before i888, but that floods struck frequently after that date, sometimes two or three times a summer. Although some residents blamed heavy cloudbursts, others blamed excessive grazing in the plateau's upper watersheds. In the late 189os, Manti physician Foster Kennar also blamed a local outbreak of typhoid fever on drinking water that issued from the overlying watershed contaminated by dead livestock. In response to these floods and diseases, leading local citizens rallied for grazing restrictions at the headwaters of Manti Canyon, which in 1902 resulted in much of the Wasatch Plateau being withdrawn for a Forest Reserve. As Manti's mayor Lewis R. Anderson recalled, "Our town, fields, and ditches were continually filling up with sand, gravel, and debris from spring run-off and the occasional torrential summer storm. Something had to be done."5

Later in the same year, Albert Potter, Gifford Pinchot's chief grazing officer, surveyed a large portion of Utah's summer livestock ranges. Potter reported that intensive grazing had ruined the forage over most of Sanpete County's high country, which he found covered with sagebrush or else completely barren. "The same story is told as in other localities," he wrote after visiting northern Sanpete County. "In early days it was all a grass meadow and the settlers came out with their mowing machines and cut great stacks of hay. Since the destruction of the grass by stock the country has all grown up with sagebrush." Conditions seemed even worse above Manti. Manti's grazing officer Nephi Ottosen reported that Pinchot himself toured the canyon that summer, remarking that, "It would take the revenue of a city like Chicago to save Manti unless the overgrazing of this canyon is stopped." Yet Potter recommended even more intensive remedies for Manti Canyon than simple restrictions on grazing. "[T]here is need of every care," Potter wrote, "to restore the vegetation on what soil is left."6

In May 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt created the Manti Forest Reserve, and at the end of the summer, 8,830 acres of Manti Canyon were closed to all grazing. But now Ephraim Canyon - lying just one watershed north of Manti Canyon - unleashed its own floods onto the neighboring town of Ephraim. The removal of mud and debris from Ephraim's streets became so commonplace that by September 4, 1913, the Ephraim Enterprise front-page headline proclaimed, "Flood Pays Annual Visit of Destruction." Manti, which lay below the only canyon closed to grazing, escaped further flooding. The apparent linkage between heavy grazing andfloods sparked




Figure i. Map showing Sanpete County, Manti National Forest, and Wasatch Plateau, Utah.

A GREAT BAsIN EXPERIMENTAL STATION

rO SANPETE COUNTY, UTAH

MANTI NATIONAL FOREST, UTAH

more proposals to limit cattle and sheep on the Wasatch Plateau. Yet a large fraction of Sanpeters, mostly livestock graziers, protested that heavy rainfall, not heavy grazing, was the main cause of floods.

The livestock graziers had reason to complain. In 1904, the sheep quota on the reserve was set at 225,000, down from 720,000 sheep four years earlier; the cattle quota was set at 20,000, down from about 55,000 in the i88oS. Although range ecologist Lincoln Ellison later estimated that actual numbers of livestock grazing in the plateau after 1904 were io to 25 percent higher than the quotas, such volatile statistics meant dramatic consequences for land and livelihood. Tense town meetings found ranchers sparring with farmers, who both argued with Manti Forest officials. Ranchers wanted more pasture, farmers more water, foresters greater good for greater numbers. Over the following half-century, senators, Forest Service chiefs, eminent ecologists, and leading range managers would all suggest remedies after traveling to central Utah and viewing the mountains above Ephraim and Manti (see Figure l).7




Chief Forester Henry Graves visited Ephraim and its canyon in 1910 before order- ing an investigation into the relationships between grazing and flooding. Range Examiner Robert V. R. Reynolds, who initiated the study, recommended in the fall that 5480 acres in upper Ephraim Canyon (like Manti Canyon) be closed to grazing. The next year, Manti Forest officials announced plans to cut sheep numbers by an additional 15 percent and cow numbers by 11 percent. Yet Reynolds called for even more intensive remedies than those that simply restricted grazing: "There can be no reasonable doubt," Reynolds wrote, "that the torrents which have devastated this region . .. can be largely controlled, if not entirely eliminated, by a restoration of the natural protective cover of shrubs and grasses." For Reynolds as for Potter, restoration appeared to be the best solution to Ephraim's flood problem.8

Artificial Revegetation

With livestock graziers complaining louder about the Manti Forest's tightened grazing restrictions, and with Sanpete townsfolk still suffering from periodic floods, Ephraim Canyon seemed an ideal place to find better ways to repair the mountain. Since 1907, the Forest Service sponsored Arthur Sampson's research on range revegetation in Oregon's Wallowa Mountains, but Utah's Wasatch Plateau presented a more desperate and dangerous scenario. In summer 1911, District Forester A. E. Sherman accompa- nied by Reynolds and two assistants selected a flat ground in upper Ephraim Canyon as the site for the new research headquarters. During these years, the U.S. Department of Agriculture was also opening other stations dedicated to improving western land management: Colorado's Wagon Wheel Gap project (f. 1910) focused on measuring water retention of forests, Montana's Priest River Station (f. 1911) concentrated on refining silvicultural practices, Arizona's Santa Rita Range Reserve (f. 1903) and New Mexico's Jornada Range Reserve (f. 1912) were dedicated to renewing desert ranges. The Great Basin Experiment Station, first called the Utah Experiment Station, focused on restoring alpine watersheds (see Figure 2). Sampson became the station's first director in 1912. By mid-century, almost every notable range researcher in the United States had worked at the Great Basin Station. Its visitors included such well-known ecologists as Henry Cowles, Frederic Clements, Clarence Forsling, Walter Lowdermilk, Walter Cottam, and Jack Majors. Utah Congressman Don B. Colton claimed that the main principles of the influential Taylor Grazing Act (1934) were developed at one of the station's annual field days in 1925 or 1926.9

Even before Sampson's arrival in Utah, Manti Forest rangers had begun to revegetate sections of the Wasatch Plateau, a process they referred to as "artificial revegetation." They reasoned that so-called "natural revegetation," a management plan that relied on remaining ungrazed plants to spontaneously reseed the range, might be accelerated or replaced by artificial, human means. J. W. Humphrey, who became Manti Forest's third supervisor, planted ponderosa pine as a young ranger in 1907 in the high, rolling terrain east of the divide from Ephraim Canyon. To his boss, first supervisor A. W. Jensen, these vast alpine grasslands seemed a good place to renew the plateau's stand of timber, which on its lower flanks had been cut heavily for railroads and towns. Yet Humphrey was afforestingraffier than reforestingthe top of tie plateau.




Figure 2. Great Basin Experimental Station, Utah (ca. 1935).

_~~~~~~~~~~~~~~i . AL

4...~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~~i .. .... ..'A

Source: Historical Files, Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, Ephraim, Utah.

In forestry circles, "afforestation" meant the planting of trees in lands never known to have supported forests In the grassy highlands where Humphrey planted his seedlings, trees had not grown in recent memory. In nature, the nearest ponderosa pines grew a hundred miles south of the Wasatch Plateau. Humphrey sought to establish a new tree plantation; he did not seek to re-establish a previously existing forest If he was "restoring" at all, his aim was to restore forest productivity rather than specific forest stands. Much like a gardener, Humphrey assumed he could place human order on the land. But Humphrey and his followers soon became more attentive to the way they saw nature revegetating the mountain.10

Of 200,000 nursery-germinated ponderosa pines that Humphrey first planted, he could not find a single living tree a decade later. In spring 1909, forest rangers planted more ponderosa seedlings in oak brush clearings at lower, undisclosed elevations. Yet here too, progress reports noted that only one-fifth of these trees still survived three seasons later. Following Ephraim's late-summer floods in 1909, ponderosa seeds were sown into 250 acres of Ephraim Canyon, but these showed similar dismal survival rates, with most sprouts being eaten by birds or rodents. That year Douglas fir were also transplanted into 300 acres of the canyon with similar bad results. A pessimistic memorandum issued just before Sampson's arrival declared that large-scale, direct revegetation of the Wasatch Plateau would be prohibitively expensive and that onatural revegetation of the plateau would probably require several hundred years.

Yet the memorandum wamred that 2oaooo acres lay in desperate need of reforestation. These foresters were discovering that in the mountains of Utah so-called "artificial revegetation" required much more than kicking dirt over a handful of seeds the way




one planted pole beans in a garden. Successful revegetation of the West's mountains must account for growing conditions characterized by shallow soils, extreme temperatures, and severe aridity. If one insisted on gardening Utah's mountains, one needed to modify one's techniques and notions of gardening.11

In addition to planting trees, Manti Forest rangers also planted grasses. Like their attempts to afforest treeless subalpine meadows, they planted forage species that had never grown in these mountains. At the top of the plateau in 1909, rangers sowed seeds of timothy, Hungarian bromegrass, Kentucky bluegrass, orchard grass, meadow oats, Alsyke clover, and redtop. Such species were common forage plants in the American Midwest-and they could be conveniently purchased from commercial seed dis- tributors. Yet as non-native, or non-local species, all adapted to moister, lower elevations, these seeds did not germinate and cover up dusty mountainsides as foresters sat back and watched. In fact, only a small portion of the brome and orchard grass germinated at all. With few precedents for regrassing western mountains, land managers could only guess at successfil species and methods. Sometimes seeds were simply broadcast in the wind over barren areas. At other times, seeds were harrowed in by horses pulling brush or else by sheep trampling the ground. Historian Thomas Alexander says that early range managers initially practiced "rule-of-tiumb" management, and that only by the late 1920S were most of them practicing scientific management. But even by following scientific principles, range managers did not always see their success rates improve much. As late as 1943, range ecologist Ellison confided to his boss Reed Bailey that Manti Forest officials still had little real basis upon which to make their decisions about grazing management: "They are-to be perfectly frank about it- only guessing," Ellison wrote Bailey. "They will continue to guess (and one may suppose, guess wrongly) until they have facts to work with."12

When Sampson arrived in Utah, he built on the experiences of the Manti Forest rangers and on his Oregon work. In the station's first annual report, he wrote that in all previous years he and other range managers had failed to establish a single exotic forage plant anywhere in the West's high mountain pastures. The only species he found to consistently survive and reproduce in these extreme environments were the ones already growing there, local or native species. To Sampson, "indigenous forage species" seemed to hold the most promise for revegetation. In future trials, Sampson and his associates focused on finding better ways to collect, germinate, and propagate forage species that could already be found in western U.S. mountains. Although questions remained as to how local or how native were "indigenous" species, Sampson looked closer at how nature ordinarily revegetated Utah's mountains.13

American grazing managers at the turn of the century categorized species in sometimes ambiguous and confusing ways. Because sheep and cattle in the West grazed wild ranges, land managers like Sampson contrasted "wild" species with "tame" species. But they also contrasted "indigenous" species with tame species, as well as "native" species with "exotic" species. Yet not all tame species were exotics. Kentucky bluegrass and alfalfa were exotic, tame species imported from the Old World, whereas American clovers and wheatgrasses were native, tame species. Native species usually meant local species, but natives might be any species found in North America. So- called "naturalized" species meant any well-adapted exotic species. These ambigu-




ities stemmed in part from the conceptual difficulty of managing wild species. The act of managing, after all, seemed to require taming.

Owing to past failures with tame exotics, Sampson assumed that natives would give better results in Ephraim Canyon. But in 1913, almost all of the 1,130 attempted plantings, consisting of sprouts and stems collected from local willow, aspen, and mountain elder, died within a few months. The next spring, he planted ten times this number, along with seeds of local gooseberry, alpine currant, and two North Ameri- can wheatgrasses. Discouragingly, very few survived, with only the wheatgrasses showing some success. Yet the wheatgrasses were only marginally palatable and did not make good livestock forage. Sampson discovered that livestock graziers might never be satisfied with the way he could revegetate Ephraim Canyon. One of his goals would be to identify all-purpose species that would grow under harsh conditions, prevent erosion, and nourish livestock. But Sampson's mounting failures suggested that these super plants might not exist.14

In more trials with indigenous plants, his immediate challenge was to amass suffi- cient quantities of seed so that large areas might be replanted. In the wild, most desirable forage plants grew interspersed between other less-desirable plants, requiring range managers to collect and sort wild seeds by hand. A small comb-like seed stripper that Sampson developed helped them to speed this collecting process. Even by 1920, Sampson still admitted that methods of collecting native seed were "crude and expensive." Even his attempts to grow native seeds in the greenhouse or nursery exposed all sorts of horticultural problems. In plots near the station headquarters, even with moderated temperatures and conscientious irrigation, five out of eight indigenous forage species showed low germination rates. In those instances when large amounts of wild seed could be collected or grown, Sampson was uncertain about the best planting techniques: in the alpine meadows he tried broadcasting seed by hand, trampling seed into the dirt with sheep, and drilling seed into disked furrows like a wheat farmer in the Dakotas. But none of the planting methods showed satisfac- tory germination rates over large areas. Again and again, Sampson confronted the difficulty of gardening with wild plants.15

After two seasons of poor results with locally found species, Sampson expanded his search for species to other nearby national forests. From Idaho, Payette Forest rangers sent him seeds of two alpine grasses that were favorites of local sheep. Sawtooth Forest rangers sent him several ounces of wild carrot seeds. From California, Trinity Forest rangers provided him with seeds of a local clover. But all of these seeds showed poor abilities to germinate and propagate in Ephraim Canyon, even in plots that had been fenced to exclude cows and sheep. Steep, eroded areas gave especially poor results.6

With these problem areas in mind, Sampson sought help from the USDA's Bureau of Plant Industry and its world network of "plant hunters." He made plans to test species that had been collected in Australia, Transvaal, and the Mediterranean. From bureau reports, he surmised that Scotch broom, a native of Spain, would show good results in the Wasatch Plateau. In 1915, the bureau sent Sampson several strains of alfalfa that it had developed from Russian stocks. Sampson's renewed efforts to plant Utah's barren mountainsides with hardy and palatable exotics reflected his dwin- dling hope that humans could force their gardens onto this land. When the Russian alfalfa strains failed-and worse, when invasive exotics such as Scotch broom began




to replace valuable native plants -Sampson and his followers would show greater humility when dictating how nature grows gardens. Although Scotch broom never became well established in Utah's mountains, other plant introducers helped spread this prolific species, creating a perennial enemy for later restorationists in milder regions, especially the Pacific states. Sampson discovered that these newly imported exotics, like the tame ones, were still not solving the problems above Ephraim.'7

Exotic or "foreign" species had long occupied the energies of horticulturists and agriculturists. Thomas Jefferson, reportedly the first to introduce Scotch broom into North America, wrote that, "The greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add a useful plant to its culture." Indeed many of the first world travelers were motivated to cross the oceans by the hope of bringing home valuable foreign species. The U.S. government sanctioned the introduction of foreign species as early as 1827

when John Quincy Adams requested that all consular officials living overseas send seeds of promising plants to Washington, D.C. In 1898, the U.S. Department of Agri- culture added the Section of Seed and Plant Introduction, which under various names up to the present has coordinated governmental exploration and introduction of plants. David Fairchild, the section's first chief and perhaps the most famous plant hunter in American history, traveled around the globe for over three decades while shipping home tropical fruits, medicinal plants, cultivars of wheat, barley, and alfalfa. Fairchild's shipments of exotic plants included scores of what many considered to be useful and beautiful plants, as well as what would become some of North America's most invasive pests. Notorious Kudzu vine spread rampantly across southeastern U.S. lands after Fairchild introduced it from Japan in 1907. One source says that by 1933, the Department of Agriculture had introduced some 103,500 foreign plant species into the United States.'8

By this time in Utah's mountains, the Forest Service had tested some four hundred exotic forage species, but only two to four of them were giving acceptable results in these high elevations: smooth brome, timothy, sweetclover, and crested wheatgrass. In milder areas, Kentucky bluegrass showed success: between 1933 and 1936, government range managers chose Kentucky bluegrass in 89 percent of the seeds they used to revegetate 40,000 acres of western National Forest lands. While Fairchild believed that culture could import nature's best species, the trials in central Utah were con- vincing range managers that nature had already imported the best species.19

During the first three decades of the twentieth century, American foresters and range managers had catalogued so many failures when revegetating with exotic trees and grasses - especially in the West's degraded desert and alpine lands - that exotics earned a bad reputation. The special disadvantages of invasive exotics were also becoming more obvious, as when harmful or useless cheatgrass, Russian thistle, and afilaria expanded across productive ranges once covered with succulent natives. So in contrast to American farmers who had learned to depend on new and exotic agricultural species, most American range and forest managers were learning to distrust the exotics. As forester E. W. Gemmer explained in 1931, exotics "have generally acquired a bad name as a result of poor growth and low quality productiveness." Already by 1918, Sampson had recommended that western land managers reseed with natives and "favor the development of native vegetation to the greatest extent possible." Sampson and his associates had also become disillusioned with the search for a super plant that




would grow under harsh conditions while providing forage for livestock. "Such plants may be found," wrote Grazing Inspector James Jardine in 1919, "or may be developed at some time in the distant future; they are not available at present." According to leading grazing experts, the best way to revegetate the Wasatch Plateau was to seed with native plants.20

When Sampson began his career in Oregon, he revegetated with exotics; a decade later in Utah, he preferred to revegetate with natives, and so he began to plant more the way he observed nature planting the land. An important though subtle point is that while he had begun to plant native vegetation, he was not planting native vegetation as it existed in thepast The natives that he planted were usually limited to forage plants useful to cattle and sheep; he planted these natives in proportions and in places quite unlike those found in nature. So while Sampson hoped to revegetate the Wasatch Plateau more like nature ordinarily revegetated it, he still sought to improve the land to a condition that was better than the original. As it became more obvious that his improvements would not work on the plateau, Sampson set his goal on re-establishing what used to grow there. By the 1920S, Sampson and his assistants would be happy to recover what the land once was, rather than to create what they thought the land should become.

Revegetating with History

Sheep and catfle ranchers in the West had long spoken of the range's historic abundance and the need to restore previous conditions. By the late nineteenth century, ranchers almost always compared a better past with a worse present. Or as agrostologist Jared Smith wrote in 1898, "The chief problem ... is, How shall we restore or bring back the grasses on land where they have been destroyed by overstocking?" In 1901 in southern Arizona, Bureau of Plant Industry investigator David Griffiths set out to determine former range conditions by querying prominent local ranchers. His experience had shown that "cultural operations appeared entirely useless" for improving the range and so the best alternative "would be to restore the condition which once prevailed." In his questionnaire to ranchers, he asked them to describe the "original condition" of the range prior to grazing. So even before Sampson set out to revegetate the Wasatch Plateau, grazing experts like Griffiths were already looking at the past for guidance in revegetating western ranges. Griffiths found that while ranchers univer- sally agreed that the range had once been filled with tall, dense perennial grasses, they could not provide him with precise information about species or compositions. He concluded that isolated ungrazed sites, like railroad corridors, would help identify historically abundant species. These isolated "relic" sites, as windows into the past, later captured the attention of range managers in central Utah.21

By the time Sampson began his work in Utah, another window into the past seemed to be the ecological climax state. As a student of Frederic Clements and the American school of dynamic ecology, Sampson believed that groups of plants developed through several stages to reach a stable climax condition. Re-establishing the plateau as it once was therefore meant re-establishing the climax. But in the field, the Wasatch Plateau's vegetational climax was very difficult to identify: every accessible




meadow had already been grazed so that existing vegetation was clearly far from a climax condition. Sampson found himself facing the dilemma of trying to recreate the climax without really knowing what the climax looked like. He hoped to resolve this dilemma by monitoring samples of developing vegetation until they reached a stable state. Theoretically, once these samples stabilized, they had reached the climax and so provided a picture of the correct goal of revegetation.22

Sampson adopted the "quadrat" method developed by Clements for tracing tem- poral vegetation changes. By periodically measuring the number and density of species in small, demarcated plots, he could estimate vegetational trends over much larger areas. From 1913 to 1915, Sampson established over forty quadrats, about one- third of which excluded grazing with fences. He found that most fenced quadrats showed yearly increases in species numbers and vegetation density, but that unfenced, grazed quadrats showed decreases in both. Typical was one fenced quadrat near the head of the canyon in Philadelphia Flat that after six years showed six species increase to twenty-four species, with plant density doubling. But in a nearby unfenced quadrat being grazed under a management plan of "natural revegetation," over half of io6 penstemon plants disappeared in one year. These and other data led Sampson to declare in 1918 that the Wasatch Plateau's range "is virtually in no higher state of productivity than in I912."23 While demonstrating that natural revegetation was giving poor results, Sampson's data also indicated that grazed portions of the plateau were moving towards vegetational impoverishment, a phenomenon he called "retrogressive succession."4

Sampson also discovered that his data did not reveal the climax: the vegetational composition in both fenced and unfenced quadrats had not yet stabilized during the course of his experiments. He could wonder where the plateau's vegetational trend was heading, and from where it was coming, but he still could not measure the climax directly. Sampson was finding out that the only certain way to identify the climax- and thus to identify the best goal of revegetation -was to have observed the climax before it was grazed. Even if the climax state was a window into the past, the only sure way to describe the climax of slow- or non-recovering, degraded vegetation was to reveal the past itself. Sampson's experiments therefore indicated that historical - not ecological-research should give the best information about what to plant on the Wasatch Plateau. After Sampson left Utah in 1922 to become a professor at Berkeley, one of the main research pursuits at the Great Basin Station was to determine the plateau's historic vegetation so that it might be restored.

Lincoln Ellison, who became Sampson's fourth successor, carried out the most comprehensive vegetational history of the Wasatch Plateau before or since. Begin- ning with his arrival at the Great Basin Station as a range examiner in 1938, and for the next fifteen years, Ellison sought to reveal once and for all the state of the plateau's flora before it had been altered by livestock. But Ellison soon discovered that not much had been recorded about the early plant cover of these isolated mountains in central Utah. He read every past issue of the Manti Messenger and the Ephraim Enterprise, which had been published regularly since the 188os, but he located few descriptions about land cover. He sought to decipher information from public land surveys that dated from the end of the nineteenth century but soon realized that these were too vague to be of much use. He inquired at the U.S. National Archives to see if




someone there might know about relevant historical accounts of Sanpete County's landcover: "Our objective," Ellison wrote, "is to obtain contemporary accounts of virgin or near-virgin conditions." But the archivists could not help much.25

Local sheep herders and retired forest rangers provided Ellison with the best historical information. From his 1943 interview with seventy-four-year-old sheep herder James Jensen, Ellison corroborated his own hunches and scattered clues that broad- leafed plants (or "forbs"), rather than grasses, originally covered much of the rolling alpine lands. In fact, Ellison observed that forbs predominated in the plateau's least grazed sites, as on top of steep-sided knolls. During summer 1942, he searched neighboring mountain ranges by horse and foot for pristine, relic sites to get a better idea of pre-grazing vegetation. But Ellison understood that most sites did not represent true relic vegetation. He also knew that Jensen's memory only reached back to the late i8oos at best. Other interviews presented conflicting information, as when elderly sheep herder Lauritz Nielson claimed that upper Ephraim Canyon was originally covered not with forbs but with tall grasses that "would completely hide the sheep and in some places cows were difficult to see." In 1954, Ellison published his accumu- lated findings, declaring that his aim was to "present a reconstruction of original cover" on the Wasatch Plateau. But with vague, often unreliable, mostly recent historical sources, he depended largely on inference and extrapolation to draw his conclusions about the plateau's pre-grazing flora. Ellison had looked to history to discover how nature had planted this mountain but found that its vegetation history might be unknowable.26

Undaunted, Ellison wished to revegetate according to the best historical evidence he could find. His aim was to replant even more like nature had originally planted, and so he sought to naturalize the land even more naturally than his predecessors. In a six-hundred-acre planting project in Ephraim Canyon, he favored a native bromegrass and a native wheatgrass, which had both been collected on the Manti Forest. The climax growth that Ellison emulated was based on more objective history than that used by his predecessors.27

Still, exotic plants were not excluded from Ellison's replanting schemes. Like Sampson, Ellison found that most non-local, native plants did not grow very well in the Wasatch Plateau. And even though the collection and cultivation of local, native seeds (especially native forage seeds) was becoming a cottage industry in nearby Sanpete Valley by the 1940S, these more native seeds did not always germinate as expected. Ongoing mediocre results with such species led Ellison to sow still more exotics into the alpine lands above Ephraim, especially smooth brome and crested wheatgrass. Ellison's principal goal was to stabilize and revegetate denuded hillsides: if he could not know what nature had once planted on the mountain, then he would attempt to plant it with the most hardy, palatable species that might grow there.28

A few land managers even considered exotic reseeding to be a "natural" way to revegetate the mountains. According to at least one participant of the Great Basin Station's 1939 range conference, human introduction of exotic species served to hasten their natural dispersal: "The importation of exotic plants for range revegetation or, for that matter, agricultural and horticultural purposes, is based on [the thesis] ... that Nature has not extended the range of all species to provide the best species for each site." According to this argument, one of the range manager's jobs was to facilitate




natural migration of species by transporting promising plants into new areas. So while Ellison's revegetation projects sometimes contained just as many or more exotics than Sampson's projects, Ellison may have seen himself to be accelerating nature's own mechanisms of seed dispersal. Whether he revegetated with historic species or with exotic species, Ellison hoped to restore the land even more like nature would ordinarily restore it. Today, most ecological restorationists would protest that Ellison's restorative techniques were less objectively natural than he thought.29

Replacing the Soil

Even with better knowledge about the flora that had once grown on the Wasatch Plateau, Ellison revegetated with almost as many failures as had Sampson. Ellison set out in 1938 to establish what used to grow on the mountain, but in 1954 he concluded that even if he could determine what once grew there, such plants would probably no longer survive and reproduce anyway. Ellison had come to think that the real problem lay in soil loss, not in species choice. Even if he could travel back a century in time to survey pre-grazing vegetation with transects and quadrats, he doubted that tiis previous vegetation could be grown on transformed soils. For Ellison, successful revegetation required soil replacement.30

Soil loss was not a new problem, nor was it recognized as a new problem. George Perkins Marsh had warned that loss of "vegetable mould" would promote floods and diminish the land's capacity to grow plants. An 1894 USDA bulletin, "Washed Soils: How to Prevent and Reclaim Them," declared that soil erosion was "a process which no human precaution can wholly prevent." Yet in spite of such warnings, most land- use experts did not yet consider soil erosion to be very serious. In moister climates of the eastern U.S. and northern Europe, plants grew on all types of surfaces, even on thin and eroded soils. But in arid or alpine climates of the West, where scarce water limited plant growth, erosion of moisture-laden soils resulted in significant loss of plant growth. True, Utah's mountain tops usually received abundant precipitation, but it remained locked up as snow for many months before melting off quickly, and so it was largely unavailable to plants; moreover, high-elevation radiation easily desiccated plants, creating still greater plant demand for water. Finally, steeply slop- ing lands facilitated the transport of soils by water so that mountainous areas were especially susceptible to erosion and the concomitant losses of moisture and nutri- ents that sustained plant growth. Simply put, a little erosion in the alpine West was much more serious than a little erosion in the rolling East.3'

When Sampson first faced the erosion problem, he divided erosion control into "natural" and "artificial" methods. Like his efforts at revegetation, he searched for hands-on, artificial methods when hands-off, natural methods produced unsatisfac- tory results: if left unaddressed, Utah's eroding mountain land just eroded further. Like his methods of artificial revegetation, his methods of artificial erosion control were meant to simulate nature's own processes. Again, he modified his techniques of erosion control to better match those that he saw -or thought he saw - in nature.

When Sampson identified the erosion problem, he initially sought to replace soils even more than to halt soil loss. But he found that typical artificial methods to




Figure 3. Principal Artificial Figure 4. Contour Trnenhing Revegetation Study Areas in 1939, Projects, 1916-66, Region 4, U.S.

Region 4, U.S. Forest Service. Forest Service.

Source: Fig. 3: "Artificial Revegetation." Unpublished Manuscript, 1939, Utah Division of Wild- life Resources, Ephraim, Utah; Fig. 4: John Floyd Iverson, "Mountain Surgery: A Chapter in the History of Conservation, Focusing on the Contour Trench as a Device for the Restoration of Mountain Watersheds," master's thesis, University of Utah, 1970.

replace soils, such as adding fertilizer and planting hardy crops to accumulate detri- tus, were difficult or impractical in the mountains. Most of his planted species could not even survive. Resorting to more drastic measures in 1916, Sampson dug a half- dozen contour trenches in the headwaters ofWhite Ledge Fork, a tributary of Ephraim Canyon. Even though Sampson wanted to build soils the way nature would build them, he found himself constructing obtrusive, unnatural trenches to collect water that would irrigate plants and halt shifting soils.

As with his attempts to revegetate, his attempt to replace soils mostly failed. Ac-

cording to an optimistic report in 1922, some trenches collected water to enable

planted seeds to germinate and survive several years. Yet other trenches washed out, serving to accelerate erosion. The intensive efforts required to build trenches made their use impractical over large areas. Disillusioned, Sampson wrote in 1918 that the use of trenches and check dams "is limited to situations where the destruction to personal and other property is of much more than average seriousness. Problems of this character properly fall under the scope of engineering." Carl 0. Sauer, who spent a lifetime studying arroyos and erosion control, concurred with Sampson. "Engineer- ing devices," wrote Sauer "are in the main palliatives ftat reduce [soil] loss, but which under extreme weather conditions may' inraete risk."32 SmsnadSurare thatyo. dg ng mhountaintre eso waste bttl buiing sym tom nstoe adf saues w ldb

them, hegfoundmhimseliconstructingwobtruive,nunnaturalmtrenhesato collectawate




Land managers in other parts of Utah resorted to contour trenching after more mountain floods ravaged low-lying towns. Beginning in 1923, thundershower floods roared down steep canyons in northern Utah's Davis County. In 1930, when destructive floods again hit Davis County, a gubernatorial commission called for the "restoration of a cover ... of suitable grasses, weeds, shrubs, and trees" in the county's high watersheds, along with the "construction of brush dams and other minor works" in completely denuded areas.33 From 1933 to 1938, the Forest Service excavated 700 miles of contour trenches in the watersheds of Davis County much like those built by Sampson twenty years earlier- except that these newest trenches were deeper, longer, and plowed with bulldozers. Thousands of contour trenches were eventually built in alpine watersheds across western America. One source reports that by 1964, 30,000 acres had been contour-trenched in eighty-three separate projects (see Figures 3 and 4). The trenches may well have captured surface water and diverted it underground, as proponents claimed, thereby diminishing floods and reducing soil erosion. But the soil layer did not grow much thicker, if at all. These contour trenches may have improved mountain plumbing, but they did little to restore mountain soils or control soil loss.34

At the time of this regional turn to trenching, range managers back in central Utah saw occasional glimmers of hope. Certain meadows in the Wasatch Plateau appeared to be recovering. Destructive floods in Sanpete Valley had also become less frequent. Part of this recovery may have been the result of CCC laborers who in 1936 plowed a series of shallow "contour furrows" in the high basins above the town of Mount Pleasant after a destructive flood washed through its streets. Some range recovery followed 1938, when the CCC stitched contour furrows into another 175 acres of the upper basin of Ephraim Canyon, as well as building and reseeding deeper furrows close to Sampson's original trenches. But in 1942, recovery in this last area was "spotty." If there was any significant recovery, it probably resulted from spontaneous regrowth rather than artificial revegetation and artificial erosion control. Livestock numbers on the plateau had reached their lowest numbers in forty years-about 15,ooo cows and 115,000 sheep.35

In spite of these auspicious observations, Lincoln Ellison protested that the Wasatch Plateau was not really recovering. In 1943, even where alpine forage grew tall, it took too long to grow back. The ground cover, he noted, was unlike its pre-grazing condition, showing inferior density and composition. This new plant cover was reduced to dust after just one or two grazing seasons, with subsequent recovery taking longer than before. In his article, "What is Range Improvement?," Ellison stressed that there is more to the range than plants. An overgrazed area may appear to be recovering, he explained, and may occasionally produce as much as before. But its soil has not recovered, nor is there much prospect that its soil will ever recover. The presence of tall grass is a false indicator of range recovery; such vegetation did not reflect true restoration. Ellison seemed to be elaborating on what Aldo Leopold had declared two decades earlier: "It appears to be a fact, especially on browse range, that 'the forage will carry more stock than the land."'36

The special challenge for range managers, as Ellison pointed out, was that they managed ranges, not pastures- wildlands, not domestic lands. Most western ranchers depended on rangelands considered to be wild. Restoring these lands required range




managers to identify former wild conditions as well as processes that could recreate them. The range managers' challenge-and paradox-was to restore wild conditions through domestic means: to touch-up the land so that it appeared untouched, to naturalize unnaturally. Range managers could rarely rely on labor-intensive methods to restore land. The vast area of ranges like that of the Wasatch Plateau, and the small number of range managers in charge of its management meant that they must rely on broadcast seeding rather than on contour-trenching. Intensive management was possible for pastures, not ranges. Pasture managers might rebuild soil, while range managers could only control soil loss. Ellison believed that the Wasatch Plateau's soil might be preserved, not restored. Its wild soils mighthave been preserved, but they could no longer be fully restored.

Forest Service ecologist George Stewart agreed with Ellison. "When nearly all the top soil, rich in organic matter that has been building for a thousand years or more, is stripped off in 30 to 6o years," Stewart wrote in 1948, "we have greatly lessened the chances of maintaining high production of forage." At the range managers' conference that year, USFS Director of Range Research W. R. Chapline declared that "the most important problem on western ranges is the restoration of forage and soil val- ues." Chapline was saying that soil-even more than vegetation-was the source of the problem and the object of restoration. When several hundred acres of "precision built trenches" were built during the next two summers in Dry Pole Fork above Mount Pleasant, the Forest Service aimed to absorb surface water more than to replace soils or diminish soil loss. Preventing floods seemed possible. Restoring soils seemed im- possible.37

After Sampson attempted artificial revegetation of the Wasatch Plateau, he sought artificial replacement of its soils. But after Sampson's mediocre successes with both, his followers resorted to artificial erosion control. By 1955, Manti Forest officials labeled their seeded contour trenches in Dry Pole Fork as "artificial restoration," which presumably reflected their active, hands-on effort to both revegetate and control erosion. Perry Plummer, Ellison's main assistant and eventual successor at the Great Basin Station, almost always spoke of artificial restoration.38 Yet Ellison remained skeptical about so-called artificial restoration, declaring that even drastic artificial measures, such as constructing trenches, furrows, and flood dams had done little to control erosion. He believed that soil loss might be slowed but not stopped. Ellison ultimately saw little hope in finding ways to reverse erosion, restore soil, and repair land. Instead, he saw greater hope in developing a new "land-use ethic." Echo- ing Leopold, Ellison emphasized that while past land use had done damage, only future land use might retain what was left. After spending his career searching for ways to restore the range, Ellison concluded that the alpine meadows above Ephraim and Manti could never be completely restored. Only ethical land use could prevent further degradation.39

Rehabilitation

After Sampson determined that the Wasatch Plateau's soils could not be replaced, Ellison decided that even soil loss might not be prevented. After Sampson concluded




that the best approach was to preserve the range through better grazing management, Ellison warned that even preservation of degraded land might be inadequate. Instead of full restoration, the realistic management strategy for many of Utah's mountains had become partial repair-or rehabilitation.

When managers spoke of "rehabilitating" rather than "restoring" the land, they had lowered their goals, no longer expecting to reproduce an undamaged range. After ten years at the station, Sampson was already counseling that the best strategy in Ephraim Canyon was to save what was left, since much damage was irreparable. Although stockmen expect great things from artificial reseeding, he wrote, "the Service should impress upon them the futility of such work and the need for conserving the natural vegetation." Permanent damage meant that even the introduction of hardy species - whether native or exotic -could never completely repair the land. At the station's 1939 management seminar, participants were informed dryly that "there seems to be no possibility of finding the 'wonder plant' which will grow without moisture and withstand extremely heavy utilization."40

By mid-century, Utah's deteriorating mountain lands required land doctors. Al- pine pastures such as those of the Wasatch Plateau were not just eroded and unproduc- tive, they were unhealthy. A 1945 Forest Service publication declared that in areas where sagebrush had replaced grass, the problem was "sick land." A decade later, Plummer explained that by helping to stabilize eroding soil, sagebrush acted as "white corpuscles" of the range. Even though Ellison suggested that there might be no cure for the land's failing health, he and his colleagues still searched for strong medi- cine. Having worked to heal the land as nature would heal it-as by revegetating with historically accurate native plants or by constructing trenches that might catch moisture to grow plants and assist natural soil-building processes -Forest Service person- nel occasionally resorted to more invasive treatments. In fact, while constructing a series of deep, precisely leveled contour trenches in the Wasatch Plateau during the early 1940s, the Forest Service saw themselves administering intensive care.41

Certainly contour trenches did not look natural, so that trench diggers were not aiming to restore natural appearances. For those who valued the mountain's untouched scenery, such trenches did not represent acceptable repair. As early as 1938, Forest Service ecologist A. Russell Croft felt that some of the bulldozed trenches that he helped build in the Wasatch Plateau's Lime Canyon might leave ugly scars on the mountainside. By the mid-1g6os, residents of Fillmore, thirty miles southwest of Ephraim, complained that Forest Service trenches marred alpine beauty. They lob- bied to prevent further trenching on their nearby mountains regardless of potential improvements to hydrology and forage. For Fillmore residents, the Forest Service favored utility over aesthetics and so were restoring only part of the mountain. After the 196os, contour trenches fell from favor in the American West because many mountain users had come to feel that the Forest Service was not restoring the most important quality of all: wildness.42

Walter P. Cottam was Utah's most vocal proponent of restoring wildness. A botany professor at Brigham Young University in the 192oS, and then at the University of Utah until 1962, Cottam was the only westerner of a small group of prominent ecologists whose meetings led to the creation of the Nature Conservancy in 1951. He also ad- mired the Forest Service's research on restoration, frequently visiting the Great Basin




Station, and even touring Ephraim Canyon in July of 1928 with his mentor, Henry Cowles. Cottam believed that if one could restore wildness to grazing lands, one would grow more forage, prevent more floods, and display more beauty. Cottam spent much of his life wondering about the pre-grazing condition of Utah's land. Like Ellison, he believed that a stable, climax vegetation existed before the arrival of Europeans - and he searched the archives and the land itself for clues about how this past vegetation had been altered. Like Ellison, he concluded that soil loss represented worse degradation than vegetation loss. When calling for the "rehabilitation of ... land resources still left to us," Cottam hoped to bring back wildness rather than wilderness. An advocate of rehabilitation, Cottam sought to restore enough wildness to recreate wildland.43

Cottam's speeches helped popularize and disseminate the accumulating results of the Great Basin Station's research. In a 1945 speech, Cottam argued that Utahns had degraded a pristine land; that Utahns still degraded this land; and that restoration could only bring back some of the land's wildness. He estimated that since Mormon settlement, Utah had lost half its production of forage mostly through irreplaceable loss of topsoil. Reiterating Paul Sears, his classmate at the University of Chicago, Cottam declared that Utah's deserts were on the march -lands once grass-covered but now barren and wind-eroded, "warn of an approaching Sahara unless we adopt remedial measures without delay." Cottam repeated Walter C. Lowdermilk's well- known "Eleventh Commandment." Soil conservationist Lowdermilk had traveled in 1938 and 1939 across Mediterranean countries to see how ancient peoples had abused and, in some cases, rehabilitated their land: "If any fail in this stewardship of the land," Cottam and Lowdermilk commanded, "his fertile fields shall become sterile stones and gullies, and his descendants shall decrease and live in poverty or vanish from the face of the earth."44

In 1947, in the centennial year of the Mormon arrival to Utah, Cottam delivered his best-known polemic about the sad condition of his state's land. Presented as the Eleventh Annual Reynolds Lecture at the University of Utah, "Is Utah Sahara Bound?" offended key civic leaders, including high-standing LDS Church members and several stockmen. But many other Utahns agreed with Cottam's remarks, such as U.S. Senator Elbert D. Thomas, a Mormon, who had much of the speech reprinted in the Congressional Record. Decades later, SaltLake Tribune editorial writer Ernest Linford claimed that Cottam's 1947 speech "started off the movement which saved much of Utah from becoming the desert he warned against." Cottam collected his principal conservation writings in Our Renewable Wild Lands-A Challenge (1961), which endeavored to show how Utahns had abused their land, before offering them hope in ways to repair it. By limiting livestock, controlling deer and elk populations, and revegetating, he said that much wildness could be returned to Utah's mountain and desert lands. Not only did Cottam believe in managing wilderness, he believed in rewilding degraded wilderness.45

Cottam also interpreted restoration through the medical metaphor: "This business of curing sick watersheds or maintaining those in good health is not unlike the respon- sibilities demanded of doctors in our own society." For Cottam, the healthiest nature was wild. Even though humans had infected wilderness, he felt that they could still provide remedies. When practicing Cottam's style of restoration, Utah's land managers




faced the challenge of finding human means to erase human effects -of touching up the land so that it appeared untouched-of resolving the paradox of rewilding. So as "rehabilitation" became one of the main labels for managing millions of degraded western acres, range managers got used to tie idea of naturalizing unnaturally. Within a generation of Cottam, the enigmatic term of rewilding would itself become more widely accepted in the parlance of restoration.46

Becoming Better Naturalizers

Since Cottam's day, the mountainsides above Ephraim and Manti have been growing taller stands of aspen and spruce, along with thicker meadows of grass. Destructive torrents no longer wash through low-lying villages. The Forest Service's ongoing programs of revegetation, more refined techniques of range management, and declin- ing numbers of livestock have all assisted in the recovery of the Wasatch Plateau. Even the old Great Basin Station has been restored. As the Forest Service moved regional research operations to Utah's northern urban areas, this cluster of buildings beneath an alpine cirque slowly fell into disrepair. These structures have now been repainted and replastered in their new role as an environmental education center. Today's visitor to Ephraim Canyon may well marvel at the double success of these twin projects of ecological and architectural restoration.

In spite of appearances, the land is not as well restored as the station. Waist-high forage no longer grows in Philadelphia Flat. Sagebrush still covers many ridge-tops; barren spots abound. It seems that Ellison's and Cottam's prophecies held true about the long-range consequences of surface erosion and the difficulties of replacing soil. Without special training, few visitors can recognize the variety of grassy, shrubby, and woody exotics that are scattered across these mountainsides. During the 197os, range managers continued to reseed this area with exotic forage species such as crested wheatgrass and smooth brome, but by 1980 they preferred to plant native species such as western wheatgrass and cliff rose, especially after President Carter issued a directive requiring them to favor natives when reseeding public lands. Decades of grazing livestock, along with ongoing reparative efforts have transformed this mountain range. Today's Wasatch Plateau is rehabilitated but not restored. More rehabilitation may well be needed to counteract erosion set in motion by hungry sheep and cattle more than a century ago.47

Range managers in Utah are now leery about gardening wild mountains. Where they once favored cultural remedies to degradation, by relying on farming techniques to till alpine terrain and plant it with hay and oats, they now favor "natural" remedies that rely on ecological principles to guide how and where to plant native seeds. With culture as ally, they searched for hardy plants that would provide livestock with forage; with nature as ally, they searched historical records to determine which plants grew in pre-grazed states. Initially, Utah restorationists revegetated with plants useful to livestock; eventually, they revegetated with any plants that might survive, turning to native species found locally. They finally focused on conserving soils after decid- ing that soil loss was more serious than plant loss. The more they emulated regenera- tive processes they saw in nature, the longer time they allowed for restoration. When




some land managers lost hope in ever fully restoring the mountains, they set their goals on partial repair. These restorationists no longer gardened by revegetating pastures; they naturalized by rehabilitating wildlands.

Subtle differences sometimes distinguished gardening from naturalizing. Sampson and his colleagues began repairing land through "artificial" means when they found "natural" means to be inadequate. Their labels such as artificial reseedingreflected their growing confidence that they could naturalize-that they could reproduce natural processes through cultural means. But when Sampson watched his plantings repeatedly die in the Wasatch Plateau, or when he observed its flora regress even further, he tried to improve the way he mimicked nature. Instead of tilling the mountains and planting exotic species, he collected and sowed local species. Rather than rely solely on artificial revegetation, he experimented with artificial erosion control. As Sampson's notions about nature changed, so too did his techniques of naturaliza- tion. Sampson would have judged his first attempts at artificial revegetation to have been too unnatural, too much like gardening. Even Perry Plummer might have criticized his own early projects of "artificial restoration" as being too artificial: years after Plummer publicized the benefits of summer cypress (Kochia scoparia), a prolific Asian exotic found to thrive in overgrazed terrain, ranchers would nickname this new plant "Plummer's Weed" when they observed how much damage could be done by invasive, non-native species. Most of today's restorationists would agree that Plummer's ongoing faith in exotic species relied too heavily on cultural biases. Similarly, today's restorationists may eventually see their own current techniques as having once been too much like gardening. Naturalizing often seems like gardening in retrospect: when setting out to remake nature, humans reproduce a great deal of culture.48

Neither gardening nor naturalizing were restoringunless one sought to bring back former gardens or former natural landscapes. Gardeners and naturalizers created new landscapes, and not until they endeavored to recreate past landscapes did they restore. The supposed existence of a better past was therefore implicit to any restoration project. Tellingly, historiographers like John E. Miller and Michael Kammen believe that the 1930S ushered in a new era of America's appreciation for its past. Cottam and Leopold at this time implored history instructors to explore the lessons of careless land use. National episodes of spoiling the land, like the Dust Bowl, may have helped convince Americans to pay more attention to what their country had once been. Across the United States, louder calls for restoring landscapes seem to have been one manifestation of this heightened American sensitivity to history.49

In the end, the story of repairing mountains in Utah-rather than shining as a tale of hope and success-may seem to reinforce the trend of telling dreary stories of environmental ruin and decline. After all, degradation lingers in mountainsides worked on by four generations of the nation's best-trained and most conscientious restorationists. After settlers came to the Wasatch Plateau and nearly exhausted its abundant resources, impoverished nature still remains after 130 years, in spite of the U.S. Forest Service. Perhaps the alpine soils and forests will never recover their pre- grazed condition.

Yet for all their failures, restorationists in central Utah made real progress in finding better ways to live on the land. They showed biological successes, as by identifying a handful of native and exotic species that could survive in denuded slopes to begin




accumulating soil. They revealed technical successes, by refining horticultural methods that could produce sizeable quantities of local seed for revegetation projects. They also demonstrated the grave difficulty of rehabilitating arid alpine lands, providing a wake-up call for improving range management in other, less-degraded areas. Finally, they revealed by their struggles that there were others before us who recognized degradation and then set out to repair it- in fact, it may be more gratifying to realize that the Forest Service acknowledged damage in the land and sought to restore it, instead of merely preserving a damaged status quo. The motivations to act rather than the successes in the field may provide the best remedy for tales of environmental decline.

Marcus Hall is a postdoctoral fellow at the Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL. Currently he is co-editing (with Peter Coates) a volume on the history ofnative and exotic species andis revisinga dissertation aboutearlyrestoration in the United States and Italy.

Notes

Special thanks are due to Lowell Bennion, Michael Cohen, William Cronon, Stephen Monsen, Richard Stevens, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments and discus- sions about early restoration in the American West. 1. William Cronon reports that his students "seemed profoundly depressed" by what they

had learned from his environmental history course; in William Cronon, Environmental History Review 17 (fall 1993): 1. Alan Taylor, "'Wasty Ways': Stories of American Settle- ment," Environmental History 3 (July 1998): 292.

2. E. 0. Wilson, The Diversity of Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992),

340. Others calling for more attention to restoration history include Ian Tyrrell who says, "Alarm over human influences on nature runs back well before the present crisis, and attempts to 'restore' disturbed ecosystems or control damaged landscapes have a long history indeed;" True Gardens of the Gods: California-Australian Environmental Reform, 186o-93o (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 1. Kevin Dann and Gregg Mitman note that, "America has continually had to reinvent the business of 'ecological restoration'; seemingly something brand new, it is instead an activity with a history;" Kevin Dann and Gregg Mitman, "Essay Review: Exploring the Borders of Environmental History and the History of Ecology," Journal ofthe History of Biology 30 (1997): 296.

3. Report on the Forest Conditons of the Rocky Mountains 2 USDA (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1888), 13-4; Henry Fairfield Osborn, "Preservation of the Wild Animals of North America," address before the Boone and Crockett Club, Washington, D.C., June 23, 1904 (n.p.), 13; Lewis Overson quoted in "Quotations on Early Range Conditions on Wasatch Plateau, from 'Verbatim Report of Meetings Held at Mt. Pleasant, Huntington, Castledale, Ferron, and Emery, Utah, Oct. 27-Nov. 1, 1911,"' (Ephraim: Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, [hereafter, UDWRE], 2; Glynn Bennion, "Some Things I Have Read, Heard and Seen Relating to Range Use in Utah," (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society) [hereafter, USHS], 8; C. L. Forsling, ed., Annual Report GreatBasin ExperimentStation, Calendar Year 1922, Station Files, United States Forest Service, Ogden, Utah [hereafter, USFSO], 1; Jeanne Kay and Craig J. Brown, "Mormon Beliefs about Land and Natural Resources, 1847-1877," Journal of Historical Geography ii (1985): 262; Dan L. Flores,




"Zion in Eden: Phases of Environmental History of Utah," Environmental Review 7 (winter 1983): 325-44; revised as Dan Flores, "Agriculture, Mountain Ecology, and the Land Ethic: Phases of the Environmental History of Utah," in Working the Range: Essays on the History of Western Land Management and the Environment, ed. John R. Wunder (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985): 157-86.

4. On the debate over whether Mormonism promoted environmental degradation, see Thomas G. Alexander, "Sylvester Q. Cannon and the Revival of Environmental Con- sciousness in the Mormon Community," Environmental History 3 (October 1998): 488- 507, and Thomas G. Alexander, "Stewardship and Enterprise: The LDS Church and the Wasatch Oasis Environment, 1847-1930," Western HistoricalQuarterly25 (fall 1994): 340- 64. For other accounts of the early degradation of Utah's grazing lands see Charles S. Peterson, "Grazing in Utah: A Historical Perspective," Utah Historical Quarterly 57 (fall 1989), and Langdon White, "Transhumance in the Sheep Industry of the Salt Lake Region," Economic Geography 2 (1926). For an excellent survey of USFS activities in Region 4, see Thomas G. Alexander, The Rise of Multiple-Use Management in the Intermountain West: A History of Region 4 of the Forest Service (USDA Forest Service, FS-399, 1987). For histories of western rangeland degradation outside of Utah, see William Wyckoff and Katherine Hansen, "Settlement, Livestock Grazing, and Environmental Change in Southwest Montana, 1860-1990," Environmental History Review 15 (winter 1991): 45-71; Conrad Joseph Bahre, A Legacy of Change: Historic Human Impact on Vegetation of the Arizona Borderlands (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1991).

5. See W. H. Lever, History ofSanpete and Emery Counties Utah (Ogden, Utah: n.p., 1898); Robert V. R. Reynolds, "A Study of Flood Conditions in Ephraim, Manti, and Six Mile Canyons, Manti National Forest, Utah," USDA Forest Service manuscript, 1910, 9-10, 30, [Microfilm reel 605, USHS]; Lewis R. Anderson quoted in Jay Melvin Haymond, "History of the Manti Forest, Utah: A Case of Conservation in the West," (Ph.D. diss., University of Utah, 1972), 10-12.

6. Albert F. Potter, "Excerpts from Diary of Albert F. Potter," 1 July 1902 to 22 Nov. 1902, 7, i6, 17, Utah State University Archives, Logan, Utah [hereafter, USUA]; Gifford Pinchot quoted in "Historical Material furnished by Howard Cox on Jan., 6,1954," [Reference File, USFSO]; Charles S. Peterson, "Albert F. Potter's Wasatch Survey, 1902: A Beginning for Public Management of Natural Resources in Utah," Utah Historical Quarterly 39 (summer 1971): 238-53. One dilemma on the Manti National Forest was that very large numbers of ranchers owned very small numbers of livestock-more families owned one or more cows or sheep in Sanpete County than in any other area of the state and the entire West. Grazing reductions on the Manti Forest therefore affected almost everyone in the county (see Charles S. Peterson, "Small Holding Land Patterns in Utah and the Problem of Forest Watershed Management," Forest History 17 (April 1973): 4-13, and Arthur H. Roth, "A Graphic Summary of Grazing on the Public Lands of the Intermountain Re- gion," (1940), Fig. ii [USFSO]). Another cause of over-grazing in the Wasatch Plateau may have been the rock-bottom costs of sheep-shearing in San Pete County: a notice in the Sanpete County Register of 7 May 1891 explained that these low costs served to attract sheep herders from great distances: "Thus are hundreds and thousands of sheep driven thither every year to ruin the range, thereby injuring directly or indirectly, every citizen of the 'Granary of Utah."'

7. Ephraim Enterprise, 25 February 1904; Lincoln Ellison, "Data from Manti N.F. Range Classification, Report-1922," 2 February 1944 [UDWRE]. Ephraim Enterprise quoted in Wendell M. Keck, "Great Basin Station- Sixty years of Progress in Range and Watershed Research," USDA Forest Service Research PaperINT-418 (1972), 3. Rushton H. Charlton




quoted in Ephraim Enterprise, 23 July 1903; "Livestock on Farms, Jan 1, 1887-1935, by States," USDA Bureau ofAgricultural Economics (1938), 137p.

8. Reynolds, "A Study of Flood Conditions in Ephraim, Manti, and Six Mile Canyons," (1910), 1, 30; the USFS's 1911 proposal for Manti Forest grazing quotas reduced sheep from 182,000 to 155,ooo and cows from 18,ooo to 16,ooo. See "Report of Meeting of Wool Growers at Mount Pleasant, Utah, October 27, 1911, called for the purpose of making Representatives to the Forest Service looking to the Rescinding of the Order of Reduction in the number of sheep to be grazed on the Manti National Forest," 62p. [microfilm reel 605, USHS]; Robert V. R. Reynolds, "Grazing and Floods: A Study of Conditions in the Manti National Forest, Utah," USDA Forest Service Bulletin 91 (1911): i6.

9. Keck, "Great Basin Station," (1972) 3, 7; Albert Antrei, "A Western Phenomenon: The Origin and Development of Watershed Research, Manti, Utah, 1889," The American West 8 (March 1971): 45; Carlos G. Bates, "First Results in the Streamflow Experiment, Wagon Wheel Gap, Colorado," Journal of Forestry 19 (1921): 402; Edward C. Crafts, "Experimental Ranges and Other Range Research Centers of the Forest Service," South- western Forest and Range Experiment Station, 1938. See also Ivan Doig, "Early Forestry Research: A History of the Pacific Northwest Forest & Range Experiment Station, 1925- 1975," USDA (1976). On Colton's role in developing the Taylor Grazing Act, see WPA Grazing History Project [box 4, folder 14, chap. 6, 157, 179, USUA]. The directors of the Great Basin Experiment Station, in order, were Arthur W. Sampson (1912-22); Clarence L. Forsling (1922-30); Enoch Nelson (193o-34); Raymond Price (1935-38); Lincoln Ellison (1938-47); A. Perry Plummer (1947-77).

1o. J. W. Humphrey, "My Recollections of the Manti Forest," June, 1953, 2 [UDWRE]. ii. Forman McLean, "Suggestions for Investigative Work on the Manti National Forest," 6

February 1912, 9-14 [microfilm reel 609, USHS]; E. R. Hodson, "Memorandum for the District Forester: Silvical Conditions on the Manti National Forest in relation to Watershed Protection," 29 November 1911, 9, io [UDWRE].

12. McLean, "Suggestions for Investigative Work on the Manti National Forest," 3; Thomas C. Alexander, "From Rule-of-Thumb to Scientific Range Management: The Case of the Intermountain Region of the Forest Service," Western Historical Quarterly i8 (October 1987): 409-26, reprinted in Char Miller, ed., American Forests: Nature, Culture, and Politics (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997): 179-94; Letter from Lincoln Ellison to Reed W. Bailey suggesting that livestock be excluded from Oak Creek for scientific study, 23 February 1943 [UDWRE].

13. Arthur W. Sampson, "A Study of Indigenous Forage Species for Reseeding Overgrazed Ranges," in Report on Progress of Experiments Initiated in i912 and Plans for New Projects for 1913, Utah Experiment Station (3 December 1912), 36 [USFSO].

14. "Planting to Check Erosion," in Arthur W. Sampson, Third Annual Report Utah Experi- ment Station (December 1914), 69-84, University of California Archives, Berkeley, Calif.

15. "Artificial Reseeding of Depleted Range Lands," in Annual Report FEY 1920, Great Basin Experiment Station, 7 [USFSO]; Arthur Sampson, "Working Plan: The Cultivation of Indigenous Forage Plants forArtificial Reseeding," March 1915 [USFSO]; Arthur Sampson, Annuial Report ofthe Utah Experiment Station (December 1913), [USFSO]; "Planting to Check Erosion," (1914),138.

i6. Letter from W. W. Sparhawk (Payette Forest) to A. W. Sampson, 30 Nov. 1913-the imported grasses were Paesonia Brownii and Frasera montana [USFSO]; Letter from H. G. McPheters (Sawtooth Forest) to Arthur Sampson, 16 July 1914 [USFSO]; Letter from J. D. Coffman (Trinity Forest) to James Jardine, 6 June 1914-the imported clover was Trifolium fusiforme [USFSO].




17. A. W. Sampson, "Memorandum for Mr. Jardine," 20 March 1913 [USFSO]; Arthur W. Sampson, "Testing the Suitability of Certain New Alfalfas for Range Reseeding," March 1915 [USFSO].

i8. Powell Glass, "Jefferson and Plant Introduction," The National Horticultural Magazine (July 1944): 127; Howard L. Hyland, "History of U.S. Plant Introduction," Environmental Review 4 (]p7): 26-33; George H. M. Lawrence, "A Bibliography of the Writings of David Fairchild," Huntia 1 (1964): 71-102. See also Tyler Whittle, The Plant Hunters (Philadelphia: Chilton Book Co., 1970), B. J. Healey, The Plant Hunters (New York: Scribner's, 1975); Kenneth Lemmon, The Golden Age of Plant Hunters (London: Phoe- nix House, 1968). For more about the spread of the Kudzu vine, see Mart Stewart, "Cultivating Kudzu: The Soil Conservation Service and the Kudzu Distribution Pro- gram," Georgia Historical Quarterly 8i (spring 1997): 15147; Knowles A. Ryerson, "His- tory and Significance of the Foreign Plant Introduction Work of the United States Department of Agriculture," Agricultural History (1934): 110-29.

19. George Stewart, "Utah's Biological Heritage and the Need for its Conservation," Transac- tions of the Utah Academy of Sciences 25 (1948): 17. See also George Stewart, et al., "Forest and Range Resources of Utah: Their Protection and Use," USDA Miscellaneous Publication 9 (October 1930): 36-37; W. R. Chapline, "Forest Ranges," in A National Plan for American Forestry, Senate Doc. 12, 73rd Congress, ist Session, 1933, 539; W. R. Chapline, "Range Research in the United States," Herbage Reviews 5 (March 1937): 1-2;

R. H. Rutledge, "Government Forest Work in Utah," USDA Circular 198 (November 1921): 20; "Artificial Reseeding-Intermountain Reseeding on National Forests of Region 4," in Raymond Price, "Artificial Reseeding Memorandum No. 8," (ca. 1936) [UDWRE]. "Proceedings of Range Research Seminar, held at Great Basin branch of the Intermoun- tain Forest and Range Experiment Station, Ephraim, Utah, July 10-22, 1939," USDA Forest Service, 311, Forestry Library, University of California, Berkeley, Calif. [hereafter, FUCB]; E. W. Gemmer, "A Word for Exotics," Journal of Forestry2g (1931): 92; Arthur W. Sampson, "Range Preservation and its Relation to Erosion Control on Western Grazing Lands," USDA Bulletin 675 (1918): 17, 29; James T. Jardine, "Range Management on the National Forests," USDA Bulletin 790 (1919): 57.

21. Jared Smith, "Experiments in Range Improvements," USDA Division of Agrostology Circular 8 (1898): 1; David Griffiths, "Range Improvement in Arizona," USDA Bureau of PlantIndustryBulletin 4(1901): 9, 10, 31. For more about the Forest Service's sensitivity to history, see Adam M. Sowards, "Administrative Trials, Environmental Consequences, and The Use of History in Arizona's Tonto National Forest, 1926-1996," Western Historical Quarterly 31 (summer 2000): 189-214.

22. See Ronald Tobey, Saving the Prairies: The Life Cycle of the Founding School of American Plant Ecology, 1895-1955 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). On the importance of the concept of succession in range management, see Maarten Heyboer, "Grass-Counters, Stock-Feeders, and the Dual Orientation of Applied Science: The History of Range Science, 1895-1960," (Ph.D. diss., Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1992), 135-209.

23. See Frederic Clements, Research Methods in Ecology (Lincoln, Neb.: University Pub- lishing Co., 1905); Arthur Sampson, "Range Improvement by Natural Reseeding," 15 December 1915 [UDWRE]; "Range improvement by natural revegetation," in Annual Report Great Basin Experiment Station, Calendar Year 1922, ed. C. L. Forsling, 47-61 [USFSO]; Leon H. Weyl, "Artificial Reseeding of Depleted Range Lands," Manti Na- tional Forest (Progress Report for Season 1915), 16-23 [UDWRE]; Arthur W. Sampson, "Future Policy of the Utah Experiment Station," (also included in the Annual Report




Great Basin Experiment Station, F.Y. 1918), 3, Management Files, United States Forest Service, Price, Utah.

24. Sampson was still arguing for the existence of "retrogressive succession" in 1924. See Arthur W. Sampson, Native American Forage Plants (New York: Wiley & Sons, 1924), 61.

25. In 1947, Ellison studied survey notes of the Government Land Office dated 1856, 1872, and i885: Lincoln Ellison, "Memorandum," January 5, 1947 [UDWRE]; see also letter to USFS office from Herman Kahn of the U.S. National Archives, 17 December 1947 [UDWRE]. Ellison's voluminous research notes about the early vegetation of the Wasatch Plateau are included in a folder entitled "History of the Wasatch Plateau" [UDWRE].

26. A. Russell Croft, "History of Development of the Davis County Experimental Watershed," (1981), 38 [historical File, Davis County Experimental Watershed papers, USUA]; "Range Conditions around 188o," [interview of James Jensen by Lincoln Ellison], 15 July 1943 [UDWRE]; "Comments by Lauritz Nielson on changes and some of their causes in Ephraim Canyon," [interview by Perry Plummer], 14 April 1953, 4 [UDWRE]; Ellison, "Subalpine Vegetation of the Wasatch Plateau, Utah,"(1954), 90.

27. "Memorandum for Lincoln Ellison," i6 August 1938 [Artificial Reseeding files, UDWRE]; "'Artificial Reseeding Project'-Ephraim Canyon Drainage," 30 Nov. 1942 [UDWRE].

28. "'Artificial Reseeding Project'-Ephraim Canyon Drainage," 30 Nov. 1942 [UDWRE]. Stephen Monsen of the USDA Shrub Science Laboratory reports that Ephraim is today the headquarters of four out of Utah's six native grass seed companies (see Lisa Jones, "He's Worried About Weeds: Uncommon Westerners Profile," High Country News 32 (25

May 2000).

29. "Proceedings of Range Research Seminar, Ephraim, Utah, July 10-22, 1939, 311.

30. Ellison, "Subalpine Vegetation of the Wasatch Plateau, Utah,"(1954), 18o. 31. George P. Marsh, Man and Nature; Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human

Action (New York: Charles Scribner, 1864; reprint with foreword by David Lowenthal, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1965), 35; "Washed Soils: How to Prevent and Reclaim Them," USDA Farmer's Bulletin 20 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1894), 7; Thomas R. Vale, "Mountains and Moisture in the West," in The Mountainous West: Explorations in Historical Geography, ed. William Wyckoff and Lary M. Dilsaver (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995): 41-65; Lincoln Ellison, "Establishment of Vegetation on Depleted Subalpine Range as Influenced by Microenvironment," Ecological Monographs 19 (April

1949): 114-18. 32. "Planting to check erosion," in C. L. Forsling, ed., Annual Report Great Basin Experi-

ment Station, Calendar Year 1922, 97-101 [USFSO]; Sampson, "Range Preservation and its Relation to Erosion Control on Western Grazing Lands," (1918), 34; Carl Sauer quoted in Journal of Farm Economics 20 (1938): 765-75.

33. J. H. Paul and F. S. Baker, "The Floods of 1923 in Northern Utah," Bulletin of the University of Utah xv (March 1925): 3-20; Torrential Floods in Northern Utah, i13o, Report of Special Flood Commission appointed by Governor George H. Dern, Circular 92

(Logan: Utah State Agricultural College, 1931), 22; see also Thomas G. Alexander, "Sylvester Q. Cannon and the Revival of Environmental Consciousness in the Mormon Commu- nity," Environmental History 3 (October 1998): 499-501.

34. "Mountain-Valley Relationships," (1946), 6 [historical File, Davis County Experimental Watershed papers, USUA]; A. Russell Croft and Reed W. Bailey, Mountain Water(Ogden: U.S. Forest Service, 1964), 57; John Floyd Iverson, "Mountain Surgery: A Chapter in the History of Conservation, Focusing on the Contour Trench as a Device for the Restoration of Mountain Watersheds," (master's thesis, University of Utah, 1970), 57; Andrew M. Honker, "'Been Grazed Almost to Extinction': The Environment, Human Action, and




Utah Flooding, 1900-1940," Utah Historical Quarterly 67 (winter 1999): 23-47; Reed W. Bailey and A. R. Croft, "Contour Trenches Control Floods and Erosion on Range Lands," Emergency Conservation Work, Forestry Publication 4 (1937): 1.

35. "Miscellaneous reports," 1938 [UDWVRE]; "''Artificial Reseeding Project'-Ephraim Can- yon Drainage," 30 November 1942 [UDWREJ.

36. Lincoln Ellison, "What is Range Improvement?," The Ames Forester 21 (1943): 15-22;

Aldo Leopold, "A Plea for Recognition of Artificial Works in Forest Erosion Control Policy," Journal of Forestry (1921): 268.

37. George Stewart, "Utah's Biological Heritage and the Need for its Conservation," (1948), i6; W. R. Chapline, "Speech," Proceedings of the Society for Range Management (Fort Collins, Colo.: The Society, 1948), 72; John Floyd Iverson, "Mountain Surgery," 72.

38. A. Perry Plummer, "Restoration of Juniper-Pinyon Ranges in Utah," (1957), 5 [UDWREj; Perry Plummer, "The Great Basin Experiment Station," unpublished manuscript, n.d., 8-9 [UDWRE].

3 Lincoln Ellison, "Our Weight in the Balance of Nature," Transactions of the Utah Academy of Sciences 32 (1955): 17-18.

40. Arthur Sampson in C. L. Forsling, ed., Annual Report Great Basin Experiment Station, Calendar Year 1922: 1 [USFSO]; "Proceedings of Range Research Seminar, Ephraim, Utah, July 10-22, 1939," 17 [FUCB].

41. Sagebrush Saga: The Story of an Opportunity for Rebuilding the Western Range by Eliminating Sagebrush and Planting Grass, USDA Forest Service, Intermountain Re- gion (January 1945); Perry Plummer, "Browse and Grass,"(ca. 1955), 1 [UDWRE].

42. Iverson, "Mountain Surgery," (1970), 71, 8o. 43. Dave Livermore, "Conservancy Opens Great Basin Field Office," On the Land (August!

September 1987), 1. Biographical studies of Walter Cottam include William Horsley Limb, "The Life and Contributions of Dr. Walter P. Cottam, Educator-Scientist," (master's thesis, University of Utah, 1962); Maxine Martz, Why Hurry Through Heaven?A Biogra- phy-MemoirofDr. Walter P Cottam (Salt Lake City, Utah: Red Butte Garden &Arbore- tum, 1999). Cottam's early interest in historical vegetation changes is shown by Walter P. Cottam, "Man as a Biotic Factor Illustrated by Recent Floristic and Physiographic Changes at the Mountain Meadows, Washington County, Utah," Ecology4 (October 1929): 361- 63; W. P. Cottam and George Stewart, "Plant Succession as a Result of Grazing and of Meadow Desiccation by Erosion since Settlement in 1862," Journal of Forestry 38 (August 1940): 613-26; W. P. Cottam, "Resources of Utah," Transactions of the Utah Academy of Sciences 22 (1945): 53-64.

4 Cottam, "Resources of Utah," (1945): 53-64; George T. Renner, The Conservation of National Resources, An Educational Approach to the Problem, (New York: J. Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1942); Paul Sears, Deserts on the March (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1935); Walter Clay Lowdermilk, "Lessons From the Old World to the Americas in Land Use," The Smithsonian Report (1943): 413-28.

45. Walter P. Cottam, "Is Utah Sahara Bound?," Bulletin of The University of Utah, 37 (1947): 1-40; Martz, Why Hurry Through Heaven?P, 125-31. In a December, 1957 Salt Lake Tribune editorial (and then again during remarks at a University Club speech on April 17, 1958), Cottam took special issue with J. Reuben Clark, a prominent Utah cattleman and second counselor to the president of the Mormon Church. At a convention of the Utah Cattlemen's Association held on December 13, 1957, Clark openly criticized the U.S. Forest Service for lowering grazing quotas on National Forest lands. See also Alexander, The Rise of Multiple-Use Management in the Intermountain West: A History of Region 4 ofthe Forest Service (1987), i65-68, and Thomas G. Alexander, The Forest Service and




the LDS Church in the Mid-Twentieth Century: Utah National Forests as a Test Case (Ogden, Utah: Weber State College Press, 1988).

46. Walter P. Cottam quoted in Salt Lake Tribune, 4 January 1958, in Limb, "The Life and Contributions of Dr. Walter P. Cottam," (1962), 39-40. Beginning in the 1930s, "rehabilitation" is frequently used in government publications, as for example, in the Annual Report, Great Basin Experiment Station, Calendar Year 1937 [USFSO]. For interpreta- tions of rewilding, see John Davis, "A Sidelong Glance at The Wildlands Project," in Place ofthe Wild: A WildlandsAnthology, edited by David C. Burks (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1994); "Rewilding Mallory Swamp" at http://www.malloryswamp.org.

47. Jones, "He's Worried About Weeds: Uncommon Westerners Profile," High Country News 32 (25 May 2000). A recent ecological study in Colorado shows that mountain vegetation disturbed by humans more than a century ago still exhibits lower diversity and density than nearby undisturbed vegetation [Charles G. Curtin, "Can Montane Land- scapes Recover From Human Disturbance? Long-Term Evidence from DistuLrbed Sub- alpine Communities," Biological Conservation 74 (1995): 49-55].

48. Conversation with Richard Stevens (of the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources), 2 June 1994, Ephraim, Utah. Aware of the invasive properties of Kochia scoparia, Plummer had warned ranchers that, "It is realized that any newly introduced annual such as kochia could turn into a bad weed so that disadvantages would eventually outweigh the advan- tages." Quoted in A. Perry Plummer, "Artificial Revegetation, Species Adaptability," 8 February 1950 [UDWRE].

49. On the rising appreciation for American history during the 1930s see John E. Miller, "Rose Wilder Lane and Thomas Hart Benton: A Turn toward History during the 1930s,"

American Studies 37 (fall 1996): 83-101, and Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords ofMemory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: 1991). Aldo Leopold, A Sand CountyAlmanac; and sketches here and there (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949), 205. For a national comparative history of environmental restoration, see Marcus Hall, "American Nature, Italian Culture: Restoring the Land in Two Continents," (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1999).



repairing mountains: restoration, ecology, and wilderness in twentieth-century utah

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