NAT U R A L R I VA L S

a l s o by j o h n c l ay to n :

Wonderlandscape: Yellowstone National Park and the

Evolution of an American Cultural Icon

Stories from Montana’s Enduring Frontier: Exploring an Untamed Legacy

The Cowboy Girl: The Life of Caroline Lockhart

 NAT U R A L
R I VA L S
John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, and the
Creation of America’s Public Lands

Joh n Cl ay t on
 N AT U R A L R I VA L S

Pegasus Books Ltd.

148 W 37th Street, 13th Floor
New York, NY 10018

Copyright © 2019 by John Clayton

First Pegasus Books cloth edition August 2019

Excerpts from the John Muir Papers, Holt-Atherton Special Collections,

University of the Pacific Library. © 1984 Muir-Hanna Trust

Interior design by Maria Fernandez

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part
without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may
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Printed in the United States of America

Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company
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To Charlie “Chasmo” Mitchell,
teacher, scholar, inspirer, friend
 CONTENTS

Cast of Characters ix
Timeline of Key Events xi

Prologue xiii
PART I: NATURAL PROPHET, NATURAL STATESMAN 1
1: Gramercy Park 3
2: “Radiate Radiate Radiate” 15
3: The Tragedy of John Muir 34
4: “Sufficient Confidence in His Own Wisdom” 59
5: The Tragedy of Gifford Pinchot 83
PART II: THE BIRTH OF PUBLIC LANDS 101
6: Bigger Stakes at Play 103
7: Free Land for Many Uses 125
8: No Trespassing 140
9: Lake McDonald’s Delight 159
10: The Public Good Forever 180
Epilogue 207

Acknowledgments 217
Notes 221
Bibliography 259
Index 267
 CAST OF CHARACTERS

On the 1896–97 National Forest Commission:

John Muir (1838–1914), (nonvoting) naturalist, wanderer, writer, activist, evan-

gelist. Defender of Yosemite National Park, cofounder of the Sierra Club.

Gifford Pinchot (1865–1946), (secretary) forester, politician, administrator.

Founder of the U.S. Forest Service, advisor to Theodore Roosevelt.

Charles Sargent (1841–1927), (chair) horticulturalist, botanist, head of Harvard’s

Arnold Arboretum. Friend of Muir, mentor to Pinchot.

Arnold Hague (1840–1917), geologist, Yellowstone expert. Imagine John Muir

crossed with a Washington, D.C., insider. Ally of Pinchot.

William Brewer (1828–1910), botanist, proto-forester, taught Pinchot at Yale.

Henry Abbot (1831–1927), civil engineer, streamflow and reservoir expert, ally
of Sargent.

Alexander Agassiz (1835–1910), zoologist. Did not participate.

O. Wolcott Gibbs (1822–1908) (ex officio), chemist. President of the National

Academy of Sciences.

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 C A S T OF C H A R AC T ER S

Magazine editors:

Robert Underwood Johnson (1853–1937), associate editor of The Century. Muir’s

close friend and political collaborator.

William Stiles (1837–1897), editor of Garden and Forest. Charles Sargent owned
the magazine, but Stiles was chief writer and lobbyist.

George Bird Grinnell (1849–1938), editor of Forest and Stream. Aristocratic

hunter-conservationist and friend of Theodore Roosevelt.

Supporting players:

Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903), landscape architect, park planner, mentor

to Pinchot.

Bernhard Fernow (1851–1923), forester, Pinchot’s predecessor as chief govern-

ment forester.

William Kent, (1864–1928), philanthropist, congressman, donor of Muir Woods

National Monument.

William Holman (1822–1897), Indiana congressman. Rural cheapskate and

anti-monopolist.

Relevant U.S. presidents:

Benjamin Harrison (R), in office 1889–93. Created first Forest Reserves.

Grover Cleveland (D), 1893–97. Convened the National Forest Commission.

William McKinley (R), 1897–1901. Little interested in the natural world.

Theodore Roosevelt (R), 1901–09. Nature lover with charismatic personality.

William Taft (R), 1909–13. More timid than Roosevelt but charged with car-
rying on his legacy.

Woodrow Wilson (D), 1913–21. Little interested in the natural world.

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 TIMELINE OF KEY EVENTS

Before Muir and Pinchot meet:

1838: John Muir is born

1864: Yosemite Valley: Cali-
fornia state park
1865: Gifford Pinchot is born
1868: Muir arrives in the
Sierra
1872: Yellowstone: national
park

1880: Muir marries Louie

Strentzel
1889: Pinchot graduates Yale
1889: Muir and R.U. Johnson
in Yosemite
1890: Yosemite, Sequoia, and
General Grant: national parks
1891: Forest Reserve Act (Sec-
1891–93: Pinchot at Biltmore
tion 24)

1892: Muir organizes Sierra

Club
1893–94: Pinchot–Laura
Houghteling romance

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 T I M ELI N E OF K EY EV EN T S

Muir-Pinchot collaboration (climax of this book):

1893: Pinchot and Muir first meet in New York

1895: Century symposium, “A

Plan to Save the Forests”

1896: National Forest Com-

mission trip

February 1897: Washington’s

Birthday Reserves

March 1897: Civil Sundry

Appropriations Bill

June 1897: Forest Man-

agement Act (Pettigrew
amendment)

1897–98: Muir’s Harper’s and

Atlantic articles

June 1897: Pinchot offered

federal job

Later events:

1898: Pinchot becomes chief

forester
1901: Roosevelt becomes
president
1903: Muir and Roosevelt in
Yosemite
1905: Pinchot founds U.S.
Forest Service
1906: Yosemite Valley added
to national park
1907: Muir and Pinchot at Sierra Club board meeting
1910: Pinchot is fired
1913: Hetch Hetchy dam is
approved
1914: Muir dies
1946: Pinchot dies

xii
 PROLOGUE

n a springtime drive from my home near Yellowstone to Glacier

O National Park, I tumbled across rolling green foothills and then

crested a snowcapped mountain pass where evergreens blanketed bus-
tling creeks. As my eight-hour route spooled along rural two-lane roads, I
enjoyed changing patterns of landscape: varied geology of mountains and
plains, varied ecology of woodlands and grasslands, and varied land use of
ranches and small towns. Behind those patterns, visible only on specialized
maps, was the fact that some of this land was privately owned and some
was public.
My house looks out on public land managed by the U.S. Forest Service.
Glacier is public land managed by the National Park Service. Between
the two, I drove through lots of public land administered by the federal
Bureau of Land Management.  1 I also drove within view of national wildlife
refuges, dammed reservoirs, an air force base, designated wilderness areas,
and lands administered by the state of Montana. In effect I was on a tour
of public lands: different uses—such as recreation, habitat, or economic
development—managed by different agencies, reflecting different sets of

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 PROL O GU E

societal values. An extreme example came during the hour I spent driving
across the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. On these lands, a sovereign nation
sets the public-land priorities—a Blackfeet nation that for centuries did not
concern itself with “ownership” of land. In the late 1800s, whites demanded
that Blackfeet recognize property rights and organize their lives around
private land. Then whites also started talking about “public land.”  2
When I was growing up in Massachusetts, most public lands were rec-
reational destinations, such as a beach, a woodsy trail, a city park, or an
athletic facility. In 1990, I moved to Montana, where public lands are both
ubiquitous and multifunctional. In addition to recreational destinations
such as Yellowstone and Glacier, Montana has public lands managed for a
variety of purposes by the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management.
Indeed these multiple-use agencies seek to balance logging, grazing, habitat,
recreation, and other uses—on acreages twenty times greater than that of
the Park Service.  3 Their processes to achieve that balance aim to give all
members of the public a voice in decisions. Those decisions affect Western
landscapes’ magnificent wide-open spaces—and the economic livelihoods
of ranchers, loggers, guides, and others who work the land, as well as the
self-identity of hikers, hunters, bikers, Jeepers, skiers, snowmobilers, and
others who play on the land.  4
Managing public lands is thus complicated. Each interest group pursues
a different deep-rooted passion, but furthermore each stretch of land boasts
different characteristics. Matching everything up is like putting together a
jigsaw puzzle—except that ongoing political developments keep changing
the sizes of the pieces. Furthermore, although assembling a jigsaw puzzle
is a fun family activity that merges interests to assemble a beautiful vision,
on public lands the puzzle-work is a tedious prerequisite for people’s true
interests, which are the activities that take place on the land.
My drive to Glacier in the spring of 2017 followed a series of controver-
sies suggesting that the nationwide public-lands jigsaw might get entirely
swept off its table. The reigning Republican party platform called for fed-
eral lands to be returned to states. Congress changed accounting rules to
make such land transfers easier. The administration of President Donald

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 PROL O GU E

Trump began a review designed to shrink national monuments. All this

developed soon after the acquittal of militants who took over Oregon’s
Malheur National Wildlife Refuge to protest the very idea of federal land
ownership. In opposition to these trends, public lands became a major
wellspring of the 2017 #resistance to Trump. A popular rallying cry held
that these lands were our citizens’ shared inheritance, which the corrupt
administration intended to destroy.  5
I had trouble with both sides of the debate. The arguments for federal
land transfer relied on naïve fantasies in which well-paying rural jobs would
magically appear and litigation would magically vanish, despite every-
thing we know about our economic and legal systems. Meanwhile, many
defenders of public lands ridiculously overstated the bogeyman, acting as
if America’s crown jewels were already on the chopping block.  6
To alleviate my frustration, I asked whether deeper values were fueling
the clash. And I realized that when people talk about public lands, what
they really want to talk about is lands that demonstrate our society’s relationship
with nature.  7 That’s why people care so much about these issues: they’re
fighting not only over acreage but also over a relationship. Indeed, the
relationship contains spiritual components—some people’s almost-religious
faith in nature and its systems is conflicting with others’ faith in technology,
enlightened bureaucrats, or free markets.  8
Antagonism toward Trump’s interior secretary, Ryan Zinke, provided
a simple example of the intertwining of public lands and attitudes toward
nature. Zinke favored large increases in drilling, mining, and other devel-
opment on public lands. In other words, he wanted public lands to reflect
a more resource-extractive relationship to nature. Personally, I disagreed;
I even saw his position as a betrayal of the public trust. But I couldn’t call
Zinke an enemy of public lands, because he did believe in federal owner-
ship of the lands to be drilled. He even resigned as a delegate to the 2016
Republican convention over its public lands disposal platform. Indeed,
there’s no reason for public lands to be exclusively associated with nature-
friendly outcomes. Actions on private lands can benefit nature, as when Ted
Turner runs herds of bison, the Nature Conservancy funds conservation

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 PROL O GU E

easements, or Michael Bloomberg proposes business stances to fight cli-

mate change.  9 And some public lands have little explicit effect on nature,
as when they are used for streets, plazas, libraries, military facilities, rodeo
grounds, or museums.  10
The real wonder of public lands is less about outcomes than it is about
process. On public lands, we as a democratic society get to decide collec-
tively what happens. We can come together to articulate our relationship
to nature. Bike trail here, elk habitat there. Logging here, grazing there.
Scenic pullout here, oil rig out of sight behind a hill. Even if putting
together the jigsaw puzzle can feel like a tiresome chore, it’s a privilege.
And its results, though far from perfect, are almost always better than a
pile of jumbled pieces. In short, although we often speak of public lands as
if they’re nature’s lands, what makes them profound is that they’re democ-
racy’s lands.
That’s why the public land debate was resonating so deeply: it captured
both conflict about America’s relationship to nature and conflict about the
structure of America’s democracy. Although those conflicts felt as in-the-
moment as a Trump tweet, they had deep metaphysical roots. Does nature
provide humans with essential resources, or is it bigger and more holy than
corrupt human society—and what process do we use to find a balance?
When phrased as such a philosophical conflict, the divide might seem
impossible to bridge. Yet the historical evidence says otherwise. We bridged
the divide, once. America embraced public lands throughout the twentieth
century. America created the varied land-management agencies whose work
I had witnessed on my drive. Americans started calling public lands a birth-
right. I’d seen—and even taken for granted—the results on the landscape:
somehow America once established a public land ideal. Why didn’t I know
more about how that had happened?

I was driving to Glacier to research a story. On the shores of fjord-like

Lake McDonald, where unending forests spill from bare pointed peaks
all the way down to impossibly clear waters, two renowned individuals
had once taken an unheralded camping trip. In 1896, when they visited,

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 PROL O GU E

Glacier was not yet a national park, and part of the purpose of their visit
was to decide its fate.
One of the men was John Muir, the most well-known naturalist in
American history, often called the “father of the National Park Service.”
In part through his successful efforts to enshrine Yosemite, Muir brilliantly
articulated the principles of protecting national parks as places where
nature can provide people with spiritual renewal. The multitalented Muir
was also a groundbreaking scientist, much-lauded author, and founder and
longtime president of the Sierra Club, one of America’s first environmental
advocacy organizations.
Staying with Muir at Lake McDonald was Gifford Pinchot. Today Pin-
chot’s name isn’t as widely known as Muir’s. But many who know it hold
him in similar regard. In 1905, Pinchot founded the U.S. Forest Service to
chart a sustainable course for America’s timber while also yielding benefits
such as clean water and forest recreation. Pinchot’s principles and leader-
ship were almost singlehandedly responsible for the organization’s success.
Meanwhile, Pinchot served as President Theodore Roosevelt’s chief advisor
on environmental issues, including the massive expansion of public lands
that may be Roosevelt’s greatest legacy.
In some circles, Pinchot is also famous as a counterpoint to Muir. Many
historians use the two men to embody opposing philosophies. The romantic
Muir is preservation: leaving nature alone so as to benefit from its holistic
wonder. The practical Pinchot is conservation: using natural resources
sustainably to serve what Pinchot called the “greatest good for the greatest
number in the long run.”  11 To regular folks, preservation and conservation
may seem like similar ideas, especially in contrast to wanton exploitation of
natural resources for short-term gain. But to some scholars, the difference
between these near-synonyms helps explain America’s twentiethth-century
environmental history.  12
From 1905 to 1913, the two philosophies clashed over plans to dam a
remote Yosemite valley called Hetch Hetchy. Because the dam would pro-
vide drinking water to a great number of people in San Francisco, Pinchot
saw it as good conservation. Because it would devalue natural conditions

x vii
 PROL O GU E

in a national park, Muir saw it as an affront to preservation. Muir lost that

battle, but his disciples used it to inspire a crusade.
Ever since, almost every dam, mine, grazing allotment, timber sale,
proposed wilderness area, national park, or national monument—every
decision about priorities on public lands—has been argued as an expression
of this preservation-versus-conservation divide. How much use is necessary
for human needs, and how much degrades the sanctity of nature? Although
each situation differs slightly, each is fueled by that same basic question.
Each thus plays out predictably. Conservationists get accused of too much
compromise with short-term extraction; preservationists get accused of
elitist and out-of-touch disdain for human society. As the battles rage
within bureaucracies, on election days, and in courthouses, the negativity
stymies meaningful action. The preservation-versus-conservation stale-
mate leads to outcomes bad for nature and society both.  13 When experts
try to explain why this happens, the easiest way to illustrate the divide is
to describe Muir and Pinchot at Hetch Hetchy. But the danger in telling
a story like that is that it can end up implying that Muir and Pinchot
themselves caused the stalemate, that their actions split the environmental
cause. That was the lesson I’d taken from college classes, occasional read-
ings in environmental history, and popular treatments such as Ken Burns’s
documentary The National Parks: America’s Best Idea—the two men were
implacable enemies.  14
Under that assumption, once I discovered that the men had spent time
together on the shores of Lake McDonald, I could imagine their interac-
tions making for good drama. Lots of bickering. Maybe Pinchot would
point out the first trees to cut and the first valleys to dam. Maybe Muir
would fulminate that none of it should be touched, for any reason, ever. I
could write a book titled Natural Enemies, with a plot in which the heat
of their arguments grew to a boiling point.
But by the time I drove to Glacier, that vision was already in trouble. In
real life, my research showed, Muir and Pinchot didn’t argue very much.
For example, both men used the same word to describe their interactions
at Lake McDonald: delight.  15 Living on opposite sides of the country, they

x viii
 PROL O GU E

wrote many letters—and most of those letters were warm, enthusiastic,

affectionate, and supportive. One of their most famous arguments, at a
Seattle hotel in 1897, was later shown to have never happened. And even
Hetch Hetchy is often misunderstood: it was not a straightforward clash
between preservation and conservation, nor were Muir and Pinchot its
primary antagonists.
How would I come to terms with fact that Muir and Pinchot didn’t act
like enemies? I achieved a breakthrough when I came to think of them as
rivals, the way 1980s basketball players Larry Bird of the Boston Celtics
and Magic Johnson of the Los Angeles Lakers were rivals. Bird and Magic
exhibited different playing styles that embodied different philosophies
about basketball. When they competed against each other, the rivalry chal-
lenged both to greater heights. But they weren’t mortal enemies. Growing
up in Massachusetts, I’d been a huge Bird fan, but I didn’t see Magic as
evil. I knew that Magic’s talents were equally deserving of triumph—that’s
what made it a great rivalry.
If Muir and Pinchot were rivals rather than enemies, then they simply
offered alternative paths to articulating a constructive societal relationship
to nature. The paths were like different approaches to the summit of a
mountain: like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton making funny movies,
Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner writing fiction, the Beatles and
the Rolling Stones making rock ’n’ roll, Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem
fighting for feminism, or Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. advancing
civil rights. The rivalry of Muir and Pinchot offered different reasons to
move beyond short-term exploitation. If different people preferred one to
the other, that was a productive expansion of the audience for their shared
passion.
Then I remembered the climax of the Bird-Magic rivalry, in 1992. They
joined together on the U.S. Olympic Team, the “Dream Team.” Their styles
turned out to be complementary. They delighted in each other’s skills and
character. They took basketball’s beauty and joy to an international stage.
Their legacy: basketball was propelled from an American-only sport to one
of the world’s most popular.  16

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 PROL O GU E

What if John Muir and Gifford Pinchot had likewise been collaborators
who created a useful legacy? What might that look like?

This book tells how the Dream Team interactions of rivals John Muir and
Gifford Pinchot contributed to establishing the public lands ideal. We start
with the moment the two men met, at a Pinchot mansion on a private park
in New York City. To understand their rivalry, we then look at Muir’s life,
the way his prophet-like ambitions turned him into a political activist—and
led to disappointment over Hetch Hetchy. A similar narrative of Pinchot’s
life shows how his statesmanlike ambitions led to similar sorrow. Then we
return to the late 1800s. We bring in additional characters to examine not
only individual ambitions but also societal ones: the need for new expres-
sions of Americans’ collective relationship to nature. As we watch Muir
and Pinchot share outlooks with each other at Lake McDonald, and then
communicate and enact that shared vision, we see how they convinced
Americans to embrace public lands.
This angle on Muir and Pinchot is unusual. It doesn’t talk much
about wilderness, nor about their individual activities with the Sierra
Club or Forest Service. Without diminishing the importance of those
angles—certainly wilderness is central to Americans’ ideas of nature—this
book is telling a different story, one about public lands in general.  17 Notions
of a Forest Service, a Park Service, a Bureau of Land Management, or a
government-designated wilderness area depend on a broader ideal of public
land. Public lands are, in essence, a prerequisite to most of today’s perspec-
tives on environmental issues. These perspectives, and the agencies charged
with implementing their results, exist only because Americans understood
the purpose of public land far differently in the 1910s than they did in the
1880s. The collaboration of Muir and Pinchot helped make that change
happen.  18
Muir and Pinchot did not invent public lands any more than they
invented a preservation-versus-conservation divide. Indeed they were just
two of many individuals involved in this culture-wide change, and any
attempt to rank those individuals’ contributions would be both impossible

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and foolish. Maybe the role of Theodore Roosevelt was more important,
or Frederick Law Olmsted, Robert Underwood Johnson, Charles Sargent,
Bernhard Fernow, or George Bird Grinnell—either as individuals or while
engaged in rivalries of their own. Or maybe if none of these people had
existed, wider forces of economics, demographics, and technological devel-
opment would have elevated others to play their roles.
However, there are three good reasons to look at these changes through
the lens of John Muir and Gifford Pinchot. First, we’ve already told so
much environmental history through these two men—projecting back onto
them so many of our own assumptions about wilderness and spirituality
and economic development—that it’s worth looking at their relationship
in a different light. Second, in the current moment, as our longstanding
debates about the environment intensify around issues of climate change,
we are also having debates about how our democracy functions: about how
people relate to each other, as well as to nature. As ever-more-divisive
rhetoric threatens to split the public, it’s worth looking back at how Muir
and Pinchot saw “the public” in “public lands,” and whether rivalries such
as theirs can sometimes be productive rather than divisive.
Third, and most fascinating, is the way the Muir-Pinchot rivalry mirrors
the deeper rivalries that fuel the American character. Americans love to
see life through nature-versus-civilization contrasts: country versus town,
spontaneity versus planning, heart versus head. We are relentlessly practical
innovators who are also among the most religious people in the developed
world. We pride ourselves on classlessness but honor inherited wealth.
We claim to be outsiders and self-made even when our success relies on
insider networks. We crusade for fairness even while hopelessly entangled
with self-interest. We hate elitists unless they agree with us. We admire
statesmen until they are vilified by our favorite prophets. Our hunger for
community is second only to our individualism. Our values are always
coming into conflict—sometimes in the form of a person such as Muir
versus a person such as Pinchot, and often within our own individual souls.

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 PROL O GU E

My visit to Glacier was memorable. I took the official Lake McDonald

boat cruise on a perfectly still blue day without a single other craft on the
water. Early one morning, avoiding the crowds, I followed Muir’s steps to
the stunning, glacier-fed Avalanche Lake. I dug through old documents
to learn about Lake McDonald in 1896. I camped on the lakeshore and
watched the sunset the same way Muir and Pinchot had. I found the joint
legacy I had hoped to.
But the story of that legacy ended up bigger than I expected. Where
Natural Enemies would have been a sometimes-depressing story of two
men’s lives and the enduring quarrels they spawned, with Natural Rivals I
instead discovered the birth of public lands. I hit upon the story of a country
founded on seemingly unlimited natural wealth bumping up against those
limits, and finding its character in how it responds. I saw it as the story of
a society maturing into adulthood, learning to appreciate and balance its
profound blessings. It was the story of America, told on and through the
lands we collectively own.

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