Stewart Creek and the Salvation of the Magruder Corridor

Brandy Peak, Bitterroot Valley, Montana

“The earth is not a resting place for any Brandborg.”

                                                                                                          Big Brandy

Note: Both Stewart and Guy Brandborg were known as “Brandy” throughout their careers. This is vexing to a would-be biographer of Stewart (like myself) who realizes that he can’t tell the story of one without referring often to the story of the other. Their family had a way to solve this conundrum by simply referring to Guy as “Big Brandy”.  When I can fit it into this narrative without overly-confusing the reader, I will also use Guy’s family handle.

Stewart M. Brandborg’s dad, Guy M. Brandborg, often came to visit his son’s family in the Washington, D.C. area when Stewart was working for The Wilderness Society during the ‘60s and ‘70s. It was on one of these visits, when Stewart had an appointment to meet with Lee Metcalf, that Big Brandy asked to come along.

            “Are you sure you want to go?” Stewart recalled asking him, to which his dad replied “oh yeah, let’s go. I’m ready.” And off they went.

            This was sometime in the late ‘60s, during the middle stages of the Magruder Corridor controversy, which involved a scheme the Forest Service and the lumber companies were colluding on to arbitrarily exclude hundreds of thousands of acres from the new Wilderness Act, that Senator Metcalf had helped the younger Brandborg champion. There was a road there, the only one in those mountains, the so-called Magruder Corridor, built in the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) between the small Montana lumbering town of Darby and smaller lumber and mining town of Elk City, Idaho. The Forest Service and the timber industry were ready to use the road for the purpose it was originally built, to “get the cut out” and to “develop” the vast, wild area the way that God (or at least a certain version of Himself) desired those last wild areas to be developed, with roads and clearcuts and picnic tables. Of course. That sort of thing.

Conservationists were working the issue hard because, aside from the fact that the Upper Selway country (the Magruder Corridor) was a vast, unspoiled area in its own right, it would be a watershed precedent for them if they could get it designated as wilderness even though a perfectly good road existed right through the middle of it. 

But the Forest Service was run by foresters, and after the passage in 1964 of the Wilderness Law that directed their agency to identify areas within their domain that qualified for inclusion into the newly-mandated system that disallowed practicing their profession, their natural inclination was to drag their feet. And so they did, by coming up with a set of criteria that set their wilderness-designation bar so high that any area that wasn’t “pure” like a vast, wild tract with a primitive dirt track scratched through it in the ‘30s by a crew composed of young men who were wearing their first pair of shoes, for instance, would be disqualified and released for “multiple use”, which in forester-speak meant more roads and career-enhancing board-feet. And yes, picnic tables. This became known as the “Purity Doctrine” and has skewed wilderness conversations ever since, away from protecting and preserving the Land for its own sake towards the foresters’ preferred altnerative, the slow but irrevocable attrition of Death by a Trillion Cuts. All relatively-intact ecosystems rendered “impure” by the presence of a road, primitive, ill-advised or anything in-between, would be forever vulnerable to logging, roading (and picnic tables) no matter how economically or environmentally silly those activities might be, and in a place like the Magruder Corridor, which was many rough miles away from any mill or road maintenance crew, the prospects for such silliness at the highest levels were all but assured. At the time the Brandborgs visited Lee Metcalf, in fact, the foresters and lumbermen had figured in the Magruder Corridor as a fair-and-square part of the region’s timber base, largely because of the road’s existence. Metcalf, while not so keen on “getting the cut out” was on board with the developing of the Magruder Corridor for political considerations, even though he is remembered today as one of Montana’s premier progressive politicians, which includes his championing of watershed environmental issues like the Wilderness Act. For his part, Big Brandy had been working the Magruder issue hard back home, including the currying and advising of a new activist in Hamilton, Montana, Doris Milner, to take the front role in pushing for the Corridor’s salvation. Metcalf had been hearing a lot from Doris by this time, but he either didn’t know that the Brandborgs were also thick into the controversy or, more likely since he was a consummate politician, he may have known and strategically didn’t let on.

            So father and son drove to the Capitol and went to see Lee. They sat on deep leather couches that interior designers of Senate offices still prefer, and they talked, Lee and Big Brandy, about many things. Lee and Big Brandy, you see, were old friends. Lee had grown up in the Bitterroot when Guy was the Forest Supervisor there. They were both counted within the post-World-War-Two Montana intelligentsia that included Bud Guthrie, K. Ross Toole, and other progressives who were beginning to stand up to the Anaconda Copper Company's bullying grip on Montana's politics and resources. In 1949, for instance, Lee (as a Montana Supreme Court justice) had been one of Guy’s defenders at his infamous House UnAmerican Activities (HUAC) inquisition in Missoula. The "Company" didn't like the way Big Brandy was preaching about Pinchot's "social forestry" designed to conserve resources for the long-term benefit local, rural communities. More to the point, the Company intensely disliked a Bitterroot Forest Supervisor's (Big Brandy's) advocacy for more government regulation on private company tracts in the Bitterroot that they were in the finishing stages of skinning the "golden stream" of ancient Ponderosa Pine off of. They sent a man to his office in Hamilton one day to warn him off, to tell him he better lay off of that "social forestry" stuff or else, and Big Brandy had told him to go to hell. It wasn't long after that that he received an impersonal letter ordering him to appear before an inquisition in Missoula, which resulted in a great victory for Big Brandy. The list of defenders at that hearing represented a virtual Who’s Who of Montana’s progressive activists--including Lee--who testified (according to Stewart six decades later) that "the last thing he would be would be is a communist because he's so in love with making democracy work." These were the golden days, at least in Montana, and they succeeded in beating back the McCarthyites in that instance. Lee, in other words, had long-supported Big Brandy staunch advocacy of Gifford Pinchot’s early version of tree-based democracy, based on favoring sustainability of both forests and local jobs over corporate greed. Simple enough, and in those days it was natural for intelligent people who were active in Montana’s politics to be on board with Pinchot’s vision and with Guy Brandborg’s garnishing of that vision with his famous socialist twist (although Big Brandy never referred to himself as a socialist), and so he and Lee knew and regarded each other well. Guy's vocational specialty was rangelands, and Lee, who was forever in the midst of the resource wars that constantly whirled Congress by the tail, must have welcomed Guy’s refreshing homespun expertise as a tonic against the professional lobbyists he must have been obliged to also entertain on the very couch the Brandborgs were currently occupying.

            There was a fly in the ointment, though, and after an unspecified length of warm discussion, Lee’s voice became low and he started in on a new subject.
"But there’s one thing…” he began, his deep quiet tone gathering steam as one word followed another, “…that’s driving me up a wall…”, his voice rising like a slow moving tsunami until by the end of the sentence he was literally shouting, “…is that goddam Magruder Corridor!!”

            Six decades later, Stewart recalled an eruption, a venting, a mushroom cloud of frustration that the Brandborgs little suspected Metcalf had on the subject. “Wasn’t millions of acres of wilderness enough!?” Lee fumed. 

            Of course, being the consummate political animals they also were, the Brandborgs never let on that they had anything to do with trying to save the goddam Magruder Corridor. After all, Lee was a senator now, and as advocates for sound forestry practices in the Bitterroot and wilderness designation for qualified areas, Big Brandy and his son wanted something from him in that context. So all they could do was “sit on that couch and grip leather”, like cowboys trying to stay on a sunfishing horse, as Lee went on and on about the goddam Magruder Corridor! 
          But the Brandys had their way in the end, and too many of us who have enjoyed those unravaged, wild areas that he, his dad and Doris saved for these last forty years take for granted the fact that eventually Doris won Lee over to the the conservationists' point of view and that the Magruder Corridor is now part of the largest contiguous unloaded (except for one) wilderness area in the lower 48 and not a road map to Hell. 

Lee Metcalf eventually had a wilderness area and a wildlife refuge named after him in gratitude for his environmental advocacy. The Brandborgs, for their part, disapproved of the naming of geographical features after mere humans, but they let that go after their fashion. Big Brandy actually ended up having a peak named after him while Metcalf was still a sitting senator. Brandy Peak is the first one you see at the mouth of the Lost Horse drainage in the Bitterroot Mountains when you look up into it from Highway 93. Other than expressing pleasure that a mountain would be named after his old friend, Metcalf’s only other recorded comment was the gruff statement, “Well, now the Bitterroot Mountains have an active volcano!” 

Stewart, too, has a creek named after him, in the Upper Selway country. This happened in 1937, when his dad, Bitterroot National Forest Supervisor at the time, had a CCC crew punching a road down to Paradise from Magruder Station with the newfangled bulldozer, ironically just below the Darby-Elk City road being built at roughly the same time. The foreman of Big Brandy's crew, Charlie Engbretzon, had befriended twelve-year-old Stewart and led him up a steep unnamed drainage that emptied into the Selway just above Paradise Guard Station where Stewart shot his first deer. Charlie then had a CCC boy make a simple wooden sign that read “Stewart Creek” and nail it to a tree where the creek crossed under the new roadbed Charlie and his crew were in the process of creating. That sign apparently lasted long enough for the name to stick onto the maps of the protected wilderness lands that would have been logged and thoroughly roaded long ago if not for the creek's namesake, along with several hundred other “elitist” nature-lovers who pestered Metcalf until he caved to their side. Stewart would qualify this story told decades after the facts with a simple addendum, that he didn’t think Stewart Creek should be named after him. After all, that creek had a destiny of its own long before he showed up.
       Consummate politicians—the good-hearted ones, anyways—are in such short supply today, but the arc of environmental justice is always slow and accurate. Every once in a this arc is even observable among committed creatures within the human species. We’d all do well to remember the physics of that kind of justice that doesn’t necessarily have to include us in her sweep.