Prologue

                                                                                                       Watercolor by Daniel LaCroix

“I always tried to envision getting good people to make democracy work. I didn’t want to confine myself with wilderness.”

               Stewart M. Brandborg, Executive Director, Wilderness Society, 1964-1976

            

Stewart Brandborg, the last true activist to lead The Wilderness Society, maybe the oldest activist still fighting the Wild West’s crazy resource wars, maybe the last old-time activist left in America, was sitting in his motorized wheelchair, telling a story.

One time his friend, Olaus Murie, had come to Washington D.C. on a Greyhound bus from his cabin in Moose, Wyoming to testify before Congress on behalf of some critical conservation issue or other. Olaus was president of a small organization (The Wilderness Society) on the cusp of blooming into its name, and this was the late fifties, the golden age of massive federal projects that were by design and definition bigger and more durable than the pyramids of ancient Egypt. It was the golden age of dams.

Congress, like Egyptian monarchies, is one of those rarified clubs that attracts vulnerable people who, as often happens, accumulate more power than they can handle and become prone to the suffering of pharaohs. This is a diagnosable disease, a timeless itch that has everlastingly tanked societies grown too top-heavy. It’s the itch of would-be gods who worship themselves and the big and durable things they could command to be built in their names and then have those big things named after them. So, although Brandy couldn’t recall the exact nature of his friend’s visit when he picked him up at the bus station that day, it was probably a dam that Olaus had come to town to school the pharaohs about. 

A long trip on a bus back then took some wind out of your sails even if you were young, but especially when you were in your sixties and dealing with health issues, as Olaus was. So when the bus pulled into the station, Olaus, who had logged thousands of miles on foot and dogsled in the mountains of Alaska and Wyoming, took a walk around the block to stretch his legs while waiting for his ride. 

Olaus and Brandy had a lot in common. Both were westerners, uncomfortable in cities and physically-acclimated to living outdoors. Both were wildlife biologists with extensive experience “in the field”. Finally, and maybe most importantly, both came from that pioneer strain of Scandinavian stock that still populates the North-Central Minnesota plains, the people who came immediately after those plains were seized from the Dakota people during the tense, uncertain early years of America’s Civil War. It’s ironic that these lands were taken during the watch of no less a politician than Abraham Lincoln, who would seek to secure the blessings of liberty for immigrants fleeing tyrants in Europe and for people from Africa whom those Europeans enslaved, but couldn’t seek the same courtesies for the original inhabitants of the Land. True, there were sentimentalists among the abolitionists who elevated him to the presidency, who yearned to “save” the “savage” with “Christianity”, none of which were words used by the Dakota people to describe themselves or their predicament. For his part, Lincoln also used words alien to the Dakota people, to describe what his administration took from them. He used the words like “frontier” and "wilderness" and, given the radical strain of Swedes and Norwegians that ended up springing from that virgin sod of the Dakota peoples’ plains turned upside-down, that’s a pretty fair definition of irony. What, for instance, could late-19^thcentury Scandinavian farmers fleeing decrepit, autocratic monarchies in search of personal freedoms have known about what the Dakota People thought of their dear Land, or how they described it? 

Not much really, and so the Scandanavian farmers didn’t think about it much, at least not at first, and that’s how it was when Olaus was born in 1889 along the Red River that defines the boundary between North Dakota and Minnesota, to Norwegian immigrants and, four years later, when Brandy’s father, Guy (also known as “Brandy” throughout his lifetime) was born in Ottertail County, the next one over from the Muries, to Swedish stock. 

By the mid-1950s, Guy’s son, Stewart, and Olaus were fellow Wilderness Society board members. Brandy’s day-job was Project Director for the National Wildlife Federation, whose director, George Callison, saw potential in bringing “westerners” into the simmering national conservation stewpot, westerners who liked to fight dams, which was exactly what Brandy was doing in central Idaho when Callison became aware of him. There were two massive federal dam projects proposed to drown out Central Idaho’s wilderness, Penny Cliffs on the Middle Fork of the Clearwater and Bruces Eddy (later realized as Dworjak Dam) on the North Fork, and Brandy was fighting both of them while simultaneously working for Idaho Fish and Game, an impressive juggling act. He had been a lookout and a smoke chaser for the Forest Service in his teens and had studied mountain goats for several years during and after college. He was a wildlife biologist, a conservation activist, the son of an already-iconic “social forester” of the Gifford Pinchot mold, and a westerner. It was a novel idea, this seeking out those who lived in the “field” and who could speak in eloquent counter-arguments to nominally-elected potentates openly pining for their own monogramed Eighth Wonder and Callison set his sights on enticing Stewart Brandborg to come to Washington. And so he did.

It wasn’t long after the Brandborgs, Stewart, AnnaVee and their baby, Becky, had settled into the rhythms of D.C. that Howard Zahnizer, executive director of The Wilderness Society, noted similar potential in this big, young, talkative westerner. “Zahnie” took Brandy under his wing, drove him around Washington D.C. in his Cadillac Convertible (which ever-after impressed Brandy as “the bee’s knees”) and tapped him to serve as a board member of the Wilderness Society, as a protégé and also as a taxi-driver for fellow conservationists needing rides to and from bus stations. So Brandy was not surprised when he showed up and found Olaus waiting for him, holding a leaf. 

“It’s amazing,” he recalled Olaus saying. “How fine-veined they are, how they blow down the sidewalk in the wind as they do. How perfectly designed for their purpose they are.” 

AnnaVee was listening to this story from their open kitchen. She had been tolerating Brandy’s telling of it until he came to the part about the leaf. Then she quietly sidled up, which was how they split the duties of lifelong activism all those years in D.C. and then in Montana--evenly. She was Brandy’s fact-checker, Brandy taking up the airspace, AnnaVee underlying his narrative with the critical combination of introspection and accurate memory. 

“There are some things that you should know about Olaus, Sigurd Olson and Zahniser” she advised me in her quiet voice that was every bit as earnest as Brandy’s louder one. 

“Zahnie was somebody that you just immediately loved. You just felt good in his presence. The same was true for Sig. You were glad to be there, and glad to have him with you. Olaus was a little different sort of person. To me, sitting with him was like sitting next to Christ.” 

This book, “What’s Bigger Than the Land?”, was started--and partly takes place--in Stewart and AnnaVee Brandborg’s livingroom, just south of the small western-Montana town of Hamilton. Brandy was not only the last surviving architect of the 1964 Wilderness Act, he’s also been an instigator and touchstone for much of the considerable environmental activism which has occurred in Western Montana since he and AnnaVee packed it up and moved back home from the Beltway in 1986. Countless strategy meetings have occurred in this house, leading to significant victories—or at least stallings--against the local adherents of the extractive status quo, which in turn led to his and his family’s vilification by those local adherents. Brandy and Anna Vee were both native Montanans with deep roots and, since the Bitterroot Valley is still rural and relatively small, at least one of the villifiers was someone who attended their wedding in 1949. There have also been those people who just moved up from some urban dystopia with the intent of surrounding themselves with others who look like them (Montana is almost 90% white) and think like them (Trump won in Ravalli County by almost 70%). Just people, in other words, the usual problem, but no matter. Brandy and AnnaVee never gave an inch, let alone gave up. They were of that vanishing species of gracious, determined fighters who listened to everybody and then did what they knew had to be done. Liberals in the old-time sense of the word, which is to say “socialists” in the old-time sense of that abused word (at least Brandy and his dad were, although they never entered into socialism's unfortunate "dogma-wars" by describing themselves as such), rare beasts in our current, troubled times. 

The topic of our first discussions were several vintage cardboard boxes of personal files from Brandy’s days as Executive Director of The Wilderness Society. The story of the boxes, in a nutshell, is about how Howard Zahniser—Brandy’s friend and mentor—unexpectedly died four months before his eight-year battle to pass a Wilderness Bill was finished. Brandy took over as head of the Society for the last push and, when Lyndon B. Johnson finally signed it into law on September 3, 1964, Brandy characteristically missed the whole thing. He was, instead, out west.

“I was the guy,” Brandy put it, “that had worked his butt off following Zahniser’s passing in May, and I didn’t even get to the signing. I regretted that but here I was with four kids and a raccoon…” 
This was a pattern repeated throughout his long life (he died in 2018 at the age of 93). In the summer of 1945, for instance, he was surveying lodgepole out of Bozeman, two feet in diameter and straight as pillars holding up the roof in the sky. He had been classified 4-F by the draft board a couple years before, and his aunt had given him a Model T. On VJ Day, when the atomic age was gaping its jaws in Japan, he was in Bozeman, celebrating with a girl he liked. After all, he had a Model T.
He wasn't sure whether Johnson knew a wilderness from a cow pasture, but he was a superb politician, and that’s what mattered as far as signings go. He didn't need to be there, and so seminal events could yawn in the distance for all he cared, and that was one of the biggest gifts Brandy brought to the Wilderness Law and, more importantly to the implementing of it. Someone dedicating their life to the preservation of America’s remaining intact ecosystems needed to know the Land enough to be humbled by it, and so it was that so long as there was still some open country left to roam in, Brandy would roam in it, and encourage others to do so. 

 Brandy led the Societyfor the next twelve years, until 1976 when he was fired by the board. This occurred because he fought an oil pipeline in Alaska, and had alienated some industry-funded foundations such as the Mellon Foundation (Gulf Oil) that some members of the board were interested in soliciting grant money from. Brandy wasn’t being “professional” enough, these board members surmised, and so they hired a business consulting firm to find fault in Brandy’s “professionalism”, which the consulting firm dutifully did. Brandy’s firing, in turn, created an uproar throughout the environmental community, and even today to say out loud what was widely-thought back then, that The Wilderness Society fired Brandy because he spearheaded an almost-successful fight against the Alaskan Pipeline is a statement incredible on its face and still unbelievable to many within the movement. But that’s what happened, and in early January of 1976 , he and two of his top staff staff, Ernest Dickerman and Virginia (Peeps) Carney (both of whom would resign from the organization soon after), arrived at The Wilderness Society offices in downtown Washington D.C. to clean out his office. They ended up stuffing a couple dozen boxes full of Wilderness Society records covering the periods 1955 to 1977 that Brandy wanted saved—which were most of them--and walked them out through an unused back door onto the asphalt roof of the People’s Drugstore, which their offices sat above and which, coincidentally, was within sight of the White House. They didn’t use the front door because the new interim-director, Clif Merrit, a long-time colleague of theirs and a fighter in his own right, was sitting at the front desk, supposedly monitoring what Brandy was taking out of his office. The whole thing was, to say the least, awkward: for them, for the new interim-director, for everyone involved in the whole awkward affair. 

They carried the boxes across the roof and down the fire-escape ladder, where the Brandborg family’s station wagon was parked on the street below. They loaded them up, and Brandy drove the boxes home to Turkey Foot Road in Maryland just north of the Washington metropolitan area, and that where they stayed for a decade, when the Brandborgs finally headed west for good.

The Wilderness Society entered into a period of turmoil from this event. It became one of the major debacles in America’s post-Nixon world, when the “left” seemed to be finding its feet and then, seemingly-inexplicably, stumbled. There was an explanation, of course, but it’s still a inexplicably-fierce debate raging within the nationwide environmental community: how beholden progressive non-profits should be to corporate donors. Brandy, who was in on the cusp of so many watershed victories for the environmental movement, was also in on the cusp of that same movement’s watershed setback from which it has never fully recovered. Nixon, who would have been in the last year of his presidency in 1976 if he hadn’t been forced to resign, could rightly claim that he had signed more environmental legislation into law than any other president. But Nixon’s green tint was almost wholly the result of the democratic pushing and shoving from below that Brandy and his colleagues were so adept at. Maybe Nixon could be excused if he snickered a bit at the whole affair because, in the end, he got his pipeline. 

When the Brandborgs moved back to the Bitterroot Valley, the Wilderness Society files came with them. Still tucked in their original cardboard boxes, they were stored in the various basements, garages and sheds where papers that are dear to the possessors invariably end up, and in those vintage boxes they remained, relatively unmolested for the next thirty years. 

It wasn’t a complete set anymore. Some had already made their way down to the University of Montana archives in Missoula. An unspecified few had been lost in a still-unexplained house fire when the Brandborgs were living in the hills above the small logging town of Darby twenty miles south of Hamilton, a town which still held both him and his dad personally responsible for “shutting down the mills” decades ago, the very mills that both Brandborgs had repeatedly warned were overcutting their own selves out of existence—which is what they did. But through all that about a dozen boxes still remained, mostly in the garage, a few out in the garden shed. They contained dog-eared documents from the environmental movement’s budding days when so much seemed possible, and actually was achieved. There was a whole box, for example, marked “Timber Supply Act”, an existential threat to the budding power of an unpredicted awakening that was by fits and starts blooming and booming by the late sixties. If it had passed, it would have congressionally-mandated unsustainable levels of timber harvest on national forests into perpetuity, making moot most of the improvements in forest management that came before and after it. The remaining forests of the Rockies, indeed the remaining forests throughout the nation, would have been stripped for quick cash, as so many had been already. This was at the height of the Vietnam War, when college kids and their professors were widely credited with such notions as “ecology”, “wildlife corridors” and “population explosion”, notions that industrialists felt had no place in serious talk about forest management, let alone about anything else. It was all pure communism to them, but Brandy, having grown up with his feet in the actual dirt, called their bluff and made it stick, which was another of his strengths. It was his saddle-seasoned dad, after all, who was raising hell about overcutting the Bitterroot National Forest, in what came to be known as the “Clearcut Crisis” at this very historical second when such “anti-communists” as these industrialists invariably were, who may have never seen a mule up close let alone settled their butt on one for a month, were advocating for armed soldiers on college campuses as the solution to this “problem” of the sixties. The Clearcut Crisis in the Bitterroot was exactly what the sponsors of the Timber Supply Act had in mind to counter with their no-nonsense, get-the-cut-out legislation. They even gave the Brandborgs an off-hand compliment by re-naming their legislation the “National Forest Timber Conservation and Management Act” which, of course, was not about conservation at all. Stewart and Guy took them down in flames, paving the way for the National Forest Management Act of 1976, and this Brandy claimed as one of his proudest moments, a largely-forgotten one now that had a significant mouse nest in it, possibly multi-generational ones. Clearly something needed to be done.

Personal miracles exist in almost anyone’s garage. Letters from great-aunts who moved to Los Angeles to be movie stars, pictures of ancestors on Ellis Island, that $96 hospital bill that paid for your birth, the sort of documentary detritus that doesn’t want to be thrown out but transforms into clutter after a few decades of hanging around in linen closets. That’s when a time-honored trajectory is applied to them with the rationale that, if you can’t fit it neatly on a bookshelf or turn it into furniture, out it goes into the true archive of American history since at least World War Two—the garage. In the Brandborg’s case, this accumulated detritus ran deep into a largely-forgotten history, or worse a misinterpreted one, of an environmental awakening that hadn’t happened in this country before, and, sadly, hasn’t happened since. It was exciting, overwhelming and personal. Foolishly, perhaps, I dug in.

The wording in this book attributed to Brandy are either in quotes as his own, or paraphrased from his own. They can be found within the excellent series of taped interviews conducted by Dick Ellis in 2003, in several other interviews and videos now archived at the University of Montana’s K. Ross Tool Archives within the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Library or within the tapes and notes of my own conversations with him (also archived--see appendix). I tried to stay faithful to his meaning and intent, while not generally citing or footnoting them overmuch along the way because I decided it would distract from the stories which I was ultimately after in the boxes—and what I believed Brandy was after, too. Not just the facts within (which, in the interest of full disclosure I admit that, due to their voluminous nature compared to my own, laid-back one, I merely cherry-picked) but the dust they kicked up. Brandy’s especially but a little of my own as well. After all, it’s been my luck to choose a drop-dead-gorgeous country like the Bitterroot to live in during such interesting times. I’ve been working and playing here for decades, in the same wild country that Brandy and his colleagues saved for my generation to have the opportunity to live, work and play in at all, and I have something to say about how they are being defined and defiled by those who simply may not know the history of their temporary salvation well enough. There’s something here in the Northern Rockies, I think, this home-sweet-home of the Nimi’ipuu (the Nez Perce People), that speaks to the existential pickle we’re in. Call it a power, a trance, radon poisoning. What I know after all these years is this: that whatever it is, it exists, just like Jesus, neither of which you can justify your belief in other than to say that most beliefs are valid if they’re honest, and that some are even true. Beliefs squishy things, after all, and necessarily so if they’re to have any value to the believer. Everyone believes something, but whatever belief you chose to bake to that golden brown that makes them edible, shouldn’t they at least be leavened with some mere observations? That any belief a society hold dear is a compromise? One that a society makes with its natural environment in order to illuminate the rules of survival so a member of that society can see the rules for what they are? That real beliefs, the useful ones, are at their core land-based? That from the primary urge to survive comes the necessary reverence to do the right thing, and not vice-versa? Any parent can understand this, that at their best beliefs are just raw facts under the warming shadow of rainclouds in northern winter skies that help us to survive, no matter whose God you choose to worship. 

Brandy literally grew up organically from the Land, something fewer and fewer of us have the opportunity to do. He and his colleagues successfully convinced millions that they simply could not live without those last wild places from which they sprang, which is true. More important to us now is that in applying this tree-based philosophy of “making Democracy work” to modern politics, they literally stumbled on one possible recipe to do just that, which could in fact save us, if we so choose. 

“Wilderness!” you hear them say, more and more with a roll of a condescending eye about a thing within which their lives are less and less entwined, even those who now claim the mantle of Environmentalist . “That’s so Sixties!” 

Well, it is just a word after all, and an expeditious one at that. But how about “democracy”? That’s just a word, too, but it describes a living organism, a land-based one, and wherever you find the Land you’ll find a different species of democracy native to that place. Here in North America, there was a vibrant form residing in human populations long before the Atlantic Ocean washed an equally-vibrant (albeit predatory) Greco-Roman form upon its shores, where they crossbred. We tend to forget that our cherished American democracy is a hybrid, a mix of the native and the non-native, a cut-bow trout swimming in the ever-more-sacred waters of an industrialized world on the very verge of polluting those waters to the last drop and then privatizing the toxic result. And then there will be no trout, no water, no democracy at all. We tend to forget that, far from being democracy’s creator, we are merely its host species, and that we neglect this symbiotic relationship at our peril. 

I have allowed myself to become convinced that within the political template created by the early conservationists and the various other progressives to meld their depthless love of wild places with political realities, to get people to see the essential value of a mere word—Wilderness!--and to fight for it, are the same nuggets that could save the Land, and possibly us, from our accumulated foolishness. These stories and insights may be centered around the Northern Rockies, but it seems to me that the extreme and even violent politics we have seen here in Montana as well as throughout most of America’s rural landscapes for the last thirty years or so (the militia movement, the “Tea Party” phenomenon, the current Trump presidency) is as good a metaphor as the next for the illness that plagues us if you have the inclination to look. Old-time activism, the kind practiced in the mid-twentieth century by Big Brandy (Guy) and his son, is a pretty good recipe for fighting despair (our real enemy it seems to me) and maybe better than most given what we’re left to work with. It’s grounded and doesn’t put Jesus to sleep.
We tend to kill our prophets, or at least ignore them if their lucky, along with the core truth that burns at the heart of their misinterpreted reveries, the one about humility, about us being frogs in a slowly boiling pot of our own stew resulting in our misinterpreting that simple lesson, the one about humility. We beg our own set of questions, then, which are at heart not modern ones at all: Is it really about what the environment can do for us, or about how pretty we think things are? Or if some of us believe that sunsets are the eyes of God shining down to enlighten our path? Or if others believe that coal is the gift of that other god, the Old Testament one with the warped sense of humor? Is it even about belief at all? Is our task merely Science, then? To measure “ecosystem services” so that they can be more easily parsed up and dealt out between the various human “partners” at the negotiation “tables”? Might there be a missing ingredient in our land-based debates we’re having these days? Might it be that humankind needs as much wild country (and its evolving, resident democracies) as we can possibly nurture for the simple sake of our continued survival on this planet? Might we need to save what’s left of our remaining wilderness not as a matter of sentimentality, belief, or “ecosystem services”, but as a matter of fact? 

Our times are nothing new, and it’s never been too hard to see the mountains past the hype. Either by intent or ignorance, most of us tend to miss the forest andthe trees, and if you’ll indulge me this little bit further I’ll re-iterate that what is usually lacking in our armchair discussions about the Land is that democracy, the main ingredient in any solution of epic human concern, needs vast swaths of relatively intact ecosystems to burn in and to rejuvenate, to evolve in and to survive, and that democracy is what is lacking in the Land.

It’s something to think about, anyway. 

That’s our scheme.

Chapter I

Charlie Engbretzon’s Ford

Paradise, Idaho

Early November, 1937

Charlie Engbretson’s Ford was like all Fords, narrow-bodied and modest, fitted out with the standard bench seat that made it a comfortable ride when it only held two. But a man named Mack (not his real name) was the ranger at Deep Creek, and Mack had a wife. He also had a woman set up in a tent on the Little Clearwater a few miles upstream, where an old trail had gradually given out and been abandoned. Nobody used the trail anymore, and that was Mack. 

Charlie had planned an all-weekend deer-hunting expedition with the boy sitting next to him, and they were heading back from Paradise Guard Station to the CCC camp with the boy’s first deer, a fair-sized Muley buck lying in the back of the truck. But when they stopped at the Deep Creek Ranger Station a couple miles downstream from the camp for a quick chore he he found Frank and Jessie Lantz, just in from the Salmon River and putting up their stock in the station pasture. That changed his mind. It was the weekend, and he knew that Mack was nowhere around and that if he didn’t give the Lantzes a ride over Nez Perce Pass that night, they’d be stuck at Deep Creek waiting for Mack or some other wayward soul traveling along the Paradise Road for who knew how long. 

                    Without consulting the boy then, Charlie unilaterally cut their hunting trip short, crowded the tired couple onto his little bench seat with the (now) disappointed boy sitting sideways and hunched up next to him, and then he drove everybody out, up the Deep Creek road, past the CCC camp, up and out of the Selway Canyon and over Nez Perce Pass, then back down the other side of the mountains into the Bitterroot Valley and north to Hamilton, the boy’s home.

                    The boy—Stewart Brandborg--was used to these mountain characters, people who could conjure up time and make it go backwards if they wanted to, to when forests had personalities that they had opinions about. His father, Bitterroot Forest Supervisor, Guy Brandborg, was recognized even then as one of these master conjurers of for what was left of 20^thCentury cowboy culture, the culture that had displaced the original one, the Ni’i mi puu's and the Salish folks', the ones that used to walk the trails with dogs near where the new Paradise Road was being built now. The boy was haphazardly being gifted an education by his father, into a world that was vital, crucial and—at least in his father opinion--would disappear like smoke if boys like Stewart didn’t pay enough attention to what his father figured was worth paying attention to, and the Lantzes were part of that education even though he didn't acknowledge such categories of divine intent at the time.

He knew the road between Deep Creek and Hamilton well enough, for instance. He’d just ridden over it with his father, Guy, (also known as "Brandy" throughout his life)  who travelled it during the summer months to check on the progress of the Paradise Road. Guy had been given Charlie’s CCC crew by the New Deal government along with his supervisor position at the Bitterroot National Forest. He were going to punch the road through to Paradise, where there hadn’t been a road before. Guy and his boss, Major Evan Kelly, were foresters from Pinchot’s early mold, rough-talking, good in the saddle and committed to the public domain. Major Kelly was probably more committed to roads than Guy, but however Guy felt about roads in these places where there hadn’t been any, he didn’t flinch from the task. This was the Depression, a famous time of few jobs and much opportunity, and Guy’s true religion was the capable, underemployed mountain people like the Engbretzons and the Lantzes, whom he’d search out during just such hard times and bless with a steady government job and his own signature appreciation for rural Westerners. 

Guy would stay for a day or two, then drive back to his other duties at the Supervisor’s Office in Hamilton, leaving Stewart in the Engbretson’s care for days at a time to learn a thing or two. Officially, Charlie’s job was to supervise the road crew, but Guy also granted Charlie a special dispensation to take the boy on outings, much like later generations turned their sons over to Scoutmasters. It was enough of adventure, then, driving back to Hamilton in the dark for hours pinned between three adults in an inadequate Ford, so of course Stewart didn’t whine. It wasn’t one of his options. He bunched himself inward instead, comforting himself as best he could next to his mentor, Charlie Engbretzon the “mountain man”,  absorbing another experience. Taken as a whole, it was idyllic.  

“Had my bed in (Charlie’s) office and his wife was a few hundred yards away in the summer tent camp where they lived. I ate with the CCC boys. We would hunt grouse, we would catch fish…” and Charlie “always had the new scheme to make things exciting”. 

On this Fall morning Stewart and Charlie had gotten up at first light and bumped along the new Paradise Road that was being carved out of the canyon shoulder for about an hour until they came to where a no-name creek had been spilling into the Selway River unaided since the last Ice Age, but was now being helped under a roadbed through a culvert considerately placed by Charlie’s crew. This was seen as an improvement by Charlie,  whose Ford bench seat represented a luxury that would have been unthinkable in the upper Selway just a couple of years before. There would have been no bench seats, no culverts and no road at all between the CCC camp and Paradise before then. The CCC boys had brought it all down into the Canyon especially for the purpose of improving access to firefighting efforts and timber as envisioned by Major Kelly (and Guy) and, by extension, President Franklin Roosevelt, who shared Kelly’s belief in roads. As for the CCC boys, they were mostly from the heart of poverty-stricken America, suddenly graced with a regular government paycheck and some bulldozers to more perfectly bring the 20th Century down to where the only sounds of such centuries before had been the squeaks and rattles of the Decker pack saddles and metal bits on an occasional string of government mules heading to a fire. 

“Who could ask for more?” Charlie might have pointed out to young Stewart as they climbed out of the truck early that morning, shouldered their rifles, and set off up the steep sides of the little trickle of a creek to see what they could see.

Maybe the first thing they saw was the skittish wriggling of giant fish just below the surface of the water, members of those vast tribes of Steelhead that still existed in happy numbers that fall, but were slated for extinction the very next year. The Army Corps of Engineers was going to do that job, close the gates at Bonneville Dam on the Columbia, four rivers and six hundred miles downstream from the little no-name creek in the Spring. They would then fill a slackwater reservoir once and for all into a deep cut of geology accurately known as the Columbia River Gorge by pioneers but forever after would be known as “Lake Bonneville”. Charlie may have known all this, may have even said something about it to the boy--and it could have been that a skittish wriggling under the waters below their feet was the very first thing that they saw, the last free run of giants coming up from the sea. 

Chapter II

Frank Lantz

Salmon River 

Early 1920s

World War One was over, the rural depression that preceded the great one was at its full surge, and Frank Lantz came to on a sandbar just below Horse Creek rapids. He had just lost all his provisions, his scow, and he had almost drowned. Now all he had was the shirt on his back. Other than that, he was okay. 

            He had been heading back down into to the Salmon River canyon where he had a homestead before the war, a lovely alluvial flat called Butt’s Bar, across the river from Corn Creek where the road ends today. It was about thirty miles downriver from Shoup, Idaho, where the only telephone line into the canyon ended, where ancient rock shelters spoke of a People’s claim to the country long before thin, fragile lines hung in the sky with a bit of wood and glass. 

            He probably built his scow in the little ranching and mining town of Salmon, the end the line for the old Gilmore and Pittsburg Railroad, the one that never prospered because the country never attracted enough citizens to justify a railroad anyway. It was harsh and full of sagebrush, canyons, rapids and rattlesnakes. Uninviting to the unadventurous, ideal for building scows. You could get the rough-milled lumber there, load it with the supplies you needed to get through the winter: food, nails, ammunition, a change of clothes, a complete outfit. Then you could set off floating down the wild current to your destiny which, in Frank’s case was about seventy miles downriver.

            When he rolled his scow into the eddy at Butt’s Bar, however,  he found that someone had jumped his claim while he had been away in the army and then back home in West Virginia until he found he couldn’t keep the oven-hot, snake-infested western canyons out of his blood any more. It’s the same old story, and there’s no reliable record of what occurred between the moment Frank gained the landing and the moment he turned his scow back down into the river’s current. But Brandy says that he was prone to muttering simple things when faced with exasperating situations that, in the end, didn’t seem worth too much of his time. 

“T’ hell with it,” was what he probably said, then, and he turned his bow downriver towards a deeper wilderness of a harsh, wonderful canyon where he knew he could find another old village-site of the People, another wide-enough bar to set up his homestead or a village. But it was a homestead Frank had set his mind to do and that's what he did.

            His boat, for its part, was the typical Salmon River sweeper. Its design was efficient for the purposes required of it, and in fact it was the only design with any proven record of success in navigating the river’s rapids. Many miners from the gold rush days had tried to float the Salmon with their various boats, some more fragile than others, and of course dozens had drowned.  

Then, on December 20, 1902, the Lewiston Tribunereported that: “an odd-shaped flat-bottom scow, twelve feet long and four feet wide, landed at the wharf yesterday with three men—Capt. Harry Guleke, R.E. Dwyer and J.V. Dwyer. They made the trip from Salmon City to Lewiston via the wild Salmon and Snake, a voyage heretofore just dreamed of”.

“The era of one-way traffic on the Salmon”, the paper declared, had arrived, and Captain Guleke was enshrined by a forgotten western journalist as being the Salmon River’s first whitewater thrill junkie.

            As often happens with newspaper, they got the facts wrong, while holding impeccably-true to the emotions. Captain Guleke was indeed a whitewater thrill junkie, but his first one-way trip down the river was in 1896, not 1902, and before him the legendary Johnny Mackay had made at least 20 trips down and through with variations of these one-way “sweepers” that were probably evolving even before Mackay took to experimenting with them. Mackay was primarily a prospector, so some of his trips lasted three years or more, which is maybe why the journalist who enshrined Guleke didn’t count them. To be accurate, though, Guleke was in the habit of dynamiting rapids to make them safer for his personal passage, a habit which should have technically disqualified him as well. It’s just an historical footnote now though, which the hordes of modern thrill junkies who float down the Salmon atop colorful rubber rafts on any given summer’s week should take note of nonetheless: that egos can be deflated just like blue, unnatural rubber rafts. 

Sweepers were assembled locally and were, by necessity, rustic. A typical one was little more than a narrow, flat-bottomed barge built of rough-cut lumber, and if possible, the lumber was green to lend it the “give” to withstand the shock of the rocks and the rapids. This was beautiful, but what distinguished the sweeper as the singular achievement of high folk art was its long, oar-like rudders that dipped into the water both fore and aft. The shafts were made of peeled lodgepoles that were plentiful in the high country above the river, and the blades on the end of the shafts were made of the same rough-cut lumber as the boat. The blades were “swept” by one or more persons who stood amidships pumping the handles for all they were worth like a Neolithic version of a weight machine. It went without saying that physical strength, not common sense, was the first requirement for such undertakings, because the trick to sweepers was to thread its bulk of crudely-assembled wood through the house-sized boulders and punch through what modern boaters now call Class III and IV rapids, classifications which didn't exist for Frank. He only had the simple one that Captain William Clark dubbed the entire river with when he viewed Pine Creek Rapids just downstream from modern-day Shoup--the River of No Return--and before the advent of rubber rafts and jet boats the river was still living up to that name. So Frank turned his bow into the current away from his jumped claim at Butt’s Bar with all the classification he needed, and his sweeper—like all sweepers--was designed accordingly.  

They had a fair chance of making it downriver without breaking up if the pilot was skilled or lucky enough. But whether they made it down whole or in pieces, none of the pieces would ever see the upper Salmon again. They were indeed “one-way boats”, built especially to survive a trip downriver and then to be carefully pulled apart when beached at its destination, its rough boards and nails to be recycled into building materials for the owner’s purposes, for housing an “outfit” whether it be a mining claim, a homestead or, in Frank’s case, both. Sweepers must have appeared as a thing of exceptional utility to those who would go to such lengths seeking privacy, and no doubt their hearts quickened with anticipation as they nailed one together to head downriver with. Taken as a whole, the enterprise Frank embarked on was beauty bookended with beauty, and more than a little bit dangerous for anyone with no previous whitewater experience, even with trimmer boats. Evidence suggests that Frank was one of these, and “foolhardy” is what you might call it today. But it was called “pioneering” then, and still is by those with that little bit of luck, muscle and time on their side, things that have always allowed for successful foolhardiness.

Horse Creek Rapids was less than four quick miles downriver from Butt’s Bar, so it was probably an hour later that Frank was picking himself up off of the bar below the rapid, a typical bar for the river, an alluvial fan at the mouth of a side stream, abruptly cut off from the main current, the river pooling on the upriver side, then cutting a rapid around the bottom, depositing its high-water load of sand and flotsam—Frank in this case--below where a narrow, relatively flat and livable patch of land usually existed. 

“T’ hell with it!” is what Frank probably muttered, then, as he picked himself up, and continued on foot, downriver with only his shirt, and maybe his pants and shoes.

To be fair, this is how the story was told to me by Brandy, who knew Frank well back in the old days, but there are other stories about Frank Lantz out there, and you can find them in the most unlikely places if you’re interested in Salmon River lore. I’ll stick to this one, though, told to me first-hand by someone who presumably heard it first-hand from Frank himself. Frank was the only real witness, after all, and this is a good story. No matter then, just picture a man who knew as well as anyone how fast things can change in the Salmon River Canyon, and how good a story those fast things can make if you can just stand yourself up and walk away from them, which is what Frank did.

He hiked about seven more miles until he reached another bar used for millennia by the People, and more recently by early miners as a stopover between the goldfields to the south of the river and the little mining town of Dixie to the north. It was a well-known place, or at least as well-known as any place along this lonely stretch, and Frank decided that it would do. He claimed the few acres of level ground just upriver from Disappointment Creek, which would become known as Lantz Bar, and he lived there for the rest of his life, which would last five more decades. 

By the mid-thirties Frank was working for the new Bitterroot National Forest supervisor, Guy M. Brandborg (Brandy, like his son) who had jurisdiction down into that section of the canyon and an appreciation for old-timers like Frank. Brandy Sr. had been rangering for about twenty years by then, in the newly organized national forests of Montana and Idaho. Before the Bitterroot he had been a supervisor on the Nez Perce, the next forest over the mountains, which overlapped with the Bitterroot Forest in the Selway country and stretched west into the most inaccessible reaches of the Snake River known as Hell’s Canyon. 

In those days, a ranger’s job was done almost exclusively from a horse’s back, and Guy was constantly in the saddle, building lookouts on the high peaks and points, fighting fires, riding ranges, studying grasses. He didn’t have a lot of formal education, but he read, mostly on “social” topics, the kind which his own father had a passion for. Charles W. Brandborg was a prominent Swedish-American farmer who ran a grain co-op in Hibbing, Minnesota in defiance of the local railroad bosses and merchants. Eventually he ran for governor, in 1910 for the Socialist Labor Party (SLP), which is, as of 2018, the oldest surviving socialist party in America and which, if you know much about the tumultuous history of socialist parties in America, is saying something. Socialism, which has been part of the stitching that’s held America’s fabric together since at least Thomas Paine, was a Brandborg tradition grown and nurtured in each generation like wheat sown annually in the co-op-infested plains of western Minnesota, and making democracy work has been their work of choice. They took it personally, and maybe it’s the sheer tenacity of the SLP against all odds that rubbed off on the Brandborgs. Who knows? But it was Guy’s radical family combined with his farmboy upbringing that polished him into becoming an erudite observer—and an enthusiastic participant--of western life and, almost coincidentally, of the wild country and the people who adorned his mountains. 

He had his favorite horse, Sage King, who took him down into the deep canyons of the Snake and Salmon and along their breaks, checking the condition of the allotments, eating dinner with the ranchers and educating them on the latest grazing techniques such as they were understood at the time. His Forest Service grazing manual, printed three years after his dad ran for governor, had scribbles and coffee stains on it. He was typical of his time and place, in believing that better days were just around the next bend. In Guy Brandborg’s case this meant he believed in Gifford Pinchot’s “social forestry”, the new kind, the better kind for the people and the Land. 

Despite his lack of public schooling, he managed to finish one of Pinchot’s new Ranger Schools being offered at Montana State University in Missoula during the winters he wasn’t building trail on the South Fork of the Flathead. This schooling took him two winters, and when he was finished he gained his stride, coupling “social forestry” to the social theories of his father. When his intimate knowledge of animals acquired during his childhood years on the family farm was added to this mix, he had all he needed to become a foot soldier in the early service of public lands.

He learned his packing from his outfitter brother-in-law, Ernie Lenoux, who dude-wrangled in Glacier Park, and spent the Great War years breaking horses and mules for the Army, so the ranch people in the deep canyons of his jurisdictions saw him as one of their own, and seemed to like him as much as he did them. It was clear that he knew a thing or two about cowboying as well as modern range management and so they listened to his jabber. By the time Guy came to Hamilton with his young family to head the Bitterroot Forest in 1935 he could recognize guys like Frank Lantz a hundred miles away, cut from his own cloth, and he cultivated them as the kindred spirits they were, who could help and entertain him, just as he would help and entertain guys like Frank, all according to Pinchot’s master plan and his socialist father’s instructions. Guy, in other words, was like most foresters had to be in those days, a true believer in the public domain and other radical ideas.  

The rugged Salmon River country was a country prone to frequent fires that were hard to catch in time to be in compliance with a new rule the Forest Service had instituted by the time Guy took charge of the Bitterroot. The “10 a.m. Rule” mandated that a smoke had to be extinguished by 10 a.m. the morning after its discovery by a fire lookout before it got out of hand. The Forest Service was as young as a boy eligible for the draft back in the Thirties, and the idea of putting out all the fires for the sake of all the trees was just as new and, by definition, as radical. Guy’s boss, “Major” Evan Kelly, arrived at the Region One Supervisor’s Office in Missoula in 1929 with a priority that all his foresters were to heed, to stop “that goddam conflagration out there!” 

There had been a string of dry summers and big fire seasons in the region, unfightable ones that Kelly would fight nevertheless. He’d been an officer during the Great War with the 20^th Engineers, a unit that became famous for converting France’s forests into trench shorings and bridge struts. Forest fires were just another war, another herculean effort that would change everything for the better once again. Kelly tasked his rangers to make firefighting their top priority, with access the key, and the evidence suggests that he was a true believer, in roads and trails and Number 9 telephone wire, which were all seen as progressive management tools by most foresters in those days, tools to tame the fiery Beast of the tough, western mountain.

Not all foresters believed this, though, even back then. Region One’s assistant-supervisor, Elers Koch, for instance, was Kelly’s second-in-command, a native-Montanan, contemporary of Norman McClean and one of Pinchot’s first rangers to graduate from his newly-endowed School of Forestry at Yale. Koch played a crucial role in the Big Burn of 1910, and he was of the opinion that putting out all the fires was not only not practical, it wasn’t economical or even desirable, and especially not worth all the roads that his boss was punching into the back country. Koch didn’t object to the new trails that cut up the old Nimi’ipuu Land in ways the Nimi'i'puu might have objected to, but he didn’t like the roads, particularly the one that destroyed the essence of his beloved Lolo Trail to the north, the ancient highway of the People. He thought it was a sad trade-off, and an expensive one at that, to have such a zero-tolerance policy toward fires that you have to kill what you love in order to save it. His voice, though, along with the voices of fellow foresters like Bob Marshall--and even Guy to some extent--were just the first fresh drops of rain falling on the dry dead killing zones such as the battle-scarred foresters coming back from the fields of France had envisioned forest fires to be: The enemy! In times coming soon enough, those drops would turn to cloudbursts, and then to floods. But people needed work in the 30s, and it wasn’t that time yet.

It happened that Lantz Bar was strategically-located for Guy’s rangering tasks. He needed a contiguous network of well-built trails and No. 9 galvanized-steel phone line tacked to the trees next to those trails for the lookouts to communicate with the guard stations and for the government pack strings heading into temporary fire camps to get through the mountainous country. It was a hard physical job, horrendously-so, and Guy had no choice but to offer it to someone who was tough enough, money-starved and already there. Frank qualified on all counts, and he got the job. 

His territory became the middle of a long finger of cow-face steep canyons and ridges about a mile from top to bottom, steep enough to be epic and inaccessible by definition to the very firefighting efforts that Guy was instructed to manage it for. 

“My dad”, recalled Stewart eight decades later, “had given Frank the assignment of building and maintaining trails on that strip of the Bitterroot National Forest that extended from the headwaters of the Selway down to the Salmon River. It wasn’t an extensive piece of landscape, several miles wide from the Salmon River to the north into the upper Selway. This became known informally as Frank Lantz’s Ranger District. It didn’t have that title officially but for all intents and purposes it was Frank’s territory. Frank took very seriously the job of locating trails from Lantz Bar up over the Salmon River-Selway River divide. He was given an Abney level that he mastered, which helped him be almost a perfectionist in holding a grade of eight percent, or ten or fifteen percent to fit the terrain, but always gradual enough for a mule in good shape and not overloaded could handle in a day and always a nice change from the straight ups or downs along the jagged ridgelines that the Indians (sic) and, later, the miners, had left. This was to be known as the ‘Frank Lantz Trail Network’.”

“With a (string) of horses and mules,” Stewart recalled, “you could keep a pretty steady walk because the trails were at no higher (grade)…than man and beast could maintain without too many rests going up the mountain. This he did with great expertise and pride.”  

In addition to his trailbuilding duties, the 10 am. Rule dictated that a fire lookout (another relatively-new idea) his horse and pack mule must navigate the forest trails such as they existed to the site of a smoke and then chop, saw and dig with hand tools until the smoke was out, the lookout became exhausted, or help arrived which, in the Salmon River country during his tenure in the employ of the Forest Service, was likely to be named “Frank”.

            Early in Frank’s career, Guy put out a call to the various ranger districts in the area to pick out a surplus mule or two from their strings to send along to Deep Creek for Frank to do his work with. Most of his rangers were as saddle-seasoned as Brandy was, which meant they had the collective sense of humor of a typical cowboy outfit. Guy’s bulletin, then, was duly understood as an invitation to cull out their worst outlaws and get rid of them, which is what they did. A dozen or so of the meanest mules and horses in the forest were loaded up from various points of Region One, brought over to Hamilton. Then Guy sent word down to Frank that it was time for him to come over and get his string. The animals were loaded up and sent over Nez Perce Pass to Deep Creek (later Magruder) Ranger Station on the upper Selway where Frank could receive and saddle them, and string them over the divide down to his place on Lantz Bar.

This happened in the spring, when the Bitterroot Forest put on a three-day Guard School at Deep Creek for greenhorn lookouts as well as the returning seasonals, and there happened to be some of them loitering around the station when Frank showed up for his animals. The lookouts had just finished with their low-elevation telephone-line repair work and were at Deep Creek waiting for their class to start. Smokechasing was dangerous work, and except for a string of the No. 9 galvanized-steel phone line tacked to trees the lookouts would be mostly on their own once they were turned loose in the mountains. Their actual jobs would start when the weather dried out enough to justify their being sent to their various mountaintops. Then they would hike or ride up their various trails, clearing them of trees that had fallen the previous winter and repairing the broken phone line as they climbed the mountains along the way. It was tough, and maybe the lookouts weren’t in too big a hurry as they gathered around the rough station corral when Frank showed up for his stock. 

            The animals’ reputations had preceded them, and the loitering lookouts straddled along the unpeeled lodgepole fence rails to watch the show. It was, as Stewart recalls, “quite a display”. The animals not only were known renegades, they hardly knew each other. This made for a toxic mix of dominating personalities with very powerful kicks. Ask any politician during a particularly vicious election cycle how those kinds of dynamics work out and, just like Congress during any typical session since at least the Civil War, they bucked, snorted, bit and did everything they could to forcefully assert themselves while stubbornly refusing to cooperate for the common good. These animals were outlaws not diplomats, in a “situation” no less, and it was three in the afternoon before Frank got them up the trail in a line toward Thompson Flat and home down over the Selway divide. A long trip, almost thirty miles if he went by way of old Swet Cabin along the Shoup-Elk City trail and up and over Eakin Point (8,000’) and then straight down a mile into the breaks, which is what he probably did. It was broken, precipitous, as high and desolate a country as you could pick for no help being available or expected if you had a wreck with such a string of unruly, steel-shod horses and mules who were maybe under the illusion that they were running for political office. It’s not recorded what Frank thought of this joke played on him, but no matter. He got through with these bad girls and boys, and next spring he came back, where another crop of perennial lookouts loitered like the glacier lilies, fighting off nodding heads against the tranquilizing effects of a warm Spring sky by goosenecking toward the light, or anything interesting, gathering once again along the lodgepole rails to enjoy another already-legendary show, which to their disappointment had a slightly different script this time. A string of well-behaved mules and horses were led into the corral where Frank unsaddled them and walked through them, under them and behind them (!) He patted them, cared for them and there were no displays, no ill-tempered kicks or bites. The mules and horses obviously loved Frank as their father, and the transformation had only taken a year. They were his animals now, and even though Frank proudly built his network of trails on a grade so packers wouldn’t have to stop and “breathe” their string, Frank would always let his mules stop and blow anyway, because he loved them, and for the rest of their shared existence in the Salmon River Canyon the mutual relationship continued. This, by the way, is one of the countless ways that horses and mules are different from politicians. 

             By necessity Frank would occasionally come to town for supplies as well as for a “tear”. 

“Somehow (Frank) got involved in the social whirls of the small Bitterroot community of Corvallis,” Stewart recalled. “He attended a dance where he became acquainted with Jessie, a belle of the valley who had been in mourning over the loss of her twin sister. Magically…the two of them got together and made beautiful music, so beautiful that they decided to get married and to return to the Salmon River that very night.

            “The story goes that by Sunday after the Saturday night fling…they were headed back to Frank’s place at Lantz Bar by way of the West Fork of the Bitterroot on horses from somewhere on the West Fork over the Magruder-Nez Perce Pass into Deep Creek and then south up the Selway over the top by way of the ridge south of Salmon Mountain into the Salmon River slopes…Frank made a go of it with Jessie and Jessie rarely came out. She stayed year-round there at Lantz Bar with Frank.”

They built their home there, with cabins, a cold cellar, corrals for the stock and a pretty orchard that was producing good crops of apples when Stewart frequented the place in the early 50’s. They had a garden that took up two or three acres of the bar and with the elk meat Jessie canned for the winter they were self-sufficient enough in their basic needs to settle themselves down and become widely known for befriending the “skim diggers” who found themselves in the country during the depression years of the late ‘20s and ‘30s.

“They called them skim diggers, the prospectors who would take up temporary occupancy along the river…The Salmon River was famous for the fine gold the alluvial fans at the mouths of little canyons would hold if you got down to bedrock and worked the gravel with a sluice box, picking up the fine flakes to survive. Some said you might make a dollar a day. But the Salmon River canyon in that period through to Riggins and down to White Bird supported several dozen skim diggers…who would set up a little placer operation and make enough to keep themselves in food.

            “Frank valued the wildlife in the lower Salmon River country at that time. He was particularly fond of the bighorn sheep...and Frank was quick to see that the bighorns were easy targets for these meat-hungry residents who’d come into the Salmon River canyon. So it was his unwritten law that the bighorns were not to be taken. If he came upon someone that had shot one of these animals they would settle with him. And if there was anything left after his settlement he would take them to the law if they didn’t end up floating feet first down the river.”

In early November of 1937, Jesse made one of her rare trips out of the Salmon with Frank to visit her family in Corvallis. They came out the usual way: up from  Lantz Bar at 2800 feet elevation, then up the Eakin Ridge trail that Frank had built, past the little basin below Eakin Point where some old sweat lodges still stood, over the top at 8000 feet, then down to connect with the old Shoup-Elk City Trail which, before the gold rush was the southernmost thread of the Nimi’ipuu’s Buffalo Trail (the Southern Nez Perce Trail), the easiest path through the heart of this part of the Rockies, the better path than the Lolo Trail up north, the path that the Shoshone war chief, Pikee Queenah (Swooping Eagle or “Old Toby” in Corps of Discovery accounts) didn’t show William Clark for reasons of his own. Frank and Jessie took this old, old path, along the high ridges above the Selway, until he struck Witter Ridge, where he dropped down the steep Witter Ridge trial, one of Frank’s showcases, to Thompson Flat along the river, where another of the People’s many villages once existed. Then out to Deep Creek Ranger Station, at 4000 feet or so and, hopefully, a ride over Nez Perce Pass. Thirty miles of up and down and up again and down again where, if something happened to you you’d have to wrestle with Destiny without expectation of help or witnesses unless you were inclined to pray for company to the old powers that still resided there.  

                    

Chapter III

The Paradise Road

During the Depression conservation meant keeping the tortured soil of what was once the Great Plains from leaving the Earth as dust, and keeping the yet-to-be tortured forests of the West from going up in smoke. To early conservationists like Franklin Roosevelt, this saving of forests meant roads, and so he upped the ante for more of them in the Northern Rockies. He kicked in the funds and manpower to the cash-starved ranger districts in the form of boys from poverty-stricken areas who were given a chance to learn a marketable skill, to earn a real paycheck every single month for the first time in their lives. 

Construction jobs like the Paradise Road were activities that the Selway country hadn’t seen before, and the Land lacked the time to take the full measure of it. It would be what it ended up being, and for the Upper Selway there was a learning curve. Such work, when it had been done there at all, had been accomplished with dynamite and men behind a farm implement known as a Fresno Scraper. This was the plow-like scraper blade originally developed to level orchard tracts in the sandy soils of California’s San Joaquin Valley so that they could be flood-irrigated more efficiently. They were mule-driven and slow by definition even in the best of circumstances, which the Paradise Road wasn’t. The Fresno Scraper’s adjustable-blade would revolutionize roadbuilding all over the world—and it’s still the prototype for monsters required in altering geology. Mountaintop-removal, tar sands, interstates, the Paradise Road, are all examples of what became possible with the various spawn of the Fresno Scraper. 

It’s true that the CCC crews were still using them in Glacier Park where they were grading out the Going-to-The-Sun Road, but that road was crazy-steep, and using such modern wonders like bulldozers with Appalacian boys who just recently started wearing shoes must have been viewed by managers at the time as borderline suicidal. The merely-steep country on the Selway, though, was slated by bureaucrats in Washington and on-the-ground rangers like Kelly and Brandborg to be one of the new palettes upon which the freshly-trained artists of the tank-tread technologies crawling out of the back end of World War I were to paint their futures, hone their nerve and prove what a bulldozer could do. Kelley understood its significance. He had been with the 20^thEngineers in France building roads and logging trench timbers for the war (which they won!) and he sent a few early-generation bulldozers over Nez Perce Pass and down into Deep Creek for the boys to use.

“They were always breaking down,” Stewart Brandborg recalls eighty years later. “But they’d always find a way to fix ‘em up enough to keep ‘em going.” 

Which was, of course, what the boys wanted to learn, to fix ‘em up, ride ‘em, lust after ‘em, and finally make themselves useful in the tough new world where they knew there were going to be more roads, more bulldozers, over and over, as far as the eye could see, forever. 

As for the Paradise Road, it was burdened by default with its own conundrum. Who knows what Paradise is or isn’t for one thing, let alone where. This was a technicality, though, and not what stopped the road at the mouth of Whitecap Creek were Paradise Guard Station was located. What stopped it was World War II. The road had been scheduled to blast past the guard station and down the wild Selway River all the way to Moose Creek Ranger Station in the middle of what’s still considered “nowhere”. Then it was to arc west with the river for twenty more miles and out to the Selway’s meeting place with the Big Clearwater where it would connect with a companion road being built down from Lowell, Idaho to the north. It was to slice the last great hunk of wilderness left in the United States almost exactly in two just as the pioneers had been prescribing for the country for the century of settlement preceding the arrival of the bulldozer. It was to be the road that was going somewhere and doing something. 

It was also seen by most conservationists of the day as a progressive undertaking, creating jobs and safer, more efficient access for logging and firefighting, and if World War II hadn’t stopped all federal projects not related to the war effort and chased all the CCC boys into the Army or to the better paying shipyard jobs on the coast (as much as a dollar an hour) it would have been the road that would have decided once and for all what Paradise was and wasn’t. For his part, Big Brandy, who would go on to become one of Montana’s all-time great conservationists and wilderness advocates, didn’t flinch from the roading task.

“That was the grandest exercise…for my dad,”Stewart  explained of those years when Montana was teeming with unemployed loggers, millworkers and cowboys, “in finding these capable seasonal workerswho could go into these camps and give guidance to these young fellows in the skills of woodsmanship—trail maintenance, phone line maintenance, operation of equipment.”A bunch of boys who’d never worn shoes before were put at his disposal, and no good socialist (which was what Big Brandy essentially was) was going to let them get away without a little education. 

He took those greenhorns from Appalachia and, before they ever climbed onto a bulldozer, had them sit down for a few days. He’d go over mundane, required subjects like safety and basic firefighting skills, but then he would go on and teach them some history, a little social science and a few other things that his upbringing in the cooperative-riddled plains of late 19^thCentury Minnesota had given him a passion for. Like Gifford Pinchot and many of the first rangers, Big Brandy believed in “social forestry”, the “wise-use” (read: slower-use) of resources so that the rural communities that depended on them could thrive into perpetuity. 

“We Americans have not yet learned to live in the same environment, generation after generation,” he would say to local civic groups he spoke to.“As individuals we have been able to move on to new land when the old farm wore out. As a nation we have moved on to exploit new frontiers”. Decades earlier, Pinchot had enshrined such radical thinking in his 1907 manual, "Use of the National Forest".

“What the West needs is people who come to stay,” he wrote. “The man who skins the land and moves on does the country more harm than good. He may enrich himself and a few others for a very brief time, but he kills the land. He cares nothing for this, because he does not stay in the country, but moves on to new fields and repeats the skinning process. It is he who is the greatest enemy of the home builder.”

It happened that the summer before Charlie Enbretzon and Stewart had given the Lantzes a ride over Nez Perce Pass, the Brandborg family had entertained the elderly Pinchot at their home. Edna and Guy had moved to a comfortable house on 715 South Third Street in Hamilton a couple years before from Grangeville, Idaho, another small, neatly manicured ranching community just on the other side of the Bitterroot Range where Guy had been Assistant Supervisor of the Nez Perce Forest and where, on February 2, 1925 their son, Stewart was born. 

The family spent summers with him riding the ranges and mountains of the Salmon River and Hell’s Canyon Country while Guy was stationed there and when they moved to Hamilton they continued the theme of making many outdoorsy friends, including their close friend, Major Kelley who, as a token of their esteem, would come over for dinner and to socialize and smoke. This small-town lifestyle would eventually keep Stewart out of World War II since he suffered so terribly from asthma inflamed by second-hand smoke. But second hand smoke was a concept lying far in the future, and no one was thinking about such things, including Major Kelly and Gifford Pinchot.

Hamilton, like Grangeville, was idyllic in 1937. Power mowers hadn't been invented yet, and so South Third Street was quiet enough when Pinchot drove up in his big Packard sedan in front of the Brandborg house. Young Stewart remembers being as impressed that Packard was driven by an African-American chauffer as much as by the car. Major Kelley was also there, and the three foresters turned their backs to the family hearth to dry their pants out after their day-long jaunt in the woods.

They had been up in the mountains that day looking at the Lick Creek logging sale, which Pinchot’s foresters had lain out and sold to the Anaconda Copper Company in 1906. That was the year that Pinchot came to the Bitterroot foothills to inspect the sale for the first time along some Bitterroot faces that his newly created Forest Service was offering up for bid. Montana was full of residents prone to independent thought and quaint euphemisms. They also knew which side of their bread the butter was on, so they didn’t waste any words distilling the region’s sole corporate behemoth, the Anaconda Copper Company, down to two words—the Company--so that everybody in this sparsely-populated state would know exactly what they meant when they said them, including Gifford Pinchot. 

The Company had been well on its way to skinning the Bitterroot Valley by then, particularly the private lands opened up for settlement in direct contradiction to the 1855 Hellgate Treaty made with the Salish people, promising them the Bitterroot Valley as theirs forever. But the words in such treaties were just promises made by a government that had as many soldiers to break them as the grains of sand shoveled away by skimdiggers on a Salmon River bar, and so a railroad was built up the valley and the People were then forced out, first by starvation and finally by a rude military escort, while the settlers cheered (some cried) and then, in collusion with the railroad, the Company started converting the valley’s cathedral stands Ponderosa Pine that formed “a chain of forests shading the west side of the valley” into cash. 

The Company reasoned that they were ripe for the picking. It was too tempting, too easy to access the giant trees along the broad flat valley bottom and its tributary canyon creeks that had enough current in the springtime to float the logs down to the Bitterroot and then to Hamilton, where a dam and a state-of-the-art mill had been built. These were the five-to-eight foot diameter, hundred-foot-tall, ancient Ponderosa that no longer exist because they were giants, never to be replaced in our time or maybe any other. It took less than twenty years for many of the valley’s new residents who were true believers in "settling the country" as well as a government inspector who came to make sure that the government’s toothless “Timber and Stone” Act of 1872 was being adhered to be appalled. 

When the Company desired more, they found that the board feet still existing grew within the confines of public lands newly “locked up” by Pinchot’s brand new Forest Service, and in 1906 the Company wanted everyone to know that it would have those board feet. This new government agency of Teddy Roosevelt’s, the one currently claiming public ownership of those logs it counted as theirs by simple right of conquest, this was something the Company knew it would have to deal with for a little while, but only for a little while. It fully expected to have its way soon enough with the Forest Service, as it was accustomed to having with everything and anybody else who got in its way. Eventually the wood would be theirs again, soon enough. And so it was. 
Old-time foresters during this time referred to the trainloads of giant yellow logs heading down the Bitterroot to Missoula and Butte on flat cars as the “golden stream”. Sometimes a single log would take up a whole flatcar, and the old-time foresters knew that if the Company kept ravishing its own holdings the way it was bent on doing it wouldn’t be long before it would demand the right to ravish the public’s virgin stands, and the low-elevation old-growth Ponderosa that rose like pillars out of the bunchgrass hills would be gone for good. The Golden Stream would cease by 1940 if not before. These foresters, including Pinchot and later, Brandborg and Kelly, knew this as a function of simple math in the form of mill capacity, and they were right.

Pinchot was attempting to change the equation with his new brand of “social forestry”, and in the early 1900s he and a few of his followers thought they could eventually work simple math to the forest’s advantage if they were as patient as the trees they were trying to grant a reprieve to, and trees are nothing if not patient. The Lick Creek sale, then, was one of the first attempts by the new Forest Service to introduce a European concept into the equation of large-scale logging in America. “Selective-cut” logging was the practice of not taking all the pumpkins at once but to cull through the stand, pick out the best and leave the rest to grow more for the twin purposes of later profits and community stability, two purposes that the Company saw as frivolous. The sale was set to be the largest in the Northern Region, and Pinchot’s foresters painted trees, took notes, and generally made a special effort to do their best with the available science available to them. Pinchot came to Montana in 1906 and made some personal, on-site modifications. Then the Company got its logs, but with some new restrictions that they and all future corporate logging operations would ever-after resent. 

The Lick Creek sale became a prototype of sorts, for what the first Roosevelt Administration was trying to accomplish with forests nationwide, and the site became a de facto test for the long term effects on the health of the Land with Pinchot’s revolutionary “scientific forestry” applied. By 1937, photography was still coming into its own as a scientific tool, and the Bitterroot Forest’s new supervisor, Guy Brandborg (he arrived in 1935) set up permanent stations matching the older photo stations Pinchot had originally used, so that future foresters could make decisions based on factual data. Naturally, then, when Pinchot came through the area that year on a tour of his old stomping grounds, he stopped by the Lick Creek sale, and was led around on a rough and tumble inspection tour by Guy and Kelley in the wet summer rain.

The dynamics between Kelley and Brandborg were interesting. Kelley started making his way in the world as a miner in California when he fourteen, “separating small grains of gold from large masses of earth” as he put it. He knew a thing or two about labor, in other words, and this qualified him as one of those old-time people Guy habitually appreciated. Their families became close probably even before Kelley appointed him supervisor of the Bitterroot, and they didn’t see any inherent problems with roads brought into such a big country that had so few of them. This was Pinchot’s stamp, the greatest good for the greatest number, and it was the progressive outlook for its time. Putting impoverished men to work with gainful, dependable employment was the rule of the day for land management, right out of the “Use Book”, in fact, and few, if any, rangers could look past the critical needs of those afflicted with an existential economic depression and conjure up too many negatives for putting desperate people to work. Both Brandborg and Kelley, in fact, did have misgivings in the opening up of the public’s timber base and watersheds to the big mills who had used up all their private stumpage and were now eyeing the last of the public realm. But they thought in terms of watersheds then, and they never thought the big mills would ever want the high-country lodgepole, Pinchot’s “protection forests” that were to act as buffers for the “golden stream” of harvestable pine. 

“The question,” Pinchot wrote in another publication, “is not of saving the trees, for every tree must inevitably die, but of saving the forest by conservative ways of cutting the trees. If the forest is to be preserved, the timber crop now ripe must be gathered in such a way as to make sure of other crops hereafter.”

Conservation was a farming term, and forestry was farming. Henning, Minnesota, where Guy grew up, was a farming community, and Guy’s father, Charles, was a farmer. He also ran a grain coop that competed against locally entrenched business interests and which got him into a lot of trouble, and this was the progressive map of the world as it stood in 1937, and Guy was his father’s son. 

As Pinchot backed himself up to the fire, he reiterated to his listeners what he had written in his Use Book thirty years before, that Democracy could survive only through the maintenance of a productive resource base. He also charged Brandy that if he wanted to be a good forester he’d better defend sound practices like Lick Creek.

“Goddamit Brandy”, Major Kelly added, “you’d better do it!” And so for the next four decades, that’s what Guy “Brandy” Brandborg did, and he got into a lot of trouble for doing so.

The Forest Service, in essence, was created under such assumptions, but unbridled capitalism, as we know, was not. The Anaconda Copper Company held a monopoly on power in Montana before the Forest Service was invented, and it took a dim view of foresters in general, and foresters in particular who had the inclination to preach the Pinchot gospel of “selective-cut” and “democracy” in the same breath. The Company maintained that what Big Brandy (and by extension, Gifford Pinchot) preached was seditious. “You could have abundance for this generation but poverty for your children,”[v]Big Brandy once said before a local civic group, and it wasn’t a decade after the three foresters backed themselves up to the Brandborg fire that Guy would be forced to endure a House Un-Amercan Activities Committee (H.U.A.C.) inquisition for what The Company considered his unforgiveable transgression of not bringing the mountains down low fast enough to suit their bottom line. It’s worth noting that, according to Stewart, some of the CCC boys disagreed with what was too much and not enough. 

“You find many people back in the Bitterroot Valley,”he recalled a half a century later, “who have reunions, cite the wonderful experience and what a difference it made in their lives.”

Of course there were also the CCC boys who couldn’t see how such progressive distractions as Big Brandy gifted to them could keep them employed like government-work projects combined with big, greasy bulldozers, the second-had kind that needed fixing a lot and were cantankerous in more subtle ways. Most of the CCC boys were just itching to get on top of that kind of thing, not social studies, and the small towns of the Bitterroot are still crowded with their philosophical offspring, those who genetically love government work projects while hating the government. This, by the way, may be the best thing you can say about the peculiar strain of socialism that’s been as American as rhubarb pie since its beginnings, that at least the people who claim to hate it now are wearing shoes.