SAWED AND GONE!
by Roger Dorband
PART 2
The Disappearance Of The Great Pacific Northwest Rainforest

“We do not want those whose first impulse is to compromise. We want no straddlers, for, in the past, they have surrendered too much good wilderness and primeval areas which should never have been lost.”
– Bob Marshal, Founder of the Wilderness Society

IN THE BEGINNING
IN SPITE of the conifers 300 million year evolutional history, the coastal conifers we know today, fir, cedar, spruce, redwood, hemlock and pine, began developing along the northwestern coast of the North American continent at the end of the last ice age, a mere 11 thousand years ago. As the glaciers of the Miocene epoch gave way to warmer and wetter climatic conditions, a vast, narrow strip of barren earth stretching from northern Kodiak Island in Alaska to just south of present day San Francisco was laid out like a coastal highway.

That doesn’t mean that conifers immediately popped up there or that forests began to appear. For a variety of reasons, the deck was stacked against the coastal conifers ever becoming a forest let alone a rainforest of epic proportions comprised of the biggest and oldest trees the world has known.

The land where the progenitors of this forest eventually came to be was not a welcoming place for flora to take root. The geologically young, volcanic soils were rocky and mountainsides were steep. The ground they grew in was stingy with the elements needed for their sustenance. Cool temperatures and a lack of sunshine in winter, especially in the north, did not encourage new growth.

The rainforest’s eventual maturation was in large part defined by its slow accommodation to the hydroclimatic conditions of the Pacific Northwest as well as to the other harsh conditions in which it was finally able to exist. In time generation upon generation of decaying grasses, deciduous shrubs and small trees provided enough humus for the conifers to get a foothold. They began to slowly develop, each species on its own timetable in accordance with the conditions of its locale.

If such an aid existed, a Google time app would reveal that the forest we eventually dubbed the Elliott Forest reached maturity 5000 years ago in synch with the development of the other forests stretching up and down the coast. Without such precise technological help that dating is at best conjecture on the part of botanists and ecologists who freely admit that most of the Elliott’s history before and after its maturation remains shrouded from view the way the forest is often hidden beneath a cloak of thick, grey fog and mist.

The veil of time begins to lift as our view focuses closer and close to the present. Core samples, stumps and some early photographs speak of two inexorable forces that have shaped the Elliott into the forest we see today. Fire and logging have each impacted the natural development of this mixed conifer forest.

The Elliott, like every forest, has its own unique history.

In most areas where one finds untouched remnants of the ancient rainforest one also finds trees of great age and epic proportions. Douglas fir trees from 500 to1000 years old, though rare in Oregon, still exist in the state. Mammoth Douglas firs that have lived for a millennium are still found along the Salmon River near Mount Hood and in a few other places. Not so in the Elliott Forest.

In recent years core sample inventories of the trees in the unlogged portion of the forest found that the oldest trees are in the neighborhood of 250-275 years old while the majority range between 100 and 200 years old. The lack of trees far older, which one might expect on virgin forestland, signal the impact of multiple large wildfires that took place before and after the arrival of trappers and settlers in the early 19th century.

In the mid 1850s Native Americans living in the area told trappers of a massive fire in the Elliott Forest in approximately 1765. We’ll never know if the fire was started by lightning or set by the Native Americans themselves. Members of the Coos and other bands of Native Americans in the region set fire to portions of the forest from time to time in order to clear the land for better hunting visibility and the gathering of berries and camus that would fill in after the burns.

Doing the math indicates that the entire forest did not burn in 1765. The trees now 275 years old somehow survived that fire and multiple fires in the 19th century. The period from 1840 to 1890 in particular saw very destructive, large wildfires in the Elliott Forest . During that time frame many of the trees now 275 years old were nearing 100 years of age, a life span and commensurate size more likely to survive wildfires according to a consensus of forest ecologists.

The lack of trees older than 275 years in the Elliott Forest does not disqualify its unlogged portions of approximately 41,000 acres from being included as part of the original, ancient Great Pacific Northwest Rainforest. The hallmark of that classification is the stipulation that it is untrammeled forestland that has never been logged. Wildfires on one hand are an intrinsic part of the natural life of all the forestland in the northwest. Logging is not.

Ecologists, backed by the latest science showing that wildfires are primarily beneficial to the long term health of forests, now speculate that the clearing effect of these fires helps establish the presence of Douglas fir, the conifer which yields the strongest and most durable lumber that is favored by timber companies. It is the presence of this species of conifer that sealed the fate of large portions of the Elliott Forest during the last 150 years.

BECOMING THE ELLIOTT STATE FOREST
A photograph taken in 1890 by George Gould, one of the first homesteaders in the Elliott Forest, shows burned over hillsides covered with tall snags. The Goulds chose the eastern part of the forest as the site of their homestead because it had been relatively recently burned off by a wildfire. Consequently they didn’t have to clear the hillsides to create pastureland where they planned to raise sheep and cattle.

By 1890 Gould and his family, who had been on the land for five years, had begun logging cedar snags, the largest of which they floated down the Millacoma River to Coos Bay for milling. Smaller logs they milled with their own water powered mill to create lumber for their numerous barns and outbuildings.

And so it began. Logging, in some form or another, has been going on in the Elliott Forest virtually forever since.

The first trees felled in the Elliott Forest and elsewhere in the Coast Range were mostly for local use by those living on the land. But eventually big timber companies found the old growth of the Oregon and Washington Coast Range irresistible. When they arrived the oxen used to drag logs out of the forest in the late 19th century were soon replaced by steam donkies, winches driven by steam, that speeded up the process of getting the logs to the mills and increased profits for the timber companies.

The footprint of the timber industry giants that have since run rampant in Oregon began in 1900 when Weyerhaeuser Timber Company first appeared in the state. By then the Weyerhaeusers, the Rockefellers and other timber barons had deforested much of the great forests of Maine and Michigan, virtually denuded Appalachia of its hardwood forests, and had their sights set on getting richer by shifting the pillage to the south and the west.

To encapsulate an interesting and tumultuous political period, by 1890 concern for the rapid disappearance of the nation’s forests had many in congress worried. In 1891 President Harris signed into law the Forest Reserve Act. The largely symbolic gesture wasn’t given substance until the following administration. In 1897 President Grover Cleveland took a second step toward conservation by establishing National Forest Reserves, set asides totaling 21 million acres of forestland to be controlled by the government primarily for use as “public reservations” whether or not they had valuable timber.

Thereafter, John Muir, the botanist and preservationist who founded the Sierra Club in 1892 and had been lobbying the U.S. congress for years, may have breathed a little easier. Ten years passed though before Muir’s influence would have an even greater impact. In 1903, Muir, who became an advisor on forests to the federal government, took full advantage of an opportunity to take acting President Theodor Roosevelt on a camping trip to Muir’s beloved Yosemite Valley.

Roosevelt, who came to office after President McKineley’s assassination, already considered himself a conservationist. The trip with Muir, however, supercharged Roosevelt’s commitment to saving as much as possible of America’s forest as a national trust. By the end of his second term in 1912 Roosevelt had doubled the number of national parks and created the National Forest system that encompassed 148 million acres.

In the Coast Range of Oregon the new designation included the Siuslaw National Forest, set aside in 1908, which contained much of what became the Elliott State Forest.

The land swapping between the state and the federal government, and the rest of the forest horse trading that eventually resulted in the 90,000 contiguous acres proclaimed the Elliott State Forest, is an interesting tale too long and convoluted to recount in detail here. That history and much more can be found online in Caulk Boots and Cheese Sandwiches, a magnum opus by Jerry Phillips, the Oregon Department of Forestry’s manager of the Elliott from 1970 to 1989. (Be advised it’s a disorderly tome of 120 mini chapters in over 400 pages. You will find lots of useful information and interesting stories about the Elliott but the verbiage is as thick as a blackberry patch, so pack a machete.)

Two years before Roosevelt left office Oswald West was elected governor of Oregon. 1910 had been a year of catastrophic wildfires that burned millions of acres and took many lives throughout the west, including Oregon. In his first year as governor West responded to the need for forestry planning by working with the legislature to create the Oregon Board of Forestry and the Oregon Department of Forestry. These fledgling organizations were created in order to have a structure in place for dealing with fires in forests that were not protected as National Forests.

At their inaugural meeting in 1911 the Board of Forestry appointed Francis Elliott as the first State Forester. He served in that capacity until his death in 1930. During his tenure he took the ODF from its narrow function of mitigating fire on private and state owned land to an organization that was committed to broader forest protection and sustainability.

Shortly after his appointment as State Forester, Elliott and Governor West, both of whom were keen on the value of the state’s natural resources being for the benefit of the people of the state, began discussing the prospect of Oregon having its own state forests.

The basic notion they arrived at was an exchange with the federal government of forest land the state already held the tile to, some 70,000 acres, that lay scattered within the bounds of the newly created National Forests. In the exchange the state would acquire a contiguous block of land elsewhere in the National Forest to be designated as Oregon State Forest.

The 70,000 acres of state owned land designated for ex- change were part of much larger state holdings that resulted from the 1859 granting of 3.3 million acres of public land to the state under the federal Admissions Act. The caveat of that grant was the stipulation that any value accrued from the land would go to funding public education in the state. Now referred to as the Common School fund, this stipulation has loomed very large in the Elliott Forest’s destiny.

Neither West or Elliott foresaw the difficulties of realizing their vision of state forests in Oregon. Neither could foresee the decades long impact of World War I, the onset of an economic depression, and the entanglement of red tape involving the federal government, the State Land Board, the Board of Forestry and the state legislature. It took twenty years for the first state forest to become a reality.

In August of 1930, after being successfully assembled through protracted land exchange, a 90,000 acre section of forest in the Coast Range north of Coos Bay was designated Oregon’s first state forest. It was given the name Elliott State Forest in honor of the state’s first state forester who had worked diligently to make it a reality and who regrettably had died in June of that year.

WHAT’S IN A NAME?
After being known as the Elliott State Forest for 92 years, that forest, with the passage of SB1546 in the Oregon Legislature on March 4, 2022, has become the Elliott State Research Forest. And so it will remain until another generation has a different notion of its purpose.

For 5000 years the forest simply was. It immerged out of the Great Mystery, the Natural Oneness of all life forms, nameless, purposeless, without an agenda other than to live and perpetuate itself in the glory of the creation. Its world was silent until creatures arrived to hear the whish of wind in the boughs of the trees or the thunderous thud of an elder tree as it hit the ground having reached its natural end. For the most part stillness and silence prevailed in the forest for thousands of years.

Against that backdrop how artificial and abstract it seems to be calling the Elliott a “working forest” or a “research forest”. How and why does such nomenclature serve our purposes? Whose purposes? What is gained by that sort of categorization and what is lost?

The final episode of this series will explore more of the history of the Elliott State Forest and the process of creating the Elliott State Research Forest in the context of SB1546.