Arthur Carhart

"Do you have to circle every lake with a road? Can't you bureaucrats keep just one superb mountain lake as God made it?"

It was Arthur Carhart's first summer assignment with the Forest Service, and the two outdoorsmen sitting round the campfire with him were speaking their minds.

At first, Paul Rainey and his hunting buddy tried to diplomatically ascertain Carhart's goal for surveying Trappers Lake in 1919. When that didn't work, their straightforward questions proved a turning point: Their feelings, Carhart realized, echoed his own.

Convinced the plan to build a road and cabins around the lake should be abandoned, he returned to the regional office in Denver with a new perspective on land management, recommending the lake be left undeveloped for wilderness recreation. Impressed by Carhart's reasoning, C.J. Stahl, his superior, accepted the plan. Trappers Lake was left alone. Known now as "the Cradle of Wilderness," the lake is still undeveloped and roadless today, nestled within Flat Tops Wilderness.

While no one person can be called "Father of the Wilderness Concept," Arthur Hawthorne Carhart has been referred to as "the chief cook in the kitchen during the critical first years." His role in preserving Trappers Lake marked just the beginning.

Born on September 18, 1892, in Mapleton, Iowa, Carhart spent his youth as only child tramping through the woods and fields around the family farm. After graduating high school, he left for business school in Sioux City. Carhart was an ambivalent student, more interested in rebelling against his father's wishes and playing drums with a series of bands in dance halls and bars around the Sioux City area. As the sound effects man for silent movies at the Majestic Theater, one of his steadiest jobs, he improvised footsteps and gunshots on the drums. A serious case of pneumonia during the spring of his second year sent him back home. While he recovered, he read The Tree Doctor, by pioneer tree surgeon John Davey. Carhart enrolled in Iowa State College's landscape architecture program soon after, continuing a sideline as a club musician. His degree in landscape architecture, awarded in 1917, was the first ever given by Iowa State.

Carhart struggled to find a job following graduation. Frustrated by unsuccess, he enlisted as a musician with the U.S. Army Band. When a medical officer at basic training in Georgia asked if any new recruits had prior experiences with natural or biological sciences, Carhart volunteered and was promptly sent to Washington to train as a medical officer. During World War I, massive food poisoning and digestive disorder outbreaks occurred regularly at army camps. Carhart was placed in charge of an eleven-man lab responsible for the safety of water supplies for Maryland's Camp mead and surrounding communities. He worked diligently to understand the causes of water pollution and educate his fellow soldiers about environmental links between the camps and communities and the surrounding areas. This early experience in the army helped solidify Carhart's environmental attitude and his understanding of the relationships between people and the environment.

In 1919, Carhart married his college sweetheart, Vera Van Sickle, and after an honorable discharge from the army, the Forest Service hired him as its first full-time landscape architect, even though his official title was "recreation engineer." Before that year, recreation had not been on of the Forest Service Administration's mandates, allowing the Park Service to promote outdoor recreation in the public domain. So, Carhart's hire represented a major departure for the agency. He did not receive a warm welcome in his new Denver workplace. Many dubbed him "beauty doctor" or "beauty engineer." But with a superior who welcomed the opportunity to begin serious recreational planning within their district, Carhart enjoyed free-reign in many land-planning decisions.

Following his assignment on Trappers Lake, Carhart's work with the Forest Service culminated with an evaluation of what became another of today's wildernesses: Superior National Forest's Boundary Waters Canoe Area. Weeks paddling through the area took him to either side of a local debate over access and development. His recommendation that the money for roads be pulled and the region left accessible only by boat was controversial, if not radical, for the then-conservative and utilitarian Forest Service.

Between canoe trips, Carhart received a visit from a New Mexico colleague: Aldo Leopold, then an Assistant District Forester. They discussed ideas for land left undeveloped, conserved as wilderness. Leopold soon after championed the creation of the Forest Service's Gila Wilderness Reserve (today, a congressionally designated wilderness). A memo Carhartt wrote after their talks reads:

"There is a limit to the number of lands of shoreline on the lakes; there is a limit to the number of lakes in existence; there is a limit to the mountainous areas of the world, and...there are portions of natural scenic beauty which are God-made, and...which of a right should be the property of all people."

Support for Carhart's plans remained strong at the regional level. But with the national level bureaucracy moving so slowly on controversies, Carhart worried about the lack of action on many of his land-planning efforts. He resigned his position with the Forest Service in December 1922. The agency that so frustrated him is, today, proud to claim him as a visionary, placing him alongside Aldo Leopold in recognition of his contributions to developing the wilderness idea.

Modern environmental purists often find fault with Carhart's early wilderness thinking, his pragmatic and often instrumentalist view. And yet, his insights into the uses and psychological value of outdoor recreation remain perceptive and important even today. Carhart recognized Americans' paradoxical relationship with the modern world, tearing down and building at a desperate pace while simultaneously dreaming of vacations in the forests and on the shores of quiet lakes. Early on, he maintained strong views on the social value of wilderness and outdoor recreation. More than mere sport, recreation was spiritual rejuvenation. He wrote, "Perhaps the rebuilding of body and spirit is the greatest service derivable from our forests, for of what worth are material things if we lose the character and quality of people that are the soul of America?"

After the Forest Service, Carhart joined Culley and Irvin McCrary, a Denver architecture firm, where he spent the next six years. He wrote in his spare time–short stories, articles for outdoor sports magazines, and landscaping advice columns. By the mid 1920s, readers of magazines as diverse as American Forestry, Sunset, Outdoor Life, and Better Homes and Gardens regularly came across his work. He sold his first novel in 1928: The Ordeal of Brad Ogden, the tale of a young conservation-minded forest ranger battling a stubborn bureaucracy. Brad Ogden embodied the young Carhart, an idealistic conservationist willing to risk his career to support his environmental principles. Carhart published similar pieces of conservation-themed pulp fiction throughout the 1920s.

Despite his pro-environmental preaching, these fictional stories, as with his early wilderness philosophy, displayed considerable ambivalence and contradiction. The most surprising example of this tendency appeared in Carhart's second book, The Last Stand of the Pack. Published in 1929, the book follows the last wolf packs in the western United States as they are hunted out of existence. This extermination is portrayed as sad in its evidence of the fading frontier but justified in the need to protect the West's new civilization. Perhaps repentant about his unfortunate portrayal of the wolf slaughter, Carhart never again attempted to justify predatory animal control, instead arguing later for sharp regulations and policies.

Writing consumed more and more of Carhart's time, until, in September 1930, he quit the architecture business in favor of full-time freelance writing. For the next thirty years, Carhart dedicated much of his writing and advocacy work to reconciling sportsmen and conservationists. A central insight he contributed to the environmental movement, he believed sportsmen needed to play a role in any successful environmental coalition in the American West. Four books aimed at sportsmen sold well requiring multiple reprints and editions. The most popular, The Outdoorsman's Cookbook, an unintentionally humorous guide to wilderness cuisine, featured such absurd recipes as "armadillo sausage" and "stewed muskrat." The other three books, Hunting North American Deer (1946), Fresh Water Fishing (1949) and Fishing in the West (1950), were practical guides for sportsmen, each laced with a strong conservation message.

Carhart also worked with various government agencies and environmental organizations in the late 1930s and 1940s to. In 1938, he took charge of Colorado's newly formed Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Program, working the next five years on wildlife surveys and coordinating statewide wildlife restoration programs. He later held adviser and board member positions with the Izaak Walton League and the American Wildlife Federation. He established ties with the timber industry, trying to improve its image with sportsmen. Although his work around chemical pesticides didn't rival the vision of Rachel Carson, concern for their overuse and abuse became another subject of his writing, and she read his work while conducting her research for Silent Spring (1962). The two later corresponded about pollution in the Denver Arsenal and the Lost River in Oregon.

In 1949, many well-known wilderness advocates came together to fight the construction of a dam across Echo Park within Dinosaur National Monument in Colorado. The national effort to defeat the Echo Park dam was a watershed for the American conservation movement, preparing the way for other accomplishments like the Wilderness Act. Carhart gained respect as a leading local spokesman in the anti-dam movement, which provided an expanded national audience for his writings. And, like that, the stage for the success of his five most important environmental books was set: Conservation Please! Questions and Answers on Conservation Topics (1950), Water or Your Life (1951), Timber in Your Life (1954), The National Forests (1959), and Planning for America's Wildlands (1961).

Conservation Please! features answers from well-known experts, as well as Carhart's commentary on all issues, demonstrating his evolving environmental philosophy. Simply assembling all the pertinent questions for the book proved so daunting that he commented, "Any volume which would include all questions must be answered if we are to have reasonably completed conservation achievement in our nation would soon become a library."

Carhart strongly believed that his generation of conservationists needed to build a research and advocacy center for future environmentalists. To him, the availability of conservation information was critical to the success of the conservation advocacy movement. He continued to worry about it until the Denver Public Library's Conservation Library was established in 1960 out of his own private holdings. Today, the library holds over 2,500 linear feet of manuscript material, books, serials and photographs documenting critical aspects of the United States' 20th century conservation movement. The designated official record repository for organizations like The Wilderness Society, Izaak Walton League of America, American Bison Society, American Rivers, and American Farmland Trust, the library also holds papers from individuals–letters, memos, and writings of prominent preservationists, such as Aldo Leopold, Olaus Murie, Ira Gabrielson, and Howard Zahniser.

Edward Zern from American Motors, actor James Cagney, Arthur Carhart, December 1968. Denver Public Library, Western History Collection, Conservation Library Collection photos.

Carhart died in 1978, after almost 20 years sighing relief over the library's creation. The American conservation movement is dotted with his contributions. But the library may be his greatest today. The numerous messages and ideas archived by the library ensure his legacy is preserved and that future conservationists can benefit from his wisdom.

Arthur Carhart's efforts in the wilderness movement and his skill at uniting disparate groups, such as conservationists and hunters, toward a common goal are reflected in the organization that bears his name, the Arthur Carhart National Wilderness Training Center, founded in 1993 to foster interagency cooperation in wilderness stewardship.

References

Arthur Carhart National Wilderness Training Center

Conservation Collection at the Denver Public Library

Kirk, Andrew G. "A Clean-Cut Outdoor Man." Collecting Nature: The American Environmental Movement and the Conservation Library. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2001. 19-47.

Wolf, Tom. "Ahead of His Time." Forest Magazine. Summer 2004.

National Park Service, Dinosaur National Monument History and Culture

Forest Service, White River National Forest, Trappers Lake

Forest Service, Arthur Carhart's Plan for the Superior National Forest