The history of live-stock grazing in the North Cascades contains the formations of the United States Forest Service (USFS) and the National Park Service (NPS), the agencies sometimes contentious differences over land management policies and the decades-long debate for a North Cascades National Park and for wilderness preservation.
In the late 1800s, concerns about the future of the nation’s publicly owned forest and grass lands led to the formation of both the United States Forest Service (USFS) and the National Park Service (NPS). When Congress authorized the withdrawal of forest reserves from the public domain, these reserves were originally managed by the Department of the Interior (USDI). In 1905, Congress transferred the reserves to the Department of Agriculture (USDA) where the USFS was formed to manage these reserves which were then renamed National Forests and National Grasslands. The USFS were given the mission of sustaining the health, diversity and productivity of the Nation’s forests and grasslands. The 1st Chief of the USFS, Gifford Pinchot, stated that National Forest lands were to be managed to “provide the greatest amount of good for the greatest amount of people.”
In 1907, the Washington Forest Reserve was established in Washington State’s North Cascades. Two National Forests, which bridged the Cascade Range, were formed from this reserve. The Mount Baker NF, which was formed later in 1907, includes much of the forest lands along the western slopes of the Cascades along with most of the high peaks along the divide as well as some of the higher eastern slopes. The Chelan NF was formed in 1908. After several name changes and changes in size this became the current Okanogan NF. The Okanogan NF includes forest lands along the eastern slopes of the Cascades as well as the high-altitude mixed forest and grasslands of the Pasayten Country which includes the 7000’ meadows of Horseshoe Basin near the eastern edge of the Pasayten.
Not everyone agreed what the greatest good was. Many American came to believe in a conservation approach including John Muir who “wanted land preserved in its pristine condition”. Several National Parks were created including Yellowstone in 1872, Yosemite in 1890 and Mt. Rainier in 1899. In 1916, Congress authorized the formation of the National Park Service (NPS) within the Department of the Interior (USDI) to manage these and any future national parks. The NPS Mission was to preserve unimpaired the natural resources of the national parks.
While both the USFS and the NPS manage public lands, their management missions are different. This difference in management aims coupled with the fact that they report to different cabinet secretaries often led to contentious disagreements between the agencies over land use issues. There was lot of “empire saving” versus “empire building” in these battles as forming new national parks usually resulted in transferring USFS lands to the NPS. The resulting clashes led some to believe that the two agencies were “natural enemies” because the NPS operates by the “leave it alone” principle and the USFS operates by the “use it wisely” principle.
Livestock grazing on public lands was one of the key factors in the early development of the American west. In the 1800s large ranching operations developed utilizing the grasslands of the unclaimed public lands. Live-stock grazing is usually not allowed in national parks, but Congress authorized the new USFS to regulate grazing and permit it in the national forests as long as it did not injure forest growth. USFS policy stated that the “cattle and sheep which are grazed in the national forests bear an important relation to the supply of beef and mutton in this country, and represent an important industry and basis for established homes and every effort will be made by forest officers to promote the fullest possible use of grazing resources”. Grazing began in Horseshoe Basin as early as 1901. As the new National Forest took over management, permits were issued allowing ranchers to graze their stock, for a fee, in the publicly owned high meadows during the snow-free months. In 1917, the Forest Service issued a sheep grazing permit to the sheep rancher Ross Smith. This began over 50 years of the Smith family’s permitted live-stock grazing in the Horseshoe Basin area.
There is a long history of proposals for a national park, or parks, in the North Cascades. A petition was signed proposing a park north of Lake Chelan in 1892. Other proposals were made in 1906, 1908, 1916, 1921 and throughout the 1930s. In 1937, the Secretary of the Interior authorized a study of the proposed Icy Peaks NP consisting of public land, much of it National Forest, stretching along the spine of the Cascades from the Canadian to the Oregon borders. This enraged the USFS and the timber industry so much that the proposal was never introduced in Congress.
Some in the USFS felt that they could manage wilderness better than the NPS which they considered to be more tourist and development oriented. In 1929, partly in an effort to appease the increasing environmental pressure, the USFS issued the L-20 Regulation. This land use regulation authorized designating Primitive Areas to provide a level of protection to the most pristine USFS lands. These areas were to be managed “to maintain primitive conditions of transportation, subsistence, habitation and environmental to the fullest degree with their highest public use”. The L-20 Regulation continued to allow road building, grazing and logging. This led some to believe that “The USFS was more concerned with wilderness preservation as a way to appease preservationists and fend off Park Service land grabs than as a standard management practice.”
In 1931 the Whatcom Primitive Area was established in the North Cascades by the USFS. This was re-named the North Cascades Primitive Area and enlarged to 801,000 acres in 1935. This Primitive Area contained land in both the Mt. Baker and the Okanogan NF lands including the high meadows of the Horseshoe Basin.
In 1932, the wilderness advocate Bob Marshall compiled a list of the roadless areas in the U. S. and sent it to all the USFS Regional Foresters with the request to set some of them aside as wilderness. None of them agreed with him. In 1939 he was the Director of the USFS Division of Recreation and Lands . He wrote the stricter U-2 Regulations which were then issued by the Secretary of Agriculture. The U-Regulations, which replaced the L-20 Regulation, prohibited roads, motorized transportation and commercial timber harvesting in the selected areas now called wilderness or wild areas. The wilderness areas could only be modified or eliminated by the order of the Secretary of Agriculture. The existing primitive areas were to be managed under the U-Regulations and were to be reviewed to determine if they to be included as wilderness. Many pre-existing uses, such as grazing permits, could be continued under a grandfather clause. Marshall argued that large tracts in the North Cascades should be designated as wilderness to keep the NPS out.
The decision to log old growth forests in USFS’s Three Sisters Primitive Area and the proposal to build a dam in NPS’s Dinosaur National Monument caused conservationists to realize that what the agencies could designate, they could remove. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas expressed the view of many in an article written by him for the National Parks Magazine: “Indeed what is within or without a wilderness area is determined by the fist of the Secretary of Agriculture on the recommendation of the Chief Forester. Neither of these men is elected by the people…Moreover, ‘the law’ under which they act is a set of regulations which they themselves drew. They can revise these regulations at will…if wilderness is to be protected…these sanctuaries need the mantle of protection that only an act of Congress can give them”.
A campaign was begun to establish a national wilderness system. A 1st draft of the Wilderness Act was written in 1954 and immediately faced the united opposition of timber, mining and grazing interests. Both the USFS and the NPS initially opposed it. It took years of hearings and compromises before the Act was finally passed by the U. S. Congress on September 3, 1964.
The 1964 Wilderness Act established a Wilderness Protective System. Wilderness is defined as “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man…undeveloped Federal land retaining its primeval character…without permanent improvements or human habitation..” The Act stated that only Congress had the authority to designate Federal lands as wilderness areas. All areas previously classified as wilderness or wild by the Secretary of Agriculture or the Chief Forester were designated as wilderness areas and placed within the Wilderness Preservation System by Congress. The Act required the Secretary of Agriculture to review all existing primitive areas to determine their suitability to be designated wilderness and to report their findings to the President who would then recommend the re-classification of each primitive area to Congress. Congress could then decide which of these areas recommended by the President would be designated as wilderness by Act of Congress. The Act prohibited commercial enterprise, permanent roads, motorized vehicles, motorized equipment, motorboats, mechanical transport or structures in wilderness areas. Certain existing uses such as grazing or use of aircraft within a wilderness area were allowed under the Special Conditions section of the Wilderness Act: “Within wilderness areas designated by this Act the use of aircraft or motorboats, where these uses have already become established…and the grazing of livestock, where established prior to the effective date of this Act, shall be permitted to continue subject to such reasonable regulations as are deemed necessary by the Secretary of Agriculture.”
The battle over the creation of a North Cascades National Park also continued during this time period. In 1959 the USFS released a North Cascades management plan emphasizing logging and environmental groups responded with a new park proposal. When members of Congress directed the two agencies to study this proposal together, the Forest Service refused to work with the Park Service. In January, 1963 the Secretaries of Agriculture and the Interior jointly wrote a letter to the President. This letter, commonly known as the ‘Treaty of the Potomac’, recommended an interdepartmental study of the management of the federal Cascade lands from south of Mt. Rainier to the Canadian border. President Kennedy agreed and in March the 5-member North Cascades Study Team was formed. The team, which was made up of two members of each of the departments and a Chairman jointly selected by the two Secretaries, held team meetings, held public hearings and in December, 1965 transmitted a report containing their study results and recommendations to the two Secretaries. The report was written by the Team Chairman, Edward C. Crafts who worked for the Department of Interior. He reported that the team members agreed in general in the facts and on most of the recommendations, but continued to disagree on whether there should be a new National Park in the North Cascades. Crafts wrote that the wording and recommendations in the report were his and added that the other members’ opinions were included in the report and that these opinions should be considered as alternate recommendations. The recommendations, as written by Craft, included a new 698,000 acre North Cascades National Park with lands transferred from the North Cascades Primitive Area and other USFS lands and a new Okanogan Wilderness to be formed from the remnants of the North Cascades Primitive Area to the east of the new National Park. The two Interior department members thought that the new National Park should be bigger. On the other hand the Dept of Agriculture/USFS members opposed any new national Park in the State of Washington. They also recommended continued management by the USFS, re-classifying the North Cascades Primitive Area to Wilderness Area and where appropriate continued logging, mining, grazing, and building new roads. The inter-agency battle continued.
Senators Jackson and Magnuson of Washington State introduced a bill in 1965 establishing the North Cascades National Park and Ross Lake Recreation Area and designating a Pasayten Wilderness on March 20, 1967. The areas described followed Craft’s Study Team recommendations closely. The bill did not initially include the Horseshoe Basin. The bill was referred to the Senate Interior Committee where hearings and compromise revisions were made. The Horseshoe Basin-Windy Peak area was added to the proposed Pasayten Wilderness at the ‘last second’. This area had been left out of the bill initially as it was reported to contain 96 million board feet of timber. When the conservationist Brock Evans requested more information from the Okanogan NF supervisor, a re-cruise was done and it indicated that only 18 million board feet existed. When this new data was received, it was also learned on a Friday that the Senate Interior Committee was “marking up” their final bill on the next Monday and that the Horseshoe Basin was not to be included because they believed that it had too much timber. The new information was rushed from Seattle to Washington D. C. by special delivery-email and on Monday, the Horseshoe Basin had been added. The Senate passed the amended bill later that year. The combined Congress then passed the Act creating the North Cascades National Park and the Pasayten Wilderness and the bill was signed by the President on Oct. 2, 1968. The Pasayten Wilderness was basically made up of the part of the North Cascades Primitive Area east of the new National Park. The Act abolished the classification of the North Cascades Primitive Area.
Livestock grazing continued in the Horseshoe Basin until at least 2001. The grazing permits in place at the time of the designation of the Pasayten Wilderness remained under the Special Conditions section of the Wilderness Act. There were six permits in the Okanogan Forest’s part of the Primitive Area in 1968, four for cows and two for sheep. Emmet Smith’s Horseshoe Basin permit, which had been converted from sheep to cattle in 1965, was one of the six. The USFS listed six grazing permittees in 1973, but Emmet Smith was not in this list. Evidently he had given up his permit sometime after 1968. The 1973 USFS report also added that they were considering converting the Horseshoe Basin Allotment from cattle back to sheep. In 1974 it was reported that the sheep allotment for 1,500 ewes in the Horseshoe Basin area was not used due to late melting snows. In 1980 the U. S. Congress passed the Colorado Wilderness Act which contained new and more permissive guidelines regarding the management of grazing within the Wilderness Areas. These new guidelines, which were adopted by the USFS, included: “There shall be no curtailment of grazing in the wilderness simply because the area is designated wilderness. It is anticipated that the numbers of livestock would remain at approximately the same level as when the area was designated as wilderness.”
In the 1990s an increasing number of hikers and backpackers began to visit the Pasayten Wilderness. They complained about the effect of the grazing herds on the Pasayten Wilderness. In 1995 one party reported a flock of 1000 sheep with 1200 lambs near their camp in the Horseshoe Basin. Several other hikers wrote letters complaining about the meadows full of sheep dung, the noise of the sheep and the damage to the native vegetation and wild flowers. The Supervisor of the Okanogan National Forest wrote “today managing livestock in Wilderness is more challenging because of the attitudinal shifts occurring in our society”.
The number of commercial horse tours also increased. The Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics accused the outfitters of destroying wetlands, fouling waterways, illegal stock-grazing and also accused the Forest Service of gross mismanagement of the Pasayten. Stricter, eco-friendly, regulations were established in 1999 and one reference writes that grazing was finally banned. Other references indicate that grazing was still possible after 2001. The Methow Conservancy paid 3 stock grazers, including the sheep grazer in the Horseshoe Basin, to give up their grazing permits The Okanogan-Wenatchee NF Supervisor wrote in a March 26, 2001 letter to Harvey Manning that the permits were not the property of the Methow Conservancy, but had been returned to the Forest Service. The grazing permits were then vacant and that prior to restocking these allotments a NEPA analysis would be needed. (But evidently the permits still could be issued in the future.)
The re-located Skull and Crossbones Lookout was apparently destroyed by the USFS in 1972, This comment by a retired wilderness ranger, which was included in a WTA trip report, provides a clue about the final fate of the re-located Skull and Crossbones Lookout: “Interesting, I was also a wilderness ranger there in 1973-1976 based out of Horseshoe Basin. There at first were 2 cabins there. I was out of a cabin that was signed Bighorn Cabin, it was along a fork of Horseshoe Creek, from Sunny Pass looking north you would go down the pass and then turn left and go about 1/2 mile. I believe I was told that originally it was a trapper’s cabin from early 1900s that Forest Service took over and kept maintained. There was another cabin that was a sheepherder’s cabin to the north of there just before you got to Louden Lake. It was removed the year before I started and I hauled much of the wood from it over to the Bighorn Cabin for my stove fuel. It was a fantastic time for me living in the mountains and getting paid to hike in the scenery and talk to visitors. Like you, I have many wonderful memories of my time there. Michael” POSTED BY: Wild Ranger on Jul 09, 2022 03:20 PM