A Taste of Sowbelly and Saleratus Biscuit: Gifford Pinchot's Arkansas Adventure

Abstract

GIFFORD PINCHOT HAS LONG BEEN CONSIDERED the father of American forestry. In 1898, Pinchot became chief of the Division of Forestry (a predecessor to the modern-day Forest Service) and helped build the fledgling agency into the leading federal mechanism for forest conservation. In one capacity or another, Pinchot's support and guidance helped Presidents Grover Cleveland, William McKinley, and Theodore Roosevelt (a close friend) establish and expand what would become the National Forest system, including the Arkansas (now Ouachita) and Ozark National Forests, created in 1907 and 1908, respectively. Pinchot's many proteges staffed a growing number of forestry programs, and he sent friends and contemporaries like Samuel J. Record and Frederick E. Fritz Olmsted to help implement scientific forestry on public and private lands. Bankrolled by the Pinchot family, the Yale Forestry School emerged as the premier forestry institute in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century.1 Early Yale faculty members like Herman Haupt Chapman and R. C. Bryant helped to prod portions of the timber industry towards sustainability and, hence, permanence. But in 1891, Pinchot was just a wide-eyed novice exploring many of the forests of his native land for the first time, and his journeys would bring him to Arkansas. Pinchot had been born into an influential Connecticut family just after the Civil War.2 Because of his family's affluence, Pinchot could attend Yale University and then pursue, with his father's encouragement and blessing, a career in a profession so obscure in the United States that he had to travel to Europe for his technical education.3 When he returned from L'Ecole Nationale Forestiere in Nancy, France, as the first American formally trained in forestry, Pinchot faced a predicament. Since most citizens in 1890 viewed the virgin forests of North America either as a limitless resource or an obstacle that needed to be cleared for higher uses such as agriculture, they had little desire to manage their timber for the future and even less to hire some European-trained upstart to tell them how to do it. Fortunately for Pinchot, his family's wealth allowed him to further his career by traveling with Bernhard Eduard Fernow, a Prussian-born and trained forester who was the chief of the Division of Forestry in the U.S. Department of Agriculture.4 In January 1891, the brusque Fernow invited the young forester on an excursion to the bottomlands of eastern Arkansas to observe the timberlands and lumbering operations of the South. Having just completed a report on the Pennsylvania white pine lands of the Phelps, Dodge Company, Pinchot accepted the non-paying trip: Dr. Fernow had been asked to examine a body of hardwood timber in the overflow lands of the Mississippi in eastern Arkansas. Very kindly he invited me to go along. Here was an open door to learning a little more about the United States. Although brief, this trip is interesting for what it reveals about Pinchot at the beginning of his career in terms of both his personal and professional development. Before their widespread commercial and agricultural exploitation, the hardwood-dominated forests of the lower Mississippi River Valley had impressed many observers, including the writer Thomas Bangs Thorpe who, in 1840, romantically penned: Gigantic trees obstructed my path, and as I cast my eye upward, my head grew dizzy with the height; here, too, might be seen dead trunks shorn of their mighty limbs, and whitening in the blasts of years, that appeared, dead as they were, as mighty as the pillars of Hercules; and I could not help comparing them to those lone columns of fallen temples, that occasionally protrude themselves above the ruins of Cheeps and Thebes.6 With the exception of areas along the railways and a few of the major rivers, most of these hardwood forests had not experienced any significant clearing by 1890. The big yellow poplars and black walnuts of Crowley's Ridge had largely been cut by the time of Pinchot's visit, but eastern Arkansas still contained extensive tracts of virgin timber dominated by oak, hickory, gum, baldcypress, elm, ash, and numerous other species. …