Crown Jewel Wilderness: Creating North Cascades National Park by Lauren Danner

Abstract

442 OHQ vol. 119, no. 3 degree. (He is a journalism graduate of the University of Washington.) He asks the questions a person outside the scientific community would ask, provides the answers in understandable prose, and writes about people as much as science. One of those people was Harold McCluskey, who had survived “the biggest internal dose of radiation of any surviving nuclear worker in history.” He described McCluskey, home after four years of treatment, as “defiantly upbeat” (p. 58). More than a few of Williams’s science stories intersect with history: bringing irrigation to the Columbia Basin Project in Washington; drowning of Celilo Falls by The Dalles Dam; “oracle bones” in a museum in Taipei, Taiwan; and the replacement of staffed lighthouses along the Pacific Ocean with automated lights. Williams places all these stories in the context of their times. His writing is matter-of-fact, but he tucks in bits of information that bring an era or an area to life. This book has a little something for every reader, from scientists who are featured in much of the book to casual readers who like good stories. Williams had a reputation as a solid, accurate reporter when he was a journalist writing “the first draft of history.” This personal review of his life and work is a worthy second draft. Roberta Ulrich Beaverton, Oregon CROWN JEWEL WILDERNESS: CREATING NORTH CASCADES NATIONAL PARK by Lauren Danner Washington State University Press, Pullman, 2017. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. 326 pages. $29.95, paper. To all who have laid eyes on its regal peaks and deep green valleys, North Cascades National Park (NCNP) is a stunning piece of scenery. Along the Pacific Slope of the United States, the sublimity of its natural beauty is rivaled only by Washington State’s two other national parks: Olympic and Mount Rainier. If you were to ask anyone in Seattle with a pair of hiking boots, they probably would assume that preserving North Cascades was a no-brainer. But in Crown Jewel Wilderness, Lauren Danner digs into the region’s history and reveals the prolonged contention that prevented the park’s establishment until 1968. With an impressive grasp of the nuances of federal land-use classifications as well as deep knowledge of the finer points of mid-century conservationism, she demonstrates how a generation of proposals, negotiations, and compromises spawned one of the most complex land management arrangements in the West, comprising national forests, national recreation areas, wilderness areas, and one spectacular “jewel” of a national park along the Canadian border. Danner builds on a robust body of historical literature that tells a tale of bureaucratic enmity between the National Park Service and the U.S. Forest Service. The story will be familiar to anyone who has watched Ken Burns’s popular PBS series, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea. The narrative typically begins, as Danner does in the first chapter, with differences of ideology between Gifford Pinchot and John Muir. It becomes more complicated with the rise of the automobile and the concerns of nascent wilderness preservationists like Aldo Leopold and Bob Marshall. And then, after World War II, it simultaneously fractures and explodes, with the agencies coming to function as pawns among private interests, public pressures, and well-organized grassroots organizations. In a 1989 essay, historian Hal Rothman described the inter-agency rivalry as a “regular ding-dong fight,” quoting sources from the 1930s to describe “squabbles” that “often seemed petty, motivated by little more than bureaucratic intransigence and a degree of territoriality rivaled only by medieval despots” (“‘A Regular Ding Dong Fight’” Western Historical Quarterly, Summer 1989). Danner carries Rothman ’s analysis into the mid twentieth century and adds evidence to support the argument that his conclusions apply to the postwar era, albeit in distinctive forms. But, for as well-researched and thoroughly retold as it is, Crown Jewel Wilderness is less driven by scholarly argument than it is by Danner’s pure passion for wilderness and the 443 Book Notes mountains themselves. At best, this results in a rich, if not incomplete, story of the region during the twentieth century. At worst, it obscures the author’s most important findings. In...