Prologue to the Timber Sale

The Seeley Lake Timber Sale 1907-1910

If the early history of Seeley Lake is intertwined with the lumber industry, the rise of the United States Forest Service is incontrovertibly intertwined with Seeley Lake and in particular with the Big Blackfoot Timber Sale of 1907-1910. Historian and member of the Camp Paxson Preservation Board Gary Williams has provided information about that sale. The Seeley Swan Pathfinder will be bringing some of the interesting bits of information he has discovered about logging in the Seeley Lake area and also about the fledgling U.S. Forest Service.

SEELEY LAKE – In 1905, lands that had been designated forest reserves moved from the jurisdiction of the Department of Interior to the Department of Agriculture's Bureau of Forestry. Gifford Pinchot quickly reconfigured the bureau into the United States Forest Service and two years later the reserves were renamed National Forests. The new Forest Service immediately inherited a lot of land and a lot of legal and political problems, including ones in Seeley Lake and the surrounding area.

An article written in 1943 by Assistant Regional Forester (and later first Supervisor of Lolo National Forest) Ehlers Koch and reprinted in the April 28, 1994 issue of the Seeley Swan Pathfinder identifies the extent of the western Montana forest division: "The Lewis and Clark was a vast area extending from the Big Blackfoot Valley on the South, clear to the Canadian line, including what is now parts of the Lolo, Flathead and Lewis and Clark National Forests, and all of Glacier Park."

Expounding on the scope of the Forest Service's task, Ehlers said, "These were years of pioneering in the National forests. There was a lot to do, a whole new country to explore, trails to be built into the wilderness, bridges over mountain torrents, the first telephone lines to string out. The new forest officers had to learn to fight fire, and to administer the first timber sales. There were old timber trespasses to settle, fraudulent claims to dispose of, maps to make of uncharted country and a beginning of forest nurseries and planting."

Some of those "timber trespasses" and "fraudulent claims" centered around dealings with the Montana Improvement Company (MIC) which owned the lumber mill in Bonner, Montana. According to the Bicentennial Committee of Bonner School's publication "The Story of Bonner, Montana," the MIC had a mutually profitable arrangement with the Northern Pacific Railroad so that MIC "obtained control of all timber on railroad lands along the 925 mile right of way. However, no adequate survey of this land had been made at that time, and the company made no attempt to distinguish between railroad and government sections. They assumed the right to cut timber indiscriminately along the right of way..."

In October 1885, the Secretary of the Interior filed criminal and civil suits against MIC and the railroad, charging them with cutting timber on government land.

The Bicentennial Committee wrote that MIC responded by creating and turning over their assets to a new corporation named the Blackfoot Milling Company. A number of similar restructurings resulted in name changes including Blackfoot Milling and Manufacturing Company, Big Blackfoot Milling Company and Big Blackfoot Lumber Company.

In 1898 the Anaconda Mining Company bought the mill, dam and 500-million feet of timber to be harvested along the Blackfoot River. According to "The Story of Bonner, Montana," "The copper firm obtained the mill for support lumber for its mining operations at Butte and its smelters at Anaconda and Great Falls. It was often noted the mill at Bonner had one of the finest mine timbering plants in the world."

The Bonner Mill opened in 1886 with the capacity to mill over 150,000 feet of lumber a day.

According to the Bonner Bicentennial Committee, the first logging camp was believed to have been established 25 miles upstream at Fish Creek. With no established road up the Blackfoot Valley, loggers reached the site on a trail beginning in Wallace [now Clinton]. The route dropped into Wallace Gulch, climbed the Garnet Range, dropped back down to Camas Prairie [now Potomac valley], crossed a ridge between Union and Elk Creeks and finally into Sunset Prairie near the Blackfoot River. The cut logs took the river route, herded by men in flat-bottomed river boats. The first river drive brought 20-million board feet of logs in time for the mill opening.

J.D. Black in "A History of the Seeley Lake Area" claimed, "The timber in the Seeley Lake area was being cut and marketed with total disregard for conservation or land use by future generations. The name of the game was 'cut and get out.'"

Black also wrote that the Big Blackfoot Milling Company (BBMC), around the year 1900, "had clear-cut much of the area around Salmon and Placid Lakes using various loopholes and outright thievery to gain access to the land."

In 1907, the U.S. Forest Service contracted the biggest timber sale it had yet undertaken. Fifty-million board feet of lumber was to be harvested, primarily from the land east of Seeley Lake, and sold to the BBMC. According to Black, the Forest Service hoped that by offering a legal avenue for the mill to obtain the lumber it needed, the BBMC would no longer find it profitable to employ illegal means that often ended in lawsuits.

Before detailing the 1907 Timber Sale itself, the next article in this series will explore the "fraudulent claims" including the "rubber forty."

 

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