Olympic National Park: The Forest the Timber Industry Almost Got

The fight over Olympic National Park lasted more than five decades. It began in eighteen ninety-seven when President Grover Cleveland designated the original Olympic Forest Reserve, and it did not end until nineteen fifty-three when a boundary expansion finally added the Pacific coastal strip that is now the park's most visited section.

At every stage, the timber industry's position was consistent. The old-growth Sitka spruce, some of the finest timber in North America for aircraft construction, ship masts, and high-grade lumber, was worth more as board-feet than as scenery. Logging operations had already cut a significant portion of the peninsula's private and state lands by the time federal protection became a serious possibility.

President Theodore Roosevelt created Mount Olympus National Monument in nineteen oh nine, protecting the mountain core and the elk. Congress established Olympic National Park in June of nineteen thirty-eight, when President Franklin Roosevelt signed the enabling legislation. The western rainforest was included, but only after intense political negotiation in which timber interests successfully excluded some old-growth areas. The park boundary was drawn and redrawn multiple times.

What remained inside the park is what you can see today in the Hoh, the Quinault, and along the coastal strip: forest that, in some places, has not been cut in the two thousand years since the Ozette village was buried and before. The park enclosed territory that five tribal nations had governed for thousands of years without being formally consulted on the process. The conservation victory and the dispossession are the same event, recorded from different positions.