The First National Forest: Shoshone and the Act That Changed Everything

On March third of eighteen ninety-one, President Benjamin Harrison signed the Forest Reserve Act, a single section tucked into a larger land revision bill. The act gave the President authority to set aside public timber lands as forest reserves, protecting them from sale and settlement. Two weeks later, Harrison used that authority for the first time. He designated two million acres of land surrounding Yellowstone's eastern boundary as the Yellowstone Timberland Reserve.

That reserve became the Shoshone National Forest. The first in the United States. Every national forest that came after it, all one hundred fifty-four of them, traces its legal ancestry to this mountain valley and this act.

The reserve was created not out of love for wilderness, but out of fear of losing it. The previous two decades had shown what happened when timber came down without any check: stripped hillsides, silted streams, flooding downstream where watersheds no longer held snowmelt. The argument that passed the bill in Congress was partly aesthetic, partly hydraulic. Keep the trees, and the rivers would stay predictable. Destroy them, and the water supply for farms and cities downstream would become erratic and eventually catastrophic.

What the act did not do, at first, was define what management meant. The reserves existed. What happened in them was unclear for roughly six years, until Gifford Pinchot and the newly created Forest Service began working out a philosophy: not preservation, not exploitation, but what Pinchot called wise use. The forest would be used. It would also be managed so that the using could continue.

That argument is not settled. It is still being argued today, in exactly this forest.