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A long and winding trail
Forty years ago, establishing Wilderness Act was an uphill battle.

By Angus M. Thuermer Jr.

President Lyndon Johnson strode rapidly into the Rose Garden at the White House, quickly greeted some of those gathered there, took the podium and made his formal remarks. Then he sat down at a small desk next to the lecturn, chatting over his shoulder with his congressional allies gathered around him. LBJ reached out his Texas-sized hand, gathered a fistful of pens from a rack and began to sign the document before him.

His lighthearted quips contrasted with the important setting. Joking to the lawmakers behind him while a small audience observed, LBJ dipped one pen in the inkwell and made a small stroke

"I'm still getting letters about that trip you went on with my wife," he said to Stewart Udall, secretary of the interior who stood behind his left shoulder. Everybody laughed.

LBJ used pen after pen, until he had a good collection, to complete a capital L. With yet one more pen he finished his signature with a flourish. That day, Sept. 3, 1964, the monumental Wilderness Act became law.

Johnson began handing the pens out to the powerful and famous men behind him; Reps. Wilbur Mills and Wayne Aspinall, Sen. Frank Church and others. Only two women were in the group that morning and each got one of LBJ's mementos. One was Alice Zahniser, the wife of a tireless lobbyist, Howard Zahniser, who had died only weeks before just after testifying for the act. The other was Mardy Murie of Jackson Hole; her naturalist husband, Olaus, another advocate of the act, had died about a year earlier.

The two women represented the heart of the country's fledgling wilderness movement. The pens they received from the president that day created a law that guaranteed, as much as possible, that 9 million acres of federal land, including the Teton and Bridger Wilderness in the Bridger-Teton National Forests, would remain forever wild.

But it did much more. Even in the country that had invented the notion of the national park, conservationists like Olaus Murie and Howard Zahniser saw an unfulfilled need. Before the Wilderness Act there was little guarantee that great wild places, even those in national parks, would remain primitive.

"It was the first statutory protection of natural land," says Doug Scott, Campaign for America's Wilderness policy director and author of the just-released The Enduring Wilderness.

Yes, Scott says, there was park legislation and national forest wild areas protected administratively ­ but any of that could be changed with the stroke of a pen or the appointment of a new Forest Service chief. And none of the land-managing agencies in the U.S. would answer the question about what development was appropriate and draw a line saying "this is where we will stop."

"That was the whole point of the Wilderness Act," Scott says. It provides an overlying protection to federal lands that can only be altered by Congress.

To Olaus Murie, a naturalist who learned about wildlife by living outdoors, preserving wild places was paramount to the very idea of life as he knew it. Zahniser, too, a birder who reveled in the texture of the Pennsylvania and Allegheny River forests from the first day he got a pair of glasses as a child, understood the immeasurable value of wild lands. The two worked as directors of the Wilderness Society to see the Wilderness Act passed.

But where did the idea of wilderness originate? It has been part of the American landscape from pre-history. Perhaps only when civilization attained the ability to dam every canyon, pave any meadow, build a road up most mountains came the realization that unbridled "advancements" could erase an essential aspect of the continent. In a world increasingly measured against the economic yardstick, other values were imperiled.

Adolph Murie, Olaus' brother who studied wolves in Mount McKinley National Park, gathered some of the advanced thinking of the 1930s, Scott says, when he authored a study for the government about making Isle Royale, Mich., a national park.

"To administer Isle Royale as a wilderness area, it is important to secure a personnel which has a feeling for wilderness and understanding of wilderness values; otherwise the desire to be doing something to the area will be hard to curb," Adolph Murie wrote. "The administrators should be told that their success and achievements will be measured, not by projects accomplished, but by projects sidetracked. In the management of a wilderness area, we must somehow depart from the 20th century tempo of activity."

Some of those ideas were already part of the American conservation ideal. Since the creation of Yellowstone National Park in 1872 and the growth of the park system through the 1900s, John Muir, Stephen Mather and others advocated for nature. Aldo Leopold touted to other foresters the importance of wilderness writing in the Journal of Forestry in the early 1920s. During that time administrators protected national forest wilderness and primitive areas, but not permanently.

So in 1935 a coalition of civil servants, lawyers, biologists and foresters formed the Wilderness Society to advocate just that. Bob Marshall, an Interior Department official was one of the main forces ­ both in terms of funding and work ­ behind the group.

The very impermanence that the society worried about haunted the young coalition when Marshall died a few years later at age 38. Author Scott said that spurred others to action including Knoxville lawyer Harvey Broome, a Wilderness Society co-founder who wrote a letter to Olaus Murie.

"When Bob was taking care of national forest wild lands, we didn't have to worry" was the essence of the correspondence, Scott says. "Now I wonder if they are really safe."

The Wilderness Society came to the following realization, Scott says, that a law including a map is the best way to protect wild lands forever. "In the Wilderness Act we draw real lines in the law," he says. "Those lines cannot be changed except in another law. That's the power of the Wilderness Act."

With the death in 1945 of the society's first director, the group settled on Zahniser, a government editor, former newspaper man and birder, to be the new leader. Olaus Murie served as a half-time counterpart in Moose.

Their work was daunting. Scott quotes one Murie passage from 1945 that outlined the post-war threat.

"The blueprints virtually postulate 'lifting the face of Nature,'" Olaus Murie wrote in 1945. "The new dams proposed are so numerous they can not be conveniently listed. It is known that many of them would affect wildlife resources to an alarming degree. Many, with accompanying roads, would invade wilderness areas. Never before has there been a greater threat to what remains of primeval America."

The first draft of the wilderness bill in 1945 called for a national system of trails, like the existing Appalachian Trail. That changed to include rivers, then "belts" or areas as the bill, without being adopted, began to mature.

Sidetracked by threats to dam the Colorado River and flood part of Dinosaur National Monument, the country's fledgling conservation movement built a national conscience in that successful battle. By 1955, the Sierra Club and David Brower were household words because of that fight. Zahniser and the Wilderness Society, returned to their mission and carried the momentum. They argued, Scott says, that primitive lands are essential to the human spirit: "Its preservation is a purpose that arises out of man's own sense of his fundamental needs," Zahniser wrote at the time.

But who was this man, Howard Zahniser, a bureaucrat ensconced in an office in Washington, and what did he know about wilderness?

"My father was very interested in birds from a very young age," says Howard Zahniser's son, Ed, who works as a historian for the National Park Service in Harpers Ferry, W. Va."It was that that drew him into a wider interest in nature and to the arena of wild preservation."

The family, including mother Alice who later would witness the Wilderness Act being signed, traveled to several wild areas, including what would become the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, the Bob Marshall Wilderness Area in Montana, and the Jedediah Smith Wilderness on the west slope of the Tetons.

"I remember the Tetons vividly," Ed Zahniser says. "We camped in Alaska Basin and David Brower taught me rock climbing there. I was 10 years old. Alaska Basin is probably my mother's favorite place in North America apart from our cabin in the Adirondacks."

Howard Zahniser "loved to imitate bird calls, making noises with his lips pressed against the back of his hand," Ed says. He also saw a larger world.

"I think my father was interested in the whole of nature," Ed says. "He was just taken with the glory of the whole global scheme. It was a matter of having your horizon expanded by the things he knew to notice and the things he noticed that he didn't know.

Olaus Murie, also smitten by the natural world, came to further understand its fragility after visiting a timber sale in the Three Sisters primitive area in Oregon. Administrators changed a boundary to exclude 53,000 acres of timber in exchange for the same amount of "rock and ice." With the change "the biological diversity went down dramatically," Scott says.

As Zahniser pursued legislation, he and Murie began to disagree about tactics. Eventually, legislators and advocates drafted 65 wilderness bills and held 18 hearings. All these machinations, Scott says, wore on Olaus Murie, who was more of a big-picture thinker than lobbyist. Mark Harvey, history professor at North Dakota State University, Fargo, points to another fundamental difference between the two men and their approaches.

"The Wilderness Soc-iety was first and foremost an educational organization," Harvey says. "It had to be, in part because of the IRS tax deductibility." That status encouraged charitable donations, which could be written off a donor's tax bill, but required the receiving organization to forego substantial amounts of lobbying.

"In the 1945 [Wilderness Society] bylaws that were hammered out, this was the understanding," Harvey says. "This was to be an educational organization to promote and advertise wilderness by speaking, writing and so-on.

"Murie in many ways always believed that was the main job of himself and Zahniser ­ to educate. Unless you could enlist more people in the cause of supporting wild, no law could make up for lack of public support."

On the flip side, Zahniser believed that wilderness ultimately would likely disappear without statutory protection. "They had a lot of soul-searching debates in the late '50s," Harvey says. "These debates were very much brought on by real fears and concerns that Zahniser's intensive lobbying for the bill would run afoul of IRS regulations. It would revoke the tax-deductible status, which would be catastrophic to the income of the society."

The threat was real. Not too many years later, after the Sierra Club took out full-page newspaper ads in the New York Times denouncing dams planned in the Grand Canyon, the IRS imposed its code on that organization. "Just a few days later [after the newspaper ads ran] a man in a black suit hand-delivered a letter to the Sierra Club offices in San Francisco," Harvey said, announcing the revocation of the Sierra Club's tax-deductible status.

But the Wilderness Society was under the IRS radar screen as it pushed for adoption of the act in 1964. Congressional leaders assured the group Zahniser was not going too far.

And so, with Zahniser's dogged determination, Congress passed the Act and LBJ strode into the Rose Garden to sign it. "If future generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than contempt, we must leave them more than the miracles of technology," he told the Rose Garden gathering. "We must leave them a glimpse of the world as it was in the beginning, not just after we got through with it."

Looking back 40 years, how important has the act become? "It is one of a handful ­ I mean a single hand ­ of the most important conservation measures in our history and a model for the world," Scott says. There are wilderness laws in South Africa, New Zealand, Namibia, Russia in eight states and among the Flathead Tribe.

The act boosted conservationists' causes. It required grassroots advocacy and the creation of many small regional groups to propose and monitor wilderness areas. Today, the 9 million acres in the original act has grown to more than 105 million.

"It is hard to think of any other category of our land that's protected or devoted to any particular thing that amounts to 5 percent of our total land ownership," Scott says. Those who created the act did it for selfless reasons, he adds.

"These were incredibly humble people," he says. "They weren't power-brokers or arm-twisters ­ not at all. The Wilderness Act was their statement of humility toward the land. Olaus Murie, Howard Zahniser and their colleagues knew what they were doing was forging a tool, that if they could get this basic idea of wildness as an overlay, they would be handing that tool to future generations who could put it to work."

For Mardy Murie, that call rang true. With the death of Olaus, she was unprepared to carry on. On Sept. 2, 1964, Secretary of the Interior Udall's office called Moose, inviting her to the Wilderness Act signing ceremony at the White House the next day.

Murie fretted to herself in her cabin; "Oh, go 'way; leave me alone, I just don't feel like doing anything." Then she recalled some of Olaus' oft-repeated words "Say yes Mardy, don't say no."

So Mardy Murie and Alice Zahniser stood with the presidents' men 40 years ago to witness history. And Murie went on saying "yes," working with the Wilderness Society as the act grew up, playing a crucial role in the largest addition to the wilderness system by helping define what parts of Alaska merited protection.

On Sept. 3, 1964, Mardy Murie instinctively knew where the future lay. "I won't try to go into any of my feelings about all this," she wrote her family after the 1964 ceremony. "But I am glad and grateful that I could go, and especially that I could have that time with Alice [Zahniser] and her children, and meet the folks in the [Wilderness Society] office..."

Whether it was to those "lovely young [Zahniser] people" or the eight young "dedicated and interested" women staffing the burgeoning Wilderness Society office, Mardy Murie was passing the torch.

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Wilderness birthday party Saturday

The Forest Legacy Center hosts a 40th anniversary party for the Wilderness Act on top of Snow King Mountain on Saturday.

The event runs from 5 to 7 p.m. and includes wine and cheese, a silent wilderness art auction, guest speakers, and views of the Gros Ventre Wilderness.

The event costs $25 for those who take the chairlift. Hikers pay only $15 and children younger than 12 are free. Proceeds are to be matched by the National Forest Foundation.

"Conservationists like Olaus and Mardy Murie, Loring Woodman, Leslie Shoemaker, Dick and Judy Inberg, and many others in the Jackson Hole area were leaders both nationally and locally in the wilderness movement," wrote Jennifer Mongolo, Forest Legacy Center development director in Jackson in an invitation.

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Notes and sources

This story was written based on interviews with Ed Zahniser, Doug Scott, Mark Harvey and Nancy Shea with the help of the following published material:

Letter from Mardy Murie to "Mama-Lou" and Murie's family, dated Sept. 8, 1964, Moose, courtesy The Murie Center.

"A Wilderness-Forever Future" by Douglas W. Scott, Policy Director, Campaign for America's Wilderness.

"Howard Zahniser; Architect of the Wilderness Act," Newsletter of Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance by Mark Harvey, North Dakota State University, Fargo.

"Witness for Wildlands; Howard Zahniser and the 1964 Wilderness Act," by Ed Zahniser in Environmental Activists, Greenwood Press.

The Wilderness Act of 1964

"Seven Steps to Preserving Wilderness and Wildness Forever," Remarks by Ed Zahniser at the National Wilderness Conference, Seattle, 1998.

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