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| Description | Lincoln Ellison Director, Great Basin Branch Experiment Station 1938—45 by Liane Ellison Norman Lincoln Ellison 2 Table of Contents Introduction 5 I 7 II 11 III 19 Appendix A 25 Appendix B 29 Appendix C 35 Appendix D 37 Footnotes 39 Lincoln Ellison 3 Introduction What follows is a succinct account of Lincoln Ellison’s life, with emphasis on his seven years as Director of the Great Basin Branch Experiment Station, from 1939—1945. Information has been gleaned mostly from his carefully kept journals and the letters to his wife, Laurel, who kept them until the early ‘70s, when she entrusted them to me, their eldest daughter. There are other letters to his close friends, Harvey Anderson and Charles A. Wellner. This account was written to be part of the historical record kept in the Museum of the Great Basin Environmental Education Center so that visitors will have some idea of the early days of what was usually called The Station. Some path-breaking ecological research has been done with this place as headquarters. Lincoln Ellison’s research and publication continue to guide younger ecologists. I have also tried to convey what kind of men these early ecologists were and what life at The Station was like for their families. —Liane Ellison Norman Lincoln Ellison 4 LINCOLN ELLISON I “My purpose, I think, is social: to lead people toward sanity & wisdom by recovering the primitive environment. To this end I can devote whatever aptitudes I have in literary skill, scientific reasoning and love of the romantic.” My father, Lincoln Ellison wrote this in his journal on November 24, 1939, a year and a half after being appointed Director of the Great Basin Branch Experiment Station, a Forest Service research facility in the Wasatch Mountains above Ephraim in Central Utah. When he made this declaration, he was musing on naturalist Bob Marshall’s untimely death. In October 1939, Lincoln reported that he and Marshall, an old friend, had walked up and over Mt. Ogden, discussing this “recreation research project.” A few days later he wrote, “We have had shocking news: Bob Marshall is dead. He died of coronary thrombosis while on the train between Washington & New York. It is the more shocking & unbelievable to us because of our recent weekend with Bob.” Marshall, who directed forest recreation for the Forest Service at that time, had become a part of Lincoln’s thinking about devoting his own energies to forest recreation. For Lincoln, “recreation” meant more than a picnic in the woods: it meant a recovery of the primal relationship with the non-human world of which David Abrams writes in The Spell of the Sensuous.1 Abrams speaks of the “age-old reciprocity with the many-voiced landscape. We still need that which is 1 New York: Pantheon Books, 1996. Lincoln Ellison 5 other than ourselves and our own creations.” Lincoln, like Abrams, believed, “that we are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.”2 In the statement quoted above, Lincoln resolved what had been a quandary for him in his earlier years. Was his vocation to be a scientist, a naturalist? Or a poet, essayist, novelist or dramatist? The world in which he would make his choice was mired in the Great Depression between two world wars. Jobs were scarce and the future uncertain. He was driven all his life, I believe, by a strong sense of loss. Lincoln’s father had decamped when he was fifteen. His response was to record his observations of plants and animals in his early journals. Later he experienced a loss of sensibility when he was immersed too much in purely intellectual activity, as occurred in academic settings. The same sense of loss figured in his perception of the natural world: the loss of the human relationship to nature, as roads, automobiles and other artifacts of technology transformed the kinds of places that had been his solace as a teenager. The loss that came to be most important to him was that of irreplaceable soil, which had taken eons to create, eroded and washed away because of overgrazing or other kinds of abuse. He came to see soil as the fundament of both nature and civilization. In his declaration, quoted above, he saw a way of combining his gifts: he would be a scientist, observing the natural world, formulating what he found out for other scientists, but also explaining to ordinary people the policy implications of what he knew. The loss of Bob Marshall as friend and potential boss was enormous, for this was the connection that had made the possibility of working in forest recreation seem both real and probable. “I have asked for a transfer from Range 2 p. ix. Lincoln Ellison 6 Research to the Division of Recreation!” he wrote to a friend during his first year of graduate study at the University of Minnesota. “It seems very odd to me now that I should have been so long in finding out what I really want to do, especially when most of the things I have done & the thots [sic] I have thot have pointed so uniformly in this direction. But now I feel like one of the old prophets after revelation—I know what to do now.” Bob Marshall, he reported, was “of the opinion that I should come over.” Lincoln continued to pursue the idea of transferring to the Forest Recreation Division even after he was appointed Director of the Great Basin Branch Experiment Station.3 His campaign to transfer came to naught, but several times he mentions “my new recreation research assignment.” Even as he pondered Marshall’s untimely death he wrote, “For the present: research in forest recreation as it exists today, to learn its nature in every detail.” In 1942, the Journal of Forestry published his paper on “Trends of Forest Recreation in the United States.” Though couched in the formal terms of quasi-academic research, this article expresses his aesthetic and spiritual connection to the out-of-doors, mentioning “the extent to which [a camper] shakes off the effects of the civilized environment and absorbs the benefits of the wilderness environment….” Automobiles, which brought campers and hikers into the forests, were changing that environment: “the last remnants of wild America, something which had been considered permanent and inexhaustible, were discovered about 1920 to be melting away under a network of roads.” Forest recreation had changed: “20 years ago the typical camper traveled afoot over 3 The “Station” refers to a place that has had a variety of names: the Utah Experiment Station, Great Basin Experiment Station, Great Basin Branch Experiment Station, Great Basin Research Center, Great Basin Experimental Range. Lincoln Ellison 7 trails or where there were no trails, carrying a minimum of worldly needs in his packsack and depending to a considerable extent on his skill in woodcraft.” Shortly after Lincoln arrived at the Station to assume his new duties as Director, he wrote to his wife, Laurel, then visiting her parents in southern California, that he longed for “days in the hot sun, with the creak of pack sack leather, evening and morning walks, the being alone, amongst huge mountains, over a little fire, and the dropping off to sleep many nights ‘with the starlight on our faces.’”4 In his forest recreation article, Lincoln noted two reasons for the preservation of wilderness: one was for recreation, literally re-creation of the spirit, which grew jaded by size, speed, paving—the humanly constructed world; the other, interesting in light of the body of his later research, was “the desire to preserve primeval specimen areas of vanishing forest types for science.” A central theme of his scientific work was the conviction that the range was so thoroughly degraded because of overgrazing by both domestic and wild animals—the latter unchecked because of policies to kill off predators—that it was difficult if not impossible to establish a baseline from which to determine the effects of such misuse. In his Journal of Forestry article, Lincoln wrote that foresters, in matters of recreation, “have not been leaders, promoting intelligent, productive use, but indifferent followers.” Lincoln wanted to be a leader and knew the goal toward which he wanted to lead: sanity and wisdom, which he saw in terms of recovering the primitive environment. He saw the recreational uses of wild land as having an instructional value: people who experienced themselves, as he had, in the immensity of forests and mountains would be 4 From Rudyard Kipling, “The Feet of the Young Men,” The Five Nations.. Lincoln Ellison 8 inclined to love and respect the natural environment. But he also knew intuitively that once wild places were lost through human use, the soil would follow. This sense of the ineffable loss the world suffers when it loses soil permeates much of his writing, both personal and professional. I can only guess that the adolescent Lincoln’s sense of recovered sanity in early forays into the mountains near his home in southern California resulted in his considerable ambition to convey his wonder at and to protect the natural order, which held spiritual significance for him. In the magnificent ordering of nature, which encompassed everything from the arrangement of subatomic particles to the ecological balances he sought to understand and conserve, he believed that human beings had “been very greatly favored, and I think we should appreciate this, for it bears on the question as to how we should live.”5 5 From an unpublished and unfinished treatise, “What Can One Believe?” written in the form of a letter to his four daughters. Lincoln Ellison 9 II Lincoln, like many of his generation, came from immigrant stock. All of his grandparents were part of the great surge of migration that took place at the turn of the twentieth century. His father, Alfred Oscar Ellison, was born in Dunedin, New Zealand in 1883, the son of Edward Ellison of Sweden, lamp trimmer6, and Hanorah McNamara, a seamstress born in Ireland and transplanted to Dunedin. His mother, Alrena Beatrice Thomas, was born in Grass Valley, California in 1881, of Mary Hannah Vincent, also a seamstress, and Charles Thomas. Charles, a tin miner, married Mary Hannah in 1877 in Redruth, Cornwall, then migrated to northern California’s gold mining fields.7 Five years later he sent for Mary Hannah to join him there. He was born Alfred Lincoln to Alrena and A.O. (as he was known) on August 2, 1908, in Portland, Oregon, where the Ellisons lived until he was about four, when they moved to San Francisco. Alrena must have lived in San Francisco earlier as well, for her memories of the 1906 earthquake were vivid. Perhaps she met A.O there, for Edward and Hanorah Ellison had migrated from Dunedin to Auckland, New Zealand, and from there to San Francisco—from one seaport city where he might ply his trade to another. Lincoln’s sister Constance was born in 1914 in San Francisco. By 1919, when David Grayson was born, the Ellisons had moved to Burlingame, further down the Peninsula. The next year, when Lincoln was 12, the Ellisons moved to Los Angeles and then, slightly north, 6 A lamp trimmer worked aboard a ship, keeping its lamps in trim. Dunedin is on the southeastern coast of New Zealand. 7 Both Cornish and Irish miners were vigorously recruited in the late nineteenth century to work in American, Australian and New Zealand mining. Lincoln Ellison 10 to the farm town of Arcadia. David Ellison says8 that this final move was to raise chickens “to provide eggs for King’s Dairy Lunch” in Los Angeles, one of the several ill-fated restaurants A.O. ventured. A.O. walked out on his wife and children around 1923. According to David, his father’s desertion was never explained. A.O. did not provide financially for the family he left behind, though he did stay erratically in touch, and, says David, left boxes of presents on the front porch on Christmas and the Fourth of July. Lincoln never forgave his father’s defection—later he legally dropped the “Alfred” from his name—though he speculated in a letter to Laurel Elver, whom he later married, that his mother had let herself get too fat and was too bossy and disorganized to keep her husband happy. About the time of his father’s departure, Lincoln began keeping journals— a life-long habit—chronicling his observations of plants, insects and birds, hikes and camping trips alone and with friends. There is no record in these early journals of adolescent turmoil, family matters or the loss of his father, which must have hit him hard. It is possible to read his early journals as a redirection of his attention from confusion and hurt to a more primal set of relations, in which he found sanity, clarity and solace. Though he was only a teen-ager, Lincoln assumed much of the household’s male responsibility, not only for providing some income and tending the two-acre farm, but trying to provide emotional and moral guidance for Constance and David. The Ellisons converted the chicken house on their property to family quarters, an embarrassment for Lincoln in high school. “We never went hungry,” David remembers. “We grew vegetables—the best rhubarb 8 The quotations from David Ellison come from interviews and conversations with him in 2002. Lincoln Ellison 11 and asparagus anywhere in the world. All the water from the shower, tub and washing machine went on the vegetable garden. There were vines trained on the fence with grapes and berries.” In addition to raising chickens, vegetables and fruit, his mother took in washing and baked pies and Cornish pasties, which her children sold from a wooden wagon along with the eggs from the chickens. Eventually Alrena sold corsets door-to-door and later Avon products. During college and thereafter, Lincoln’s visits to the chicken-house homestead were always occasions for vigorous weeding and trimming outdoors and cleaning up indoors. Whether it was a reaction to his mother’s chronic messiness or a genetic predisposition for tidiness, Lincoln was passionately well-organized and neat all his life. Even on weekends or when doing dirty work in the house or yard, he shaved his tough beard and tucked in his shirt. Lincoln graduated from Monrovia High School in 1926, then went to UCLA, drawn equally to science, literature and languages. His high school essays and a poem, published in a journal of student writings, foreshadow his naturalist’s bent. At some point in his adolescence, Lincoln took part in a Trailfinders camp, under the leadership of Harry James, and later on during college spent part of one summer as a leader on a Trailfinders expedition into the southwest. Among Lincoln’s papers, from his earliest years into adulthood, are essays, poetry, stories, plans for novels and plays. By the time he graduated from UCLA, he was widely read in classical and English literature, and had at least reading fluency in Latin, Spanish and German. Later, in graduate school, he Lincoln Ellison 12 acquired sufficient French to read scientific papers. His college grades were consistently higher in language and literary subjects than in science and math. As a young man, Lincoln found summer and part-time employment as he could—working on a road construction crew and maintaining smudge pots for a nearby farmer. Beginning in 1927 and into the early years of the Depression, he worked for the Forest Service: on a blister rust ecology crew in northern Idaho; as a field assistant at the Jornada Range Reserve in Las Cruces, New Mexico; on a blister rust ecology crew in northern California; as a field assistant at the Southern Forest Experiment Station in Bogalusa, Louisiana, on longleaf pine study; as a field assistant for the Northern Rocky Mountain Station on various phases of forest management; as a field assistant in forest management research and type mapper for the Northern Rocky Mountain Station (for the Forest Service) and for Glacier National Park (for the Park Service.) Short on money, Lincoln worked to pay his way through college, taking five years rather than the usual four, and pinching pennies. My mother told me that during college he subsisted on peanut butter and bananas for a year in order to save the money to date her. He met Laurel Elver, who lodged and served as “mother’s helper” in the home of Dr. William Epling and his wife. Epling was a professor of botany and Lincoln’s advisor. Lincoln and Laurel married in 1933, two years after their graduation, his with a BA in botany, hers in child development and elementary education. Laurel was a beautiful, ebullient and sociable young woman with a background of pioneering. Her German immigrant father, Leonard Charles Fritz Frances Elver of Wisconsin, and her mother, Mary Ellen Bartell Elver of Iowa, had gone from her mother’s home state, where Laurel was born, to establish Lincoln Ellison 13 several homesteading communities on the barren plains of eastern Colorado. Leonard Elver was a restless man, who got homestead grants, “proved up” the allocated land, and moved on to another homestead. In the small communities of which the Elvers were part, Leonard served as all-purpose official—doctor, lawyer, faith-healing religious leader. Eventually they settled as far west as they could go in the small farm town of Moorpark in Ventura County, California. There Leonard, born a Lutheran, established two Methodist churches and introduced tomato farming to the county, while Laurel, an accomplished pianist, played for church, wedding and funeral services. Lincoln knew that each posting with the Forest Service was insecure. He took the assignments he could get and was sent off for long periods into remote areas, so Laurel, an elementary school teacher in her hometown of Moorpark, stayed behind for a year after their marriage. (She told, humorously, of the widespread perception in Moorpark that she had married a ne’er-do-well who had abandoned her.) But later, in an undated letter to Laurel, he remembered “the feeling [of being married], as if one said, ‘Gentlemen, I have passed 21 and never felt a bit different from the day before—that date, like the equator, is only an imaginary line. But now, gentlemen, I have taken to myself a wife, and thereby proved to myself and to the world, that I am a boy no longer, but a MAN. There is something unique & flavorful in this accomplishment.’” When Lincoln was assigned to Forest Service range research in Miles City, Montana in 1934, Laurel joined him. Not only was this period the depth of the Depression, but both Lincoln and Laurel had lived poor most of their lives. Photographs show the young Ellison’s first house, a rude cabin at Hogback Wells, on a desolate prairie near Miles City. It was only a step up—if that—from Lincoln Ellison 14 the tarpaper shack in which Laurel had lived on the flat Colorado prairie as a young girl. Lincoln and Laurel had four daughters: the first, Liane, was born in 1937, just before Lincoln became Director of the Great Basin Experiment Station; Laurel Elizabeth was born in 1939, only three days before a twelve-day seminar held at the Station, in preparation for which Lincoln labored mightily; Linda was born in 1941, shortly before the Ellisons spent the second of two academic years in Minneapolis, where Lincoln did his PhD course work; Linnea was born in 1945, as Lincoln ended his directorship of the Station to devote full time to directing range research for the Intermountain Region. Lincoln received his PhD in 1948. Though her background as a homesteader’s daughter had prepared her well for the life of a forester’s wife, Lincoln had only known her as the adored and protected child of parents whose taste in Edward Guest’s sentimental poetry he deplored. He feared that his new bride was not up to his standard of toughness for hiking, skiing—a newfound passion—and otherwise roughing it. He and Laurel hiked on skis into the Montana wilds one Christmas, camping in a cave carved into the snow, sleeping on bough beds Lincoln cut from the lower branches of nearby trees, decorating an evergreen twig with the Christmas cards they had received. Laurel told her daughters of an arduous day-long climb on skis, followed by a long downhill run. Headed for an immense stump, she was too tired to turn around it, and assumed she would be killed in the inevitable collision. Fortunately it was dead and so rotten it fell apart upon impact. When Lincoln became Director of the Station, the headquarters buildings, most of which are still standing, included three houses for families, an office/laboratory, a lodge for visitors, a barn, a tool shop and a garage with Lincoln Ellison 15 second-floor dormitory. The white frame buildings surrounded a central oval full of wild grasses and flowers, bisected by a walk with a stone bench and flagpole in the middle. A greenhouse, which supplemented the office/laboratory, was later converted to living quarters, and several substantial tents were erected on wooden platforms to house members of the Civilian Conservation Corps or visitors. The Station houses were sturdy and pleasant. All had furnaces, electricity, hot and cold running water and wood stoves. None was equipped with a refrigerator: coolers, which connected kitchens with the out-of-doors, provided the only storage for perishables. During much of Lincoln’s time as Director the Station, a cow, kept for milk, cream and butter, provided a succession of adventures. Grocery orders were phoned on the Station’s sole party-line crank telephone in the office down to Ephraim’s one general store. Whoever went down to Ephraim brought groceries, mail and library books up the 15 miles of winding, rutted road. By 1945, when Lincoln took over range research for the Intermountain Region,9 and moved his family to Ogden, there were six Ellisons, three Hansens (children of Paul and Ruth Hansen, with two more to come) and four Plummers (children of Perry and Blanche Plummer, three more to come).10 Many visitors brought their families. Though apparently isolated, the Station seemed—at least to us children—a hive of sociability. Lincoln’s journal entries tell of shared evening activities that brought the Station men and families together in a 9 This new job entailed continuing directorship of the Great Basin Branch Experiment Station until 1947, when Perry Plummer took it over. 10 Paul was general factotum of the Station. Though not himself a scientist, his know-how, energy and resilience made him essential to the scientific work of the Station. His long tenure provided continuity and his sense of humor endeared him to generations of researchers and their families. Perry was a younger scientist, who succeeded Lincoln as Director of the Station. Lincoln Ellison 16 community during the short summers. There were lively games of tennis, horseshoes, checkers, chess and charades; evenings spent singing around fireplace or piano; tall tales and shop talk. One of the men found a fawn orphaned near the Station in the summer of 1939. Liane, then two and a half, and Paul Hansen’s daughter, Nathalie, adopted and hand-raised Billy Deer as a pet. The Station was an extraordinary place to grow up. It was safe and stunningly beautiful and we children could roam and play in the enchanted landscape with minimal supervision. The Ellison, Hansen and Plummer children came up from Ephraim to the Station every summer, late in June after snowdrifts had melted enough to make the roads passable, past the sagebrush of Major’s Flat, where Lincoln planted and later, with Liane’s help, dug up potatoes; across the cattleguard that stood at the entrance to the Manti-LaSalle National Forest; past the yellow rose-spangled Power Ditch with its tin can hanging on a stick for filling up boiling automobile radiators; to the place where scrub oak suddenly gave way to aspen forest, delicious with clean white trunks and shivering leaves; through mixed aspen and conifer forest to the Station, which greeted them with its gateway of thick, graduated whitewashed poles; and then further up, past the frog pond with its tiny emerald frogs; past Bluebell Flat where we children sometimes hiked with picnics and played under the little bridge where we believed the troll that devilled the billy goats gruff lived; past Philadelphia Flat; to the snow-surveyor’s Alpine Cabin a little above timber; and finally to Skyline Drive from which we could see the summer snowdrifts, slopes and pastel valleys in the cold air on both sides. We children developed a large repertoire of imaginative play. We created villages of mud and moss for fairies to live in; invented costume dramas, even Lincoln Ellison 17 operas, directed by and starring Nathalie and Liane, but drawing on the expanding cast of younger children and performed at the CCC-constructed amphitheater. We explored our environs singly or together, hiked, picnicked, observed, read and used our art supplies—crayons, paints, scissors and flour-and- water paste—to good effect. The women of the Station—our mothers and the cook in the Lodge, where single men and visitors stayed—developed a cooperative social life, which allowed the scientists—all of them men at the time—to make systematic observations of the plots on the Wasatch Plateau. These were the quadrats that had provided the historic data Lincoln had been assigned to study as well as continuing observations. The importance of headquarters was that it allowed the scientists to live with their families close to their field work. The social life of the Station created stability and companionship, and may have helped to neutralize the rivalries of strong-minded, opinionated and ambitious scientists. The Station’s children learned the fundamental geography of the world as well as an ethic for living in it. We all learned, for example, the habit of cleaning the house thoroughly before we left it for the year, scrubbing the insides of drawers and cabinets as well as the outsides. The last thing before the key was turned in the lock was mopping up, rinsing the mop at the outside tap, and leaving it wrung out by the back door to dry. We learned respect for government property: our fathers did not allow so much as a pencil or paperclip to leave the office for other than official use, nor did they use government cars for family purposes. The WO (Washington Office) could be frustrating, distant as it was from the realities of research and researchers, but it provided employment and Lincoln Ellison 18 opportunity to men dedicated to understanding and preserving the natural world. Lincoln Ellison 19 III In 1937, Lincoln and co-author E.J. Woolfolk published an article in Ecology examining the effects of a drought in southeastern Montana. This first of Lincoln’s major articles11 concludes, “the likelihood of recurrent droughts and slowness of vegetative recovery are fundamental restrictions to the size of the human population. Failure to recognize them has already resulted in much loss and suffering and the abandonment of great numbers of homes. It seems fairly evident that the population, to be in ecological balance with this environment, should be no greater than can use the ranges lightly enough to permit recovery and accumulate a forage reserve against future droughts.”12 Ecological balance became a theme of Lincoln’s scientific work, an understanding that human beings depend on their habitat, which can only serve them when it is honored and protected. This understanding is far more commonplace now —though still resisted in some quarters—than it was in the first third of the twentieth century. In a compendious article published posthumously, Lincoln speaks of successful range management, which allows for continuing soil formation, compared to unsuccessful management, which sets “destructive processes in motion by which soil built over thousands of years can be wiped out in a few decades.” His published work provides increasing insistence that ecological balance can slow if not prevent irreplaceable soil loss, and that such balance springs from an ethical (rather than utilitarian) relationship between human beings and the land.13 11 He had published two fieldnotes on birds in the Condor, 1936. 12 Italics added. 13 Marcus Hall, “Repairing Mountains: Restoration, Ecology, and Wilderness in Twentieth- Century Utah,” Environmental History, VI #4, October 2001, pp. 585-610. Lincoln Ellison 20 Lincoln’s first job as Station Director was to put the various records of previous research in order; his second was getting the Station in shape for a twelve-day seminar on range research for over 50 participants and some wives. The first project led Lincoln to consider methods for recording and analyzing quadrats so as to understand the long-term interactions of grazing, vegetation, soil, rainfall, runoff and animals. This work eventuated in two methods papers. The seminar drew on practical skills as he arranged for housing, cooks, pots and pans, a heavy-duty washing machine, enough showers, created a picnic area and tried to keep the Station’s cow from roaming. Throughout his tenure as Director of the Station, he combined research with practical activities such as fire proofing and procedures, fixing a broken typewriter and hosting visitors from around the world. As he monitored experimental quadrats, he began to think that even within so small an area there were separate conditions for vegetal regeneration— microclimates, he called them. “The central idea is the existence of two contrasting environments—the immediate neighborhood of groups of plants, protected against the direct contact with sun, wind and the dash of rain, where the soil is filled with roots and receives a continual supply of organic materials; and the other is the space between such groups, open to the elements. Here it is that water runs and soil is first lost. This latter environment is clearly the less hospitable to new plants, in spite of the seeming fact that competition from neighboring plants is least there.” He also observed gopher activity as a source of soil instability. Both observations led to published papers. On the 25th of April, Lincoln, Paul Hansen and possibly Perry Plumber, “dug down thru almost 9 feet of snow & found green and yellow-leaved plants Lincoln Ellison 21 which were currently being grazed by gophers.” In 2002, Durant McArthur, a geneticist and research leader of the Shrub Lab at Brigham Young University, reported to Lincoln’s daughters and sons-in-law at a family reunion held at the former Great Basin Experiment Station, that when Lincoln found these green plants under snow, he realized that germination and as much as a third of growth took place under a bank of snow that protected the plants. At about the same time, Lincoln began to think of the history of vegetation. “It occurred to me with peculiar vividness that I should not look at a forest, a brushfield, a grassy slope, as something permanent, but as something which is probably a change from an earlier growth form. I should always ask: What sort of a stand was here before this generation? thus I should think in steps of 100 years or so ….” Publications resulted from nearly all of Lincoln’s research. For many years he spent an inordinate amount of time working with co-author Russell Croft on a handbook for range managers, Indicators of Condition and Trend on High Range- Watersheds of the Intermountain Region. Published by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, it was an endless source of drafts, criticism and revision and frustration: working with a co-author wasn’t easy, nor was trying to articulate and illustrate in plain, simple, easily understood ways the intricate and complicated conditions that range managers must track. Several more specialized versions of this research were published in The Journal of Forestry under Lincoln’s name alone. Lincoln’s PhD dissertation, Subalpine Vegetation of the Wasatch Platueau, Utah, published in 1954 as #24 by Ecological Monographs is, according to Wendall Keck, in his history of the Station, a summary of ecological information about the Lincoln Ellison 22 Wasatch Plateau, using “data from some of the meter-square quadrats established by [the first Director of the Station] Sampson and charted at intervals since then; old photographs, range survey records, and data gleaned from many of his own studies provided additional useful information. To understand this vegetation, it was necessary to work out salient characteristics of soil development and primary succession….”14 A list of Lincoln’s publications [Appendix A] from 1937 to 1951 shows research focused on various factors having to do with rangeland in the intermountain west. In 1952 and 1954, he published articles that applied his ecological approach to other areas; the eastern part of New South Wales and southern Queensland in Australia. The first had to do with soil erosion of pasturelands; the second with the movement of the soil mantle in the wake of forest clearing. These articles came from a year (1951—52) spent in Australia on a Fulbright Fellowship working with Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, the Australian equivalent of the Forest Service. The recognition represented by the award of the Fulbright Fellowship and the Australian experience was a stimulant, a signifier of recognition to Lincoln, which suggested to him a broader application of his interests and talents. He was a natural teacher and as Director of the Station had worked with many field assistants, who were apprentice scientists. One of his colleagues, Jim Blaisdell, recalled that he was “a conscientious supervisor, and patient teacher. I remember his keeping a group of us out in a downpour on the Great Basin 14 Great Basin Station, p. 28. Lincoln Ellison 23 Experimental Range so that we could observe the mechanics of runoff and erosion.”15 It is clear from his journals that he spent considerable time and effort working with researchers on editing manuscripts. Blaisdell recalls “his thorough review of manuscripts and the many times he would pause and reach for his thesaurus so that we could discuss the precise usage of keywords.” Lincoln also served on the editorial board of Ecological Monographs. In 1955 Lincoln was approached by the University of Michigan and urged to apply for a faculty position, which he did, envisioning a life devoted to research about which he could teach and write. He interviewed for the job in January 1956, liked what he found at the Ann Arbor campus, and was bitterly disappointed when another ecologist was offered the job. The reason he was given was that the successful applicant was ten years younger: Lincoln was then 47. Among Lincoln’s private papers16, I found a memorandum dated August 25, 1956 to Reed W. Bailey, Director of the Intermountain Forest and Range Experiment Station in Ogden. In it, Lincoln followed up a verbal request (mentioned in his journals) to be assigned to “the job of ecological specialist and be relieved of the duties of division chief.” His journals record how profoundly he wanted this change of position. He felt that Bailey, although supportive in conversation, did not sufficiently exert himself in representing the desirability of the change to his superiors in Washington, DC. Lincoln pursued this idea with a 15 “I Remember,” Society for Range Management Utah Section Newsletter, 1990. 16 Lincoln kept extensive scientific notes and journals, in addition to those he considered his private journal. I last saw them in boxes in the office at the Great Basin Experiment Station and stupidly—having absorbed his firm conviction that we must never take or use government property for private purposes—left them where they were. I have been unable to locate them. Lincoln Ellison 24 number of Forest Service men before it was firmly rejected in 1957. This was a major disappointment and, coming hard on the heels of not getting the University of Michigan job, was felt as a rejection not only of him but of what he had to offer the world. In 1955, Lincoln became President of the Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. His inaugural address, “Our Weight in the Balance of Nature,” is his most eloquent synthesis of his scientific work in terms non-scientists could understand. “Our lives are tied to the land in many intimate ways—not just the land that our homes occupy, nor that our fences surround, but the land in all directions, and particularly the slopes that lie above us. These ties are not only economic, in relation to the productivity of the land, not only esthetic, in relation to its beauty, but they include an ethical element in a relation between our use of the land and the balance of nature….Survival rests not only on sound management: sound management itself rests on moral values. If we ignore or despise our environment, it will destroy us. If we reverently strive to understand our environment and our place in it, if we develop an attitude of respect and love for it, we have laid the ground- work for survival.” In 1958, while he was enjoying a winter’s day of cross-country skiing with three other men near Snow Basin, above Ogden, Lincoln was killed in an avalanche at the age of 50. Durant McArthur told me of the local legend that a red-tailed hawk is often seen around Elk Knoll, where Lincoln’s ashes were scattered and a small bronze plaque affixed to a rock. Those who knew him—a decreasing number— say that the hawk is an incarnation of Linc. Lincoln Ellison 25 Appendix A Lincoln Ellison’s Publications 1937—with E.J. Woolfolk, “Effects of Drought on Vegetation near Miles City, Montana,” Ecology, XVIII, # 3, pp. 329-336. 1942—“A Comparison of Methods of Quadratting Shortgrass Vegetation,” Journal of Agricultural Research, LXIV, #10, pp. 595-614, illustrated. 1942—“Overlays as a Visual Aid in Analysis of Permanent Quadrat Records,” Ecology, XXIII, #4, pp. 482-484. 1942—“Trends of Forest Recreation in the United States,” Journal of Forestry, XL, #8, pp. 630-638. 1943—“A Natural Seedling of Western Aspen,” Journal of Forestry, XLI, #10, pp. 767-768, illustrated. 1943—“What Is Range Improvement?” Ames Forester, XXXI, pp. 15-22. 1944—“Principles and Indicators for Judging Condition and Trend on High Range-Watersheds,” Research Paper, No. 6, 66 pages, illustrated. Ellison’s notes add “processed.” This is probably the 1949 publication in the Journal of Forestry. Or see 1951 publication with Croft and Bailey. 1946—“How a Subject-Matter Division in Range Can Serve Land Management,” Journal of Forestry, XLIV, #11, pp. 929-931. 1946—“The Pocket Gopher in Relation to Soil Erosion on Mountain Range,” Ecology, XXVII, #2, pp. 101.114. 1947—“High On the Mountain Top, Where the Wealth of the State Begins,” Utah Farmer, LXVI, #11, p. 18. 1947—“Mountain Range-Watersheds,” Utah Farmer, LXVI, #13, p. 11. 1947—“Report of Meeting, Division of Range Management,” in Proceedings of the Society of American Foresters, p. 249. 1948—“Bettering Management of Utah’s Range Lands,” Utah, X, #9, pp. 8-13, 25- 27, illustrated. 1948—Campbell, R.S., Lincoln Ellison, and F.G. Renner, “Management That Restores the Range,” U.S. Department of Agriculture Yearbook of Agriculture, 1948, pp. 221-226. 1949—“The Ecological Basis for Judging Condition and Trend on Mountain Range Land,” Journal of Forestry, XLVII, #10, pp. 787-79. Lincoln Ellison 26 1949—“The Establishment of Vegetation on Depleted Subalpine Range As Influenced by Microenvironment,” Ecological Monographs, XIX, #2, pp. 95- 121, illustrated. 1950—Lull, Howard W. and Lincoln Ellison, “Precipitation in Relation to Altitude in Central Utah,” Ecology, XXXI, #3, pp. 479-484. 1951—with A.R. Croft and Reed W. Bailey, “Indicators of Condition and Trend on High Range-Watersheds of the Intermountain Region,” U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agriculture Handbook # 19, 66 pages, illustrated. 1952—“Observations on Ecological Research Relating to Soil Erosion of Pasturelands in Eastern New South Wales,” Journal of the Australian Institute of Agricultural Science, XVIII, #9, pp. 147-151 1952—with C.M. Aldous, “Influence of Pocket Gophers on Vegetation of Subalpine Grassland in Central Utah,” Ecology, XXXIII, #2, pp. 177-186. 1954—“Subalpine Vegetation of the Wasatch Plateau, Utah,” Ecological Monographs, XXIV, #2, pp. 89-184, illustrated. 1954—“Soil Mantle Movement in Relation to Forest Clearing in Southeastern Queensland,” Ecology, XXXV, #3, pp. 380-388. 1955—“Our Weight in the Balance of Nature,” Utah Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters Proceedings, XXXII, pp. 11-25. 1956—“Grazing Standards in Range Management,” New Zealand Grassland Association Proceedings of the Eighteenth Conference held at Canterbury Agricultural College, Lincoln, NZ, November 27—November 29, pp. 136- 146. 1957—“Applications of Ecology—Concluding Statement,” from a symposium on the applications of ecology, Ecology, XXXVIII, pp. 63-64. 1957—“Grazing Standards in Range Management,” New Zealand Grassland Association Proceedings, 18th conference, November 27-29, 1956, pp. 136- 147. 1957—with C.H. Wasser and R.E. Wagner, “Soil Management on Ranges,” U.S. Government Printing Office. 1957—Transcript of panel discussion of the place and functions of the division of range management in the Society of American Foresters: historical sketch. Journal of Forestry, pp. 312-313. Lincoln Ellison 27 1957—Wasser, C.H., Lincoln Ellison, and R.E. Wagner, “Soil Management on Ranges,” U.S. Department of Agriculture Yearbook: Agriculture, 1957, pp. 633-642. 1958—with Walter R. Houston, “Production of Herbaceous Vegetation in Openings and Under Canopies of Western Aspen,” Ecology, XXXIX, pp. 337-345, illustrated. 1959—“Role of Plant Succession in Range Management,” American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1956. Symposium on grasslands, Publication #53, pp. 307-321. 1960—“Influence of Grazing on Plant Succession of Rangelands,” Botanical Review, XXVI, pp. 1-78. 1960—Croft, A. Russell, and Lincoln Ellison, “Watershed and Range Conditions on Big Game Ridge and Vicinity, Teton National Forest, Wyoming,” U.S. Forest Service, 37+ pages, illustrated. 1978—“Condition of Livestock in Relation to Range Condition,” Rangeman’s Journal, V #1, February 1978, p. 10. This short article was written in February 1958 but was not published until 1978. Lincoln Ellison 28 Appendix B Byproducts of Research (Introduction to Annual Report of the Intermountain Forest and Range Experiment Station, 1940, apparently written by Lincoln Ellison)17 “I assert that the encouragement of scientific investigation and the spread of scientific knowledge by largely inculcating scientific habits of mind will lead to more efficient citizenship and so to increased social stability.”— Karl Pearson The avowed function of science is the discovery and classification of facts and the recognition of their significance, but science also contributes accomplishments which never appear on project status sheets or in publications of results. Some of the byproducts are merely incidental to the daily effort of research. Others are manifested in social responses which are far beyond the intended scope of a given project or program but which, nevertheless, are synthesized from seemingly unrelated findings of specific studies into important action programs. Research at the Intermountain Forest and Range Experiment Station is directed primarily toward the discovery and classification of facts concerning the water, timber, and forage resources of the Intermountain Region. The aim of its program is to develop methods of improving deteriorated resources and of utilizing resources, once restored, in ways that will enhance rather than lessen their value. Important progress in factual research has been made by this Station during the past 30 years, the most recent of which are described in the divisional statements in this report. But through the years the Station has also contributed important byproducts of research which, because of their far-reaching implications, merit a place as preface to the statements on specific projects. Traditionally, the research man is the one member of society who shrinks from contact with the outside world so as to devote himself more fully to his investigations; but the practical reality of the present day makes such contacts unavoidable. The research man is too useful a member of society, too greatly in demand, to be left unmolested in his cubicle. He finds himself with a double responsibility which works a mutual benefit, for in meeting and talking with people, making known the results of his researches, he broadens his own understanding by coming to appreciate their points of view. And so he converses informally in the field, along the roadside, in town or city, with townsmen, farmers, loggers, and stockmen; he conducts tours of inspection over range study 17 This long introduction to the 1940 Annual Report for the Intermountain Region, represents Lincoln’s thinking through the subject of a scientist’s research and related public policy. I’m fairly sure it had the personal goal of finding an articulation for the themes announced at the beginning of this essay. It probably also had the goal of giving the Washington Office a rationale for Congress to maintain and increase funds for range research, particularly at a time when America’s entry into World War II was increasingly likely. Lincoln Ellison 29 plots, forest nurseries, and mountain watersheds; he appears on the lecture platform of churches, schools, scientific societies, and service clubs. In these various associations wildland administrators, resource users, and the general public have come to respect the judgment of the research man and to assimilate some of the concepts developed by his investigations. Through the years the number of established facts have been multiplied. Today, basic principles and concepts are not only more clearly defined but some have grown into the public consciousness and are now integrated into the social philosophy and culture of the region. As a specific example, let us consider the progress in public understanding of the influence of plant life upon a mountain watershed. Many experiments and countless observations in all parts of the world have shown that the crowns of plants, woody or herbaceous, lessen the impact of storms upon the soil, and that the stems and litter at the ground surface and the root systems within the soil encourage rainfall to sink in rather than to wash over the surface and to hold and build up the soil rather than permit erosion. Conversely, time and again it has been found that the stripping of vegetation on steep slopes by fire, cultivation, or trampling and overgrazing have been responsible for catastrophic mountain floods. There is growing public interest and sharpened consciousness on the part of wildland managers in this region in the relationship between loss of plants and soil mantle and accelerated erosion and destructive floods. The efforts of research are back of this interest to an important extent. To illustrate, the pioneer experiments at the Great Basin Branch Station have contributed much not only in facts but in the education and understanding of a large number of people who, over a period of years, have visited the watersheds upon which the experiments were being conducted. The enlightenment of the general public through these visits probably has been a more far-reaching influence than the result of the studies as issued in strictly scientific publications. Knowledge of the important relationships between the vegetation, the soil mantle of the watershed and the stream regimen has spread beyond the realm of scientific arcana, beyond the technical stock in trade of the land manager, into the public consciousness. True, its appreciation has not yet attained anything like full stature, but the vigor of its growth bespeaks abundant health and makes a contrast to the public indifference of a few decades ago. Today, in the Intermountain region there is a mounting demand that wild lands be managed for the best interests of the public at large. The public is demanding that important watersheds be brought under control, which has resulted in a program of watershed acquisition by communities, counties, and the Federal government for the purpose of insuring application of the best management practices. Another type of research contribution, which is little appreciated by the man on the street, is the synthesis of known facts, it may be from the most unrelated sources and in the most chaotic disarrangement, into a meaningful whole. Lincoln Ellison 30 Such a synthesis is illustrated by this Station’s work on the problem of floods which, until a few years ago, periodically had been causing great damage to the communities at the base of the Wasatch Range. Careful observation on the ground, together with gleanings from such diverse sciences as geology, plant ecology, and hydrology, provided a fund of data from which the final synthesis was made. Piece by piece the bits of evidence were fitted together into a reasonable explanation of the cause of the floods and a practical action program to solve the problem. The achievement was the more notable because, as has so frequently been the case in scientific advance, first it was necessary to overcome a formidable mass of prejudices and fixed opinions hallowed by supposedly scientific authority which regarded the floods as normal phenomena, as nature and as much a part of the common citizen’s everyday experience as the familiar outline of the mountains themselves. But, divorced from preconceptions, the evidence showed the floods to be clearly abnormal, originating on small areas of watershed which had been stripped of vegetation, and further showed that effective control depended, not upon dikes and spillways at the foot of the mountains, but upon the reestablishment of the ability of the soil of these same high, barren areas to absorb moisture readily. Building additional facts upon this foundation, a practical system of cultural treatment was devised and methods were worked out whereby a protective stand of vegetation could be established. The dramatic success of this program, affecting as it did the most populous portion of Utah, provided a most effective stimulus to the awakening public appreciation of the relationships between plants, soils, and mountain waters. For one reason or another, man has been inclined to regard his influence upon the physical world as ephemeral and of slight consequence, his marks upon the surface of the earth but fleeting. The limited experience of the individual has told him so repeatedly what the world is like that he comes to regard its appearance as something inevitable and unchangeable. It is easy for him to imagine that a weed-grown range has always been a wasteland, or a bare mountainside always devoid of trees—if only they have been barren long enough. It is easier to imagine a desert to have been a desert since Creation day than to imagine that it may be a desert because of man. It is easier, when floods come down from the mountains, to assume floods an inevitable part of man’s lot since the days of Noah, rather than to ascribe a more immediate cause. Surely such vast consequences, consequences of such remote and awful origin, cannot be the fault of men—they must be acts of God! As scientific knowledge increases, the consciousness is borne upon man that his influence on this world, far from being insignificant, is vast indeed, and that when he has fallen on evil days it has been largely his own doing. But within this consciousness there is room for more than self-condemnation and penitence: a reasonable hope for the future also finds encouragement. If man has brought himself on evil days, why cannot he bring himself on better days? If he can hurt himself on a vast scale, surely he can help himself on a vast scale also! We are beginning to realize as a people, that we can help ourselves, and we have some facts and proofs already to go on. We are conscious that quantity is not the sole criterion of good husbandry: an acre of land has meaning only when Lincoln Ellison 31 we know its quality, which we have learned to judge by what grows on it; and the number of livestock a man runs has meaning only when we know their condition and the conditions of his range. We are conscious of the necessity for vegetal cover if the soil is to be productive, and we are conscious of the necessity for good soil if we would have vegetation. We are conscious of the practicability of the artificial planting of denuded lands and of cultural repair of eroded slopes—means of rehabilitation which, not many years ago, were scoffed at as visionary. Above all, we are aware of the need for the restoration and repair of our natural resources, and this consciousness, like the others, is growing every day. These elements of consciousness are already merging into a positive philosophy of accomplishment based on a conviction that we can wittingly alter our environment for good as in the past we have unwittingly altered it for ill. The roots of this philosophy reach back into the facts and the relationships between facts that research has disclosed. These facts and these relationships are thus the soil from which philosophy grows, and such philosophy is therefore to be reckoned, in some measure, among the accomplishments of research—the seldom-evaluated accomplishments of research which become integrated with people’s lives in ways that may make them more imposing than the sum of all the facts they spring from. Lincoln Ellison 32 Appendix C Award for Distinguished Service from the Utah Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters 5/2/58 In recognizing Dr. Lincoln Ellison, past President of the Utah Academy, with this Distinguished Service Award, the organization honors itself as truly as it does the recipient. It is hardly necessary to remind members of the Academy that Dr. Ellison achieved well-merited international reputation as scholar and scientist; that the list of his publications in ecology, conservation, and related subjects is impressive; or that his services as professional consultant and reviewer were in wide and constant demand. His appointment as Fulbright Research Fellow to Australia in 191-52 and as delegate to the Seventh International Grassland Congress in New Zealand in 1956 attest forcefully to the truly substantial character of his professional reputation. Too frequently the research scientist is pictured as a highly educated hermit who works aloof and alone in his laboratory or on his experimental place. This picture is entirely inappropriate for Lincoln Ellison because he gave inspiring and energetic leadership not only to his intimate colleagues in the Forest Service but to a wide group of dedicated associates in other scientific organizations. As chairman of the Intermountain Section of the Society of American Foresters, chairman of the Western Section of the Ecological Society of America, as past president of this Academy and first chairman of the Junior Academy Division of this organization, and on the editorial board of Ecological Monographs, he devoted himself unstintingly to the enlargement and improvement of their important work. This list of activities in which Dr. Ellison proved himself a leader is suggestive rather than inclusive. It would be futile to attempt here to list the research projects that Dr. Ellison projected, initiated, or completed during three decades of work with the U.S. Forest Service. It is more to the point to note two of his conspicuous achievements. In research, his outstanding contribution was in the realm of ecology, particularly his study of the ecology of subalpine rangelands and his concepts of plant-soil relations on mountain range and watersheds. He firmly believed in the necessity of an ethical as well as a scientific basis for conservation—a philosophy that he stated eloquently in his presidential address to this group in 1955. The importance of his studies and publications in plant ecology, as they related to special phases of the economy of Utah and neighboring states, cannot possibly be overestimated. A second outstanding contribution was his quiet but dynamic leadership in training professional men in analyzing range conditions and trend and in supervising range research through the Intermountain region. I should be seriously remiss here if I omitted mention of his high qualities as a man among men: the integrity of his character, the clarity of his vision, the Lincoln Ellison 33 creativeness of his spirit. In many special ways, he exemplified the Renaissance high ideal of “the scholar and gentleman”; the man of learning and of culture; the man with scientific objectivity mellowed by warm, friendly understanding. All of us who enjoyed the rare privilege of knowing Linc either professionally or personally have repeated to ourselves, in substance at least, the classic tribute by Alexander Pope: “Thou wert my guide, philosopher, and friend.” Lincoln Ellison 34 Appendix D “Resolution of Respect” Lincoln Ellison 1908—1958 His many friends and associates were shocked by the sudden, tragic death of Dr. Lincoln Ellison, Chief of the Division of Range Management Research, Intermountain Forest and Range Experiment Station, Ogden, Utah. “Linc” was caught in an avalanche on March 9 while ski-touring on Mt. Ogden about one and a half miles from Snow Basin in the Wasatch Range. Dr. Ellison’s early years with the Forest Service were chiefly in Region One, Montana and Idaho, where he began his career in 1927. He directed research activities at the Great Basin Research Center, Ephraim, Utah, from 1938 until 1945, when he came to Ogden to take charge of range management research. High among the many honors awarded him scholastically and professionally was a Fulbright Research Fellowship to Australia where he was affiliated in 1951 and 1952 with the Commonwealth Scientific Industrial Research Organization. He was a delegate to the Seventh International Grassland Congress at Palmerston North, New Zealand, in 1956. He was a prominent member of the Society of Sigma Xi. In recognition of his leadership and professional attainment he served as chairman of the intermountain Section of the Society of American Foresters, chairman of the Western Section of the Ecological Society of America, member of the editorial board of Ecological Monographs, president of the Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters, and member of the Awards Committee of the Utah Section and member of the national Program Committee of the American Society of Range Management. Recently he was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and currently was a member of the Council of the Ecological Society of America and chairman of the Junior Academy Division of the Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. His writings and speeches in the professional fields of plant ecology and related subjects have been widely published and acclaimed. Reed W. Bailey Ogden, Utah March 17, 1958 |
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