THE PUBLIC WAS
RAILROADED
Railroads and
Clearcuts: Legacy of Congress’s 1864
Northern
Pacific Land Grant
Derrick
Johnson and George Draffan with John Osborn. Inland Empire Public
Lands Council, Box 2147, Spokane, WA 99210, 1995, $15. 198 pages,
paper.
Review by Ken
Olsen
The Northern Pacific
Railroad snookered us out of ground it wasn’t entitled to, fostered
timber barons instead of helping homesteaders and left the Pacific
Northwest with a seemingly unsolvable timber crisis 130 years
later.
This in return for a gift of 40 million
acres, the largest land grant in U.S. history. The checkerboard
2,000 miles long and 120 miles wide stretches from Lake Superior to
the Puget Sound. The land grant was intended to finance a rail line
that would open the Northwest to settlement. Largely it was a
disaster.
So charges the new book, Railroads and
Clearcuts, a daring salvo from physician John Osborn and writers
Derrick Jensen and George Draffan, all of Spokane,
Wash.
They say the men behind the Northern
Pacific – today part of the Burlington Northern Railroad –
repeatedly violated the terms of the land-grant legislation
President Abraham Lincoln signed. They didn’t meet congressional
deadlines for building the railroad, failed to sell the land after
going bankrupt the first time, as the law required, and
illegitimately claimed millions of acres of Indian reservation
land.
Most egregious in the authors’ view, the
land barons sold a huge chunk of the original land grant to
Frederick Weyerhaeuser. This gave rise to the most powerful timber
companies in the Northwest – Weyerhaeuser, Potlatch and Boise
Cascade – which have common founders and still share some corporate
directors. Along with Burlington Northern’s logging spinoff, Plum
Creek Timber Co., these corporations have created the current
timber shortage in the Northwest, the authors charge, and now that
the corporations have exhausted their supplies, they are putting
extraordinary pressure on the national
forests.
Railroads and Clearcuts boils complex
history into easily digestible prose. There are copious footnotes,
startling photographs of clearcuts, and a bibliography to make an
academician proud.
The book seems aimed at
readers with little knowledge of forestry issues and though that
tone will please the novice, it will leave the seasoned
environmentalist wanting more. References provide clear direction
to additional information, but the writers should have pulled more
of the meat out of the footnotes and into the
text.
Railroads and Clearcuts is still an
intriguing read and poses an innovative solution to forest
problems. Congress, the book says, still has the authority to
review the land grant and it could force the companies to
compensate the American public or even take back the land. There is
historic precedent: In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge started an
investigation, saying “the defaults of the Northern Pacific were
numerous and flagrant.” The company forfeited 2.9 million acres and
paid a $300,000 fine.
This book couldn’t come at
a better time, as Congress seems determined to repeat the Northern
Pacific land-grant largess by giving away more than 4 billion
board-feet of public timber under the guise of salvage logging.
Railroads and Clearcuts is photo album and script of what we seem
doomed to repeat. n
Ken Olsen
reports from Pullman, Washington.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline The public was railroaded.
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