Newton Bishop Drury Oral History Interview, Part IV-VI

Notice
This is a transcript of a tape-recorded interview donated to the Harry S. Truman Library. The reader should remember that this is essentially a transcript of the spoken, rather than the written word, although some editing was done.

Numbers appearing in square brackets (ex. [45]) within the transcript indicate the pagination in the original, hardcopy version of the oral history interview.

RESTRICTIONS
All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between the Regents of the University of California and Newton B. Drury, dated October 18, 1972. The manuscript is thereby made available for research purposes. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The Bancroft Library of the University of California at Berkeley. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the Director of The Bancroft Library of the University of California at Berkeley.

Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the Regional Oral History Office, 486 Library, and should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user.The legal agreement with Newton B. Drury requires that he be notified of the request and allowed thirty days in which to respond.

Opened 1972
Harry S. Truman Library
Independence, Missouri

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PART IV

ADDENDUM

June 3, 1963

THE 1960’s: THE YEARS OF (UN) RETIREMENT  

THE 1960s: THE YEARS OF (UN) RETIREMENT
(Recorded June 6, 1963)

First World Conference on National Parks

FRY: Mr. Drury, would you like to tell us something about the First World Congress on National Parks that took place in Seattle last year? [1962]

DRURY: In the few minutes that I have I'm afraid I can't do justice to it because it covered many nations and many topics. I might say that it was quite an interesting and inspiring meeting. It was held primarily under the auspices of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, whose headquarters I had the opportunity to visit shortly after the Seattle session near Lausanne in Switzerland.

FRY: This was co-sponsored by UNESCO and FAO? United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization and Food and Agricultural Organization.)

DRURY: Yes, under their general sponsorship, and the National Park Service, and the spadework was done rather largely by the Conservation Associates, Inc., of which George Collins is the president and Mrs. Doris N. Leonard is the secretary. Mr. Collins was secretary-general of the conference and organized it admirably. Mrs. Leonard as his assistant did a great deal of the detail work which was most extensive.

I had the honor of presiding at one session, the session on Tuesday, July 3rd, 1962. The general topic was that of national parks and equivalent reserves, particularly with respect to their scientific, economic and cultural values.

FRY: Good, I wanted to ask you about that. Please go ahead and explain.

[537]

DRURY: Well my outstanding experience there, aside from the interest of the diversified panelists, was that for the first time in my public speaking career I found it necessary to wear my glasses when reading my notes. [Chuckles] The auditorium was dark and there were so many foreign names that required very close scrutiny before they were pronounced that I finally succumbed and put my glasses on.

FRY: I'd like to insert here that in addition to the section you were leading, Section Two, there were four other sections. One was "Purposes, Principles and Policies of National Parks;" another was "Optimum Use of National Parks;" another one was "Administration of National Parks;" and the final one was "International Coordination of Parks." So we can see which slice of the pie you had, then, in discussing the scientific, economic, and cultural values. The article in American Forests (Richard H. Pough, "The First World Congress on National Parks," American Forests.  August 1962, pp. 36-40.) brought out that the main concern became economic values. Did you think this was true?

DRURY: That unquestionably was true, and the interesting part of it was that the representatives from these many countries, all of whom were just as idealistic as we tried to be, also shared our frustration because of the constant inroads of commercial pressures on natural areas. The note that ran through the conference was one of hopefulness that something could be done to hold some of the face of nature free from the impact of modern economic activity, and if there was one theme more than any other that was dominant, it was the question of the management of wildlife. It seemed to me that on

[538]

DRURY: that phase, particularly with respect to the representatives from Africa, there was quite a pronounced difference of point of view. The concept of wild animals as food supply, which is related to the population explosion and the fact that a large percentage of the people of the world are undernourished, led to some rather interesting and heated debate as to the extent to which wild animals could or should be protected.

It's the same problem that has always come up, but it hasn’t been an issue in this country as yet because of our abundant resources. I can remember many years ago the Inter-American Conference on National Parks and Reservations at which I spoke in Denver, Colorado, in the late forties. One of the representatives from Peru, I think it was, asked what you would do if you had to choose between preserving an area's superlative scenery and natural resources intact and seeing people in the surrounding country starving to death for lack of consumption of those resources. All I could say was that I approached the answer to that question with great humility because I was fortunate to be in a country where we still weren't faced with that problem and had a great deal of wild land which for many generations at least we hoped we could preserve, and we hoped we would never have to face that alternative.

FRY: Did they mention any trend toward developing domesticated animal production in these countries?

DRURY: This was just a sort of a side issue that emerged every now and then. No, there was not much talk about the culture of domestic animals, and that wasn't the primary theme, of course.

One of the pleasures of this conference was that a great many of my old colleagues in the National Park Service were there--for instance, Horace Albright,

[539]

DRURY: Lawrence C. Merriam, and Dr. George Ruhle, who was particularly effective, I thought. He was for many years a naturalist in the national parks, and now represents the Service in international affairs. And Victor Cahalane, who was our head man on wildlife, and of course Director Conrad Wirth of the National Park Service. The Sierra Club bulletin had a good summary of the session at which I presided.

FRY: I was wondering if you had anything to tell us about what went on in the halls and hotel rooms outside the regular conference sessions in Seattle?

DRURY: Well, I think, as is always true in the case of conventions, those sessions were more valuable than the formal sessions.

One thing that struck me about everybody at that conference was the faithfulness with which they attended the general sessions. Apparently all of those representatives, and they were highly trained and highly literate individuals, many of them scientists, were there for the purpose of trying to get some basic concepts. I thought that the representatives of the National Park Service did themselves proud in more or less leading the discussion; particularly I think Dr. Ruhle, who is now on the staff of the National Park Service in charge of international affairs, made several very telling statements. Mr. Wirth made a fine opening statement. Probably, the dominating figure was Dr. Jean Baer, a very eminent scientist in Switzerland; he's so eminent and his subject is so abstruse that even the secretary of the International Union couldn't define exactly what it was he was an expert upon. He has to do with entymology, and is among the very select few in scientific circles in the world who is very well known. He is a splendid man and most cordial. One of the things we arranged was to set up

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DRURY: an exhibit on the California redwoods in the headquarters of the International Union, and also to send a representative from the League to their next conference. It's to be in Africa somewhere.

FRY: Was there any serious discussion of foreign aid for parks in the less affluent nations?

DRURY: Yes, there was quite a little discussion and Carl Gustafson, who's on the staff of the Rockefeller group, and Horace Albright had several discussions regarding projects in Africa and elsewhere, in which the Rockefellers were interested. I think that's one reason many of these representatives were there and were so faithful in their attendance; they represented their governments, and I believe they were thinking in terms of the possibility of aid to some of their conservation projects--some of which aid has materialized.

FRY: I guess a lot of this happened outside the conference rooms, too.

DRURY: Yes.

Trip Abroad

DRURY: One of the interesting offshoots of this international session was that following it the directors of the Save-the-Redwoods League, who had been given a special fund for the purpose, asked me to go abroad for a few weeks and compare notes with some of the leading conservationists in countries like England, Switzerland, Germany, France, and, just in passing, Spain. That was an extremely interesting experience for me, and for a fellow who isn't particularly seeking any more education I got a great deal. [Laughter] Having met so many of these people at the Seattle conference I found it quite an effective entree.

[541]

DRURY: The main impression I gained in these various countries from conferring with these conservation leaders, like the head of the National Trust and Nature Conservancy of England, and of course Dr. Jean G. Baer, who is the president of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature in Switzerland, was that from the standpoint of preservation of the natural scene those countries were in a way ahead of us, because, paradoxically enough, in economic development they
are somewhat behind. In the north of England I visited a very interesting station of the Nature Conservancy, in Westmorland County, a place called Grange-over-Sands--that's a good British name, isn't it? It was on the coast, very picturesque country, -- utterly unspoiled--no ugly intrusions into the landscape. Most of the structures and the little villages were built of native stone, and at this station, which is primarily a scientific research station but is supported by the government, they were conducting experiments in the regeneration of the ancient oak and other forests that at one time flourished in that country. Grange-over-Sands is called a wilderness area, but there's no such thing as virgin territory, of course, in any of those European countries. They've been beaten over for centuries. But some of them have reverted to natural type, and that was true of this area in Westmorland.

While I was there I got quite a little insight into their point of view. The head of the planning organization of that agency, Nature Conservancy, took a very definite position as to the effectiveness of their zoning regulations. All of that country, the Lake District, is called the Lake District National Park, but it's quite

[542]

DRURY: different from our national parks in that the government owns only a very small segment of it. It owns this station at Grange-over-Sands but most of the land is privately owned, subject to very strict zoning, which accomplishes almost the same purpose as our restrictive laws. Apparently they have much more persuasive effect and also legal effect on people, as to what they can and can't do in modifying the native landscape. I have a great body of material that I hope to summarize some time dealing particularly with that part of England just south of the Scottish border. I took about four hundred Kodachrome pictures on this trip, of which about three hundred were pretty good. I took quite a few of the Lake Country. These are views of Lake Windemere--all that country has been developed extensively and is not in the same category at all with our wild national parks like Yosemite and Yellowstone and so forth.

FRY: If there is no virgin territory left, what forms the natural character of the preserves?

DRURY: Of course the natural regrowth was in many ways scenically satisfying, and it affords scientific research too.

One of the high spots was a visit to Freudenstadt and that section of the Black Forest of Germany; I spent considerable time with Herr Kurtz, the Oberforstrat, who spoke just about as much English as I spoke German. [Laughter] I had studied German extensively fifty years before, and about the time I left Germany it began to come back. But we got along pretty well. Of course, their forests are all utilized on a sustained-yield basis; there isn't any virgin forest to speak of. He took me to two areas that were supposed to be virgin territory. One of them was the Grosse Tanne near Freudenstadt, which was Abies pectinata--a giant fir. Some of their trees were eight and ten feet in diameter. However,

[543]

DRURY: they had been marked to be harvested as overripe. Those trees were to some extent comparable to our redwoods.

The other area in Germany that interested me a great deal was what they called a national park, the Wildsee area. One of the grotesque aspects of this trip into the wilderness was the fact that as we rounded a corner here were the remains of some former picnic--tin cans and so on. [Laughter] So I said jokingly to this Oberforstrat, "Ach, ein National Park." The first familiar sight.

Then when we got all through and were saying our good-byes, the only thing I could think of in German to say about the whole business was to wave my hand and I said, "Alles sehr regelmassig." All very tidy and orderly.

FRY: Do they manage to keep theirs more orderly than we do?

DRURY: Oh yes; European countries are much tidier than we are. They work harder at it. The Germans use every twig--even the small branches of the trees you could see bundled up and stacked along the road. A tremendous orderliness.

FRY: That would chill the marrow of our conservationists, who want dead and down timber to remain undisturbed for compost. Did you see any Sequoias?

DRURY: Yes. One of the things that I found quite interesting, and which became quite a habit with me, was the observation of Sequoias of both California species which have been planted in foreign countries, particularly in Switzerland the Sequoia gigantea; practically everywhere you went you saw some specimens, many of which must have been planted almost a century ago, shortly after the species was discovered. For instance, I have a picture of one at Geneva, south end of the lake, which must be pretty close to ten feet in diameter.

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DRURY: Apparently the Sequoia gigantea thrives everywhere in Europe; I found them in England, Italy--I have a picture of a Sequoia gigantea on the grounds at Fontainebleau, and on the Janiculum Hill overlooking Rome. I took a picture of the Sequoia sempervirens. The curator of the botanical garden at Geneva, Mr. Weibel, took me out--in the rain, of course--and you can see [in the picture] that this Sequoia sempervirens is anything but the thrifty growth that we have in our giant coast redwoods in California. It's true also in England; in the Kew Gardens the Sequoia gigantea is growing in typical pyramidal form. You could spot them in the landscape anywhere you went. The Sequoia sempervirens over there is generally a very spindly tree. Of course, Kew Gardens is one of the great showplaces of the world and, in addition to the Sequoias, the trees there are very interesting.

In France I went out to the Paris Botanical Garden--the Jardin des Plantes. I had met at the Seattle conference a M. Monau, who was a member of the staff of the natural history museum to which the garden is attached, and after some difficulty I found out where they were and went by taxicab to this dimly-lighted and not-very-well heated building. After poking around for a while I finally found a janitress, who of course couldn't speak English, but I managed to make clear that I wanted to see M. Monau. She beckoned me upstairs, so I went upstairs and whenever I met anybody all I could think of to say was, "Ou est M. Monau?" Finally I knocked on a door and a gentleman in a white smock came out; he turned out to be an ichthyologist and he knew many people in America.

I tried this on him: "Ou est M. Monau?" And he blinked and I repeated it, and then he said, "Sir, by

[545]

DRURY: any chance do you speak English?" [Laughter]

He was not a botanist, and M. Monau was in Africa, so I didn't get to see him, but I saw quite a few of his colleagues and they showed me around the botanical garden, which is extremely interesting and which, like the others in Geneva and Germany and everywhere else, had specimens of the Sequoia gigantea and the Sequoia sempervirens. As I say, it became a kind of habit with me looking on the landscape at the silhouette of the trees; I could detect the characteristic form of both the big trees of the Sierra and the coast redwood.

As we went along in the botanical garden we suddenly came across a group of old gentlemen playing piquet, or whatever they do--senior citizens of France--in front of the great cross section of the Sequoia gigantea. Upon it was a tablet saying that this had been presented to the Republic of France by the American Legion of the United States in 1928. I have yet to run down the history of it, but it showed, as we do in our exhibits, the historical events that occurred in the life of this tree, which was nearer fifteen feet in diameter than ten. It was interesting that right alongside this was a laboratory with a sign which proclaimed that the theory of atomic fission was first developed in this laboratory; this is the Scientific Museum in Paris.

Probably scenically the most satisfying place was Switzerland. We stayed at a delightful inn up in the mountains, almost on the Italian border, a station called Il Fuorn--from the fact that they once had lime furnaces there. And along the route leading to Zernez, which is the nearest town, you can see what magnificent scenery they have.

[546]

DRURY: We had another view of the Alps when we were in Germany; we went down to Garmisch-Partenkirchen, and just over the border into Austria. That's marvelously spectacular country. It's like St. Moritz in that it's a great ski center.

Zernez is on the same line as St. Moritz but very few people go there. At a place called Chur you change trains--and we made most of our tours by train, although we hired a car in England--but from Chur you can go to the left to the fashionable resort area of St. Moritz or you can take a bus to the right to the Italian border and go to Zernez. I was glad that we'd had an introduction to these people, because we met several of the scientists who were particularly studying the ecology of the red deer, which is to some extent comparable to our Roosevelt elk, which we have in the Prairie Creek redwoods. This was at the Swiss National Park, centering around Il Fuorn, about thirty miles from Zernez.

FRY: I hope we can have some of these pictures to illustrate the manuscript. How do Europeans treat the protection-versus-public use dilemma?

DRURY: There were certain conclusions that could be drawn particularly about their attitude toward the protection of nature. For instance, in the Swiss National Park, which is the only area designated by that title, the visitor is a secondary consideration. It's quite different from our philosophy in America where we think in terms of millions of visitors. The landscape and the wildlife are given first consideration; the public are regimented considerably, and they tell me that in the summertime, when there are many visitors, if they even step off the trail they're subject to mild penalties that will teach them that they have to observe the regulations. One of these is that they can't wander at will through the wilds, as we do in the United States. I told them that we'd never get away with regimentation

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DRURY: like that in the United States, and I didn't know that we wanted to.

FRY: From the point of view of someone who's supposed to be a purist, did you find that Europe has been able to preserve its wildlands as well as you would want them to?

DRURY: Well, the fact that in many regions there is less economic progress than there is in America tends to preserve the landscape better than we do, and the fact that there is more regimentation in most of those countries makes it possible to protect landscape from the impact of human use. But they don't have the superabundant and rich natural resources that we have to preserve, and I think that all the evidence is that as they are becoming affluent economically and so-called progress is descending upon them, they are doing the same things that we've done--in the way of highway construction, for instance. All through England they're beginning to put in freeways which are just as destructive of the landscape as ours, although in general the British road system is most charming and delightful. They pay more attention to roadside beautification then we have been doing.

Recent Activity of the Save-the-Redwoods League

FRY: Would you like to move on to the accomplishments of the Save-the-Redwoods League?

DRURY: Yes, I think so.

In the Bull Creek watershed we have acquired about two-thirds of the land that we were aiming to purchase in order to carry on erosion control studies. This has been done in the last year; in one year the

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DRURY: Save-the-Redwoods League has raised $900,000 and has spent over a million dollars in buying up these watershed lands. (I'll send one of the bulletins for the record.)(Save-the-Redwoods League, San Francisco, Fall Bulletin, September, 1962.) It represents a very gratifying accomplishment and puts us in a position where we're almost ready to move on to our next big project. We have in sight, with state appropriations which we believe will materialize in this legislature, and with the money the League has raised and the matching funds that Rockefeller interests have pledged, about enough funds to acquire the total of Bull Creek watershed. We are agreeably surprised that we're able to do it in such a short time. It will involve all told about 18,000 acres of land, some of which contains stands of virgin timber and some of which unfortunately has been cut over. But our most recent observations up there assure us that nature, to a considerable extent, is repairing the damage that was done by cutting and fire and subsequent floods, and we're now on a definite program financed with state funds for erosion control, which appears to be very effective.

One of our great problems is to keep the fire out of the area that we've acquired. Practically all of this watershed, except some lands owned by the Pacific Lumber Company on the Ridge, has been acquired. Right now we're moving into negotiations with this company for those lands around the ridge of the Bull Creek basin, and, more importantly, we're moving on to our next big objective, which is the preservation of the so-called Avenue of the Giants, insofar as it's privately owned, north of the present Humboldt Redwoods State Park. There are about six miles of remarkable

[549]

DRURY: stands of redwood--not a very wide area but a very important one--north of Englewood, between Englewood and the town of Stafford, that we're hoping to acquire. Within that is the famous Pepperwood Flat, part of which has been talked of as a memorial to Dag Hamarskjold.

But more important than that, perhaps, from the standpoint of raising funds for preservation is the fact that just two weeks ago the president of the National Geographic Society, Dr. Melville Grosvenor, and the director of National Parks, Conrad Wirth, and a group from their staffs, made a trip with us through the primary projects of the Save-the-Redwoods League. They spent three days on it; they even made a 25-mile boat trip up the Klamath River, which was the first area recommended back in the twenties as a possible redwood national park. A great deal of it has been cut over since then. The National Geographic Society has made a gift of $64,000 to finance a study of the problems of the redwood belt, including ecological and wildlife studies and a certain amount of land planning to supplement what we've done over all these years, to define a reasonable and logical objective as to the further preservation of the redwoods. It was of great interest and value to be able to outline both to the National Park Service and to the National Geographic Society the program that had developed out of the League's observations and experience. It will be interesting to see what they come up with in the way of conclusions and recommendations.

I gave Grosvenor and Wirth photostatic copies of a local newspaper up there which was issued in 1926, in which there was a picture of Stephen Mather, Hubert Work, who was the Secretary of the Interior, and a youngish-looking fellow whom you would never recognize was myself. The eight-column head in the paper said "Secretary Work Favors Redwood National Park."

[550]

DRURY: Since 1926 a good deal has been accomplished, of course, by the state and the Save-the-Redwoods League so that, in my opinion, and I told them so, the core of any redwood national park would have to consist of these state holdings. Because of local opposition to taking lands off the tax roll, and because of other factors, it's going to be very difficult in the immediate future to accomplish anything in the way of a redwood national park, although we've always recognized since the beginning of the League (it was one of our first objectives) that the redwoods are of such stature that they merit national recognition. I think it'll end up with some kind of federal recognition, such as the establishment of perhaps a parkway of special area.

FRY: In raising all this money, have you tried something new recently to get so much so fast?

DRURY: Of course, the Save-the-Redwoods League has been one of these slow-but-sure enterprises; over the last 43 years the League has raised in private contributions between $8 1/2 and 9 million, and the state has approximately matched that amount. We've already put in the record the fact that this total of $18 or 19 million worth of property if purchased at present prices would cost $250 million at least. We still have a program ahead of us that, if it were carried out in the ideal form, would involve $40 or 50 million--but we'll settle for less.

FRY: But this enormous amount that came through in the past year is the result of tried and true donors rising to the occasion?

DRURY: In the past year the American Conservation Association and the Jackson Hole Preserve, both of which are Rockefeller corporations, agreed to match whatever we could raise toward the Bull Creek Watershed project. They

[551]

DRURY: have now given us over half a million dollars in a little more than the past year, and we have raised an equivalent amount to match that. Now we're looking forward to a program on the Avenue of the Giants that will involve several million dollars, and we hope it can be carried out over a period of perhaps ten years with installments, with the state and the Save-the-Redwoods League matching funds, and conceivably, if certain legislation before Congress goes through, a third element coming in in the form of grants in aid from the federal government.

FRY: Well, thank you for coming over for this "addendum" when you are so busy.

DRURY: Thank you very much.

PART V

ADDENDUM

March 17, 1970

FREEWAY THREAT TO PRAIRIE CREEK STATE PARK

BULL CREEK (HUMBOLDT REDWOODS STATE PARK)

RECENT FUND RAISING AND ACQUISITIONS

[552]

FREEWAY THREAT TO PRAIRIE CREEK PARK

SHREPFER: I wanted to ask particularly about the Prairie Creek freeway controversy.

DRURY: As far as we know, we're in very good shape on that. Of course, time has been in our favor. The mode today is to at least talk about preserving the environment (Laughter) and we're very fortunate in the new district engineer up there in Humboldt County, Mr. Hal Larson, who is I think as great a conservationist as any of us. He's a leader in the Boy Scouts and spends a lot of time in the Sierra, and right from the start he showed his sympathy for the point of view of the Save-the-Redwoods League. They have assured us, after a trip we took up there with a member of the highway commission and the chief engineer, Sam Helwer, who used to be up there in Eureka. There's a quite different atmosphere than there was ten years ago, as far as their attitude is concerned.

Then of course, as you know, there has been legislation passed which eliminates the requirement that they take the shortest and cheapest route. We deceive ourselves, but I think that it's assured that the freeway at Prairie Creek will neither widen

[553]

DRURY: the present road, which they wouldn't dare to do, or go down along the coast, Gold Bluffs Beach, but will have a route as yet not completely defined along the east boundary of the park.

SHREPFER: Were there any groups who were opposed to your position of going around the grove?

DRURY: Yes, some of the operating lumber companies because of the somewhat steeper grade and the slightly longer route, and therefore the extra costs entailed in hauling. They were very definitely against it.(Putnam Livermore to editor, San Rafael Independent- Journal, April 25, 1964.)

SHREPFER: Was it the lumber companies or the trucking companies?

DRURY: The lumber companies, most of them, operate their own trucks. That crowd are always in favor of the cheapest and the shortest route of course.

SHREPFER: How about the people who live up in that area?

DRURY: Well, a prophet you know is not without honor save in his own country. There's a nucleus of very what we consider intelligent people up there, the descendants of those who really started the save the redwoods movement. You've met some of them. Mrs. Mahan's family and others. The commercial groups

[554]

DRURY: until recently and the local press have been very hostile to the idea of paying any attention to aesthetics or planning. But there's been a change there too. The main newspaper in Eureka is now owned by Lord Thompson in London, one of a series through the United States, and they take a broader view.

SHREPFER: This actually changes local editorial policy?

DRURY: Oh yes. Their position is not so hostile to anything that borders on the aesthetic or conservationist.

SHREPFER: Do you suppose that they'll lose subscription rates?

DRURY: I don't think so, because they're the only paper there. [Laughter]

FRY: This is the bright side of those newspaper monopolies we're always complaining about.

DRURY: We have some very influential friends up there. I don't know whether you've met Charlie Daly who runs Daly Brothers, the department stores. He's always been very supportive.

SHREPFER: I talked to him as a matter of fact, and he said that he wrote a letter in the local paper? (Correspondence of Charles F. Daly to Save the Redwoods League, 1938. Subject: Avenue of the Giants, Acquisition)

DRURY: I noticed that in your questions. I didn't remember that.

[555]

SHREPFER: He said he incurred a great deal of hostility.

DRURY: Yes. Yes. He did. And we have avoided embarrassing him, because he is in business up there. But if I knew that, it slipped my memory. A lot of things have happened.

Anyhow, as far as Prairie Creek is concerned, we think it's a closed issue. Now just recently--in fact, during my absence from the office--Mr. Dewitt was up there for a hearing on the Jed Smith freeway. More or less, that was promoted by Mr. Hal Larson of the local highway engineering office. Of course by law they're supposed to hold a series of hearings with the supervisors and with the citizens. At that hearing there was a good deal of talk pro and con. The supervisors split three to two originally favoring the route which had been approved by the California State Highway Commission several years ago.

FRY: That was the route that went through the park?

DRURY: Yes, what's known as the Blue Line. We have some exhibits that we can give you in the way of news releases, summaries, and Dewitt’s statement up there. There was a good showing by the conservationists and by the local people, in particular the students of Humboldt State. In fact, they were as intemperate

[556]

DRURY: in their conservation position as the chamber of commerce was [Laughter] in their commercial position. The upshot of it was they didn't take a vote at that meeting, that was just to have a hearing. It was reported that a majority of the supervisors had--three to two--approved following the Blue Route, which we've always considered would be ruinous to the park. But later on, they reversed themselves, and they now have unanimously approved what's called the Green Line, which goes through just a small portion of the park. The Save-the-Redwoods League--our directors and all of us here--feel that we would be very fortunate if they would follow that route, and that's the route the highway engineers want to follow.

We didn't pass a formal resolution because we didn't feel that we needed to condone the invasion of a state park, a potential national park, with a freeway. But on both Prairie Creek and Jed Smith, we think that we will fare very much better than we did down in Humboldt Redwoods.

SHREPFER: About the Prairie Creek area, I read in the San Francisco Chronicle during the controversy itself that Ford Foundation asked President Johnson to prevent the freeway from going through Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park.

[557]

DRURY: Well, I'll tell you exactly what happened. As you know, the Save-the-Redwoods League had a grant of a million and a half from the Ford Foundation. They gave us $500,000 out of hand, which enabled us to complete the purchase of the Fern Canyon and the Gold Bluffs Beach, and they pledged us a million dollars on the condition that we match it twofold within three years. We were able to do it in about a year and a half, so that we earned that million and a half from them. The chairman of their board of directors at that time was Mr. John J. McCloy, who was a great friend and co-worker of Mr. Herman Phleger, my classmate who's on our council of the Save-the-Redwoods League, a successful attorney here in San Francisco. It was through Mr. Phleger that we got Mr. McCloy's attention and through his encouragement that we got the grant.

One day while the thing was in process, Mr. McCloy called me across the continent and said, "Say, I've just been reading a magazine article about the freeway that they're trying to force through the Prairie Creek State Park. Does that have anything to do with the grant that we're going to make to the Save-the-Redwoods League?" [Laughter] I said, "It surely does." "Well," he said, "Will you give me

[558]

DRURY: a brief on it?" Needless to say, I did. In fact I got up the text of the memorandum. Mr. McCloy I notice is still quite prominent as an advisor to the Nixon administration; he was one of the Disarmament Board and involved in a number of matters. He incidentally was at one time high commissioner in Germany after the war. He said, "I'm going up to Washington first of next week. If you can get that to me, I'll have a chance to talk to the president.” Which he evidently did, because two or three days later we got a very frantic call from Bill Duddleston in the Department of the Interior, saying that Secretary Udall is very anxious to get all the details about the Prairie Creek freeway. It was about that time that President Johnson appointed his Committee on Recreation and Natural Beauty. (Committee on Recreation and Natural Beauty created May 4, 1966 by executive order and composed of six cabinet members plus the heads of the Federal Power Commission, the TVA and the General Services Administration and a Citizens Advisory Committee headed by Laurance S. Rockefeller.)

[559]

DRURY: So, we got that material to Udall. We don't know all of the things that happened; there was quite a reversal of position, largely because the federal government customarily put over fifty per cent of the money into the building of that kind of freeway. It isn't part of the federal highway system, the primary system, but it's a federal aid road. And the leverage from the Bureau of Public Roads, which also was rather sympathetic with our position, and needless to say, from the president's office and the Secretary of the Interior resulted in a quite different climate as far as the Prairie Creek freeway was concerned.

SHREPFER: Is this a reason why Governor Brown changed his position?

DRURY: Governor Brown, as you know, is a very amiable gentleman. He changed his position a number of times. I'll content myself with saying that. Governor Brown unquestionably is very sympathetic with our whole point of view. We owe a good deal to Mrs. Margaret Wentworth Owings, who was then on the State Park Commission, for her persistence in interviewing Governor Brown. Every time she got a meeting with him, he was on our side. And then the director of Public Works would get on him, and we weren't quite

[560]

DRURY: so sure. But there's no question that Governor Brown is sympathetic with our hope that we could keep the redwood parks inviolate.

FRY: Wasn't there some kind of legislation passed last year to define part of the highway commission's power, its previously unlimited powers?

DRURY: Yes. They passed legislation that removed from the highway act the requirement that they take the shortest and cheapest route. That's the main thing. There was other legislation proposed which didn't materialize. (In my papers is an article by Robert W. Jasperson outlining the powers of the highway commission.)

SHREPFER: So they still are as powerful as they were, or have been in the past?

DRURY: It's still up to the highway commission. Have you seen Nicholas Roosevelt's book on conservation? Dodd-Mead just published it. (Nicholas Roosevelt, Conservation: Now or Never. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1970).There's a very nice chapter on the redwoods. In that book, he states that the highway commission has the unrestricted right of condemnation of rights of way through state

[561]

DRURY: parks. Neither he nor I are lawyers, and I'm not convinced that that is exactly the situation, but there's no question that it would be very difficult to stop the highway commission if they were minded to follow a given route. Of course we had the terrible example down in Humboldt Redwoods State Park, Dyerville.

[562]

BULL CREEK (HUMBOLDT REDWOODS STATE PARK)

FLOOD DAMAGE AND CONTROL

SHREPFER: Do you believe that if it had not been for the freeway and particularly the flood damage done in 1954-55 and 1965 to Bull Creek the American Forestry Association report recommending Bull Creek as the site for the Redwood National Park might have been more widely accepted? (The American Forestry Association report was largely financed by Laurance Rockefeller and was published as follows: Samuel T. Dana and Kenneth B. Pomeroy, "Redwoods and Parks," American Forests, Vol. 71, No. 5, (May, 1965), pp. 3-32.)

DRURY: Unquestionably, if that very destructive mutilation of the park at a crucial point, the confluence of the main and the south fork of the Eel River at Dyerville, had not occurred, the Humboldt Redwoods State Park, which is the largest and many of us feel the most beautiful of the state parks, might very well have been considered as the potential redwood national park. That and the terrific damage and peril of the Bull Creek watershed--because before we could get it acquired the upper watershed was cut over and

[563]

DRURY: you know about the two years of big floods--were at least our reasons for not concentrating on it, when we were asked what we thought would be the best redwood national park. Of course, questions of aesthetics are infinitely debatable.

SHREPFER: There's a book out called America the Raped by Gene Marine, a resident of Berkeley. (Gene Marine, America the Raped; the Engineering Mentality and the Devastation of a Continent, Simon and Schuster, 1969.)

DRURY: Yes. I know about it, and I'm going to get it.

SHREPFER: He talked to the Sierra Club and as a result he stated that the Bull Creek watershed has really been destroyed.

DRURY: Well, that isn't so.

SHREPFER: He said Rockefeller Forest has been badly destroyed.

DRURY: We lost several hundred trees in the first flood, and we lost a number in the second one. Exact statistics as to the number of trees lost have never been given. It's not true that the main flat, the Bull Creek Plat, has been materially affected, except on the margin of the stream, which it will take years for nature to restore. In the 1954-55 flood we lost five or

[564]

DRURY: six hundred trees over three feet in diameter--perhaps half million dollars worth of timber. In the 1964 flood the loss was not so great.

SHREPFER: I did talk to a few people up in the northern counties, who said they felt that this kind of major flood did occur approximately every hundred years, and that it did substantial damage even without cutting or human interference.

DRURY: I don’t think there's the slightest question about that. You see evidences up there. They're still making studies of the so-called ecology of the redwoods there and elsewhere in the state parks, and particularly I think now in the national park or national park to be. It stands to reason that there have been other floods. In fact, Percy French, whom you both know, who was superintendent up there for about thirty years, remembers (he's now in his nineties) other floods that did tremendous damage.

FRY: Those root systems that the forestry faculty were investigating showed that there had been repeated floods with repeated root systems.

DRURY: You are familiar with that tree displayed in Richardson Grove which Emanuel Fritz prepared. That shows six successive systems of roots.

SHREPFER: They get a fake tap root from repeated floods,

[565]

SHREPFER: don't they?

DRURY: There is no tap root. There's been a lot of what we think is wild talk and I'll give you, for the record, correspondence we've had with the present superintendent up there, which gives his idea at least. There's no question it'll take a generation for the banks of Bull Creek to restore themselves. I don't know how familiar you are with the records of that flood, but I have here some pictures of the banks of Bull Creek before and after the flood.

But I wouldn't be worried about the main Bull Creek Plat being permanently affected by what happened there. It was a shame we couldn't have acquired all of that watershed because we could have bought it for a song around 1955 when Douglas fir, which is the dominant species on the slopes there, came into the market.

SHREPFER: Is that what they were cutting?

DRURY: Yes, mostly. There were some groups of redwoods down in the canyons on Bull Creek, but no extensive flats like Bull Creek. In fact there is no other flat that we know of that ever existed that is as extensive and as impressive as the Bull Creek Plat.

FRY: Percy still says he can gerrymander one million board feet out of an acre down there.

[566]

DRURY: Yes, he's saying that. I'm afraid his day of doing that is over though. He's had some trouble with his health. When did you see him last?

FRY: Oh, I saw him last summer.

DRURY: Was he in bed then? He is now. I talked to him about a month ago. He's all right, except when he gets up, his left leg bothers him so much that he goes back to bed.

SHREPFER: How much has been acquired in the Bull Creek watershed and how much remains to be purchased?

DRURY: We have never been able to get a firm figure as to how much the state has spent, but I have the definite impression that they've spent well over a million dollars in measures to prevent further erosion up there. There's been a good deal of volunteer effort in the planting of particularly Douglas fir and redwood. Just recently the local Sierra Club people planted several hundred, I guess several thousand seedlings. The survival of those is said to be about twenty or thirty per cent, but it's a good device.

We are now in a position I think to clean up private holdings in the Bull Creek watershed. There are eleven ownerships left. We purchased over 18,000 acres, mostly cutover land but some that is virgin timber. We'll give you a summary of the

[567]

DRURY: purchases we have made in the upper Bull Creek watershed. We were helped by the Rockefellers, but I'd say that two-thirds of the cost of it was paid by the Save-the-Redwoods League. The state put some money into it, but not very much.

Yesterday we were up in Sacramento. One of our missions was to pave the way for the ultimate acquisition--probably by eminent domain or condemnation--of the remaining private holdings in the watershed. We have a map over here that shows where they are.

FRY: That's not very much is it?

DRURY: No. Very little. There are over 18,000 acres that we've acquired in about the last six or seven years.

SHREPFER: How satisfactory do you feel that report on flood control in Bull Creek by W. C. Lowdermilk was? (W. C. Lowdermilk, Consultant, "A Report to the Save-the-Redwoods League on Critical Problems in the Bull Creek Basin, Humboldt County, California," October 20, 1961, Morongo Valley, California.)

DRURY: Very good. Mr. Lowdermilk is out of the running now. He's an invalid. I'm afraid we won't get any more help from him, but just the other day the superintendent

[568]

DRURY: up there, up at Humboldt Redwoods State Park, Wendell Davis, told me that they were religiously following the recommendations of the Lowdermilk report.

SHREPFER: I understood Lowdermilk made some long-range hypotheses.

DRURY: Yes, the Lowdermilk report made some recommendations, which we've never been able to get the money to carry out. But the revetment work along the channel at Bull Creek, which was one of the devices to arrest further erosion of the banks, has been carried out very thoroughly. As I say, I would estimate that the state has spent at least a million dollars on that since the first flood in 1954 and 1955.

[569]

RECENT FUND RAISING AND ACQUISITIONS

Fund Raising

FRY: Has the pattern of your contributions, the financial backing, changed any in this Bull Creek watershed fund raising?

DRURY: We, as you know, have two primary ways of raising money. One of them is through the establishment of the memorial groves, which as far as the moderate contributors are concerned is by far the dominant method. Mrs. W. W. Stout, who has given over $700,000, has named several groves. Of course the Rockefellers, the Fords, the Mellons, the Phoebe Watermann Foundation and several others have made very large contributions without establishing memorial groves. The Rockefeller Forest finally was named for Mr. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. more or less against his expressed wishes. At the beginning we suggested that and he wouldn't hear of it. Before his death they finally persuaded him.

We have now between 250 and 275 of these memorial groves. Contributors to them have given us close to half of the money that we've raised.

FRY: Are you talking about the watershed lands or down

[570]

FRY: the line?

DRURY: I'm talking about the money that goes into the treasury of the Save-the-Redwoods League in consideration of which the memorial groves are named in areas which have already been purchased. Then that money is transferred to a fund with which we buy other lands, some of them watershed lands, some of them virgin timber, which are then conveyed to the state. It's not easy to explain.

FRY: I understand. I work enough with university purchases [Laughter] that I know this business of transferring funds.

What about the proportion of money now that comes from the east as compared with local money? Is it any larger in later years?

DRURY:  We've always had our largest contributions from the east. I haven't checked It lately but I believe our membership is still about as It was a few years ago; about 17,000 members are Californian and the other 33,000 are from the rest of the United States. But predominately I think New York is the state from which we've had our main contributions, the Fords and the Rockefellers.

FRY: The big donors.

[571]

DRURY: We had one lady in Philadelphia who gave us $200,000. When her mother died she found in her effects an application for membership in the Save-the-Redwoods League that she had never mailed to us. Evidently they were people of large means and she made this contribution in memory of her mother.

FRY: You just barely got in on that one.

DRURY: We had an interesting episode here the other day which we can't publicize, because for some reason he doesn't want it. Mr. Andreas Feininger did this magnificent book entitled Trees. (Andreas Feininger, Trees. New York: Viking Press, 1968.) It has some marvelous photographs. Take a look at it. We wrote him a letter complimenting him on it, and about a month later he wrote back and said that he had one of his father's paintings--the celebrated painter --that he was going to give to the Save-the-Redwoods League and let a broker sell it for us. Just the other day he said he valued it at $55,000 which seemed preposterously high.

FRY: That gives him his tax deduction I guess.

DRURY: Yes. Just the other day we actually got a check

[572]

DRURY: for half that amount; we'll get the rest next year.

Those are just typical of the episodes. In answer to your question, we don't know yet whether the value is going to diminish. The collections of the Save-the-Redwoods League were, I'd day, twenty or thirty per cent less in 1969 than they were in 1967 or 1968. The nationwide publicity about the national park of course was then at its height.

SHREPFER: How about before that, about 1964?

DRURY: The League has raised close to a million dollars a year for the last six years for our so-called land fund. That is in addition to raising two to three hundred thousand a year for our general fund, which we use for operations, purchases of land and incidental expenses like appraisals and reports.

Acquisitions; General

FRY: Well, is there anything else that you'd like to add to things that Save-the-Redwoods League has been doing over the last four or five years? Outside of the national park, it's been the watershed lands at Bull Creek Plat, in Humboldt, hasn't it?

DRURY: Well, we've bought several million dollars worth of property in Humboldt Redwoods State Park.

[573]

DRURY: In 1970 we've bought maybe, oh, a couple of hundred thousand dollars worth of property, but last year we conveyed about a million dollars worth to the government, and we're holding about a million dollars worth of property that we hope to get back some money from, through matching by the state. We don't know if we will. I think it's going to be pretty slim pickings for the next year or two in California.

FRY: Why do you hope to get back some money?

DRURY: Up until recently the state has followed the principle of matching league contributions.

FRY: It would be interesting, Newt, if you could tell us what the differences are in dealing with the Reagan administration as compared to the Knight or Brown administrations.

DRURY: Well, there are no material differences--

FRY: Is money tighter and bonds harder to buy?

DRURY: No, I think that William Penn Mott, Jr. is an excellent director of the Department of Parks and Recreation and that he and all of the staff (many of them were my colleagues of course in the old days) have been most cooperative. They are limited by the legislature and its attitude toward appropriations. And the situation apparently is going to get more

[574]

DRURY: difficult before it gets any better. But the league has had wonderful cooperation from every administration from the time of the Young administration when the park commission was established right up to the present.

I think it would be of interest to posterity to know how these parks have been built up piece by piece,  just like putting a jigsaw puzzle together.

FRY: Yes. I think the impression is that you kind of go out and buy the land all at once.

DRURY: No, we can't do that, because you can see how many different ownerships there were. You can see on the map, for instance, the Russ Grove; that was given to us in the early days. And the Bellows claim; the county of Humboldt bought that. Then you see the park commission has approved naming these properties long after they were bought. And that money goes into a fund. No other way you could work it, because you can't slice off small portions of timberland from the holdings of these big companies. They won't deal that way.

FRY: In the process of this, then, do you have to pay a lot more for the last ones you buy because the property values have gone up?

DRURY: Yes, inflation and the scarcity of redwood and also

[575]

DRURY: the escalating prices of land have all contributed to increased costs.

FRY: I thought maybe just the fact that you're buying the land for a state park would inflate values immediately surrounding it.

DRURY: I don't think up here very much. But the fact that we're known to have this land in our plan stiffens the asking prices of the owners.

Here's a summary of the acquisitions from '63 to '70, to answer your question "What have we been doing of late?" It shows 23,788 acres that have been added to the parks. This is since they've started all the talk about the redwood national park.  The Sierra Club and everybody else have been talking about it, but we--let's see, in six years, we have spent about a million dollars a year buying land for parks.

FRY: All of these listed in Humboldt are primarily the watershed lands, Newt, would you say?

DRURY: Yes. Most of them. Also some large inholdings.

FRY: The Avenue of the Giants units had been pending for many, many years, is that right?

DRURY: Yes. For about forty years. That's a fact. The president of the Pacific Lumber Company, Stanwood A. Murphy, is really an elderly gentleman. His father,

[576]

DRURY: A. Stanwood Murphy, was a young man when I first talked with him in the 1920's.

We've purchased four units after a period of almost forty years. Finally we completed the holdings in virgin timber up there on the Avenue of the Giants from Dyerville north to Stafford. We'll send you a map of that too.

FRY: Were those four units all from Pacific Lumber Company?

DRURY: Yes. The first one, I think we paid six dollars a thousand board feet, and the last one we paid about sixty dollars a thousand board feet.

FRY: Isn't this the land that Pacific Lumber Company reserved for a state park for a long time? I mean they took care not to cut it?

DRURY: Yes. I think their motivation was mixed. This property is within, oh, six or seven miles of their mill. It was available at any time and they knew that it wouldn't get any cheaper. But then I think they were partly motivated by the thought that, if they could get their price for it, they'd rather see it preserved than destroyed. The senior Stanwood Murphy was rather reluctant to sell it. He always referred to it as "the chocolate on our cake." You've been there so you know what it's like,

[577]

DRURY: It's a very wonderful stand of redwoods, uniform stand.

FRY: But the senior Murphy felt it would be kind of superfluous to what you already had apparently.  That you had enough!

DRURY: Well, we didn't have the money then either. We finally got around to buying it, and Stanwood A. Murphy, who was the son, as distinguished from A. Stanwood Murphy, who was the father, had a more modern viewpoint, cooperating with the conservationists.

FRY: What side did he take on the national redwood park controversy?

DRURY: Oh, the lumber companies all stood together.

Prairie Creek Park Additions

FRY: I have the report here from Save-the-Redwoods League to its membership on the acquisition of Fern Canyon and Gold Bluffs Beach. I must confess I don't understand it, and I thought maybe you could explain.

DRURY: We just waited too long, that was all. I was in on the original purchase of the Prairie Creek lands from the Sage Land and Improvement Company, but we didn't have enough money to buy all of them so they gave us an option on a part of the land. To make a long story short, that option, if we had exercised

[578]

DRURY: it, was at one dollar and 50 cents per thousand board feet for redwood, and nothing for the other species. When we finally bought it, about thirty years later, we paid around $40 a thousand for the redwoods, as I remember it.

When we first began acquiring property in the state parks, I started maps that have listed all of the transactions and the dates recording the deeds from the different ownerships. We have one of those of Prairie Creek. I can get you a copy of that if you'd like.

We just gradually raised money and bought property. I remember that the county of Humboldt bought a piece of property, known as the Bellows claim, 160 acres, and gave it to the state. They paid $50 000 for it, which we thought was scandalous, and it was at that time, because we were buying a comparable tract for about twelve, thirteen thousand dollars. Then the Russ family of Ferndale, big landowners in Humboldt County, donated to the state the Russ Grove very early in the game. And gradually the league bought up additional land in Prairie Creek.

When I was up there in Sacramento, we were concerned, about Fern Canyon. In fact it wasn't given

[579]

DRURY: any public protection. We finally decided to try to hold the fort by filing a condemnation suit on Fern Canyon, but we never had enough money to go to trial on it. So it was after my leaving Washington, D. C. that they finally tried the case up there, and they got an award from the jury, around $60 a thousand for the same kind of timber that we'd once had under option for a dollar a thousand.

FRY: Well, another thing that puzzled me was that according to this Save-the-Redwoods League special Gold Bluffs bulletin in 1965, $2,400,000 is the cost of this 2,000 acre addition, and $550,000 is the amount the Save-the-Redwoods League must still pay Pacific Lumber Company, and yet Pacific Lumber Company gave Fern Canyon to the league?

DRURY: They made a deeded gift, yes. Of course we can't look a gift horse in the mouth. The price that we paid for the property --

FRY: For the rest of the Gold Bluffs property around Fern Canyon?

DRURY: Yes--compensated them fully for Fern Canyon, which really had no commercial value. It's a very beautiful place, but there was nothing particularly of market value there. It might possibly have become a tourist attraction like the "Trees of Mystery" or something of that sort. Of course that's exactly

[580]

DRURY: what we were trying to avoid.

FRY: On Fern Canyon-Gold Bluffs Beach, there was one other question in my mind. I thought that this had come up as a high priority item when the price was quite low, and that there was some reaction to it from your council or from someone on your council that prevented Save-the-Redwoods League from going ahead at that time.

DRURY: Well, the only thing I can remember was that we didn't have enough money. Unfortunately, you see, we had filed condemnation on a limited area--I've forgotten the number of acres--and it was to come to trial, but it never did, because the Pacific Lumber Company proposed-- I remember they flew down to San Francisco in their company plane with Mr. Tom Greig--that they'd sell us the whole property, and we agreed to make an appraisal, and we purchased it, finally, with the aid of a number of agencies and persons, like the Ford Foundation and Mrs. William W. Stout, and our general contributors. We were just a jump ahead of the sheriff. We didn't have a plugged nickel left when we got through with it. In fact, when we made the deal, we were about half a million dollars short of what we needed, but we knew we had expectations from the Ford Foundation, and so we were safe enough.

[581]

PART VI

REDWOOD NATIONAL PARK

[582]

HISTORY OF REDWOOD NATIONAL PARK ISSUE AND ITS REVIVAL IN EARLY 1960's

SHREPFER: We might begin with the history of the redwood national park idea and its revival in the early 1960's. Your chronology shows that the Sierra Club and others revived the idea in 1961. What was the league's reaction?

DRURY: Frankly the Save-the-Redwoods League from the very beginning had favored a redwood national park. When it was found that the federal government was going to do nothing for about forty years, the Save-the-Redwoods League then, as you know, (it has been set forth in our previous interviews) largely of itself brought about the establishment of the California state park system through the creation in 1927 of the State Park Commission and passage of the original bond issue of 1928. Then over the years we built up these parks and gradually developed the program toward which we had always hoped that federal aid would come, but toward which none was forthcoming for many years.

FRY: I remember reading in the minutes of the Save-the-Redwoods League Board of Directors from the thirties, where the league at that point advised against any

[583]

FRY: concept of a national park. Were you aware that for a while this was actually advised against in favor of state action?

DRURY: There's been a great variety of opinion on the part of the officers and the council of the Save-the-Redwoods League. Some of them have been for the ultimate establishment of the redwood national park, and some of them more or less against it. John C. Merriam, after the state had made its large investment, was very doubtful whether that should be transferred to the federal government.

Douglas Bill

SHREPFER: What was your reaction to the Douglas Bill calling for a redwood national forest?

DRURY: In 1946 and 1947. That bill would have been passed, I think, if Helen Gahagan Douglas hadn't been supplanted by Richard Nixon in the Senate.

FRY: Oh, you think it would have been?

SHREPFER: You think it had any chance at all?

DRURY: I think it had a good chance, but I voted for Nixon. [Laughter]

FRY: That puts you in a difficult position.

DRURY: I had quite a time in persuading Mrs. Douglas, who finally very graciously accepted it, that whether or

[584]

DRURY: not they established this colossal redwood national forest which would have taken two-thirds of the redwood belt--there ought to be certain portions of it surrounding the existing state parks which would be treated, not as national forest, but according to national or state park principles. She finally embodied that provision in the bill.

SHREPFER: Would that have included Mill Creek?

DRURY: Yes. It would have taken in Mill Creek and Prairie Creek. It would not have taken in Redwood Creek.

FRY: That bill was written in the United States Forest Service, as I remember. It was sort of a forest service bill? You were on the scene at the time. Is that your impression?

DRURY: We never knew exactly who was the author of it. There were a number of people. You wouldn't remember, perhaps, Dewey Anderson, who at one time was director of finance for the State of California.

SHREPFER: Is he still alive?

DRURY: He's in Washington, D.C. Yes.

SHREPFER: In the Conservation Association?

DRURY: Yes. He has a planning organization, of which he's the head. Dewey Anderson had quite a little to do with it. And the acting head of the United States Forest Service, Earl Clapp, was also quite active.

[585]

DRURY: The position that I took as director of the National Parks Service was that the extent of the national forests was something that was up to them more than to the National Park Service. But I was successful in getting them to provide for these park units within that forest area.

SHREPFER: You opposed the bill, did you not?

DRURY: No. Neither the Department of Agriculture nor Interior either opposed or favored the bill.

SHREPFER: I thought I had read a statement you made at the time that you thought that the bill could not be passed, in that the impact on the economy of the northern counties would be too drastic.

DRURY: No. That doesn't sound like me.

FRY: What about the Save-the-Redwoods League?

DRURY: The Save-the-Redwoods League did pass a resolution opposing the Douglas bill, but I was inactive in the Save-the-Redwoods League. Oh, I think it was a pipe dream.

FRY: It was so big.

DRURY: In those days it wouldn't have cost, oh, a third of what it would today.

SHREPFER: Would it have been a good measure to have passed in the long run?

DRURY: That's a debatable question. I was always in favor

[586]

DRURY: and the Redwoods League was in favor of extending the United States Forest Service's so-called purchase unit, which they now have more or less dismantled under the act creating the Redwood National Park providing that a good deal of the timber can be cut by the private operators. We were disappointed that the Forest Reservation Commission didn't make steady progress in acquiring redwoods. They could have bought a lot of the redwoods for a dollar a thousand board feet and we're paying as high as $60 per thousand now.

FRY: That commission was under what?

DRURY: It is a separate commission allied with the Department of Agriculture. It is known as the Forest Reservation Commission. It's still in existence and they still are purchasing additions to national forests through the United States. But they never did much in the redwood region.

Grants-in-Aid

SHREPFER: What is your feeling about the idea of grants-in-aid as a means of park acquisition?

DRURY: Well, I'm reconciled to them. [Laughter]

SHREPFER: I remember there was a big bill for federal aid to the states in 1929 and 1930 and that the league was

[587]

SHREPFER: not particularly overjoyed about the idea at that time.

DRURY: I don't recollect what bill that was.

FRY: It would have been in the Hoover administration. Maybe that was as a result of some of the activity of the National Conference on State Parks?

SHREPFER: This one was initiated in Oregon.

DRURY: I don't recollect that.

FRY: It must have been when Oregon was setting up its state parks. [Laughter]

SHREPFER: It was.

DRURY: Up until my time there in Washington, there never was a plugged nickel appropriated by Congress for national park land. It was all carved out of the public domain or was donated. For instance, Great Smokies National Park in the states of Tennessee and North Carolina, who donated a lot of land. We got, in my time, a very meager appropriation. I think it was $300,000 for the year, finally, to begin the purchasing of the inholdings in the national parks. It wasn't until the Udall administration that there was any material amount of money under this Land and Water Fund. As far as being a states' righter is concerned, having worked in both the national and state parks, I think that you should render unto

[588]

DRURY: Caesar those things that be Caesar's and there's no question of that, as I tried to point out in this memo on the Douglas bill back in the forties.

SHREPFER: That's the one I was referring to, the memorandum on the Douglas bill.

DRURY: I haven't read that for a great many years. You have a copy of it, do you? In that I think I said that it took forty-two years to establish Yosemite National Park [laughter], that the redwood national park might come in time, and that surely the redwoods were one of the outstanding features of scenic America and should perhaps be given the dignity of being a national park.

Meanwhile, the state of California's done everything that's constructive. I think it'll be some years before they'll get any accord at all, and I don't think it's going to do any harm because both the state and federal government have plenty to do up there.

Jedediah Smith State Park (Mill Greek)

SHREPFER: Did you feel before the national park idea was revived that you could save the Mill Creek watershed by yourself?

DRURY: No, and that's one reason why we felt that the

[589]

DRURY: interposition, if you want to call it that, of the federal government was absolutely essential.

FRY: Why has Mill Creek been so difficult? Or is it that the other projects have really been more urgent?

DRURY: We haven't raised the money fast enough. If we had been a little more assiduous or our contributors had been a little more generous and forehanded, we could have bought the whole Mill Creek watershed at a dollar a thousand. This was before Miller owned it, when the bulk of it was owned by the Del Norte Lumber Company.

SHREPFER: Wasn't Mill Creek the last of your projects? You waited on it because you felt that it was not as immediately in danger as Bull Creek and the other areas, so it is in your priority sequence last?

DRURY: That's right. It was in the hands of a landholding company, the Del Norte Lumber Company. Incidentally, the president of that company (who is now dead) was the husband of Mrs. William W. Stout.

SHREPFER: They were the largest stockholders.

DRURY: The Stout Grove was established by Mrs. Frank D. Stout, whose husband was once the president of the Del Norte Lumber Company. He was the uncle of W. W.

[590]

DRURY: Stout. They weren't an operating company. All they did was to pay taxes.
 
SHREPFER: I remember, from reading over the correspondence on that, that Frank Stout wished to contribute to the League, but died before he could, so she was actually fulfilling his wish.

DRURY: Yes. I remember going up there with her.

Revival of the Redwood National Park Project in 1960’s

SHREPFER: Who or what was mainly responsible for the revival of the redwood national park project in the 1960’s?

DRURY: Unquestionably the main motive force was the National Geographic Society.

FRY: Oh. That's what Dr. Crafts says, too.

DRURY: Yes, there's no question about that. And they just happened to form this divisive program by discovering the world's tallest known standing tree, which may or may not be. The Sierra Club took that up.

Dr. Rudolph Becking thought he'd found a tree that was several feet taller than this tree, but when they applied engineering methods to his measurements they found it was fifty feet shorter than Mr. Becking thought it was.

FRY: Is that where the National Geographic study came in?

[591]

FRY: Had Becking gone to them for money or something like that?

DRURY: They made the grant to the National Park Service. Conrad Wirth, who was then director of the National Park Service, and Melville Grosvenor, of the National Geographic Society, were great friends, in fact Wirth was on their board, and it was very generous of them. They've been very generous to the Save-the-Redwoods League. Gilbert Grosvenor, the founder of the National Geographic, was one of the founders of the Save-the-Redwoods League.

SHREPFER: The Fred Smith interviews--which we must discuss later--with Miller of Miller-Rellim Lumber Company are the earliest specific knowledge that I have of the revival of the idea of the redwood national park.

FRY: Is that as early as you know about for this particular project?

DRURY: Of course, the basic document is the National Park Service publication called The Redwoods (The Redwoods, Special Report Prepared by the National Park Service, United States Department of the Interior, September 15, 1964) .which was started about 1961 and wasn't issued until 1964.

SHREPFER: This report of the National Park Service under Hartzog was the one sponsored by the National

[592]

SHREPFER: Geographic Society, called The Redwoods, which favored the Redwood Creek areas, with only grants-in-aid for portions of Mill Creek?

DRURY: Yes.

SHREPFER: Was this what the National Geographic Society itself favored?

DRURY: Yes, at that time. Later on they came around to this measure that Senator Kuchel and his committee proposed.

[593]

REDWOOD GREEK VS. MILL CREEK

Position of the National Park Service

SHREPFER: The National Park Service actually changed its position in the middle too did it not?

DRURY: Yes. In 1966 we had a meeting--to make this thing fully complicated--Hartzog was out here, and Edward Hummel, who was then regional director, arranged a meeting with what they called the Senior Executive Committee of the National Park Service, which consisted of the former directors Horace Albright, Conrad Wirth and myself, and Eivind Scoyen. We met for a good part of a day out at the National Park Service office here in San Francisco, and as a result, this measure which involved the total Mill Creek watershed was given the approval of the National Park Service under Hartzog and it was because of that, undoubtedly, that Kuchel introduced his bill, which never was recommended by his committee. That's the thing I just showed you there, that green outline.

FRY: Yes. But it did form an important part on which the compromise was based?

DRURY: Yes, it was the main project. But Cohelan and his group in the House felt that it didn't go far enough

[594]

DRURY: in that it should include a good portion of the Redwood Creek watershed.

SHREPFER: Yet the Sierra Club continued until the end to call their plan the National Park Service's recommended plan.

DRURY: Well, it wasn't. I remember very distinctly in the Senate hearing we had back there, both Ed Crafts and Hartzog testified as to the superiority from several standpoints of the Mill Creek project over the Redwood Creek project. We never, in the Redwoods League, indulged in any invidious comparisons. Whether we were right or wrong I don't know.

SHREPFER: The Johnson administration was behind the Mill Creek proposal almost from the beginning, was it not?

DRURY: Not from the beginning. As I say, Wirth told me that he felt that the report that recommended Redwood Creek was premature and shouldn't have been published. It sort of fixed people's ideas as to what should have been done.

FRY: So, Mill Creek as the site for the national park was really still a question when this report came out.

DRURY: Yes. This initial report published in 1964 recommended only grants-in-aid toward a portion of the Mill Creek area and left out most of the main watershed of Mill Creek.

[595]

DRURY: As they say, these questions are infinitely debatable.

FRY: Can I ask you more about the meeting Hummel arranged when Hartzog came out here which you, Albright, Scoyen and Wirth attended?

DRURY: Yes, well I think at that time of that meeting, there is no question of Hartzog’s position. It was that they should concentrate on the total Mill Creek watershed with the corridor and the section surrounding the tall trees on Redwood Creek.

FRY: At that meeting there wasn't any opposition to Mill Creek?

DRURY: No, it was Just Director Hartzog conferring with this Senior Executive Committee of the National Park Service.

The Sierra Club and the League

FRY: I look at this from a kind of distant oversimplified view. How come the National Park Service and National Geographic were interested in that area down there where the tallest tree was at a time when I thought they were seriously considering the Mill Creek area? Is that wrong?

DRURY: I think unquestionably the Sierra Club, with whom we had several conferences--in the hope of getting a

[596]

DRURY: common program--wanted to have a new project on which to work. They were just about as much interested in having a cause, I believe, a fresh cause, as they were in establishing a redwood national park.

FRY: I see. They had just completed their big controversy over the dam at Glen Canyon?

DRURY: Well, they've had so many.

FRY: They thought they had to have another controversy?

DRURY: Our position has never been one of opposing anybody’s ideas. The more redwoods that are preserved, the better, but we also have always felt that it should be done according to a logical pattern and bringing the Redwood Creek area into the picture had two shortcomings, one of which is the lack of realism. It wouldn't be completely accomplished, and subsequent events have shown that we were right on that. The other was that we felt that it at least was no better than the Mill Creek watershed in its entirety which, as the action of Congress shows, was realizable. The amount of money that they voted would have bought up the whole thing, lock, stock and barrel, on the Mill Creek watershed.

SHREPFER: Do you feel that Redwood Creek was of national park

[597]

SHREPFER: caliber, if it had been realized?

DRURY: If the total Redwood Creek basin had been a feasible thing, no question that it would have made a very wonderful reservation. It was not the same type of forest that you find down there at Bull Creek. Redwood Creek has very little flat land. This area where the tall trees are located is less than a section, 640 acres. And there are only a few very limited flats in the entire project. So as far as the superlative redwood is concerned, it isn't in our opinion equal to the forest either in Mill Creek or in Bull Creek.

But, as I say, at no time has the Redwoods League ever tried to derogate the ideas of other people. It of course is a free country and they have the right to have their own ideas. By the same token we felt that the Save-the-Redwoods League, which has been on the scene from the beginning, surely was competent to establish its own program, which we have done.

SHREPFER: There was a thesis done on the Redwood National Park by Thomas Vale, and his contention is, I'm sure you have read it, that the league wanted Mill Creek merely because it had always been part of their plan. He maintains too that Redwood Creek had been dropped

[598]

DRURY: I think it was. That's my guess. I wasn't with Madison Grant, but I'm sure that Grant didn't penetrate into the main valley of Redwood Creek. He couldn't because there was no way of getting in there in those days.

SHREPFER: So he could well have been standing in land now in Prairie Creek State Park.

DRURY: Yes, Prairie Creek is a tributary of Redwood Creek.

SHREPFER: That's what I wanted to know.

DRURY: That is my thinking. But that's all right. We've always taken a position that the Sierra Club of course had a perfect right to espouse any project that they wanted, just as the Save-The-Redwoods

[599]

DRURY: League has. We were sorry that there wasn't unanimity on it. The interesting thing was that this issue was waged back and forth, you know. There was a period when President Johnson advocated the acquisition of the total Mill Creek watershed. The National Park Service, after Hartzog supplanted Wirth as director, changed its program in spite of their report. Wirth told me, when we were together--he, Albright and I were together testifying in Washington--that they never should have published this report. It was premature. Of course this report, which incidentally was excellently written and had some very able men like Chester Brown and others working on it, concentrated almost entirely on the Redwood Creek as far as federal appropriations were concerned. It did recommend certain grants-in-aid to the state out of the Land and Water Conservation Fund for Mill Creek and Prairie Creek.

SHREPFER: Was it merely a question of impracticality, or was it a value judgment that Mill Creek was, in your estimation, better?

DRURY: From what I know about the two areas--and it's been many years since I went to any extent over the Redwood Creek area--the Mill Creek is the more perfect of the two forests, and we took the position that

[600]

DRURY: the perfection of its charm is not determined by its size but by its quality. And you have to be practical and reasonable about these things. There is no question that if the federal government was going to do what they ultimately did--namely condemn, in effect, private property --they could, for the amount of money that they put up for the Redwood National Park, have acquired everything, lock, stock and barrel, from the Rellim Company, which would have given the complete Mill Creek watershed.

Of course, our friends in the Sierra Club were from the beginning determined that some new area should be the primary national park and they settled on the Redwood Creek area, which is a splendid area. I'll talk about that a little bit later on. We felt that it was more important to have one complete and perfect area that was attainable than to strive for something that we knew, from our experience with legislation and conferences with the federal fiscal authorities, was simply beyond possibility. There was never any chance that a complete watershed in Redwood Creek could be acquired. It would have cost maybe $200,000,000 or more. Of course, the Bureau of the Budget, which usually dominates, although it

[601]

DRURY: didn’t in this case, put a limitation of around $60,000,000 and as you know, the Congress upped that to about $93,000,000, which was quite an accomplishment. But they got a fairly fragmentary and unsatisfactory project out of the whole thing. Neither the Mill Creek watershed was protected in its entirety, nor the Redwood Creek watershed in fact. The Redwood Creek watershed portion is pitifully inadequate.

FRY: Well, Newt, the only other question I have relates to the bigger picture of the conservationists’ efforts.  The Sierra Club operates so differently from Save-the-Redwoods League.

DRURY: Well, we in the league have both the advantage and the handicap of having certain restraints on our action. We have deliberately limited our field of activity in order, we thought, to be more effective. And I think it has paid off. If you think of it in terms of tangible accomplishment, of millions of dollars worth of invaluable property preserved, Save-the-Redwoods League I guess almost leads the list. Most of these other organizations spend a great deal of time on educational effort which of course is fine, and on exhorting other people to

[602]

DRURY: raise and spend the money to do things, or getting appropriations from the government. We observe the law in that we don't try to affect legislation, immediately at least. We're not entirely free from that. And on many cases where we're invited to give testimony I think we've been reasonably effective.

FRY: Is that the first time that the Sierra Club was actually involved in acquiring land for a park?

DRURY: Of course they have supported things like the extension of the Sequoia National Park. They have always worked along with the Save-the-Redwoods League in saving for instance the Sierra Sequoias. They've given a little money for that. But the league has raised most of the money for the redwoods.

FRY: Has their heat and light always been a little on the excessive side, so that it sometimes creates more difficulties?

DRURY: That's debatable I think. But well, I just got a clipping the other day in which one of the lumber barons up there condemns the Sierra Club and their position on the timber supply act, which they were successful in holding up in Congress. They accused the club of downright prevarication, as to what the bill would do. And it is true that the bill was totally amended between the time that the Sierra Club

[603]

DRURY: started its opposition and the time it got to the floor of Congress.

FRY: I remember there was one rule about debating, and you’re an old debater, that said never overstate your position to such an extent that it's easy to refute It. [Laughter]

DRURY: I think the Save-the-Redwoods League, on the things that really count, has been very forthright. We've very clearly outlined our program. We haven't deceived anybody about what our intentions are, even in some cases where they didn't agree with us, and we have fought vigorously for the protection of parks like, for instance, down there in Portola Redwoods where the army engineers are playing with the idea of building a dam and flooding a portion of the park. I think we can stop that.

FRY: Are the Sierra Club coming in on that too?

DRURY: Yes, their local chapter is in hearings on that.

FRY: I can't quite get my hands and feet on a focal point for the contributions of the Sierra Club.

DRURY: Do you get their publications?

FRY: Yes, but I don't have anything historic yet. I mean, Newt, when you look at them over the whole historical span, how has Sierra Club fitted in? It's done a lot to make people aware of the Sierras. But more

[604]

FRY: than that, too.

DRURY: Well, they've extended that to practically the whole world, particularly the United States, and Alaska, Hawaii.

FRY: Maybe a historian should try to document their educational methods because this is where their prime contribution has been, rather than in creation and acquisition of parklands and things like that?

DRURY: They took practically no active interest in saving the redwoods until this last episode of the Redwood Creek and Mill Creek.

Alignment of Forces (Governmental and Conservation Groups )

DRURY: One thing that I wanted to make a matter of record was that after a great deal of stuttering back and forth, by the National Park Service under Hartzog, they accepted, more or less, the program of the Save-the-Redwoods League.

SHREPFER: This was after the report by Hartzog?

DRURY: Yes. This was considerably after that time. The administration plan (Kuchel Bill) in 1966 and 1967 involved the Mill Creek watershed and the tall trees and the small corridor from Prairie Creek down to

[605]

DRURY: the tall trees. At that time not only the National Park Service, the President, and the Bureau of the Budget, but the American Forestry Association in April of 1967; Governor Brown in February, 1966; the California State Park Commission in 1966 and 1967; the Daughters of the American Revolution; the National Audubon Society in August, 1966; the National Conference of State Parks in August, 1966; and the National Geographic Society who had sponsored this project, all came around to it. And the National Wildlife Federation, meeting out in San Francisco in 1967, passed a resolution favoring the total Mill Creek watershed. The Nature Conservancy in 1967, Governor Reagan in April of 1967,  Laurance Rockefeller in June of 1966, the Save-the-Redwoods League in 1965, the Isaac Walton League (the California state division)--(the national division I think supported the Cohelan bill), and the Wilderness Society supported both Mill Creek and Redwood Creek. And the Wildlife Management Institute. All of those were in favor of that measure which never got completely embodied in legislation, but which was the government program, largely I suppose because it was a smaller program, and the Bureau of the Budget were willing to pass it.

[606]

DRURY: The thing was pretty well mixed up.

SHREPFER: I have a statement here which came out in one of the magazines, that only the Wilderness Society and the Garden Club of America remained with the Sierra Club, supporting the Redwood Creek area.

DRURY: I think that's probably right.

FRY: And the Wilderness Society was supporting both?

DRURY: The Wilderness Society, and I want to be charitable to everybody, but Dick Leonard is a director of it and he gave me a copy of their resolution which supported both projects. But Stuart Brandborg, who was the manager, ignored the action of his board. That's the way I interpret it. As I get older and older, I am more and more tolerant of sinfulness. He threw his weight toward the Redwood Creek. All of our efforts were directed to trying to avoid the appearance of any breach of opinion among conservationists. We were very anxious. The series of resolutions we passed from year to year indicated that at least we tried to turn the other cheek.

FRY: How did this work out when you attended and testified at committee meetings with David Brower and Michael McCloskey of the Sierra Club while supporting different plans?

[607]

DRURY: That happened of course when we went back to that Senate hearing. But the bill which emerged from the Senate-House conference committee was unlike any bill that any of us presented to either the House or the Senate. It was a fragment. This map published by the National Geographic Society shows the essence of the program. It shows in the tracing plan the administration bill which was approved by the Senate committee, but not by the Senate. That's what all these people I just read off to you were behind.

FRY: [looking at map] So it included the corridor of land too.

DRURY: The Cohelan bill of course included all of this, which is less than half of the Redwood Creek watershed. The measure passed by Congress finally included only about 1,300 acres of the Mill Creek watershed.

FRY: The Sierra Club plan never did include the whole watershed of Redwood Creek?

DRURY: No. That would have cost at least twice as much as the Congress finally appropriated for the whole project.

[608]

LEGISLATIVE PROCESSES

Four Washington, D.C. Conferences

June 25, 1964 White House Meeting

FRY: When you first started having meetings about the national park, whom did you have them with?

DRURY: I went back to Washington, D.C. for three different hearings, one of them very reluctantly. There was one hearing I didn't go to.

FRY: I was going to ask you how come you weren't at the one on June 25, 1964.

DRURY: I can't answer that question. I don't know why I wasn't there. [Laughter] The league was not invited. I have a number of letters from friends who had the same question. But the way it came out, I'm glad that I wasn't there.

SHREPFER: How did that come out?

DRURY: It resulted in focusing attention on the Redwood Creek area.

FRY: Was that the turning point that shifted it from Mill Creek to Redwood Creek?

DRURY: The turning point and that bears on your question, who was primarily responsible for the revival of the national park issue in the sixties? It was the

[609]

DRURY: National Geographic Society, as I have already told. The Sierra Club also was involved.

FRY: Were the three meetings you did attend congressional hearings?

DRURY: No, they were hearings in the Department of Interior.

December 15-17, 1965, Meeting with Foundation Representatives

DRURY: I went back there, at the request of Secretary Udall, with Mr. Dick Leonard, the vice president of the Save-the-Redwoods League. Udall summoned executives of a number of large corporations, the Rockefellers, the Fords and of the Phoebe Watermann Foundation. I thought at the time it was premature. Nothing really much came of it. At that time Secretary Udall put it up to these foundations that they should join with the federal government in establishing a fund for a national park. The response to it was practically nil. We already had the grant from the Ford Foundation.

FRY: You said that in one of these meetings you went back for, you did so reluctantly.

DRURY: That was the one with the foundations, because I didn't think there was any chance of Mr. Udall’s project going through.

[610]

SHREPFER: What, more exactly, was the plan in instigating this meeting with the foundations?

DRURY: Mr. Udall, I think, expected to get the foundations to put up half the money for the national park, which I never thought was a realizable thing. Then we had one episode: Ed Crafts, director of the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation, and Fred Jones, who was then State Park Director, and I went down to see Miss Doris Duke in Los Angeles.(Edward C. Crafts, President's Conference on Outdoor Recreation.) She was flirting with the idea of giving three or four million dollars. That was largely predicated on the idea of acquiring Mill Creek. She didn't, because three or four million dollars was just a drop in the bucket to the total project. She's on our list still. A person is marked if they ever express any interest, you know; some of our projects we've realized forty years after they started.

SHREPFER: Yes, I hear some of the people now contributing became interested as a result of your brother Aubrey Drury’s efforts during the 1940's and 1950's.

DRURY: Yes. Aubrey stimulated a lot of memorial groves

[611]

DRURY: and bequests. We anticipate over two million dollars in pledges and bequests, most of which will materialize in the next ten years. These people aren't getting any younger. And there are a lot that we never know about. We had one woman who died in Rome and left the League $100,000. We had no record at all of ever having any contact with her.

FRY: That's great, when they just come in from outer space.

SHREPFER: Did Laurance Rockefeller have a position they made known as to whether they favored Mill Creek, the Redwood Creek, or the Bull Creek plan outlined by Samuel Dana and sponsored and paid for by Rockefeller?

DRURY: I have no knowledge that he ever took a specific position, but in general he supported the Save-the-Redwoods League. I think he was content to let the National Park Service and those of us who knew something about the subject determine the details.

SHREPFER: There were two things that Crafts said in his seminar which interested me in this connection. One was the point he made that Laurance Rockefeller had his ear, so to speak, on everything that was happening.

DRURY: That he had the president's ear? There's no question. I think it was greatly to the benefit of the whole country.

[612]

SHREPFER: Then Crafts said the administration was adamant that it should be Mill Creek; and it was very hard to get the president to compromise and allow some acquisition in Redwood Creek, as ultimately emerged.

DRURY: I don't know about that. I would somewhat doubt that, but in any event everybody, including Laurance Rockefeller and I guess the President, felt that it was better to make a start than to go through all this turmoil and have nothing result from it. That was the position of our directors. I'll give you the resolutions that they've passed. It's awfully hard to take a position on anything that is changing with such kaleidoscopic rapidity.

Meeting of Sierra Club and League

DRURY: I went back there on December 12, 1966 at the request of Crafts and Hartzog, for a conference with Ed Wayburn, and Michael McCloskey from the Sierra Club, in the hope that we could reach a common ground. They wouldn't give up the Redwood Creek project and we wouldn't give up the Mill Creek project, but at that time we thought that they were reconciled to combining the two of them. Later on the Sierra Club sort of cast aspersions on the Save-the-Redwoods

[613]

DRURY: League ideas, as not being on a sufficiently grandiose scale. It's debatable just how much you should contend for. We have never had any quarrel with the Sierra Club or anybody else. We just plugged along. Meanwhile, since the thing started, we've added over ten million dollars worth of property to the state parks.

FRY: The art of the possible.

SHREPFER: Do you think that the division between the Sierra Club and the league took a toll on the result?

DRURY: Oh, I don't think there's any question about it. I have no right to quote anybody, but you can talk to Dick Leonard. He felt that the Sierra Club had impaired very definitely the prospects of a satisfactory national park solution.

Senate Committee Hearing, Subcommittee on Parks and Recreation, April 17, 1967

DRURY: The third meeting was the hearing of the Senate committee on April l7, 1967. Albright and Wirth and I all three testified in favor of the Senate bill, which had not passed the Senate, but had been recommended by the Senate committee. It never passed the Senate. It went into conference very irregularly. It went into conference with the House committee

[614]

DRURY: without having passed the Senate. I didn't even know that you could operate that way, but that's the way they did it.

Bill in Conference Committee (Conference Report H. Rept. 1890 for S 2515. September 11, 1968)

FRY: Ed Crafts mentions how they also added features to the bill in conference committee too.

DRURY: Oh, they totally changed the bill. It is a moot question and I wouldn't want to publicize it --I would want to be sure of my ground--but as near as we can make out the dominant influence in the conference committee was the attorney for the Rellim Lumber Company. That's one reason the thing turned out as it did. The National Park Service was practically ignored in the drawing of the boundary lines. We knew that. I don't think Crafts was there. Crafts spoke as if he were there, but I don't think he was, from the reports we get.

Nor was anybody from the National Park Service. I think they came in and gave testimony, but the bill was written by the assistants to the two committees, the Senate and the House committees, who had the advantage of two or three days of observation up there in the redwood country. Whereas the Sierra

[615]

DRURY: Club, and. particularly the Redwoods League which had been studying the thing for fifty years weren't consulted. I don't think the Sierra Club was consulted.

The Sierra Club had made its influence felt, because they elected, rightly or wrongly, to defy the Internal Revenue Service and enter into controversial attempt to influence legislation. We were assiduous in avoiding getting into that position, because there was too much at stake for the Save-the-Redwoods League. It wouldn't have been fair to contributors like the Rockefellers, the Fords or the Mellons or Mrs. William Stout or any of the others for the league to have lost its tax deductibility. So we were under wraps. It's a funny thing that in the days when I was in government, both federal and state, we could lobby with impunity. There was no law or instruction against it. I used to go up on the hill. I spent a good deal of my time lobbying in Washington, D. C. as director of the National Park Service and in Sacramento for the Save-the-Redwoods League in the early days. In fact, in the 1928 Annual Report of the Save-the-Redwoods League every other page had a heading "Vote for the State Park

[616]

DRURY: Bond Issue" on it. We wouldn't dare do that today. We'd lose our tax deductibility.

SHREPFER: Was there a change in the law?

DRURY: Yes, the law was changed during the time when I was in Washington. The members of Congress got tired of getting so many letters from their constituents, which were stimulated by not only the conservationists but every other special interest group, so they got the internal revenue act changed so that you'd lose your tax deductibility if you indulged in that kind of activity. There's no question that the Save-the-Redwoods League was handicapped by the fact that they didn't engage in outright attempt to influence legislation. The only time that we put in an appearance was when we were invited, which we had a right to do of course.

U.S. Forest Service:  Redwood Exchange Unit

FRY: I just wanted to ask you about this idea of the exchange unit, if you agree with Ed Graft's version that the whole idea for a park was imperiled when the visiting congressional committee saw there really wasn't any difference in management of the Forest Service redwood unit and the privately owned redwood production forests?

[617]

DRURY: Crafts knows a lot more about forest practices than I do, but I would doubt whether that was strictly so. Does he say that? I read his testimony.

FRY: Yes. They have a sort of a showcase, experimental area and Crafts tells about how the congressional committee asked to see the rest of their forest, where they had actually shortened the rotation and were running their property exactly like the lumber companies run theirs.

DRURY: I have a very high opinion of the U.S. Forest Service and I think it's too bad that they weren't allowed to pursue their studies as completely as they should.

Reading Mr. Crafts' discussion, my impression is that none of us has the whole picture.

FRY: That's right. [Laughter] That's right. He has the sort of congressional and administrative viewpoint.

DRURY: We all got in on it at different times. I went back to three different conferences and hearings there in Washington, D. C.

[618]

Congressman Wayne Aspinall

SHREPFER: Do you think Wayne Aspinall’s rather desperate move to get the bill through at the end, even though in the eyes of many conservationists he sacrificed a great deal, was the right thing to have done?

DRURY: Oh, I suppose so. But I have no high opinion of Congressman Aspinall, either his ability or his public spirit. His career shows that it pays to live a long time. When I was in Washington, he was just a freshman congressman and nobody paid much attention to him. Now he's the kingpin on this committee, simply because he's gone back year after year. I think he was obviously biased in favor of the so-called vested interests.

SHREPFER: Then you don't think his cutting it down in conference before he introduced it and then allowing no discussion on the floor, was all because he thought that there was no other way to get it through?

DRURY: I think that was, from about every standpoint, undoubtedly so. I think Mr. Aspinall is entitled to credit, at least in getting the Land and Water Conservation Fund released, which he made a condition to any action at all.

[619]

LOCAL OPPOSITION

Economic Problem: Del Norte County

SHREPFER: What would the creation of the national park in Mill Creek, as you advocated, have done to the economy of Del Norte County?

DRURY: Well, it would have been harmful to the economy of Del Norte County. I'll give you a series of resolutions that our directors passed at different stages of the discussion of the redwood park. From the very beginning we set down certain objectives that we thought were desirable. One of these was to provide, as we had done, for instance, in the case of the Grand Teton National Park and the Jackson Hole purchase, that on a diminishing basis in lieu taxes should be paid by the government to the local community and if that had been done I think it would have allayed most of the opposition.

The League in its Spring, 1965 Bulletin first set forth the various principles that we thought should be followed, not the least of which was that the local community should be compensated for the loss of taxes, and if necessary, given government relief--which at that time and I guess still, is

[620]

DRURY: pretty widespread for every other purpose. It would be applied to Del Norte County. In other words, we didn't want to see Del Norte County's economic interests impaired by this project.

SHREPFER: Why wasn't it done?

DRURY: Because Congress didn't want to do it. We had done that while I was head of national parks; we finally settled the Jackson Hole controversy in just that way, in lieu taxes to be paid on a diminishing basis over a ten year period. Ten years now of course is long past. I left there in 1951. I understand that the citizens of Jackson Hole want to have another ten years of taxes spent on them. [Laughter] Congress was adamant on that.

But we advocated that economic aid be given to Del Norte County perhaps in the form of in lieu taxes paid for a reasonable period, at least until tourist travel somewhat compensated for the loss of industrial revenue.

FRY: Ed Crafts says they usually figure about five years for an area to make the transition in its economy, so that it's as prosperous as it was before a national park took over. Do you think that's about right? Is that what you have counted on for something like Mill Creek, or would it be slower up there?

[621]

DRURY: I never personally was as optimistic as the Arthur D. Little Associates and other firms who have made reports. I think that it's a grave question whether they'd ever recoup entirely. There's a limit--and there should be a limit--to the tourist travel in an area of that sort. The National Park Service, just like the State park service, has a very sound but somewhat restricted policy as to the extent to which public recreational use is possible in that type of a reservation.

FRY: I guess a lot of the economic recovery is based on businesses that crop up just outside the park boundaries.

DRURY: Yes, the outfit that makes the most money up there is that "Trees of Mystery."

SHREPFER: Yes, there are so many people in the parking lot it's frustrating.

DRURY: In my youth I had an opportunity to buy that 160 acres for $10,000 for the state. It was owned by the De Martin family. I suppose at the market value of the timber alone, it would be worth a quarter of a million now. But it wasn't connected with either the Prairie Creek or Del Norte Coast State Parks, so it didn't have high priority. These people, by

[622]

DRURY: using I guess legitimate enough methods, dramatize the redwoods. The same kind of phenomena that you can see free in the state parks, you have to pay a dollar to see at the "Trees of Mystery." But they've built up quite a tourist business.

FRY: They have all the gadgetry.

DRURY: Have you ever been in there?

FRY: No. [Laughter] My friends have, and they told me about the voice that booms out from the tree.

DRURY: It's all surface stuff. Some of the boys think that the state parks should have done the same thing.

SHREPFER: Well, they could have made some money for the system. [Laughter]

Residential Opposition to Park Acquisitions

SHREPFER: When you use eminent domain, you still have the trial in Humboldt or Del Norte County?

DRURY: Yes, and that's a great disadvantage too.

SHREPFER: The jurors tend to be hostile to the league, do they not?

DRURY: They do now. In the early days the juries used to be made up of farmers, who were also taxpayers. We condemned very little of the property. Most of it we bought by agreement, but when we did get the state

[623]

DRURY: to condemn, we usually bought it for a little less than we'd offered the owners.

FRY: The farmers were usually behind the idea of creating the land for a state park because they were sympathetic?

DRURY: Oh, in the beginning everybody up there in Humboldt County, everybody was our friend, practically.

SHREPFER: How long would you say that that feeling lasted?

DRURY: Until about the fifties. We wouldn't have these parks today if the lumber companies hadn't been cooperative, particularly the Pacific Lumber Company. They were more or less cooperative in that they were willing to sell at their price, but that's a lot better than not getting the property.

FRY: What changed the climate of opinion among local residents?

DRURY: Neither redwood nor Douglas fir sold very well in the early days. The country was remote. Douglas fir was worth practically nothing. We didn't even cruise the Douglas fir when we bought a tract of timber.

FRY: I wondered if you had noticed more opposition on the part of sort of the man in the street recently, perhaps as a result of an addition over the years to the population up there of people whose lives are dependent on the redwood industry.

[624]

DRURY: Oh, yes. No question about it. Now you asked before whether or not the opposition was organized. It was very skillfully organized by the lumber companies.

SHREPFER: Is it the lumber companies as opposed to the unions, or in cooperation with the unions?

DRURY: I have no knowledge of the unions themselves taking any part at all in the opposition. It was the chambers of commerce, the boards of trade and the lumber companies plus two or three organizations, such as the Redwood Region Conservation Conference, the California Redwood Association and two or three others, all of whom were very strong in their opposition. "Don't park our jobs." That was the popular local slogan.

FRY: Was the California Redwood Association in opposition?

DRURY: Yes, the California Redwood Association was a part of it. You're familiar with that report they got out, showing what the industry was doing for recreation and what they were willing to sell. The fact is that we'd already bought many of those properties listed and of course through the Nature Conservancy, the Georgia-Pacific Company tendered some wonderful groves on the Van Duzen River to the state, though the state hasn't title yet.

[625]

FRY: Oh, I didn't know Nature Conservancy had bought anything.

DRURY: They haven't bought anything, but apparently skillful tax lawyers worked it out so that the Georgia-Pacific could get the credit for giving this property to the state, as a deduction from income tax as a charitable contribution. Whatever their motivation it was a wonderful thing to do.

FRY: While we're talking about the opposition of the timber owners maybe you can explain the role Don Cave played, if any at all.

DRURY: Don Cave was the local representative there of Dean Witter and Company, the investment brokers. It was he who made the classic statement that the difference between them up there and the conservationists was that the conservationists were thinking of posterity, whereas they were thinking of the present.

FRY: [Laughter] Kraeger is the consulting industrial economist from Seattle who prepared a detailed study of the park proposals for Cave's committee. I guess they had their own park.

DRURY: Yes, Kraeger made a report showing that it would be a catastrophe for the county, particularly for Del Norte County, which is a very much smaller county.

[626]

DRURY: The loss in the tax base in Humboldt County could be absorbed, but there's no question that, without in lieu taxes, the county of Del Norte would have been very seriously affected. It's too bad that Congress was unwilling to follow the precedent that they'd set in Jackson Hole.

SHREPFER: The reason I asked about the unions as opposed to the lumber company, was that when I talked to some of the people up there and thought about it, I came to the conclusion that really the lumber companies have something to lose, but they can be compensated, whereas the people whom the unions represent are the people who lose something that is very difficult to replace. They would have to leave their homes.

DRURY: No question about that, and it may be that the unions did take a part in it, but I don't recollect it. The Humboldt Board of Trade and the Eureka Chamber of Commerce of course were very much opposed.

SHREPFER: The Eureka Chamber of Commerce is under Mr. Dick Denbo isn't it?

DRURY: Yes. He didn't see the whole picture.

SHREPFER: Of course chambers of commerce are always--

DRURY: I can't say whether or not the companies have been amply compensated because I don't know what the federal appraisals are, but I'll bet they're being

[627]

DRURY: adequately compensated. Under this act the value is fixed as of the date of the passage of the law by the federal government, but they are compensated at the rate of six per cent per annum on any unpaid balances, so that's going to run into a lot of money.

Miller-Rellim Lumber Company

FRY: I just found out the other day, when I was sitting in Ed Craft’s seminar at Berkeley,(Ed Crafts, Seminar on the "Making of the National Redwood Park," February 12, 1970, University of California, Berkeley.) that Mr. Harold Miller of the Miller-Rellim Lumber Company, which owns so much of Mill Creek, lives in Oregon.

DRURY: Oh yes. He has larger holdings in Oregon than he does in Del Norte County. I guess he is sincere in his concern about the people of Del Norte, but as far as his operations are concerned, that's not nearly as important to him as his holdings up there in Oregon. But he's like everybody else. He didn't want to have people interfere with his operations. I don't think he was handled very well. It was I

[628]

DRURY: think strategically very unwise for the enthusiasts to get Senator Kuchel and the President to approve the introduction of a bill that would have fined or imprisoned officers of the Miller-Rellim Company if they cut any more timber on lands that were being considered for the national park. That isn't the way things are done in America.

FRY: That's not a gentle persuasion technique is it?

DRURY: No. I don't think it was wise to threaten to send Miller and the Rellim Company to jail if they didn't stop cutting.

JOHN B. DEWITT: When the newspapers asked me about it, I said, "We're not constitutional lawyers." We weren't presuming to give an opinion on whether or not it was legal.

DRURY: It was done with the best of intentions, to help us in our project.

DEWITT: The press questioned the constitutionality of this law and we rendered no opinion it, but I think that the law would have been declared unconstitutional.

DRURY: We had no doubt on that at all.

FRY: But in the meantime he would have stopped cutting, I guess.

DEWITT: They never did stop cutting.

[629]

DRURY: And Harold Miller, who is a very flinty character anyhow, had his resolution to fight this thing to the death enhanced by that particular action.

SHREPFER: Was it after that he did the cutting or was that before?

DRURY: Both before and after.

SHREPFER: How extensive was his cutting in Mill Creek?

DRURY: It was quite destructive and it was planned, obviously, deliberately in order to scotch the whole project. No question about that.

SHREPFER: Is that cutting still going on?

DRURY: The property belongs to the Rellim Lumber Company and they have a right to utilize their own property. Chances are that their operations have not started yet, but they will shortly. They more or less cease in the winter time of course.

SHREPFER: Who first approached Harold Miller about this?

DRURY: That's a long and complicated story. Mr. Fred Smith, who's on the staff of Laurance Rockefeller, had a series of interviews, unknown to us, with Mr. Miller back in about 1965.

SHREPFER: I've never seen any evidence of these interviews.

DRURY: I have quite a body of correspondence, some of which is, I guess, still confidential, with Fred Smith.

[630]

DRURY: who brought us into the picture fairly early, but a little too late to do any good. The essence of his relations with Mr. Miller was that he was trying to induce him to sell out lock, stock and barrel, which is what of course we had advocated over many years. The Save-the-Redwoods League, you know, has had a program for the last fifteen years that included all of the Mill Creek watershed. So that it's always been known both in Del Norte County and in the Rellim Lumber Company, that if and when the money could be obtained from any source, we wanted to buy the entire Mill Creek watershed. But Mr. Fred Smith got nowhere with Mr. Miller.

We had some conferences with both Mr. Miller and Mr. Darrel Shroeder, who's his local manager. They were friendly, but were very firm in their intention to continue operating. We felt at one time, when they started cutting after the first legislation had been introduced, that it was not unreasonable to ask them temporarily to shift their operations to timber that was outside of the proposed boundaries, which they could have done at considerable expense, but we advocated that that extra expense be paid for as a part of the cost of establishing the national park. The league in its Spring, 1965

[631]

DRURY: bulletin, first set forth the conditions under which the redwood national park should be established in the Mill Creek area.

FRY: At that meeting of the Executive Committee of the National Park Service in San Francisco was there any discussion of how to approach Mr. Miller?

DRURY: No. Mr. Miller had been pretty thoroughly alienated before that. Of course what we advocated was that the federal government buy him out lock, stock and barrel and pay for his factory, his roads, rolling stock, his land and his timber.

When the bill came out of committee it carried the proviso that the boundaries and price would be worked out later but that the park was established right then, which was unusual I believe.

FRY: What did you think about the way this was done?

DRURY: It was unique. If they'd done that at Point Reyes, they wouldn't have been in the fix they're in now. I think that was a legitimate device.

[632]

Redwood Lumbermen: United or Divided

FRY: One of the things we haven't talked about is which companies fought hardest against Mill Creek proposal and which ones fought hardest against the Redwood Creek proposal.

DRURY: Well, at one time I think they were willing to let Rellim Lumber Company bear the brunt of the whole thing. From our standpoint, that would have been all right. We never have proposed anything in the way of confiscation of anybody's property. We always advocated that they be fully compensated. And I think that's one reason we've done so well generally in dealing with the lumber companies.

FRY: You have to consider your long range relationship with them.

What were reactions to the proposed park land owned in the Redwood Creek area? Did Miller, for instance, come out and support that?

DRURY: Well, Miller didn't own any land there.

FRY: I know, that's why I thought he might have supported it as possible park land. [Laughter]

DRURY: No, I think he was opposed to the whole program. Of course, Georgia-Pacific, and Arcata, to some extent, Simpson, were the main companies represented

[633]

DRURY: there. The greatest damage, because of their limited ownerships, was done to the Arcata Lumber Company. If we had the money, there are some intimations that either the state or the federal government might buy more land on Redwood Creek from Arcata. But the other owners I think would fight it to the death.

FRY: I am trying to get a pattern of the behavior of the men in the lumber companies because it's quite possible that someday someone will be interviewing them.

DRURY: I think they should. I can give you a lot of names of some very fine fellows in the lumber industry.

FRY: The president of Arcata, the presidency changed, but when Howard Libby was in, I thought that he changed his position in this, and that he actually testified on behalf of Mill Creek once. Is my memory wrong?

DRURY: Well, I don't think he testified, but I am sure that in his heart he much preferred to have the government select Mill Creek rather than Redwood Creek, because that would have left them unscathed. Of course, my reminiscence about Libby--we're about the same age, he's a little younger than I am. I remember when I first went up there in the twenties he was at work in one of the lumber company offices, and like

[634]

DRURY: many underlings, he took a very dim view of the management of his company. And when we twisted the tail of the lumber barons, he'd always pat us on the back. He was tickled to death when we had our big meeting with the Pacific Lumber Company, about which I've told you. When he became president of a successful lumber company his position changed a bit.

FRY: Well, he may have done more for conservation than he ever planned to do by clear cutting his holdings along Highway 101. [Laughter]

DRURY: Of course, people's motives are mixed. The lumber companies, and I think I've already told you this, objected to his doing that, not so much because of what he did, but because it was so conspicuous to the public. There are only a few of us that are beyond suspicion as to our motivation.

FRY: Yes. I'd hate to be put on trial today for mine.

[635]

AFTERMATH

Rounding Out the Watersheds

SHREPFER: Does the League plan to continue acquisitions to round out the Redwood National Park watersheds or do you feel this will be necessary?

DRURY: We of course would like to see more funds go into that, but anybody who knows the realities of the situation knows it's going to be years before that happens, and that of course is directly linked up with the prospect of the remaining virgin stands of redwoods persisting long enough so that money would become available to acquire them.

FRY: Are you talking about on Mill Creek?

DRURY: I'm talking about both Mill Creek and Redwood Creek. We still feel that the total watershed of Mill Creek should be acquired for the redwood park, even though the bulk of what we purchase from now on will be cut over land.

FRY: In that 700 acres of Mill Creek that was acquired for the park (I think my acreage is right), was that the pretty part?

DRURY: No, it wasn't the most important part. You have all these different statements we've made?

[636]

FRY: Yes, I guess I got the 700 acres from your first announcement to your membership of the Redwood Park legislation.

So, in other words, there's still a lot to get on Mill Creek?

DRURY: Yes, and the prospects, to be very frank, are quite dim, because the company has a limited amount of stumpage. They want to keep operating and there's a case where the local community surely had a great deal at stake in keeping that kind of operation going. It's a moot question as to whether the Rellim Company, which operates in Mill Creek, has enough virgin stumpage plus second growth that will come into maturity in time to sustain a continuous operation. Only time will tell about that. It'll be another generation I think before we'll know. I know that Lawrence Merriam, who's given it a lot of thought, is of the opinion that they're just on the edge of not being able to operate continuously. They have maybe twenty years of operation ahead of them and what if anything will happen to the remainder of that watershed is anybody's guess of course. But it will be in the program of the Save-the-Redwoods League, I hope, right along and it may materialize. We're doing things today that we started forty years

[637]

DRURY: ago. If you only persist long enough, you'll get most of these things accomplished.

FRY: Does Merriam's estimate include the grove of the big virgin redwoods in Rellim land?

DRURY: Oh yes, it includes their entire holding.

SHREPFER: As it is right now?

DRURY: Yes. There are a lot of nuances to that situation. It is very unfortunate because first, if there was to be a redwood national park, and I think that ultimately it will materialize, it is very unfortunate that it wasn't done a generation ago. Then the process of legislation at best is imperfect and it was decidedly so in this case. There were so many competing forces, not only lumbermen and local interests, but the Sierra Club was obsessed with the idea of the preservation of Redwood Creek, which we surely didn't oppose, but we didn't give it as high a priority as the Mill Creek watershed.

SHREPFER: When I talked to Charles Daly he said he thought that the outlines of the park could be rounded out and that it would be a satisfactory park ultimately, but he had some very serious reservations about what anybody could do about Emerald Mile. You, then, are not as optimistic as he, is that correct?

[638]

DRURY: No, I don't think that these companies will willingly sell any more land to either the federal government or the state. I don't think that the Congress would authorize condemnation, so we're in the pitiful position of having a pathetic fragment of a park down on Redwood Creek. It's debatable whether or not what we have on Mill Creek is adequate. For many years we thought it was. In fact in September of 1937 a report was made for the National Park Service by John McLaughlin and Lawrence Cook which recommended 17,000 acres of which we later bought about 10,000 acres for Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park.(John S. McLaughlin and Lawrence F. Cook, "A Report on Proposed Redwood National Park in California," September 30, 1937. McLaughlin was Acting Assistant Regional Director, National Park Service and Lawrence Cook, Deputy Chief Forester.) And only the upper portion, a little more than what's in the state park now, was proposed. That was the conception of my good friends, McLaughlin and Cook, when they made the report in 1937. But as the years went on we learned a great deal and we had a lot of sad experience with the inadequacy of holdings that didn't contain complete ecological

[639]

DRURY: units. Whatever a viable park is, it isn't what we have in Mill Creek now and particularly at Prairie Creek State Park.

Cohelan has a bill in Congress to protect the Emerald Mile in the park. There's no question that it and the watershed that contributes toward it should be included.(San Francisco Examiner, August-September, 1969, "Nixon Aid Sought on Redwoods," Sierra Club proposal for adding to Redwood National Park.) We would support that, but I think that chances of getting it through Congress in the next few years are almost nil. That answers that question, in my humble opinion.

SHREPFER: Then Mill Creek is high on the league's list of priorities?

DRURY: Yes, but we have no illusions. First of all, the Miller Company I don't think will sell. We couldn't possibly acquire the timber short of condemnation, which isn't feasible unless we had the money in hand, which we don't have. The prospects of either state or federal appropriations in the next two or three years are practically nil. It's almost inevitable that the best that we can do at Mill Creek and the best I think that they can do in Redwood

[640]

DRURY: Creek, is gradually to buy up the cut over land, allow it to reforest, do some planting, try to restore the cover of the watershed, and pray for no more floods. Of course they spoke of that flood in '55 as being the hundred year flood and nine years later they had another even worse.

There are some considerations (that I think are a little premature to discuss very much) in the planning of the National Park Service, which would involve an attempt as is provided in the act of Congress, for the government to make agreements with the lumber companies as to the way in which they shall log their timber that borders on the national park holdings in the Redwood Creek region. This is a report by Professor Stone (Edward C. Stone) and Rudolph Gran and Paul Zinke on the proposal for buffers. This hasn't been approved by the National Park Service. It may not be.

FRY: But their report was funded by the National Park Service?

DRURY: Yes. They were engaged by the National Park Service to make this report. Do you know Professor Stone?

FRY: Yes, I do. What's the date of that report?

DRURY: The date is April 30, 1969. You might be able to

[641]

DRURY: get a copy from him.

FRY: Could we read the title into the record?

DRURY: Certainly. It's called Redwood National Park. California: An Analysis of the Buffers and the Watershed Management Required to Preserve the Redwood Forest, as Associated Streams in the Redwood National Park, Stone and associates. It's 106 pages and contains some very interesting, and I think some rather impractical suggestions for ameliorating the effects of erosion from run-off when they cut the slopes above this corridor of National Park land in Redwood Creek and around the tall trees area.

There are two committees, one appointed by the Governor (They asked me to serve on it, and I begged off and they appointed Lawrence Merriam.), and one appointed by the National Park Service. They apparently have my name on it, but I asked them to put Merriam on that also. These two committees are studying the whole problem of what to do about the park holdings in both the national and state parks, and are proceeding with the customary deliberation that is exhibited by government agencies [Laughter] since the beginning of the government.

You ought to talk to Lawrence Merriam sometime about it. But the whole situation is still in a

[642]

DRURY: state of flux, and I think we might waste a lot of time speculating about what's going to happen next.

FRY: Well, does this reflect a concern about the preservation of the redwoods along the creek in the corridor? These two, the Stone report and...

DRURY: Well, the Stone report is directed directly to that problem.

FRY: -- the other one is all the parks?

DRURY: Well, we haven't concealed the fact that we think it's preposterous to have this narrow strip which is only about half a mile wide along the stream.

FRY: Is Hartzog apprised of this?

DRURY: Oh, yes. Hartzog realizes it, but they're at the mercy of Congress, even more than we are, so that if there were any prospect of money, we surely would like to have the government appropriate more both to Mill Creek and to Redwood Creek, and we would support any program of that sort.

Now, you have the different bulletins of the Redwoods League where we've tried to keep up-to-date statements of our position in relation to the Redwood National Park and the transfer ultimately perhaps of the state parks to the federal government. We've tried to maintain a somewhat neutral position until we knew just exactly what all the surrounding

[643]

DRURY: circumstances are going to be. There's one of our publications that came out right after the National Park Act of 1968 that gives the essence of the whole situation. It has a map in color showing the state and the federal areas and the watershed lands that haven't been acquired.

Transfer of State Parks to Federal Government

SHREPFER: Can the state parks be transferred to the federal government or is this in any way a violation of the original contracts made by the state with the donors of the memorial groves?

DRURY: The act, as you unquestionably have read, provides that those arrangements shall be honored in the National Park. We haven't had a legal interpretation as to whether that language means that the federal government would establish additional groves in the land for which federal money was paid. They've already of course named an area for Lady Bird Johnson.

SHREPFER: Is that a dangerous precedent?

DRURY: No, I don't think so.

SHREPFER: It's really a grove that was established without any relation to a direct donation.

DRURY: Yes, but it was in honor of Mrs. Johnson, who

[644]

DRURY: unquestionably contributed a great deal to the cause of preserving the native landscape and beauty in America.

FRY: Did she play an important role in this park?

DRURY: Well, she was very much for it yes, unquestionably, she is alleged at least to have had considerable influence with the President. One of the dominant characters was Laurance Rockefeller, who was Chairman of the President's Advisory Council on Recreation and Natural Beauty. They changed the name of that committee so much I think the establishment by President Nixon of this more formal Council on Environment is all to the good. Gives us another address to which to write him, you know.

FRY: In our previous interviews there was always some question of the terms under which private money for park land acquisition was given.

DRURY: I don't know what would have to be done. It might be conceivable they'd even have to have a vote of the people.

[John B. Dewitt comes in.]
[Welcoming of Dewitt, conversation]

SHREPFER: I was just wondering about this transfer of the state park land to the federal government and what it would do to the lands acquired under the 1928 bond issue,

[645]

SHREPFER: by which six million dollars was voted by all the people of California for the purchase of parks for the state.

DEWITT: To give to the state, not to the federal government?

SHREPFER: Yes. And not to the federal government.

DRURY: All I said was it might well be that a vote of the people would be necessary, but I’m pretty sure that the people would vote affirmatively on it.

DEWITT: I think so. Yes.

DRURY: Dick Leonard feels that it's the same kind of use that the donors and the voters in the bond issue election approved and that the court would probably sustain it.

SHREPFER: Do you believe the state parks should be transferred to the federal government eventually?

DRURY: Regardless of what I believe, I think that ultimately it will occur. I'll try to dig up a statement I made to the Congress soon after the law was passed in which I expressed my ideas as to the conditions under which we should approve such transfer, if we do approve it. Surely it should be that there should be a quid pro quo, in that at least in substantial degree it should contribute to the benefit of the redwood parks. I don't think our directors

[646]

DRURY: would willingly see these lands transferred from the state to the federal government without some kind of recognition of the need of further acquisition of the redwood country. I think that's one thing that will hold it up for some time.

Whatever action is taken in transferring these present state park properties to the federal government must further the Save-the-Redwoods program. It might be done through the medium of the Land and Water Conservation fund of course, grants-in-aid to the state. But anything that's favorable to our cause I think is a little remote right at the present minute. John Dewitt and I went up to Sacramento yesterday. It's a pretty gloomy prospect, as far as public funds for this kind of purpose are concerned.

DEWITT: I understand they can't even sell bonds.

DRURY: The state now can't sell bonds, they don't have any money even to pay escrow fees after the first of July, and of course the staff is being reduced. I've participated in this thing so long that I've seen them come and go, you know. [Laughter]

SHREPFER: What is the official position of the Save-the-Redwoods League as to the transfer of the state parks to the federal government?

[647]

DRURY: As I mentioned previously, in the past Dr. John C. Merriam, after the state had made its huge investment, was very doubtful whether the state parks should be transferred to the federal government.

Right now our directors haven't taken a specific position on it. I'll give you a copy of a statement I made to the Council of the League last year, in which I've tried to outline the conditions which might warrant the transfer of the state parks to the federal government.

There are arguments pro and con. I think one of the principal arguments in favor of the Redwood National Park is that Uncle Sam is the only one who has limitless funds, or thinks he has, to accomplish these things. Our trip up to Sacramento yesterday convinced us that it's going to be pretty slim pickings for the redwoods as far as the state is concerned for the next few years. Of course I've lived so long I've seen those things wax and wane.

SHREPFER: Do you feel that the administration of the parks would be better if it was under the National Park Service as opposed to the state of California which from my experience administers the redwood parks very well.

[648]

DRURY: I'm in a difficult position to answer that. It's even-steven with me; I know intimately the principles and personnel of both organizations. I think they're both very high class and I think there's very little choice to be made. The only thing is that the federal government already has allocated more money for staff to care for this very fragmentary holding than the state has been able to build up over the last forty years.

FRY: What about permanency of policy on management and preservation?

DRURY: I think that probably the National Park Service is a little more consistent than the state would be. There's always the possibility of a state administration coming in that would exploit the parks and perhaps not treat them quite as well. On the other hand, there is a good deal of criticism of the national park system. But the basic principle of the national parks is pretty firmly established and so far the policy that has guided them in their planning for the future of the Redwood National Park, with or without the state acquisitions, is very satisfactory to the conservationists.

FRY: No one seems to be particularly anxious now about

[649]

FRY: the question of whether the state parks would be transferred or not. Is there any pressure particularly to get this accomplished right away? I'm not aware of any.

DRURY: Personally I can't see what the hurry is. They have several years ahead of them in planning and organizing and the state parks are being very well administered at the present time. There's no question that the personnel that are in charge from Director William Penn Mott down are fully as competent to handle the affairs as anybody that they could muster in the national parks. But it would seem that--just as the Yosemite Valley, being the great area it was, ultimately was ceded by the state back to the federal government or returned to them--some of the state park area up there ought to be included in the Redwood National Park. I discussed that a little bit while I was back in Washington, in the 40's, when the Douglas bill came up.

[650]

Future: Save-the-Redwoods League

SHREPFER: Has the existence of the national park decreased the popularity of the league?

DRURY: I don't think that it has and of course we try to rationalize the present situation in our continued program of money raising and land acquisition. Since the act as passed, we've bought eight or ten parcels of property up at Jed Smith and Prairie Creek, all of which should have been in the national park but they're not authorized to be included. I think if Prairie Creek and Jed Smith are transferred to the federal government they will pass an act accepting them. That's practically all been done with Redwoods League money. The big purchase we made up there two years ago was Pepperwood Flat on the Avenue of the Giants.

Conclusion: Was the National Park Worthwhile?

SHREPFER: Do you think the park was worthwhile?

DRURY: I think it undoubtedly was. However it is regrettable that this is one of the few cases where because of the conflicting interest the technical judgment of the National Park Service was not accepted by the

[651]

DRURY: Congress. The boundary lines were mainly drawn by the underlings in the committees who had just a bowing acquaintance with the terrain. Most of them had spent only a few days there and I am afraid that they were swayed pretty largely by the arguments of the lobbyists and attorneys of the lumber barons.

FRY: Does that reflect some kind of abdication by the higher-ups?

DRURY: Oh, no. It's been going on right along.

FRY: Why was it different this time?

DRURY: Mainly because of the amount of money involved. It was the large interests of these lumber companies. They had a side to it, too. They have their stock holders to whom they're responsible. They made these large investments in stumpage, mills, roads, and equipment and they predicated these investments on having a certain amount of timber they can extract. That's why we have never advocated anything short of complete compensation to them, including amortization of plant.