1 50 8 https://highway89.org/files/original/af0b4b9dd8255af3f93c57ffd3df60ab.mp3 d32e0735f42440d5765054240e9252dd https://highway89.org/files/original/fe0d1ef3210c677f2d61ca7e5cac51c6.pdf c4cce95a61e96daf719459ad11e244a4 PDF Text Text LAND USE MANAGEMENT TRANSCRIPTION COVER SHEET Interviewee: Thadis Box Place of Interview: Mountain West Center for Regional Studies, USU Date of Interview: 21 March 2008 Interviewer: Recordist: Elaine Thatcher Elaine Thatcher Recording Equipment: Transcription Equipment used: Transcribed by: Transcript Proofed by: Marantz PMD660 Digital Recorder Power Player Transcription Software: Executive Communication Systems Glenda Nesbit Elaine Thatcher; Randy Williams (17 March 2011) Brief Description of Contents: Short demonstration interview at which several people were present, including Thad Box, Elaine Thatcher, Brad Cole, Randy Williams, Barbara Middleton, Bob Parson and Glenda Nesbit. The interview covers Box’s early years and education, including going to college on the GI bill and an epiphany he had after high school that directed his course of study from engineering to agriculture (ranching) related land use management. Reference: ET = Elaine Thatcher (Director, Mountain West Center for Regional Studies BP = Bob Parson (Interviewer; USU University Archivist) RW = Randy Williams (Interviewer; USU Folklore Curator) BC = Brad Cole (Interviewer; Associate Dean, USU Libraries) TB = Thad Box NOTE: Interjections during pauses or transitions in dialogue such as “uh” and starts and stops in conversations are not included in transcript. All additions to transcript are noted with brackets. TAPE TRANSCRIPTION ET: Okay, you hit, oops, I hit pause out of habit. Okay Thad. I’m with Thad Box. This is Elaine Thatcher and we are at the Mountain West Center for Regional Studies at Utah State University. It is March 21, 2008. And we are doing the first installment of an interview regarding land use and policy. Thad, would you say your whole name for me. Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Thad  Box,  21  March  208   Page  1   �TB: My name is Thadis Wayne Box. ET: Thaddeus? TB: Thadis. T H A D I S ET: Oh. TB: I don’t think my mother knew how to spell. ET: (laughter) Okay. When were you born? TB: I was born 9 May 1929. ET: Where? TB: On the banks of the Little Llano River in Central Texas. ET: Is that where you grew up? TB: I grew up there in Burnet and Llano counties; two adjoining counties in the hill country in Texas. ET: That’s a beautiful part of Texas. Now I’m watching the meter – the meter is on the front that tells whether it’s too loud or too soft. So I’m keeping an eye on that as we go. Well, so how long did you live in Texas? TB: Oh I lived there; I guess I left in 194-, no 1959 when I came here. So I lived there, discounting the time I spent in the army. I was there from 1929 to 1959. ET: Wow. Okay. So its home. TB: its home. ET: Yeah TB: Well. Yeah. Cache Valley is also home. ET: So then you came here in 1959. TB: I came here in 1959 and I stayed here for three years until I took a job back down in Texas at Texas Tech, starting a Range Department there in directing the Arid Land Center. And then I came back here in 1970 as Dean. Retired here in 1989 after 20 years as Dean roughly, and then went to New Mexico State for an endowed chair down there. And then came back here after I retired the second time from New Mexico State; in 1996 when we came back. Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Thad  Box,  21  March  208   Page  2   �ET: What… TB: We’re slow learners. This is our third time back in Cache Valley. (Laughter) We come and leave, we come and leave. ET: What draws you back each time? I mean, obviously one time it was a job. But what has brought you back? TB: The people and the country. You know, this is really where we grew up intellectually. You know the first time we went back to Texas after being up here we thought we wanted to go back to Texas and it was a bigger shock than coming in to Utah in the first place, going back, because we no longer belonged anyplace. And we grew up here intellectually with Fred Wagner and these other people that you’ll be interviewing. That they were our posse and this is the reason we keep coming back is because of the people here. ET: That’s great. Um, well, you have grown up into this, this land related profession. What brought you to your profession? TB: I think I was born into it. My family, (as far as I’ve traced them back to prerevolutionary time) were always people of the land. They were farmers and ranchers and moved west each time new land opened up. And then, I was born into a family there in Llano County that at that time, we were tenant farmers. Granddad and dad all lost their land in the Great Depression with …. We’ve got a bank crisis now, they had a bank crisis then and so we lost our land, we were back on the land as tenant farmers. And so I actually grew up with the land. I didn’t know anything else. ET: And then you went to school where? TB: I … Well I went to school at Southwest Texas State Teachers College for my first degree and Texas A & M for the Masters and Doctorate. I didn’t go to school, though, until after I went into the army. I wanted to go to school. Mother particularly and dad both, they’d neither gone past the grammar school area. But they wanted me to go to college. But I didn’t go because I just didn’t, until I got drafted into the army. And then when drafted in the army I went on the GI Bill and never stopped after that. ET: Mm-hm. And what did you major in? TB: Agricultural education in the first degree and then Range Ecology for a master’s and doctorate. I got into the Range program… I didn’t know there was such a thing as range management existed until one of my professors caught me one day. I was already in the process with the two other people building a radio station: I managed a radio station for a while. And we were building a new radio station and the professor, Leroy Young, stopped me in the hall, saw me looking at a bulletin board Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Thad  Box,  21  March  208   Page  3   �and said “You’re interested in range management?” And I said, “Yeah.” And he says “Come with me over to Texas A & M next week.” So I went over to Texas A & M and they offered me a fellowship and I sold out my part of the radio station and went back to school. ET: Hmm. Now I want to ask, I want to invite all of you if you see that I miss a followup, I mean or I might have been planning to ask it later. But if there’s a follow up question that you want to ask, raise your hand so that, so that I can call on you. Yes, Randy. RW: I was curious about your [attending] a teacher [college]. [Did you get a degree as a teacher at] a K-12 teacher at the Teacher’s College? TB: Yes. In fact I have a permanent teaching certificate, a high school teaching certificate which came into being during my first assignment here. The College of Natural Resources and the College of Education were having a big fight over who was to teach conservation education. And both colleges wanted it and the other one don’t. So finally the Dean of the Education College said the only way we can have this taught in natural resources is you have to have a certified teacher. And Whit Floyd who was Dean then came to the faculty and said “Does anybody in here have a teaching certificate?” I raised my hand and so I started teaching conservation education as an overload. They didn’t pay me extra for it. They didn’t give me any release time. “You just, you teach it.” And so I taught it. ET: Oh my gosh. BC: I was kind of curious, you mentioned the GI Bill. Could you talk a little bit about the impact that had on your generation in education? TB: Oh, well, absolutely. I think there were two great education acts. And neither of them really came across as an education act in the building of America as far as I’m concerned. The first one was the Morrell Act that established land grant colleges and we’re in one here today [Utah State University]. The other was the GI Bill, because what the GI Bill did was take a bunch of kids that had grown up in the cedar breaks or on cotton farms or somewhere else, drug them out, taught them a little sanitation and organization and then educated us. They sent us back and had us go to college, trade school, whatever we wanted to. But educate us. And if you look at what happened to the United States after that, when these people came into the work force, it literally changed this country. The captains of industry, the outstanding lawyers or politicians, all of them came out of that thing of where we dared to educate all the people. And I feel very strongly that that’s the responsibility of the people to educate themselves. And particularly educate the poor kids that aren’t going to get into college any other way. I wouldn’t have gone to college, in fact when I got out of high school I had, I think, six or seven different scholarships offered to me. I was Valedictorian of my class, I was a fair football Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Thad  Box,  21  March  208   Page  4   �player, and I could have gone to college, but I didn’t know how. I sent off to get the forms and they came back and they had stuff about student credit hours. I had no idea what they were. And I was too embarrassed to go and ask anybody else what they were. So I said I didn’t want to go to college. And went out building fence and doing what my people had done for years and years, and it wasn’t until I went into the Army. And to answer your question, a lot of people are like that. I’m not unique there. They simply didn’t know what was available out there. They didn’t know what ideas other people were thinking, or where you could get somebody interested in ideas other than how to make a living out of the land. ET: But you chose a land related college education and that… is that because you... why? Why was that? TB: This is going to sound corny but it actually happened. I was, after I got out of the Army for the summer I was running the jack hammer on a construction crew. I knew I wanted to go to college, but I had intended to be an engineer. Because I thought building bridges and all that sort of thing would be good. And I was working on construction and that seemed to be working out alright. And one afternoon after work I walked down and sat on a creek bank, looking down at, watching some cattle water down there. And a doe and fawn came up and watered down there. And I sat and looked at that. I said, “I don’t want to build bridges. I want to be back on the ranch somewhere. I want to be in ranching.” So that afternoon I decided that I’m going into agriculture. And the reason I took agricultural education I didn’t know anybody in any other form of agriculture, except the county agent and the ag teacher. Those were the only ones I’d had any contact with. ET: Was that moment strong enough to be called an epiphany? TB: I guess it’s an epiphany, yeah. I’ll go there with you. It was just I think facing up to what I really wanted, you know. I had thought, I considered law at one time, engineering. These were the sorts of things that they talk about that you go off and make a lot of money and do important things and I thought that was what I wanted. But when I came back and saw that doe and fawn down there on the creek bank, I decided I really wanted to be in the ranching business. And I kidded myself for many, many years, thinking that’s what I wanted to do even after I got in academia. I think one of these days I’ll make enough money to buy a ranch to go back to that. But I didn’t. ET: So you know what they say. The way to make a small fortune at ranching; start out with a big one. (laughter) Um, I had a similar experience, and you know I took… I took Western Literature from Tom Lyon here at USU back in the [19]80s and I remember he, one of his ideas was that people who become western writers who can be really identified as western writers are people who have in fact had some sort of an epiphany with the land. They’ve had some sort of experience that has Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Thad  Box,  21  March  208   Page  5   �transformed them. And brought them to a decision or has somehow changed their outlook or confirmed their outlook. And that’s why I ask, because it sort of sounds like one of those moments. TB: I don’t think I recognized it as that sort of a moment. It was just, you know, deciding that’s really what I want to do. I’ve been kidding myself, I don’t want to go off and wear a hard hat and design bridges and that sort of thing. I want to be out here with the cattle and deer and run a ranch. ET: That’s great. Well um, so let’s see, have we covered what all your professional training was? Have we, you had, you had your undergraduate degree. TB: I had an undergraduate degree then I did that in 2 ½ years. I came…. Well once I got out of the Army I decided I wanted to go through. So I went right through, summer school, everything else. Taking overloads every semester. And then we, I got a fellowship over at Texas A & M and went into Range Management work and had a really, luck I guess to be given a fellowship on the Rob and Bessie Welder Wildlife [Foundation] Refuge in South Texas. I was the first fellowship recipient there, where a wealthy oil man in South Texas had given his ranch and oil wells to a foundation to study wildlife in relationship to ranching. And so I was their first graduate student and I went down there and I learned a lot about research and ranching and so on. But I had very good fortune to be, meet a couple of people that really changed my life. And one of them was from here in Utah, Dr. Clarence Cottam. He was, came from down in Utah’s Dixie. He was Dean of Biology at Brigham Young [University] before he took the job down in Texas. And the other one was Caleb Glazener, a teetotoling Baptist from South Texas. And these two men, I think as far as their work ethic, their dedication to science, what they thought we ought to be doing, was more important than any academic work they did. Because they really believed that we were out there to do something for society, not to it; that our work had to make a difference. They wanted it to be good work. But they also wanted it to be applicable to the people in South Texas. ET: How do you spell Glazener? TB: GLAZENER ET: GLAZ TB: ENER ET: E N E R. And Cottam is C O T T AM? TB: COTTAM ET: Now tell me once more the name of the reserve? Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Thad  Box,  21  March  208   Page  6   �TB: Rob & Bessie Welder (W E L D E R) Wildlife Refuge. Clarence Cottam’s brother Walter Cottam was the old ecologist down at the University of Utah. And their son is Grant Cottam or Walter’s son, Grant Cottam was the ecologist back at Wisconsin in you know, good blood lines and ecology came through their, got into my training very early. ET: That’s great. This is probably a point where we can stop. Is there anyone who wants to follow up with another question about his education? I think stopping at your education and we’re about to where we should end. I don’t want to stop. (laughter) TB: Well you didn’t stop with my education. My education really came after I got on the job out here in Utah. (laughing) BC: I have one more question, Elaine. When you got involved with looking at the wildlife and how it impacts ranching, where was that science at at that time period? Was it in infancy or were you building on another body of work or were you at the beginning of that? TB: I’m, I’m… BC: As far as, you know, you mentioned you went to this wildlife … TB: Yeah. BC…refuge to look at how ranching and wildlife coexisted. And I was wondering where the science was at that time TB: Oh, the science. Okay. The field. BC: The field. Was it in its infancy or… TB: It was in its infancy. And Mr. Welder was really a visionary, I think. Because his will that drew up the mission for that refuge is a classic. He wanted science, but he also wanted it to be practical and he wanted them tied together. And that foundation, now, I think, it turned out something like 250 or 260 Ph.D. candidates from all over the world. Anybody, after I came here on the faculty I had several students, Jim Bounds was one, that did work down there. You apply for a grant and you can send a student down there to do the work and the foundation covers all the work. But no it was sort of a ground-breaking idea of how do we make money out of ranching and still keep the wildlife and the community healthy. And the trustees that set that up were very careful. They did a nationwide search looking for people like that and they picked these two that I mentioned. Clarence Cottam, who had been the chief scientist for the Fish and Wildlife Service before he went to Brigham Young and then Caleb Glazener who was head of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Thad  Box,  21  March  208   Page  7   �Service at that time, and a world renowned wild turkey guy. So they put together some people that they knew and knew could do the work. Yeah, it was an early experiment in that sort of thing and it’s worked out very well. BC: Has it continued today? TB: Oh yes. Yes it has. I got their, their annual report just the other day and I think they have like 16 fellows down there now working on the refuge, which is interesting. When I was down there, well, they brought on two others right after I did. There were three of us, all males. This last group of 16 I think there are only three males, the rest of them are females. And there are a couple of Hispanics and at least one black woman there, which when I was down there you know, they had people of different colors and different jobs on the ranch. You just didn’t, you wouldn’t think about a scientist in a dark skinned person there. RW: I have a question. We may need to refine our questions about this. I just thought of, in some professions having a family, a wife. Some are more conducive to doing that than others. Like in our profession, folklore, public folklore, a lot of people can’t sustain a marriage because they’re gone a lot at night, they’re gone during, you know, just big chunks of time doing field work. Have you… where, did your marriage come in during this time? And your children? Is there, you know, does a spouse have to be on board with this kind of lifestyle? TB: Yes they do. And that’s a whole nother story. And that would take several tapes to tell that. But just the first one: I had just gotten married when I accepted the fellowship over at, at Texas A & M. And so Jenny went with me down to the Welder. And I didn’t have any field crew then and she was a city girl, she wasn’t very good at it, but she came out and helped me. She was in the field practically all the time every day. In fact, so much that when I finally got my first degree – the Master’s degree, the old soil conservation man in San Patricio County who had been out helping me and worked with me wrote the graduate dean and said would you please put Mr. and Mrs. on this degree. (Laughter) Because she was out there working with me every day. But where the strain really came in is later when I had projects in Africa and Australia and all over the world and would be gone, you know for a month or six weeks at a time and it’s hard on a wife to stay home and take care of the kids and so on when you’re doing things like that. ET: I hate to stop. But we’ll stop. TB: We’re going to get around to Logan Canyon sometime, aren’t we? (Laughter) ET: We will Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Thad  Box,  21  March  208   Page  8   � https://highway89.org/files/original/90fdce30d777aec90d65d6713b3aacca.jpg 64dd5c4c56f2351616e18f3f810fe53e https://highway89.org/files/original/53d922cb2900fbf025c489bc6cd366a0.mp3 5e8dcc63c6172e841cc2e88cd28bb9a7 https://highway89.org/files/original/9d33c305b3289ce58ff347e2a82a61fa.pdf 4cbeb0158ba306efc5263da55d1fb797 PDF Text Text LAND USE MANAGEMENT TRANSCRIPTION COVER SHEET Interviewee: Thadis Box Place of Interview: Date of Interview: At Mr. Box’s home in Logan UT. April 1, 2008 Interviewer: Recordist: Bob Parson Bob Parson Recording Equipment: Cassette Recorder Transcription Equipment used: Transcribed by: Transcript Proofed by: Power Player Transcription Software: Executive Communication Systems Susan Gross Thad Box (4/4/09); Randy Williams (2011) Brief Description of Contents: The interview contains some childhood and pre-college influences on Thadis Box. He speaks of his education, mentors and of his subsequent career as a natural resource professor. Box speaks about his philosophy on ecology and land management practices, the development of natural resource management principles and how they may be extended and applied beyond land management. Reference: BP = Bob Parson (Interviewer; USU University Archivist) TB = Thad Box NOTE: Interjections during pauses or transitions in dialogue such as “uh” and starts and stops in conversations are not included in transcribed. All additions to transcript are noted with brackets. TAPE TRANSCRIPTION [Tape 1 of 2: A] BP: It is April Fools, so we want you to be honest! TB: Yeah, well I thought about putting a frog in your coffee cup, but I didn’t!! [Laughing] BP: I’m Bob Parson, I’m here with Doctor Thadis Box, former Dean of Natural Resources, Utah State University. We’re at his home on west Center Street. Beautiful home, first time I’ve been in here Thad. TB: Thank you. Well, I’ll show you around before you leave if you’d like. Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Thadis  Box     Page  1   �BP: I’d appreciate that; a home with a lot of history in it. This was an Eccles home? TB: No, a Nibley. BP: Nibley home, right. Well we sort of started this interview a week or so ago; or two weeks ago when Elaine Thatcher began to interview you at the Mountain West Center on campus. And we discussed a little bit about your formative life and career in the Texas hill country. And I wanted to just sort of begin there and follow up. You mentioned a couple of mentors that you had down there. One was Clarence Cottam who was a Utah man. I wonder if he had any influence on you taking your initial position here in 1959? TB: Yes he did. In fact, he and my major professor (that I didn't mention) is also one of my mentors. Vernon Young, a direct descendant of Brigham Young, was my major professor. And when I graduated – both those people actually offered me jobs in Texas – but I had an offer from Utah State here. And I wanted to come up here because at that time Larry Stoddart and Wayne Cook and Art Smith were the big names in Range Management. I wanted a chance to work with them, so I came up here then. But they all gave me good recommendations and sort of clued me in on how to live in Utah, particularly Clarence Cottam. He was a very interesting guy. When I decided to take the job he brought me a stack of books. Clarence was a good Mormon – in fact I think he was stake president at the time. But he brought me books, not only by Mormons, but antiMormon books for me to read and said, “Get prepared to live in Utah, read these.” And we’d discuss them. BP: So he showed you both sides of the coin? TB: Yes, he did, he did. In fact one of the books that he recommended most highly had just come out at the time No Man Knows My History. BP: Wow. TB: By Fawn Brodie. And he said Fawn Brodie was a real scholar and that I should pay attention to what she wrote. And when I came up here I found out not everyone agreed with Dr. Cottam. In fact we lost a babysitter because she saw it in our house and left. BP: It was not well received in Mormonia. TB: Well one of the things I’ve learned living in Utah, coming in then, is that Mormons who are outside of Utah have a much different attitude toward the world and people around them and other religions, as you do once you get into Zion here. BP: Why do you think that is, Thad? Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Thadis  Box     Page  2   �TB: Well I think they have to survive out there. They also get associated with people of all different religions and faiths and so on. And they just, I think have a broader view of the world. BP: Um-hmm. TB: They’re not any less a Mormon or for Mormons, I think those two men that I mentioned (Vernon Young and Clarence Cottam) are two of the finest men I’ve ever known and they lived the Mormon faith quite well, but they also let other people live their lives quite well! [Laughing] But that wasn’t what – has much to do with Logan Canyon I guess! BP: No! TB: It’s how I came here though. BP: But it is interesting and then that’s sort of background to the social landscape. I want to sort of follow up and I don’t know how many times you’d been here prior to your employment here, but what were your thoughts as you came into the mountain west, particularly Cache Valley, as compared to the hill country in Texas? TB: Well the first time I came here I had been to a meeting in Great Falls, Montana and drove down through Logan Canyon, stopped here and visited the university and then out. And at that time I was just overwhelmed at the beauty. I never thought I would live here at the time that we came through. And I was particularly impressed with Cache Valley. One of my earliest memories about that were the Lombardi Poplar trees lining the irrigation ditches, delimiting the fields; when you drove into the valley you could see it laid out like a map with the trees around the properties. BP: A distinctive part of the historic Mormon landscape. TB: Yeah, yes. And those trees disappeared in the ‘60s – earlier than that. When I left here in ’59 there were still lots of trees and I came back in ’70, most of them were gone. BP: What do you attribute that to? The short life of the trees? TB: Oh no. I attribute it to – I know why – because there was a movement with the federal aid program to farmers to save water, to get rid of poplar trees. And they paid people to kill them. And so they took them out all over the nation, not just in Cache Valley. So it was a subsidized government program that took them out. But anyway, back to what I felt like when I came into the mountain west. Let me go back -- that was my first trip through here, just a fleeting trip. BP: What year would that have been? Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Thadis  Box     Page  3   �TB: That was in, must have been 1957; 1957. Then I came back here in 1959 as a professor, or Assistant Professor in the Range Department. I was hired over the telephone and with telegraphs (we didn’t have emails then); didn’t come up for an interview. BP: Didn’t fly you out? TB: Didn’t fly me up, no. And Jenny had never been in this part of the country at all. And we left College Station with a new car – ’59 Chev – and a trailer on behind it that I built myself out of an old Ford delivery wagon; looked like something going to Oklahoma! All of our possessions in it, and a kid that was just learning to walk. And as we drove west out through New Mexico – we’d spent quite bit of time in New Mexico – and into Colorado and then into Utah, we were more and more impressed at the vastness of the country, the friendliness of the country. Our first impression of Utah, we stopped in Monticello to get gasoline and the guy came up and he was wiping our windows (which they used to in the service stations) and he stuck his head in and saw our son and he said, “Do you need a doctor?” and we said, “No, we’re all right.” And he said, “Well we have a doctor.” Which rather surprised me, and I said, “Oh yeah, you do?” And he said, “Yeah we finally got one, he’s here now, he’s in town.” [Laughing] He started telling me about the doctor and I don’t remember what he was. He was some sort of a foreigner. But they were just really pleased to tell somebody that stopped to buy gasoline that they had a doctor in that town! And so that was sort of a shock – was Utah really this backward that nobody has doctors? -- Because we didn’t know. And we came on up here, drove into Cache Valley from the south and over the old road – not the one that goes up Wellsville Canyon now – the old Sardine Canyon road. We were really impressed; got in here really tired. I think we’d driven from Moab that day, a long trip with a trailer on behind us, anyway, and tired. Got a motel, got in and I called my professor –Larry Stoddart (this was in middle of the afternoon), he said, “Well come over for supper.” Which I thought was fine. And he said, “I’ll pick you up in a couple of hours” which he did. He drove us over to the house, it was summer so it was long days, and we ate a barbecue or something he cooked in the backyard. And then he loaded us up and took us up Logan Canyon. After all this driving, I thought, “My gosh, why is he going to give us another trip up the canyon?” But I was young and polite and thought he was going to tell me about range management. But he didn’t. He drove up the canyon, he pointed out the camping places, he pointed out fishing holes. He stopped and showed us this trail where their little boy learned to walk; we could go up that trail. And he talked about Logan Canyon like he was sharing a special gift to us. Even as tired as we were and wanted to get home and wanted to get the kid to bed, we were impressed at him giving us the gift of the canyon and told us about it. And it turned out to be one of the greatest gifts that we got when we came to Logan because for the many years we’ve been here, anytime we feel frustrated or tense we go up Logan Canyon. We did it with the kids when they were little, they were raising Cain with us and having trouble, we’d just load up and take them up the canyon, let them play in the water or go for a hike or something else. And as the kids left, Jenny and I now in the summer time, I’d say probably three times a week we have supper up the canyon. Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Thadis  Box     Page  4   �BP: What’s your favorite spot up there? TB: Oh, I’m not going to give you the exact spot! Our favorite spot, and in fact the one last summer when Jenny and I were sitting up there and we were talking about getting near the end of life we decided that’s where we want our ashes to be scattered after the medical students get done carving or whatever they’re going to do [laughing] (we’re going to donate our bodies). But then I understand they cremate the remains and send them back to the family. So we’re going to have to tell them where it is. It’s up near Tony Grove, but it’s not at Tony Grove. It’s a place where you can stop your car and walk about 150 yards I guess and be completely out of the hearing of the cars and a little stream running by. I guess that’s the favorite place; one of the favorite places. BP: How important is it to humanity to have that solitude; to have places like that? Obviously to Lawrence Stoddart it was very important. That’s the first place he took you; the first thing that he wanted to show you. TB: Yeah, that had always impressed me. You know as tired as we were and the kid wanting to go to bed, he felt like he had to show us that canyon and I appreciate it. But your question how important is it? I don’t know. I think it’s important and reading psychological literature and recreation literature that I’ve done, I don’t know how important it is but it’s important for people to have some way of relaxing an getting the worries of the day out of the way. People do it many different ways. One of the great things about living here is that there are so many outdoor areas where you can go and get away. An example of that, when I found out about the 9/11 attacks I’d been at a meeting in the morning and didn’t know about it and came back in here about 10 o’clock. And my daughter in law who lived in town at the time called wanting to get together with family. Well I tried to get in touch with them and she’d picked up Paul and they’d gone somewhere else, so I just drove up the canyon. And I drove up to a place up in the Tony Grove area and walked, got away from everybody and wrote a poem (which later became a column that I published here in the local paper). But it was just having a place to go and sit and think without other people bothering you. And that’s very important. I’m rambling now, but that’s a way of answering your question. I don’t know how important it is. Some people, those that live in Tokyo or somewhere where there is no outdoors must find another spot, but it’s essential, I think, for human beings to have a way to get away from others. BP: Well I think you know, we are very fortunate here because in large cities – I mean that’s the argument used for the preservation of parks and open spaces and things like that. And we have the most beautiful park imaginable right up here in these mountains. TB: Oh yes. And Logan Canyon is a real treasure – but it’s not only the mountains and the public land and that direction; you can go west and then marvelous deserts in an hour’s drive. East it’s a little quicker; ten minutes from now I can be up and away from people. Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Thadis  Box     Page  5   �One of the interesting things now with all the increase in population, number of people, you can still go up Logan Canyon and get out of your car and walk a quarter of a mile and be completely away from people. I don’t think many of the newcomers realize this; they drive up the road, they don’t bother just to pull up a side canyon and stop and start walking. BP: I think it is a unique canyon. I don’t have a lot of experience, but one time we were in Denver (lived there for a summer) and the canyons around Denver and around Boulder and places like that, you can’t do that. It’s all private property – a lot of it is. TB: You’re right. And in fact that’s one reason that we live in Utah. We live in Utah for the people and for the scenery and other things. But one of the reasons we live in Logan is that we have public land on all sides of us. And I have more freedom to get out and traipse around over the land now than I would’ve had I stayed in Texas and owned one of the largest ranches in Texas. I could not take 10 million dollars and buy the kind of space that I can use here, in my home town in Texas. Yeah, having public land is one of the main – BP: No public lands in Texas. TB: Oh, no. Just small blocks, little state parks and I think a couple small National Forests. BP: When you got here and accepted your first position, how long were you here before you left to go to New Mexico? TB: Oh, to go to New Mexico we were here thirty-something years. When I left the first time I went back to Texas. BP: Oh, right Texas. Oh, okay. TB: Yeah. Well we were here three years in the first hitch. Yeah. BP: Three years. And how was the discipline of range management and talk a little bit more about Art Smith and Larry Stoddart and Wayne Cook. TB: Well the discipline of Range Management, Forestry, all the natural resource professions were in a phase of what I call “rehabilitation” or rebuilding the landscape. As I look back at policy changes through the centuries, the first 100 years or so, up until about 1900 our national policy was to conquer nature: get people out, settle the land. And it was the right thing to do – I’m not denigrating our people, they had to settle the country, bring it under control; bring it to bear. And then we went through a period of time when we started trying to preserve things: setting aside national parks, setting aside national forests, and so on with preservation. And then just about the time of the dust bowls in the ‘30s the professions switched to one of trying to rebuild the thing that had already been messed up. You know we went from exploitation to trying to preserve it and seeing that wasn’t Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Thadis  Box     Page  6   �working, and let’s rebuild it. And that was the stage that Range Management was in in the 1950s when I came in. This school here, Utah State University, had a particular important role in that. They first started teaching Range Management, Watershed Management, Forestry in 1914. And it wasn’t until 1918 that they had a full curriculum under a man named Becraft started the program here. And then in 1928 there became a Forestry School added Forestry to Range Management and Watershed Management, brought in several other people and then the people that I came in contact with Art Smith, Larry Stoddart and Wayne Cook – they were sort of the second or third wave that came in, mostly just before World War II. And they are really the ones that made the big impression on the rest of the world of what was happening here in Utah. Stoddart and Smith wrote a textbook that was first published in 1943 I believe (it may have been published before that); they outlined the principles of Range Management that were used all across the world then. BP: I believe it was called Range Management. TB: Yeah it was, Range Management by Stoddart and Smith. And that was the reason I wanted to come here because they were the real leaders in this place. Very good scientists and amazing people. Stoddart was trained in the Nebraska School of Ecology and had that approach of Ecology and succession and brought that to this country. Art Smith was raised in Providence, went to school here, studied under Becraft (the first guy that I talked about) and then went to California and to Michigan for advanced degrees. And so he brought to the table the whole contact with the local people because he was the local people. You know I would often see him up the canyon on a horse. In fact some of the early students that you may interview in this series will talk about Art Smith riding his horse up to teach summer camp or breaking a colt the same time he was teaching kids. And so these were I’d say two gents in the field that I was very fortunate in being able to study with. BP: What was the reaction from resource users during that early period when the profession was trying to make inroads in to rebuild? TB: It was mixed as it is today. You know the more progressive farmers and ranchers and users of the land saw the value of science and how to apply it. And having worked both in private and public land states, I’d say in private land states they are more ready to accept this because it was their land that they were improving and they could see. Here in the intermountain west many of the users of the public land resisted very strongly any sort of regulation or any college people telling them what to do. I think the reasoning was that attitude was tied in to the loss of permits. Because the public land was managed with the laws that went into effect in the 1930s. Land was adjudicated and people had the privilege to graze a number of animals on each given allotment. And then as science came in and began to evaluate and say that many of them were overstocked. In fact I’d say most of them were overstocked. And so one of the tools was bringing the vegetation Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Thadis  Box     Page  7   �carrying capacity into equilibrium with the number of animals that were on there. And most people then had to have their number of animals reduced. The people who had those permits saw it as a loss of livelihood. That’s where there were really, really great conflicts over the years that continued and still continue to this day but not as much as when I came here in the ‘50s. It was probably at a peak then. There were a lot of new Forest Rangers coming in that were dead set to get the land back to where it could graze animals sustainably and there were people dead set that they weren’t going to take any animals off the land. And so it became very bitter and difficult situation. BP: During your long tenure here in the Valley have you seen positive changes in the vegetation and things up the canyon? TB: Oh yes! If we had a video and when the snow melts I could take you and show you places where Benny Goodwin (who was another young professor at the time that I was here) and I built exclosures up Right Hand Fork and down Left Hand Fork on the other side. The land was completely bare. Now the posts are still there for the exclosures but the wire was taken up a number of years ago by the Forest Service. But there’s no difference. There’s vegetation inside and outside the exposure now. It’s all healed over; the stream banks are healing over. When I was here in 1959-60 putting up those exclosures it was bare soil. It was just really beat out and grazed out, particularly in the bottoms. Up Temple Fork and Spawn Creek and that area, was an area where when I taught summer camp the first time in 1959, I’d take students to that Spawn Creek, Temple Fork area to do their exercises and we would find areas – most of them were completely grazed out. You could not find a whole lot of stuff except shrubs for them to work on. We’d have to pick around to find the kind of vegetation we needed to do our exams. And it was a good place to give a variation of different conditions as you went away from the creeks or rivers up the side hill. So we had all that, but yeah. To answer your question there is much, much more vegetation here – herbaceous vegetation – than there was when I came here in 1959. BP: And that should benefit not only the land, but it should benefit the permittee too. TB: Yes it would. And I think the permittees are – I’ve not been directly involved with them in the last decade, but it seems to me that there’s more understanding of what they’re trying to do and willingness to graze them efficiently than there was before. BP: What are your thoughts on the two extremes? You mentioned the one extreme of grazers in the early period that wanted essentially to put as many animal units up there as they could possibly put, and the other extreme that says, “Get them all out.” Is there a place for livestock on the mountain? TB: Of course there’s a place for livestock on the mountain. And in any argument, the extremes are both wrong, when you get right down to it. The objective should be (on Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Thadis  Box     Page  8   �private land or public land) particularly on the public land, where we’re trying to keep it for future generations is to use it with whatever use you want to, but use it sustainably – that meaning that it would perpetuate itself and options would be left open for future generations. You know a few generations ago the main use they wanted to make of land was livestock or cutting timber from it and sod. Now this generation has many different ideas. Some of them still want to grow livestock up there; some of them want to use it for just a watershed to make sure we have plenty of clear water; others may want to ski on it or something else. But the point is we ought to manage the land so that future uses will not be cut out, that they’ll be available. We may not even be able to imagine what the future uses are. So that means that the productive base itself – the plants and the soil – have to be kept healthy and there to serve whatever needs we want in the future. BP: Was that the intent of the Multiple Use Land Act in the mid-70s? To try to – TB: Sort of. It was also somewhat of a political tool. The intent of the act that set aside the National Forest, the act that created the Bureau of Land Management to manage the trade lands, all those – the intent was to develop some sort of sustainable uses on the land. They didn’t say it that way in those days, but that was the intent. You can go back and look at the arguments and the intent of Congress – that’s what they wanted was to perpetuate a healthy landscape in the long period of time. The Multiple Use Sustained Yield Act came out mainly because of the arguments between environmentalists and users – whether they be foresters or cattlemen or whatever else. And one of the political compromises said let’s put it in the law that we should have multiple uses and sustained yield. They spelled out the multiple uses pretty well, but they didn’t really understand what they were talking about with sustained yield. And the reason I said earlier it was somewhat a political act was that they wanted to guarantee future use of livestock or timber, and all these other things on the land and then threw in the sustained yield because they were looking again at the future of some sort. BP: What does sustained yield mean? How do you define that? TB: Well, how I define it and how it’s defined in the act and some other things are slightly different. Sustained yield in the acts of Congress usually mean that you can continue to produce timber or whatever product it is in perpetuity. In my definition of sustained yield is that sustained yield is something that is using a resource or a unit of any kind to where it can remain healthy and viable and keep options open for future generations. There are several general principles that I think one needs to do when they’re talking about sustained yield. One is that there should be equity and justice in the present generation and the generation – [Stop and start recording] [Tape 1 of 2: B] Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Thadis  Box     Page  9   �BP: Okay we’ve turned the tape over here and Dr. Box was speaking about sustained yield before. I’m not quite sure when that ran out – it cut some of your words off. But anyway, let’s – TB: Okay well let me back up and talk about what my definition of what it takes to have sustained yield of anything – whether it’s a human community or a plant community. The first is that there is equity and justice in the current generation. By that I mean that the individuals in the generation, whether they be plants, or animals, or people have the opportunity to grow and prosper and reproduce. If they don’t reproduce there’s no way you’re going to have sustained yield. The second thing is that there should be equity and justice in future generations so that these generations can be passed one to the other; again, whether we’re talking about grass on a rangeland or people in a human community. And the third one that ties those two together is that the system has to have some sort of trans-generational transfer to where you could transfer things from the present generation into the future. And this includes genetic transfer, which we know about, it also includes cultural transfer – that you have to be able to transfer the values from one generation to the other. Again whether it’s animals knowing how to graze and why to fence that area, or people. And in all these the long term health of the system has to take priority over short-term gain and if it doesn’t then you lose sustainability. So all these put together is what I call sustained yield, or sustainability, is that we have a system that will continue in perpetuity. It doesn’t speak to uses, it doesn’t speak to “we’re going to use the range for sheep or we’re going to use it for steers.” What it does is that we keep the system healthy so that whatever the future generation wants can use it for that. And they have the obligation to use it so if somebody wants to go and run giraffes on it later they can! BP: Can I make an observation? TB: Yeah. BP: It seems to me that you’re lifelong study of vegetation and grass and rangelands and stuff has philosophically moved way beyond that to embrace the whole human condition. TB: Well I think we have to. I mean, we are humans so we have to look at the human condition. But we can learn a lot from looking at a piece of rangeland. BP: Um-hmm. TB: We can learn a lot if we stick to principles rather than get to arguing over uses or are we going to use this land for recreation and run motorized vehicles on it or are we going to run sheep on it? You know, you back up and look at that. The other thing that I didn’t mention in my little definition of sustainability is that we have to look very carefully at the interconnections and the interconnectedness of the system. The connections in the system may be as valuable or more valuable than the system itself, so you don’t want to break any of those connections. I get irritated. In the paper today there somebody was talking about sustained growth in Cache Valley. You can’t have sustained growth unless Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Thadis  Box     Page  10   �you are very careful in how you define growth. Growth in any reasonable definition is getting bigger or getting more of it. And so if you get more and more and bigger and bigger you eventually can’t get any bigger; you fill everything up. So the only way you can have sustained growth is to not consider growth getting larger or more economically productive or more people or anything else, but in quality. If you define growth as getting to be better quality then you can have sustained growth. And I’m way off range management now! [Laughing] BP: Well I don’t think you are because it comes down to an economic argument and the reason people wanted to put more and more animals on to the public land was because that was more and more revenue. It may be a quantum leap for some, but it’s not for me, to see the reason that people want more and more subdivisions and more and more commercial growth is to have more and more revenue. TB: Oh, of course! BP: That becomes one of the arguments. I think that your generation has been able to make that argument more effectively on the mountain up here than they have as far as the growth in communities. TB: You know one of the discouraging things is first, I would agree with you that I think people that came before me and hopefully my generation has done a pretty good job of taking care of the mountain, showing how it can be used. But the people as a whole have not come along with this. You know, they’ve become more and more disassociated with natural processes and are into artificial subsets of the main processes, whether it’s in the stock market or whether it’s painting houses or something else, and they don’t get back to looking at principles. And I just really get excited and celebrate when I hear somebody at any level – whether they’re a businessman or a politician or something else – that starts talking about principles and looking at how we can fit this in with the problem. BP: Um-hmm. I tend to get too far field too. But I just want to ask you because I know you mentioned before the connection with the land and how you had that connection in Texas and how you wanted to continue to have that connection. And fewer and fewer of us are able to have a connection with the land, and maybe that’s why there’s the disconnect between what you’re talking about as far as sustainability and human communities. TB: Oh, it absolutely is. It’s a big societal problem is that there are so few people that ever even have contact with the land. Fortunately I see a trend now in trying to get people back in touch with the land. There have been several people in education start looking at the ideas of getting people out and getting their hands dirty and getting them into their yards or leaving some natural areas and getting kids out into it. And I think it’s important at a very early age if we can. Most of the kids in America today – the only association that they have with the land is probably recreational experience: they went to a park; they went to Yellowstone one time. They don’t have the opportunity to get out and get themselves dirty. There was a little soapbox article in the Herald Journal last week (I forget the guy’s name) up in Preston that works in the D.I. up there that wrote about his Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Thadis  Box     Page  11   �backyard. And I just wanted to celebrate because he was talking about as a kid getting out there and the battles that he fought and how he won the NBA in the dirt and getting dirty and having forts that he defended against all comers. All those things they are important. And the kids I think want that. I have grandkids and one of the things that is most enjoyable to me is to go out with the little two year old and that they get more interested in the earthworm than they do in me! You know that is an exciting thing! But they’ve constantly got pressures from something else because they live in a different world. A couple of years ago when my grandson William was about just maybe two and a half, three years old – he was “helping” me (to use the word loosely) in my flower garden outside. I try to get the kids to work with me out there. And he found a dead butterfly and he brought to me and said, “Grandpa, make it fly.” And I said, “It can’t, its dead.” And he said, “Well put in new batteries.” BP: Wow! That speaks volumes there! TB: Right! Yeah. “Put in new batteries Grandpa.” And I couldn’t put in new batteries, but it was a moment to stop and talk to him about why you couldn’t put in new batteries when you found a dead butterfly. BP: How important in the training of students, how important was that summer camp up the canyon by Tony Grove? TB: Again, how important, I don’t know. I think it is extremely important in teaching anyone, not just natural resource people, but people that are studying to be natural resource professionals, need hands-on experience. Just like I was talking about the little kids need hands-on experience. They need to get out; they need to be able to identify the plants, they need to be able to fight a fire, they need to be able to do the sorts of things that you can’t do indoors. And that summer camp was a marvelous opportunity to do that. My first experience in teaching in Utah was in summer camp. I came here at the first of June in 1959 and Larry Stoddart told me we’re not going to have you teach anything this summer, I want you to travel with the other professors and get out and see their experiments; we have some money we can set up a little experiment for you, but we want you to get acquainted with this country. On July 3rd my phone rang and it was my department head, Stoddart said, “I’m going to have to go back on my word. Wayne Cook who teaches summer camp, his mother died back in Kansas and he’s going. You’ll have to start Monday morning.” That was a Friday! [Laughing] And I panicked! I didn’t know what – “What am I going to do!” I didn’t even know what -- . And he said, “Wayne his notes and curriculum stuff up in his office. You can go up and get it and look at it.” And I went up and looked and I didn’t really understand it. Benny Goodwin was here and I talked to Benny and he said, “Let’s go up and give you a short course.” So we went up the canyon and Benny walked around identifying plants. I didn’t even know the plants! I was raised down in Texas and these were whole new plants and stuff to me. So we spent all Fourth of July with Jenny taking care of the baby down on the Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Thadis  Box     Page  12   �river and Benny Goodwin and I walking around looking at plants. I took a Life magazine with me and he’d tell me the name of a plant and I’d throw it in there and write its name down. And we got about 100 plants. (No, that was Saturday. Sunday was the Fourth of July.) And I went up – Jenny and I alone – on the Fourth of July and we picked up all the – went through this again and I learned it. And then on the 5th of July, Monday, I was professor and I went in and talked to these kids. And I asked some of them afterwards (Jim Bowns, I think you’ll interview him this project later on, was one of the students there) and I asked them, “Did you know just how scared I was?” And they said, “No! We thought you were the professor.” But I did. So I learned as I went along there. BP: Those would have been upperclassman – didn’t they take this they’re senior --? TB: They took it between the sophomore and junior years. But these were mostly veterans that I was teaching there. Most of them were as old or older than I was. But anyway, my point is that being able to get out on the land with them and talk about principles of land management and so on. They didn’t know but I knew that land that I was standing on – I happened to have that crash course and being able to put names on plants and tell them what the grass was and being able to look at the leaf of a Poa to tell a Poa from a Festuca and so on and they thought I knew everything, but I didn’t. But to answer your question, in that two month’s time that we had them we were able to get these students to get a very good feel of what they would be learning the next two years. That’s the reason we did it between the sophomore and junior year because you keep tying back to that. You can take a field trip up there to show them later on. I think that sort of an opportunity is essential, and I think we’ve lost something that we no longer do it. We’re not the only college. A lot of colleges stopped. In fact, even medical schools and veterinary school and so on now do most of their work with computers and with simulations rather than with the real stuff. And you can do a lot with simulations, but I think if you put the two together you’d have much, much better stuff. You could run the simulations then go out and look at it, or collect the data and then run simulations. BP: Do you have any observations as to why you think that that has progressively been downplayed? And like you say it’s across the board in academia. TB: Oh yeah. Well, yeah I have some examples of that. It also ties into policy. Some years ago – in fact in the early ‘90s the Forest Service switched over and accepted the fact that MBAs had been saying that you could be a Forest Ranger without knowing the forest. You know, if you were a good manager you could do it. Prior to that if you went out on a piece of land you expected the public land manager to know everything there was about it. You know, you need to know the name of the plants, you need to know all the wildlife there, you need to know where the drainages were and how much water was in them – roughly, you know you didn’t have to put a weir in every one of them but you had to know whether it was a permanent spring or not. And that gave a different kind of management than the people that look at outcomes or data that they gather and the only thing that they can gather are the vegetation and climate and soils and so on, and then make projections from that. There’s a big difference, I think in the understanding this. And as you said it’s not just in natural resources, it’s in all academia. Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Thadis  Box     Page  13   �One of my students here that I had in summer camp went on to become a veterinarian. He went to Colorado State and I saw him a couple of years ago. He’s now a very wealthy and famous dog surgeon down in Phoenix. And he takes on, he said, about five or six interns a year to teach them how to do surgery and so on. When he was at Colorado State, Colorado State collected the old greyhounds at the race track there. And it was his job to prepare them, cut them up, get them ready to ship to other veterinary schools. And he handled thousands of dogs before he ever operated on one. And now there are very few people who have ever had that opportunity to be able to really look and dissect an animal. And the same thing happens on the range lands. BP: Well I’ll put you on the spot a little bit, but don’t you think that’s – I mean, when you get some grazer, some rancher that’s been up here and knows every nook and cranny of these mountains or out in the BLM country or something like that, and then you have somebody that the Forest Service or the BLM sends in to manage that and they don’t know anything about the landscape itself – doesn’t it leave the bureaucracy struggling for legitimacy? TB: Yes it does. And it makes both the ranger or whoever it is – the manager – and the permittee both at a disadvantage because they aren’t communicating. One of the most important things, I think, in being a good land manager on public lands is not just their technical ability, but their ability to communicate; to come in and talk the same language, to be able to get out and listen to what this old guy that you’re talking about that knows every nook and cranny, to be humble enough to say, “Would you take me up to that draw sometime and show me that spring is a permanent spring and maybe we can improve it some way;” instead of just trying to hide behind a regulation or a law. In my many years of natural resource education in several states and in another country in Australia even, we did you know, hundreds of surveys of people try to find out what we should be teaching our kids. Very seldom did we ever get a comment that said that these kids don’t know their trees or their grass or their animals or anything. But every time we’d get bundles of stuff to teach these kids to talk, teach them to write, teach them to think, teach them to get along with people. And part of this is a problem because the people that at least used to go into natural resources self-selected because they were the kind of people that liked to go out in the woods and not talk to anybody. And so you were automatically working with a bunch of kids that weren’t really skilled with getting along with other people. BP: When you came back here the second time as Dean, that was a period of time – in the ‘70s, right? TB: Yes. BP: That was a period of time there were a lot of those kind of people that self-selected to get into natural resource management and those kinds of things. I guess maybe part of that was the movement of the time. Will you speak a little bit about that? Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Thadis  Box     Page  14   �TB: Oh yeah. My 20 years as Dean here I saw all the extremes. We were talking about extremes earlier. In the early 1970s we had the largest enrollment in Natural Resources here that’s ever been in history – and probably ever will be. We were up to 12-1300 kids one year. I taught a freshman class that the room seated 314 kids, and like the airlines I would usually overbook to sign up maybe 330 and I’d think that they all wouldn’t show up, but they did all show up! And others walked in off the halls. And I had them standing up and the Fire Marshall writing me nasty notes about too many people in there. But it was a time when a lot of people were really wanting to get back to nature, get out in the woods. It was, you know near the end of the – well, it wasn’t the end, they didn’t see the end in sight,– the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War was hanging over people; the bomb was very real. They were scared there might not be a tomorrow. The bomb was going to be dropped. The whole attitude of society was building into these kids that they had to make use of the world right now and a way to make better. They wanted to get away from the war; they wanted to get away from the bomb. They wanted to rebuild the earth. And it was a marvelous time as far as getting people into education. But the change wasn’t taking place out on the land. The people were going along just as they always had. And so there was a conflict there between these idealistic young people coming in and the old timers and the users. You know one of the things we said then – you’d get into a mob running behind it and say, “Wait a minute, wait a minute, where are your leaders?” Because there were new people out doing the leading then. And almost all the ‘50s were that way with students. And up until that time most the people that went into natural resources, we assumed would get a job in natural resources. You know there was always a demand for a Forest Ranger or a Range Manager or a Wildlife technician or somebody like that. These kids were coming in – they didn’t want a job, necessarily. They wanted to learn something about the earth and a way to get out and make it better. They had just as soon go into the Peace Corps and teach English as they would to work on forestry. There was a whole different bunch of people that came in and the profession changed because of it. And I think it changed for the better in many ways. BP: Um-hmm. And some of the people that we’ll be interviewing – I don’t know most of them, I know Barbara has spoken with them, but some of these are products of that time period. TB: Oh yes, yes. In fact looking down her list a lot of those are products of that time period. BP: How do you think their idealism changed once they got out – of course you’d have to ask them that for sure? TB: Yeah, you’ll have to ask them that. Those that you’ll be interviewing are the ones that stayed in natural resources mainly. Well, no I noticed a couple on there that became Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Thadis  Box     Page  15   �school teachers and other things. But yeah, you’ll have to ask them that. But I’d like to think that their grounding in ecology – we made attempts to get even those big classes out on the land and to get them to think about the land – I think made a difference in whatever they carried on. And I would argue that part of general education should be a land-oriented course somewhere to where you get out and make contact with the land. But they don’t do it; its hard work and such things as liability laws make a big difference now. When I first started teaching we went on a field trip and we’d say, “Who wants to take their car?” And they’d raise their hands and we’d take a bunch of cars up there – wouldn’t dare do it now because you’d be subject to all sorts of lawsuits. BP: You wouldn’t even dare take a bus unless you’ve got some sort of liability coverage. Yeah, that’s definitely been a limiting factor than before. TB: Okay – one of the objectives that I understand of this oral history project is to look at how policy has effected land management. And you hinted on one policy there that I want to go back and sort of emphasize – and that’s a policy in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s: opening up the management of resources to non-resource people. And it was done for really good reasons – Affirmative Action to get more women and minorities in there and so on. But it broke down that idea that the manager had to be conversant with the land; that they had to know how to manage things. And this didn’t just go on in the natural resource professions. Where I first noticed it was in US Aid because we had a lot of overseas projects at the time. And it started with the Reagan Administration and went on through. There was the idea that if you had an MBA you could manage anything, you know. You didn’t need to know what you were dealing with; that if you had the principles of management, you could manage it. And I saw very good aid programs overseas that were dealing with very primitive people in agriculture – completely destroyed because they were looking for all the reports and management and so on. So that was one thing: the change of attitude that managers could manage anything. BP: Can I inject something? TB: Yeah. BP: What drove this? What’s the dog that was wagging the tail in this? Politics? TB: Yeah, it’s politics. And most politics are politics because there’s a real reason out there somewhere that people are interested in. Politicians don’t dream up things to irritate people – which most people think they do! [Laughing] They have an ideal or philosophy that they want to get in. And I think this leads to what I was going to say. The second thing that you probably won’t have many people talk about policy in natural resources that I think had a huge influence, that was the idea of privatizing everything. And it came in with the Reagan Administration. And this idea of getting MBAs and so on was part of the idea of privatization. And how privatization affected public land Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Thadis  Box     Page  16   �management is something that was pretty well hidden, you didn’t see it. But instead of the rangers taking care of the campgrounds, for instance, and hiring a natural resource student who would go up there and empty the garbage cans and get some on hand training and so on – they contracted it out to a contractor who hired the cheapest labor he could get (maybe an illegal alien, maybe his kids, somebody else to do it). And you broke this chain of people working with the land, starting out doing the very simple sorts of things and then working up to someday heading the Forest Service. And you’ll hear those stories of people that started out emptying garbage cans. That didn’t happen once you started privatizing things and outsourcing the management. It was more visible in the Park Service where they brought in people. The biggest Park Service manager now I think started out providing meals for prisons, but they got a contract to manage the Park Service. So they came in and eventually they take over everything. And that happened in all the land resource management. So I’d say that was one of the big policy changes that affected land management and it won’t even come up on your radar on most people you talk about. They’ll talk about the National Forest Management Act, they’ll talk about NEPA, they’ll talk about all these things that are very important; but the hands-on implementation came about with the idea that we’re going to privatize the functions of whatever agency it was. BP: Well, so when you do that then again it comes down to the bottom line – it comes down to economics rather than trying to get people involved in this system of managing our lands. If a person is getting paid to empty garbage cans, that’s all they care about. If they’re getting paid a little something to empty garbage cans, and it allows them to get up into the mountains, into the campgrounds where they want to be eventually as a professional, then it’s a different story, right? TB: Yeah, but the sad thing is if you look at the economics of it, the privatization usually ended up costing more rather than less. BP: Well, you know I’m making another jump here, but look what’s happened to the military privatization, I mean. TB: Yes! No you’re not making a jump – you’re going back to the principle. I was talking about principles and they came in, primarily in the Reagan Administration and they’ve gotten a little bit the idea that private enterprise can do a better job than the public in anything. And there are people that held workshops and so on that argued that you should privatize everything including the fire department and police department. BP: Prisons. TB: Prisons, yeah. [Stop and start recording] Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Thadis  Box     Page  17   �[Tape 2 of 2: A] BP: This is tape two; Thad Box and Bob Parson speaking this morning, April 1st, 2008. You were talking Thad, about privatization of public agencies. TB: Yeah, I’d gotten off on this thing of how policy affects management and saying that I think one of the biggest policy changes that has affected land management is the privatization of the management of many of our resources. Which I got started in earlier that I mentioned that it lead to selecting managers who understood managing businesses rather than managing land and I think those two are tied together. And the privatization started out very slowly with some of the more recreational lands like the national parks and then maybe some of the military lands that need to be managed, then gradually got into the actual land management agencies like the Forest Service and the BLM. Another policy issue that has greatly affected land management, not only here in Logan Canyon but worldwide, and that’s been the relative decline in the availability of research monies. The money available to do land management research has gradually gone down. BP: From a high point of when? TB: Oh, I don’t know – I’d have to look at the data. But my feeling is it probably had a better balance along in the late ‘80s and then we had before; I know if you throw in international land management research as well as local. But for a long time a lot of the research money for land management came through the state experiment stations and came as earmarked money to go to land management. And gradually they switched from money tied to specific land research to competitive research – BP: Competitive grants. TB: Competitive grants with the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Health and those sorts of things. That is not bad in itself; in fact I think it’s good that we have competitive research and the best researchers getting the money. But what that did, it lead to a different kind of research many times, than the kind that needed to be done. Where the old state experiment station money came through, you’d be looking at a specific problem that would be dealt with on a given area. And you were expected to develop principles out of that, but also address what was happening on the land there. Let me give you an example of some of the old time research that was done under that that is not being done now. I talked about Art Smith and Larry Stoddart earlier. Some of the work that they did up around summer camp and Logan Canyon and over to Hardware Ranch and that area in Blacksmith Fork Canyon was looking at the use of animals and their diets and a combination of stock. They came up with principles that if you put more than one class of animals on a rangeland that you make more efficient use of it; that it makes better sense to have cattle, sheep, deer, elk because each of them have different grazing habits. And so you can have Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Thadis  Box     Page  18   �more total biomass with animals that eat different kinds of plants than you have alone. And so they were able to do that kind of work with money for specific science, though the principle came out of it. They did that back in – I don’t know, it was before I came here in ’59, so I’d say in the mid-50s sometime – they did it, published it, it’s quoted all around the world, even today. Some of this common-use grazing sort of stuff. When I came back here in 1970 as Dean, one of the first meetings I attended was the Forest Service had called a public meeting on the allotment up around Tony Grove. They wanted to switch to a common-use allotment up there. It was being grazed by cattle only and they wanted to bring in – BP: The Forest Service wanted to, or the permittees wanted to? TB: The Forest Service wanted to. The permittees weren’t too happy about it because they were cattle people. Several of the environmental groups just opposed it greatly. I remember standing up on the hill there with all the Forest Service and these groups. I was new back in town. And one of the people from one of the environmental groups said, “We want to postpone this until you do some studies to show whether this will happen or not.” And I pointed across the valley over there from where we were standing and said, “Back in the 1950s Stoddart and Smith did some studies over there that proves the point that it’s better for the land to put a combination of animals up here. Go to the literature and find out what’s been done.” They still wouldn’t hear it, they had to set up their own study to find out. BP: And did they do a study? TB: No, I don’t think so. I don’t think they ever put the sheep up there. I haven’t seen them. I think, you know they were just able to block it. But my point is that the principles, many of the principles that we need have already been done and in the old literature, and if you can bring that out and bring it up to date, you don’t need to do a lot more research. BP: Do you find that the profession now is reluctant to look back at the older studies? TB: I’m not sure whether they are or not. I wouldn’t want to make that accusation that they’re reluctant to look back. I think it’s more likely that the people who are making the decisions have not had the culture of managing the land and looking back at the studies. They may have come out of another field entirely – Sociology (and we need Sociologists, I’m not arguing that), but something that is not dealing with the ecology of the land and so there is a tendency not to look back then. BP: Um-hmm. I’m going to pause this for just a second. [Stop and start recording] BP: Alright we had just a little interruption there. Okay we’re back talking about – what were we talking about? [Laughing] Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Thadis  Box     Page  19   �TB: Well I guess we were talking about management up Logan Canyon and what’s happened up there. And in the break I mentioned that when I first came here in 1959 and before I had to teach summer camp, Stoddart had told me that I should get with some of the old timers and look at a lot of the work that had been done. And I spent a lot of time with several people – Ranger MJ who died last year, and some of the people ARS people and looking at exclosures all over what’s now Logan Canyon drainage. And there were lots of exclosures that had been put in by various agencies up there. And the area outside were grazed off completely and you could look at the vegetation inside that should be there now. Now you go back to those same exclosures and there’s very little difference between what’s inside and out so the area has improved a lot. What you could do as far as experimenting with the land has changed a lot too. One of the early, I guess it was the first year that I taught up at summer camp Wayne Cook had a study that he wanted to look at the use of various herbicides in controlling Wyethia this plant that comes out in the spring with a yellow flower that you see that’s characteristic of overgrazed ranges. There’s a whole big swath of it just above summer camp up there. And he had a grant that looked at control of it using several different kinds of herbicides. And instead of going back away from the road where people couldn't see it, he had the airplanes fly from the top of the hill to the road so you could see the various strips. And of course it killed out the aspens and Wyethia and other things. But he was very proud of this and he put up a sign of what he was doing up there to improve the land by killing out these noxious plants (they weren’t necessarily noxious, but the invading plants). And we wouldn’t dare do that now. In fact, herbicides are banned from the land, but even if they weren’t the Forest Service would insist that you’d have to get out of the viewscape and so on. BP: You would not be putting it on with an airplane either probably. TB: No. Well in some areas they still do – or maybe a helicopter or something else. But that same area that he flew the herbicides on has been burned at least twice since then by Forest Service personnel with controlled burning, trying to control the aspen or keep the aspen young and re-sprouting in that area. Wayne did it with herbicides and got rid of the Wyethia at the same time. BP: Yeah. TB: Also where you go over the summit going to Brigham City on the highway down here, off to the left right at the summit that whole hillside was covered with Wyethia and Wayne went up there and spelled out “weed experiment” with his herbicide. And it was visible until about the time I retired. In 1990 you could no longer see the bare ground, but what you saw grasses that spelled “weed experiment” and there were these flowering yellow plants all around it. In the spring you could see that. BP: What are your thoughts on those kind of programs? What are your thoughts on herbicides? Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Thadis  Box     Page  20   �TB: I use them on the lawn for dandelions but I don’t think that they belong on the public lands, except in very severe and restricted cases where you can’t do something else. I think that most of what we need to be doing with public and private land is to use the principles of ecology and natural phenomena to manage the land. And herbicides should only be used where it’s not practical to do otherwise. And then, you know you have to know what you’re doing. You just shouldn’t use herbicides to kill plants, you need to know what effect it’s going to have on the connections that I talked about earlier – the bacteria, the plants, the animals are all connected. BP: Do you think we overuse [inaudible] over a certain period of time because it was easy? TB: Yeah, it’s easy. The sins of herbicides are not necessarily that they mess up the environment so much because most of them break down fairly quickly. But the main problem with them is again a principle thing – when you used it you generally used it for a specific, single case. And that case, if it succeeds may mess up the rest of the system. You know it’s not so much the toxicity of the use – though that’s important in some time – but it’s how it breaks the connection, how it changes the whole system. And this happens when you start dealing with single uses. You know I think a classic in that and we talked about earlier about the poplar trees in Cache Valley – this government project to pay for getting rid of vegetation started because an economics professor down in Arizona did a calculation (he didn’t actually kill the vegetation) but showed that if you killed all the vegetation on the watershed that you could increase water flow by (I don’t remember what) five-fold or something. BP: Is this the Salt Cedar down – TB: No it was not just Salt Cedar. This was – I forget the economist’s name – but it made all the papers. People said, you know water is always the short resource in arid lands, “we need to get rid of all this useless vegetation that’s using it.” Well trees are exorbitant users of water and certainly poplar trees are. And so the government put in programs that you could pay people to get rid of vegetation. They killed out all the big Cottonwoods down in Arizona along the streams there that had great use beyond just using water, as far as keeping the ecosystem managed. But they killed them out just to get more water. And it took us a couple of decades to find out that we were doing something wrong. Well my point here is that any time you go in with a surgical strike for one particular use – whether it’s to increase water yield or make more grazing for livestock or to increase teddy bears, or whatever else – that you’re going to get in trouble because you’re not looking at all the interactions that are taking place. BP: Isn’t that where the discipline of natural resource management comes in? TB: Yes! BP: I mean isn’t that essentially what you teach, isn’t it? Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Thadis  Box     Page  21   �TB: Yes. You mentioned earlier, accused me of becoming more philosophical and branching out into everything. The big core of resource management is ecology; looking at the health of the system. And if you get the health of the system, whether you call it a cattle range or a forest or fisheries that produce big trout, the principles of ecology are very important. And if you start looking at how are we going to get more big fish out of the pond, you’re likely to screw up the whole thing. You need to look at how you manage the whole system. The same way if you start looking at the landscape we’ve been talking about up Logan Canyon simply as a place to graze livestock, you’re in trouble at the very start because the objective should be to keep that landscape healthy and to keep it useful so that whatever uses we decide to make of it we can make of it. And whatever use we decide we want to make, we should make certain that it won’t destroy or cut out options for people in the future. There are some places that you almost have to do that. For instance if you open up a gravel pit here up Logan Canyon you’re going to probably change that particular spot to where it can’t be brought back just by good ecological management – that you have to do something on these drastically disturbed landscapes. Same thing if you graze a range too long and you lose the soil on it; you change it to where you’ve got to maybe do some rehabilitation of some sort. But otherwise you work with nature rather than against it. BP: So nature’s pretty adaptive and – what’s the word I’m looking for? – it will come back. TB: No. I think one of the big mistakes that we have made in my generation of natural resource managers is to teach, or at least mis-teach, to where people picked up on this idea that if you do something bad to the land – whether you over-farm it or over-graze it or burn it too much or cut timber off of it – that all you need to do is to back off and it will come back. That’s not true. We used to think it was. In fact, I mentioned that Stoddart came out of the Nebraska School of Ecology – that was one thing that Clements taught and one of the main things we call “Clementsian Paradigm of Ecology” that succession starts from bare rock and gets to a climax and then uses force it back down that chain, you take the use off and nature will bring it back. We now know that that doesn’t happen. But a lot of people – and they teach it in grade schools and so on – believe that that will happen. That if you just stop doing the bad things it will take care of itself. It would if you hadn’t changed the system. But as I mentioned earlier with the soils washed away, if the climate has changed during that period of time or if the conditions are different, you’ve got a whole different system. And now we talk about states and transitions and thresholds that if you force land through use – these dry farms over here on the west side of the valley – if you stopped farming them now with the subsoil showing on them and so on, they won’t come back to the same palouse, prairie-like vegetation that was there when the pioneers first came in. BP: Right. Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Thadis  Box     Page  22   �TB: They’ll come back to a bunch of weeds and other things. So you’ve got to be careful with this thing that nature will take care of itself. It will, it will stabilize the ground but it won’t be the same sort of a community at all. The same uses won’t be available. BP: Where would you date that change in philosophy? In Clements idea – the coming to grips with the idea that yeah, you can screw nature up to the point that it won’t always come back at the climax. TB: It’s been around a long time but it really wasn’t accepted. Actually a British ecologist named Tansley, probably in the 1930s was talking about this sort of thing. And then Odum in his book in the ‘50s wrote something similar. But it wasn’t generally accepted until -- must’ve been about the ‘70s or ‘80s. Some Australian scientists really challenged the Clementsian Paradigm. They were looking at much broader problems – you know, broader landscapes than we have here where they have ranching properties that they have over there that they call “stations” that are half as big as the state of Nebraska. And so you’re looking at different sorts of things. And they noticed the old Clementsian Paradigm didn’t work. We’d also noticed that here. I’d first noticed it when I came to the mountains. I had been trained in the prairies where that Clementsian system works fairly well. You come here to the mountains, there is a different eco-system on the north slopes and the south slopes; there’s different ones between different kinds of areas within the mountains. So we knew it didn’t work, but nobody had really worked out the principles and thought it through until this Australian group (led by a South African really) started looking at it and starting publishing in the literature. And then it came back into this country. And we’re still arguing about it. There are people in the land management profession that would get very angry with what I’ve said about that nature doesn’t bring places back if you just quit using it. So we’re in that process of change now. Just as a sideline, when I was in Australia in January, I had a yarn with Margaret Friedel who is one of the scientists over there that was involved in that and interviewed her and wrote an article for Rangelands or let her write it; just published her comments about how they developed this concept and started early in there. We know now more than we did. We still don’t know really how to manage the new concepts that are coming in because we know that you can change a site so much that it will never come back to what it was before, but how do we get it back? And I think what you do is really establish the interconnections as much as you can and then maybe nature can take it back. But it will be a different community than what you had there originally. BP: Nature itself can alter sites to the point where -- I mean is the landscape ever stationary? Is it ever static? TB: No, of course not. You know one of the things that amuses me and irritates me and I get mad at is just looking at the letters to the editor in the Herald Journal of people arguing over climate change! [Laughing] Of course the climate changes! It changes all the time. It’s not the same now, and that’s one of the main things in “nature” if you want to say, or Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Thadis  Box     Page  23   �whatever, that the system adjusts to the changes. And most of the time it’s slow. Sometimes you get a drought that will come on and maybe for a period of 50, 30, 60, 10 years and then change back. Or it may be a general trend. I became a natural resource manager because of the drought of the ‘50s. I always wanted to be a rancher and the drought of the ‘50s made my dad go broke and I went to college to learn how to be a scientist. I never went back to the land. I’m getting off the subject. Your question was does the landscape change with nature? Of course it does and we have all sorts of examples. You can go up in the mountains and look at the fossils and see that it has changed dramatically. And the argument over whether it’s man-caused or not is also as silly as the one that some people saying we don’t have climate change. Well we do. We could argue over the direction it’s going. And whether it’s man-caused is argued. If you look at my field, range management, and in any place in the western United States when it was opened up for grazing, we killed out the Indians and the buffalo. Within three decades of the time it came here (and I’ve got data that show it happened in the plains, it happened in Salt Lake) – within three decades of when human beings came in with their grazing animals the land was overgrazed. One system after the other came in. Now that was man-caused. And we can show that the dust bowl of the 1930s was because of over-plowing and overgrazing. It was exacerbated by drought. Sure, drought came in there but the erosion was mancaused. So to argue that humans don’t change landscapes make no more sense than the climate doesn’t change. So I read these passionate letters to the editor about climate change, I think, “These people don’t know what they’re talking about.” BP: So the land is really more fragile, I mean it can be changed easily? TB: It can be changed easily. I don’t think land is fragile. That’s one of the ways of thinking – and there are some ecologists that disagree with me. You see a lot of times they talk about ecosystems being fragile. They’re very resilient. BP: That is the word I was looking for a minute ago, Thad! Resilient. TB: They take a lot of change and come back. There are some systems that are fragile and there are some resilent systems – and it usually shows up in what their evolutionary past was. If you get a vegetation type that evolved in the absence of a large grazer – we see more of them in Australia than we do here (but there are some places that if you look back the fossil records you know they’d never had a big grazing animal on there) – they tend to be more fragile and their vegetation will die out sooner when you start grazing it and be less apt to come back and you’ll get another type of vegetation coming in. But I don’t see the land as fragile. It takes a lot of abuse and it has an amazing regenerative power. One of the things that humbles me as a biologist is the regenerative power that occurs in all systems. I don’t know what your wound history is, and don’t want to know, but you can cut yourself, you can get shot in the army, and there are all sorts of things, and you Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Thadis  Box     Page  24   �get well. They even note examples of where you’ve grown whole new vein systems for some reason and they don’t know until after they do the autopsy that you’ve done your own natural bypass. There’s great regenerative ability in natural systems. So, again, I’m getting off the subject. BP: I think it’s all connected. I think your point that you’re trying to make is that there’s a connection between the land, between humans, between animals; and again, it’s the ecologist in you, right? TB: Yeah, I guess it’s the ecologist in me. I guess I’m very fortunate in that being trained in that and working – well I know I’m fortunate to having a good job for many years in ecology. But I was very fortunate to be raised on the land from the beginning. You know, to be a kid outdoors and observing things that happened and wondering about them. And sometimes it got me in trouble, you know. When I was a kid my uncle, who was a year older than I, used to catch lizards and hook them up to old Prince Albert tobacco cans and work them as a team. And we noticed that their tails would break off very easily, but they could re-grow a tail. Well I had a great uncle that had his arm shot off in World War I and one day I asked my granddad if God would let lizards grow a new tail, why can’t Albert grow a new arm? Well that got me in trouble! [Laughing] I was being blasphemous, questioning God and a whole bunch of things. And I don’t think I’m unique. I think kids want to know answers to those questions. I talked about my grandkid wanting to put batteries in the butterfly. Why can’t man grow an arm? BP: Well that’s the questioning nature of humans. TB: Yeah. BP: Why we’re out to discover things. TB: Another thing that may be off the point, but one of my opportunities in my career was to work in Somalia before there was much – [Stop and start recording] [Tape 2 of 2: B] BP: We just turned the tape over and Thad was about to tell a story when he was in Somalia. TB: Yeah. The reason I’m bringing this story up to relate it to land management on national forests is how very primitive people sometimes understand the connections and nature much better than many of our professionals. I had the opportunity to work in Somalia in 1967 when there was only 85 miles of tarmac road in the whole country. And being out with the nomads, many nights I spent in nomad camps. Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Thadis  Box     Page  25   �One of the things I was trying to do was to build a checklist of plants and find out what the plants were used for. I had a checklist that an old British biologist had made many years ago. It had the Somali name and the genus and species and that was all. And I was struggling trying to key the plants out with a key that wasn’t working very well. Our cook who was with our project starting telling me the Somali names of the plants. And it turned out that he’s been herding camel since he was 12 years old. I could ask him any question I wanted to about a plant; he could tell me its Somali name. He could tell me what kind of soil it grew on, how soon it came up after the rain. And he wasn’t unique. The people that took care of the camels and grazed them there knew that sort of knowledge. They learned it out there. And they’d learned the inter-relationships between them: when you could graze and keep the vegetation going. I was taking notes as fast as I could and once I got the Somali name I’d get the Latin name. And essentially he wrote my report for me. This kid had grown up out there. And my point being that anyone who spends a long time out on the land – watching camels or herding sheep, or just out there hunting deer or whatever else – if they’re observing it all. They see these connections and begin to make connections together. And then if you suddenly find a theory or a system that ties them together, you’re very happy. Art Smith used to tell the story about Ray Becraft who started the program here. Becraft came through Utah State, studied with James Jardine and then took over the program with just his baccalaureate degree, like they used to. And he was teaching forestry and so on. I don’t know whether he got a grant or how he was able to do it, but he was able to go to the University of Chicago where the famous ecologist Cowles developed this system of succession or described this system succession. Well Art Smith said that Becraft told him that when he started hearing those theories of Professor Cowles his head hurt. He couldn’t go to sleep at night because he was relating them to what he had seen all his life in the hills in Utah, and the grazing in Utah and so on. So here was a kid, you know, 1500 miles away who got back there and he he ran into something that caused him to tie all that he’d observed all his life – herding sheep or whatever he did – together. BP: Now where was Ray Becraft from originally, do you know? TB: He was from Brigham City, I believe. Yeah, I’m pretty sure he was from Brigham City. And he came here and did his work here. And he worked with Cowles off and on then for a number of years. In fact some of the documents I think I got in Special Collection when I was looking at the history of our college, I found that Cowles came out here and taught summer camp a couple of years. BP: He was here for summer school in 1924 I know. TB: Yeah. Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Thadis  Box     Page  26   �BP: And probably other years too. TB: Yeah. And so that connection very early between the people here who were developing the curriculum and land management and the best theoretical ecologist in America at the time, it wasn’t an accident that this university developed that sort of tie. It goes right back to those roots. BP: Pretty interesting. Yeah, that summer school that they established in the 1920s was – they had the biggest names – it was a stroke of genius. I mean it really was because these were professors that didn’t teach during the summer and they offer them a nice stipend to come out here and it was a good climate in the summer. TB: And you have those documents in Special Collections? BP: We do. TB: I want to come up and dig through those because I think that’s really, right there is the key to the early culture of this College of Natural Resources. It started one generation before Becraft, with the Jardine brothers. They were from Cherry Creek, Idaho and came down here. And I think one of them majored in Math and the other in English or something. I know one of the Jardine’s taught English here. But they also started putting together this concept of natural resource management. BP: They did. TB: Mainly I think because of the watershed problems; the hills washing down. And they were looking at – and the one that studied Engineering was more interested in that. But then when Jardine left, Ray Becraft came in and he studied and teaching. He taught forestry, he taught range management, he taught watershed management -- all in 1918. And then with his tie with Cowles and the theoretical ecologist it gradually developed into what it is today. BP: Yeah. Very interesting history with how that came together – TB: Well I shouldn’t be talking to an historian about this – BP: Well, yeah but you were part of it! TB: You know there are two things that I am interested in: in biology and natural resources history certainly is important. But it’s not just the history of genes, it’s also the history of memes. And when Dawkins came up with this memes concept of the unit of cultural transfer – BP: You’re going to have to define that for me. I’m not familiar with it. Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Thadis  Box     Page  27   �TB: Okay. “Memes” is a term developed by the biologist Richard Dawkins who has just published this book that there is no god or something – BP: Oh, okay. Um-hmm. TB: A great, famous theoretical biologist. He came up with a concept called “Memes” (m-em-e-s) where he said that there was a unit of cultural transmission – that you could transfer beliefs and values from one generation to the other. And that they were as important as the genes in determining what the culture would be like. And that speaks very loudly to me. And I think it speaks to people that work with land management, even though most of them don’t know it because that’s not a concept that is normally taught in biology courses. That there are stories, most of these have gone through mother to child and learning and stories taught around campfires and whatever, but it’s the memes that are passed on are as important for a school as the genes. You’ve got to be able to pass on the passion, the dedication. And I think one of the things that’s wrong with our country now (it’s not wrong, I mean it’s just happening with our country that we’ve got to correct) is that we aren’t passing on the values that make us a stronger, more democratic country. We’re passing on values that its better to get rich than it is to serve your fellow man. BP: Right. TB: And so that is – and I’m way off the subject now! But that’s an important thing – BP: Well let me tell you – you know who John Widtsoe was? TB: Yeah. BP: He was the president here and the dry farm expert. But anyway, I just saw a letter that he wrote to a former student who had been here, in which he congratulated him on his graduation and his new employment (and I forget where he’d been hired, but some place out of state) and told him to always bear in mind his responsibility as a college man, his responsibility for the public good, and not to be overwhelmed with seeking money. And that was his advice to this young graduate. I mean that’s – and you know you would never hear that, you would never hear that. And of course that was a hundred years ago, it was 1908. I think that’s important. TB: Well I had that drummed into me with family and with these mentors that I mentioned (Clarence Cottam, Vernon Young, Larry Stoddart, Smith) – all, you know, that it was important to serve. And that was the reason that I went into this, was to make the world better. And if you’re going to interview (I see the list) some of the people that I taught they may tell stories about me because that was one of the things that I always did was try to drum into them. Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Thadis  Box     Page  28   �In fact, many of the classes that I started when I was teaching in what was then the new Forestry building (the one that’s now the Natural Resource Biology building). The windows in the classroom faced the mountain. And on the first day of class I’d tell them to get up and walk out and go look at that mountain. And then I’d tell them that their job was to make that mountain better. And it’s corny, but it’s important. It’s important that we feel value, or value what we do and that it will help change the world. BP: And do you see that as missing in the educational, in the curriculum today? TB: Yeah. Well, no I won’t say that it’s missing because there are people that do it. But this generation, and the generations are different. And they have different ways of looking at how to make the world better. You know, I’m sure that some of them believe that the way to make the world better is to get very wealthy and then you can spend it making the world better or something else. But I don’t see the general emphasis on that you’re here to learn how to serve the general public; you’re here to make the community stronger. There’s a lot more “it’s all about me.” I’ve noticed this, in fact I’ve been thinking about writing up the change in the generations. When I started teaching in 1959, most of the kids there were not kids, but young men (no young women there), they’re young men and most of them were veterans of the Korean War. I was a veteran of the Korean War and we’re about the same age. They were there to get a job, work out on the forest and make the land better. You know and improve their status in life. Most of them came off the farm, didn’t have any idea of ever being wealthy. Their idea was to get a job where they could do something useful. And then in the 1970s – we talked about this earlier – there was this idealism that swept that whole generation of the ‘70s, that you know, we’ve got to do something better. And they were obsessed on the threat of the bomb, the war. And the Vietnam War closed down. But we still had the bomb. So the generation of the ‘60s became the “me” generation; “I want to get mine.” And Rambo ruled, you know. They were big. They were tough! That was what that generation was all about. BP: The generation of the ‘80s. TB: Yeah, yeah. I said ‘60s – the generation of the ‘80s, I’m sorry. The generation of the ‘70s was this make the world happy and everything’s going to be alright and then after the Vietnam War it was the “Rambo Rule” time and I was going to get mine while it’s good. And then the generation of the ‘90s (and that was the last generation that I really taught) was a real mixed bag. Some people wanted to get back to the serve their world (and a lot of Peace Corps volunteers and so on came through) but the others were wanting to, you know get ahead quickly and make a lot of money. And so it was a mixed bag and I can’t follow through on it. Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Thadis  Box     Page  29   �But if you look back now at our leaders, most of them are coming out of that ‘60s generation – that the whole idea was to get mine while the getting’s good because the bomb’s over us and we’re liable not to be here anyway. And I think it’s affected us all the way through society. It’s a long ways around of answering your question of whatever it was – I don’t remember! [Laughing] BP: Yeah. I think, you know, we are what we’ve been taught and our culture. And I’ve found that – how do you say that again? TB: Memes. BP: Memes. TB: M-e-m-e-s. Google “Richard Dawkins” and “memes” and you’ll – BP: I’ll put in “Dawkins.” TB: Yeah. BP: I think we’ve covered most of this. The one thing I didn’t ask you is a part from religious zeal for the land are you a practicing religionist? TB: No. I’m an atheist. BP: Um-hmm. Okay, that answers that! TB: [Laughing] I wasn’t always. I was raised in very fundamentalist Christian church from a long series of Methodist preachers. BP: Uh-huh. TB: My sister’s just been working on our genealogy and I didn’t realize how many Methodist preachers there were. I was raised in that tradition. My first stint in Utah I taught the Presbyterian Sunday School for college-age students. Had all the black people on campus in my Sunday school because they were brought down there by Charles Belcher who was going to make sure that Cornell Green and Willie Redmond and all those guys went to church! [Laughing] BP: Did you find that it was out of a degree of real soul searching when you finally decided that you did not have a belief in God, or was that something that you perhaps carried with you for some time and you just finally came to the realization? TB: I think it just gradually grew on me. It was hard to admit it. BP: You’re carrying a lot of these cultural things. Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Thadis  Box     Page  30   �TB: Yeah. Because you know, it was so much a part of my life. And I taught Sunday school, I was a ruling elder in both the Southern and the Northern Presbyterian churches for many years. And I guess where I finally decided to be honest and come out of the closet was that if there is a God and the god is not omnipotent then it is no god. And if there is an omnipotent god and he lets the world get as screwed up as it is, he’s inefficient or incompetent! So it makes no sense to believe in a god. This is the first time anybody’s ever recorded that I’ve said it. I don’t go around telling people they shouldn’t believe in God, that’s their business. BP: No reason to. TB: But for me it doesn’t work. And I guess a very personal thing may have been what put me over the hump on this, My mother died a long, nine year agonizing death with Alzheimer’s disease. She was one of the most Christian people I ever knew. One of the most giving, selfless people I ever knew. So if there was anybody that God ought to have treated right it would have been her. And you know, if there’d been a god that was omnipotent, why would he let that happen? It just makes no sense. BP: Yeah, there are questions you can only answer two ways. One is that there must not be, and the other I don’t know how people – people do deal with that. But there is a certain morality that comes out of the Christian traditions and you don’t hear them talk much about it in this day and age. But you talk about your mother and having that Christian – is that anything that carries over? TB: Oh yes! And Bob I don’t deny at all, I am a cultural Christian. I am a Christian, culturally. BP: Well I am a cultural Mormon. [Laughing] TB: Yeah, well I’ve run into a lot of them that way. I’m a cultural Christian and most of the teachings of the New Testament I buy into because they’re good socially. But that’s entirely different from saying that I believe in a god. BP: Sure. TB: I believe in the actions and the body and some of that. And you mentioned that there were two choices: “I don’t know” or “there is no God.” I’m a scientist so you know, you set up any sort of null hypothesis and you can’t find that there is a god. So you know, I’m much more comfortable saying that I’m an atheist than I am saying that I’m an agnostic. And as I say, I don’t go around talking this or preaching because I’m a cultural Christian and I’m proud of my Christianity. But I’m not going to believe in God, that a god did it. BP: We are, like I said, we’re the sum of everything we’ve gained up to this point in our lives, and so I’m sure it’s affected you – TB: Yeah, and it’s affected me mainly in my association with my fellow human beings. Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Thadis  Box     Page  31   �BP: Sure. TB: I’ve never thought about this and I’ll think about it after we turn this off, I’m not sure how my Christianity and the evolution through the Christianity has affected my relationship to the land, or if it did at all. It certainly reflected my attitude toward using the land, but it still very much anthropomorphic. If you notice all the time that I talked about uses it was for human beings’ good. And that’s part of who I am. I grow crops or whatever because people need to eat. And I got into the profession of agriculture before I did into ecology and the reason was I got in to feed a hungry world. That was very much sort of a missionary thing – to get out and feed a hungry world. BP: Is there anything else you’d like to add right now Thad? TB: No, if you think of anything talk’s cheap! I’d be glad to visit with you. BP: I think there’s much more you’ve got to say. TB: Well I think we didn’t get into what I thought was this was mainly about was the effects of policy on management. And it’s in there but it’s sort of – we can look at that again. And like I say, I’m willing to talk anytime. I enjoy it. BP: I enjoyed it too. TB: Well thank you. BP: Thank you very much sir. [Stop recording] Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Thadis  Box     Page  32   � https://highway89.org/files/original/e757e554a140865f3e092004b8ae80f8.pdf 27857c6f91d16ca8789823644ada7bf4 PDF Text Text About this collection: By Thad Box Logan Canyon runs east from the lush Cache Valley, which supported Shoshone families for hundreds of years. Beavers raised their broods in the streams and marshes. The first Europeans, mountain men and fur traders, gave rivers and canyons French names. Mormon pioneers established farms and towns in the valley, cut mountain forests for lumber and railroad ties, developed dairies and beef herds in the canyon. Landless, migratory sheepmen brought flocks from afar. By the late 1800s, the land in canyons and mountains was barren. Sheep herds could be counted from Logan by the clouds of dust they raised. Logan River and its tributaries were polluted by silt and debris. Utah Agricultural College was established in 1888 as Utah's land grant school. The Cache National Forest was created in 1902 at the request of local citizens who feared mudslides from denuded lands. These local citizens wanted the landscape rehabilitated. For the next 100 years scientists, engineers and land managers conducted research, applied what was learned and rebuilt the abused land. In so doing, hundreds of scientists, scholars, land managers and local citizens helped reclaim the areas in and around Logan Canyon into a special place of beauty. They gradually rebuilt its productivity. Hundreds of thousands of people come through the canyon each year. The canyon has become more than a beautiful mountain canyon; it is a part of people's lives and an icon of their culture. Some of the earliest work at Utah Agricultural College and the Utah Agricultural Experiment Station was stabilizing land to prevent landslides and improving overgrazed and overcut mountains. Curricula were developed in the emerging fields of forestry, ecology, range management, watershed management and environmental engineering. Managers were trained in Utah, but worked worldwide. Academic units in the College of Natural Resources and the water program developed reputations for land care. Their research was applied all over the world. In an effort to document these efforts, Special Collections and Archives in the Merrill-Cazier Library have the personal and professional papers of many of the scientists and land managers who helped rebuild Logan Canyon. More are being added. These collections form a valuable reference for anyone interested in land management and policy. These include papers from pioneer academics such as Laurence Stoddart and Arthur Smith, forest ecologist Lincoln Ellison and forest manager William Hurst. Beginning in 2008, Utah State University’s Special Collections & Archives, the Mountain West Center for Regional Studies and the College of Natural Resources Department of Environment and Society collaborated to collect the oral histories of key land use managers and users. Trained interviewers from The Logan Canyon Land Use Management Project gathered oral histories of people who have worked in or enjoyed the Canyon during the last century. In these interviews, available in audio and transcript form, people talk about what Logan Canyon meant to them. The stories of ranchers, recreationists, scientists, activists, scholars, foresters and sheepherders add cultural depth to the work of scientists, engineers and academics. This growing collection of oral histories and personal papers from those who have worked in Logan Canyon is fast becoming a major resource for others interested in rehabilitation, land management and policy. These oral recollections form a basis for understanding policy in one area. Principles from them can be applied to broader land areas.     � Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Where else is this found? Give the URL for the item, if it is in another respository (like CONTENTdm) <a href="http://digital.lib.usu.edu/cdm/ref/collection/LoganCanyon/id/109">http://digital.lib.usu.edu/cdm/ref/collection/LoganCanyon/id/109</a> Digital Publisher List the name of the entity that digitized and published this item online. Hosted by: Utah State University, Merrill-Cazier Library Conversion Specs Recording equipment: Marantz PMD660 Digital Recorder Transcription equipment: Power Player Transcription Software: Executive Communication Systems Date Digital Record the date the item was digitized. 2012-10-16 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Thad Box interviews, 21 March 2008 and 1 April 2008, transcriptions, color photograph Description An account of the resource The first interview covers Thad Box’s early years in Texas and his education. The interview was a demonstration of interview techniques by Elaine Thatcher to members of the Land Use Management Oral History Project members, including Brad Cole, Randy Williams, Barbara Middleton, Bob Parson and Glenda Nesbit. The second interview contains some childhood and pre-college influences of Thad Box. He speaks of his education, mentors, and of his subsequent career as a natural resource professor. Box speaks about his philosophy on ecology and land management practices, the development of natural resource management principles and how they may be extended and applied beyond land management. He talks about the importance of people to have access to nature. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Box, Thadis W. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Thatcher, Elaine Subject The topic of the resource Box, Thadis W.--Interviews Box, Thadis W.--Family Utah State University--Faculty--Interviews Agricultural education--Texas Logan Canyon (Utah) Recreation--Utah--Logan Canyon Mormons--Social conditions Rob and Bessie Welder Wildlife Foundation Cottam, Clarence, 1899- Glazener, Caleb Young, Vernon A. (Vernon Alphus), 1894-1973 Range management--Study and teaching United States. Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944 Canyons--Utah--Cache County--Psychological aspects Solitude--Utah--Logan Canyon Public lands--Utah--Logan Canyon Stoddart, L. A. (Laurence Alexander), 1909-1968 Smith, Arthur D. (Arthur Dwight), 1907-1993 Restoration ecology--Utah--Logan Canyon Grazing--Utah--Logan Canyon Land use--Utah--Logan Canyon United States. Multiple Use-Sustained Yield Act of 1960 Sustainability Privatization--Law and legislation--United States Range management--Research Cultural landscapes Land research Rangelands--Revegetation Utah State University. Forestry Field Station Camp Medium The material or physical carrier of the resource. Oral histories Interviews Spatial Coverage Spatial characteristics of the resource. Llano County (Texas) Cache County (Utah) Australia Somalia Blacksmith Fork Canyon (Utah) Hardware Ranch (Utah) Logan Canyon (Utah) Tony Grove (Utah) Utah United States Logan (Utah) Cache County (Utah) Utah United States Temporal Coverage Temporal characteristics of the resource. 1920-1929 1930-1939 1940-1949 1950-1959 1960-1969 1970-1979 1980-1989 20th century Language A language of the resource eng Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Utah State University, Merrill-Cazier Library, Special Collections &amp Archives, Logan Canyon Land Use Management Oral History Collection, FOLK COLL 42 Box 2 Fd. 4 &amp 5 Is Referenced By A related resource that references, cites, or otherwise points to the described resource. Inventory for the Logan Canyon Land Use Management Oral History Collection can be found at: <a href="http://library.usu.edu/folklo/folkarchive/FolkColl42.php">http://library.usu.edu/folklo/folkarchive/FolkColl42.php</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Reproduction for publication, exhibition, web display or commercial use is only permissible with the consent of the USU Fife Folklore Archives Curator, phone (435) 797-3493 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. Logan Canyon Land Use Management Oral History Collection Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context FolkColl42bx2ThadisBox Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 21 March 2008 1 April 2008 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2008-03-21 2008-04-01 Is Version Of A related resource of which the described resource is a version, edition, or adaptation. Changes in version imply substantive changes in content rather than differences in format. Logan Canyon Reflections https://highway89.org/files/original/c7dbf87062e63e2e01f16cd3dd8ffab7.mp3 6e43a491cb771a222a83e2341e4abb12 https://highway89.org/files/original/e0de45f69d9ebb87cef3b6c67f7ce874.pdf fb3f1710dbcdca4777fb1ff8a2e5e200 PDF Text Text LAND USE MANAGEMENT TRANSCRIPTION COVER SHEET Interviewee: Ron Goede Place of Interview: Ron Goede’s home in Logan, Utah Date of Interview: 16 October 2008 Interviewer: Recordist: Elaine Thatcher and Brad Cole Elaine Thatcher Recording Equipment: Marantz PMD660 Digital Recorder Transcription Equipment used: Power Player Transcription Software: Executive Communication Systems Transcribed by: Glenda Nesbit Transcript Proofed by: Elaine Thatcher, Randy Williams (3/09; July 2011); Ron Goede reviewed (27 July 2011) Brief Description of Contents: Ron discusses his family life, education in Nebraska in a German and Russian German communities, undergraduate work University of Nebraska, involvement with the Air National Guard as an aircraft mechanic, graduate studies at Utah State University in fisheries, and his career in fisheries in Utah. Reference: ET = Elaine Thatcher (Interviewer; Director, USU Mountain West Center for Regional Studies) BC = Brad Cole (Interviewer; Associate Dean, USU Libraries) RG = Ron Goede NOTE: Interjections during pauses or transitions in dialogue such as “uh” and starts and stops in conversations are not included in transcribed. All additions to transcript are noted with brackets. TAPE TRANSCRIPTION DISC One ET: This is Elaine Thatcher and Brad Cole. We are with Ron Goede at his home in Logan. And it is October 16, 2008. And it’s about 2:15 in the afternoon. And so we’re going to talk with Ron about his career in fisheries and whatever else comes up in the conversation. So Ron, why don’t you start by stating your full name your birthday and birth place? RG: Okay. Well my full name is Ronald William Goede. G O E D E. I’ve gotten used to that all the time now. So I remember. I was born in Columbus, Nebraska on April 4, 1934. Let’s see what all do we need now. Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 1   �ET: No that’s all I asked you for. RG: Do you want me to just proceed with that. ET: Well if you just want to give us a quick rundown on... did you grow up there? RG: Well I was there until I was twelve. It was; I don’t know it was a German thing. And I was raised in a German neighborhood. So my father was a German Lutheran Minister. And spoke German. And we moved to Lincoln. And then I grew up in a German Russian immigrant culture. He took over a church there. And that’s kind of where I grew up. So a lot of my, a lot of my cultural background, even though it’s not my blood background. I was Prussian, you know. But my background actually was more German than Russian. ET: So did you grow up speaking some German? RG: Oh yea. Yea ET: You still speak it? RG: Yea. Not like I did before. I’m getting self-conscious about it. BC: What was your dad’s name? RG: Herman Martin Adolf Gerda BC: And your mother? RG: She was Irene Lavern Hahappold. HAHAPPOLD. And she was from a farming community. I had an intellectual side with my father’s side and she was from a big German farming community. Ronald Grandion, Nebraska. So on those two were big in my background. I learned to have a lot of consideration and respect for both the intellectual and the working side. Thought a lot of both of them; and that’s kind of stayed with me, always has. ET: What was your education like? RG: Um. Well of course I went to public school in Columbus up to the sixth grade and then went to high school in Lincoln: Lincoln High School. And then I graduated. And then [in] 1952 from there and then I started to attend [the] University of Nebraska in Lincoln. Started in engineering but didn’t like it. Stayed with it for a couple of years and then got out of it and went into arts and science. And that was a real turn on for me. So after the engineering I majored in botany. And then also I had a major in Botany and also one in Zoology. And I got a degree out of Lincoln: a bachelor’s degree. Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 2   �ET: So you had a double major? RG: Yea a double major. ET: Botany and Zoology. RG: At that time they asked you to have one major and two minors or two majors. And so I was really into the biology period. So anyway I also got involved at this time in the military was hanging over your heads pretty hard. So I ended up, while I was going to University of Nebraska, I joined the National Guard. And I was in the Air National Guard and I was trained as an aircraft mechanic. So I worked up, went through one enlistment there. And then I ended up with about a year of active duty there too in the Air Force. At that time you had to have eight years in some combination military. The more active duty you had the less reserve time you had to do. So I was in there until I was going to be until for that eight years. And then I let’s see. I came to school up here at Utah State. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with biology so I applied for graduate work at: Duke and British Columbia for forestry; and Missouri and Utah State for fisheries; and Wisconsin and Purdue for pathology. And I figured well I’ll let them wade it out you know. And I got accepted at all of them. And so then that didn’t help. So I decided, actually one of the reasons I came to Utah was simply because I’d never been to Utah before. I could have easily gone any one of those directions because I was interested in all of it. But with a degree in Botany and Zoology, a bachelor’s, the only job offer I got was with the – was a fruit inspector in a post office in Kansas City. And I decided well I’d better rethink this. That wasn’t one of them things I had on my plan. ET: So you were still doing your time in the National Guard when you got accepted here? RG: Yea, that’s right. I would have just been finishing it here: the National Guard. And then when I came here there wasn’t an Air National Guard unit at that time close by here so I went into the standby’s reserve. I was still doing my eight year. And then let’s see, I finished the degree well somewhere in there. Let’s see in 1958 I went to work for River Basin Studies for the Fish and Wildlife Services River Basin studies in Alaska; and [I] did biological surveys on the Sisitna and the Yukon. ET: Was this after you got your masters? RG: No, this was between, about half way. I didn’t have any money. And I hitchhiked. I did about a year here and I was advised I had to get some money somewhere. And I hitchhiked to Seattle. And then from Seattle the Fish and Wildlife Service paid [for me to travel to Anchorage]. And then I had to live in a warehouse; I was just gonna go right to the boondocks, rather than get an apartment. I just lived in a Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 3   �warehouse: a Fish and Wildlife Service warehouse and slept on a sack of seines [fish nets]. And I had that little stove in there and they’d bring. The guys that worked the commercial fish stuff would bring me little catches every day. I had shrimp and things like that. But it wasn’t too . . . couldn’t have many guests. And then went out to start doing their surveys. And they hired me primarily for my botany because they wanted me to do complete biological surveys in impoundments. They were talking about putting three major impoundments on the Mississippi River. And they wanted to know everything that was alive basically in that proposed impoundments area up to everything that was going to be impounded. So I worked the length of the Susitna. And I finished the project. ET: And you were identifying plants at some point. RG: Everything. Fish and anything I could get. But plants are the one they were worried about; because it tied in so much to the game forage and everything else. And the streams were pretty heavily fed by the glaciers; by the Susitna Glacier. So it looked a lot like a sidewalk, you know, gray, the Susitna. And the salmon couldn’t make it up, the water was too rough. They had an area called Devil’s Gorge; the salmon couldn’t even get by there. In fact we lost a person. We lost a person in Devil’s Gorge. But I finished that project. And then I decided I had to make some decisions. Of course I couldn’t spend anything because I gave the banks of power of attorney because I wasn’t in town. There was no place to spend it. And so they just kept depositing it. That got me to where I could afford to go back to school. So I came back to Utah State. And I had a master’s project. I wrote a project up for and it went to Bill Sigler [he] was my major professor. He was in charge of the Fisheries program, the wildlife department then. And I wrote one [mater project] up on the effects of sodium fluoride. Fluoride was a big issue then: fluoridization. And so I had a project on the effects of sodium fluoride on primary productivity of a stream. I worked it out on the Logan River. So when I finished that. That took a couple of years. That was a slow process. In those days you didn’t get a lot of money for [graduate work?]. A matter of fact I built my experimental unit out of an old airplane canopy; one that Sigler had from surplus. It was a plastic airplane canopy and I had to cut it and I molded it in my oven in my apartment; burnt the hell out of myself. And it worked and then they decided to go ahead and build some for me – have them built. ET: So these were what? RG: They were microcosms. They were tubes where I could put samples of algae and so forth in there and then run the water past and collect the gasses and so forth. And then I would measure the chlorophyll in the plants to give an idea of what the productivity was. And that would go up or down, depending where the fluoride level was. Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 4   �ET: Did the fluoride have a negative effect on the growth? RG: Not too much. It actually got a little. They got a kind of a carbon dioxide gush when you treat them with the fluoride. So it had an impact but we never, with that particular study we didn’t work out whether that was bad or not. But it was, it was. We didn’t have calculators then either. Except the big Marchant and Fridens [calculators] you know. We had to wait in line to use the calculators. You could have never set that on a table because it went ka kink, ka kink, ka kink. Finally it would slosh over. So anyway that was when I got a job. I started to work on a Ph.D. but it was just. I simply needed to find a way to make some money again. And I was kind of burned out with the whole process anyway. So I got a job with Missouri; the State of Missouri, and started to work for them. And I worked for about I think I went to work for them like in June of ’61. And then in October of ’61 yea October of ’61 they had the Berlin crisis and I got activated because I was still in the reserve. I only had about three months left on my eight years and I got activated. So of course then I’d joined a unit in Ohio and then they decided they didn’t have a crisis. But you couldn’t get out, you know. They didn’t have a crisis but they couldn’t let you go either. So I spent a year there just volunteering for temporary duty anywhere I could, just to keep it interesting. So I flew all over. And I was still a mechanic. And I was flying all over the country. So then when I got [out] Missouri had to [give me a job again]. [They] gave me a leave you know; they had to when I got activated. Except the same job wasn’t there [when I got out, so] I had to take a different job. And when I got to back to Missouri, I was working for their research group under Slim Funk: John L. Funk, out of Columbia, Missouri and then I took over. Just before I went to the service I had taken over the paddlefish study. This was the reason I was interested in Missouri in the first place. Of course I didn’t get that back. But I was also doing small bass mouth reproduction studies. And I kind of lost, lost those projects. And I ended up in lakes and impalement studies and I finally took over their public use – management in their public use areas like St. Louis and Kansas City and places. And then they started, they sent me to Stutguard, Arkansas to a workshop that Fred Meyer had. Fred Meyer was a parasitologist with the Fish and Wildlife Service. And run it at the fish farming experiment station in Stutguard. And that was a two-week class. And that really turned me on. That was a really it was . . . it wasn’t strict fisheries, it was more fish health. And Fred told me that in about ten years ago fishery biologists would be a dime-a-dozen. But fisheries biologists with a special deal and I said, Wow that’s heavy. So I went back to Missouri and I wasn’t back there long. And I gave several papers, reports on the class. And I enjoyed doing that. That was fun. And I still like to do things like that. Like to talk, I like to talk to a crowd. Just like the Bridgerland Folk Society. But anyway while I was doing that, they asked me that their Chief of Fisheries, P.G. Barnacle in Columbia and he was, would have been. I mean yea, Chief of Fisheries. And he worked out of Jeff City, Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 5   �Jefferson City. But he asked me if I was interested in, well he wanted me to take a tour of their, the state fish hatcheries which were directed by AG George Morris who ended up being. I would class George as another one of my mentors. But he was a native Hillbilly: a very good fish rater. ET: Fish what? RG: Fish culturalist. And Missouri, well a lot, well a lot of the culturists in those days were locals. You know the people that have a knack for it are real savvy of doing it. They didn’t know why they were doing some of those things. But when I was taking the tour he had another man Harvey Willoughby was along. And he was chief of hatcheries for the Fish and Wildlife Service out in Minneapolis. And I had a good time with them. I could really relate to Harvey. And so Harvey and George both became really good friends. And they were until they died. I was always in touch with those two. But George and Harvey were both inducted into the Fish Culture Hall of Fame, they call it in Spearfish, South Dakota. A Fish and Wildlife - there’s a national program. ET: I never knew it was there. RG: Yea. And they have. So those two both made it into the [Hall of Fame]. And so they would good ones to draw to you know. Then they asked me if I would. What? ET: The Fish Culture Hall of Fame? And it’s with what the state fisheries up there? RG: No. It was actually started by someone. Actually a friend of mine, Arden Trandell, who was Fish and Wildlife Service. ET: Arden Trandell? RG: Trandell. Yes. And then he retired. But he’s, in fact I think Arden’s in there too. And then he ran it; took care of it for them for awhile, after he retired. And they’ve got the biosketches and CV of everybody’s that’s gotten. I’ve got all those. They ran it kind of through the American Fisheries Society. Then after I took that tour Harvey got his degree. Harvey Willoughby. I’m just, I’m pointing. This is a nondescript point. Amorphous. I guess. But anyway Harvey got his degree at Montana State with C.J. DeBrown. And he had two thumbs. From this joint down there were two little thumbnails. ET: Oh my word. RG: Just on the one hand. And I learned fairly early on that he would distract you that way. When you were arguing with him, he’d fool with that thumb. And I’d tell him, “Damn it Harvey, put that in your pocket.” And he’s says, “Well it works sometimes.” And I’d say, “Well I bet you can pick both nostrils at the same time.” Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 6   �ET: But he was just a wonderful guy. He finally retired in oh Grand Junction. And he’s dead now. And his name is Willoughby? RG: Willoughby. W I L L O U G H B Y. Just a great guy; he ended up being Chief of Hatcheries for the Forest and Wildlife Service out of Washington. And really did a lot of work with new species of fish in Europe oh like the Samo Hucho hucho. The big Danube trout that they tried [and the] Lake Horid trout that they brought over here and tried in this country. Neither one of them worked all that well. But he was just a real ET: The Danube trout and the what? RG: Lake Horid. I think its H O R I D trout. It was from Central Europe. From the Alps. But Harvey was a shaker and a mover you know. He was a good advocate of culture and disciplined culture. And I thought a lot of Harvey. And George was. Old George Morris was a great, had a great influence on me. And I had my, when I was trained. When I got out of the Air Force this last time; after then they gave me a discharge you know. Then I was finished with it. But I had nine years by this time. But while I was an aircraft mechanic I got an enormous respect for preventive maintenance. And I was a crew chief taking care of the aircraft, you know. And I was working with fighter aircraft. I had the F-80’s and 86’s and 84’s. And, but that stayed with me. I still feel that way. And I carried that became part of my professional credo. You know that take care of it before it breaks. And don’t let it break with it’s up there. The pilots take issue with that. They don’t like that. When they were going down they looked to see who signed the paperwork. So this all, this all comes down to where I kind of. Where I went and why I went there, and what I did when I got there. You know. I started in Missouri I got really interested in the fish health was a big part of it. And the fish diseases. And while I was working for Missouri they sent me to Lee Town, West Virginia for about eight months to study and Dennis Snieszko, who was kind of one of the world leaders in fish pathology in the world. ET: What was his name again? RG: Snieszko. S N I E S Z K O: Dennis Stanislas Snieszko. He came here, he was educated in Poland and came here to get away from Hitler. And because they wanted him on their bacteria warfare; and he wouldn’t do it. So he came here and went to work for Kent Dietrich which was bacteria warfare in this country. But that was okay as long as it wasn’t Adolf. And he didn’t like it. He was a gentle man. And I had, I had it [?] So I got those three. I had four mentors in my life. My father was one and then Snieszko, Bill Sigler and George Morris. People that had that kind of impact on me. A lot of people were teachers, but I always add a Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 7   �little extra for the mentors. They really get down inside. And I guess Dennis Snieszko is dead now. But boy I had a huge respect for him. Um, let’s see. ET: How long were you there? RG: About eight months; it was training, a formal training. They would only take four people a year. So then I was one of the four and it was very intense. Eight hours a day. You had four hours in a lecture and then four hours in the lab. All just, every day of the week. And you know, you were, you had exams and all that business. So it was formal. And Snieszko made a comment. He had been criticized by some of his peers for taking time out for to train from a research program. And his response to that was, there’s no point in building the bricks if there’s no one to build the houses. I still get choked up with this because he really meant a lot. And that stuck with me. And I never got that out of my system. So I did all my career a lot of training. But always I did it at the University here. But I did a lot of workshops. And when I developed that autopsy system I taught that to around 1500 people in 32 different states. And so that was a heavy, heavy part of my program was to pass on what we were finding to people, other professionals. So and I just. There were just us two. About two years ago. Two or three years ago I got the Snieszko Award finally. For distinguished service from the American Fisheries. And it’s interesting. You know one of the other scientists there, which I got to be really good friends with and was also, is a world famous pathologist. He’s dead now too. But it was Ken Wolfe. And Ken got the first Ph.D. here at Utah State. ET: Really RG: Not in fisheries. But the first. That was right after they went to the, at University from Ag College to University. He was the first Ph.D., Bill McConnell got the second one and John Neuhold got the third one. So, but Ken was a. He started the work with cell culture and stuff with, in fisheries. And so they could do. He was the first, developed the first cold-blooded cell line. So they could do the work with viruses. And I used his methods when I came here I found virus in Kamas; at the Kamas hatchery: the IPN virus. And started his cell culture here in my lab. But I was close friends with Ken until he died too. And Glen Hoffman was kind of the big. Did a lot of the early work on whirling disease. He was there too. These guys were all world class fish pathologists, men very well known. Hooked into. n Italy everybody came there to see those guys, you know. So you got to meet all these people and talk to them. And a lot of them spoke German. ET: So you got along fine. RG: Yea. It was funny how many of them did speak German; they weren’t all Germans. But German for awhile was kind of the technical language, scientific language. So anyway, so that’s where. Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 8   �Then I came back to Missouri and I built their first disease lab, fish disease lab that they’d had. Down in southeast Missouri, down near Cassville Missouri. Not too far, about sixty miles out of Springfield. At a stake park down there. And had, and started working with fish quality. I liked that. I took it a step beyond the health and or disease and decided I was interested in the quality in a more general attack. And disease was just a part of that. And that’s kind of, that kind of became my thrust, all through the rest of my career. Was the fish quality and of course a lot of work with disease. But always in the context of quality. ET: So about what year are we up to now? When you came back to that RG: When I came back… I came to Utah after. I came back to in ‘62 after the air activation. And then went to Missouri for about eight months. And then came … I had worked before. I had to work. I went to work for the hatcheries there after Harvey. Had that meeting with Harvey, tour with Harvey Willoughby and George Morris. Apparently I didn’t know that but I was being assessed or evaluated. To see, because they were worried about putting a technical person with these old guys. You know. They weren’t happy about me being there. Those old guys. They had. Then you had a college graduate they stuck a couple of adjectives in there too. But Harvey maintained that since George was kind of a hillbilly himself. But Harvey said he didn’t know many people who would, who would get along with those guys. But he thought I would. And so the very first job I had there was working. And so I went to work as a hatchery biologist. And very first job I had there was a disease case. I never forgot. I still use this in lectures and stuff. But the, he didn’t want me there. That was pretty obvious. And he was very nervous about me being there. ET: Harvey didn’t? RG: No this old guy that was the hatchery superintendent for the Roaring River Hatchery. Bob Price. And we ended up being really good friends too. But he asked me. I said, “Well in the first place in Missouri you don’t just sit down and get right at the subject. You’ve got to get over to it, you know. Talk about the weather and everything else, you know.” And I finally said, “Well I understand you’ve had some trouble here.” Oh, he says, “they’re dead. But I don’t think it’s anything serious.” And he was serious. He was serious as hell. But I knew just exactly what he meant. But I was really struggling to keep from laughing you know. And that’s always stuck with me. That there’s being serious and then there’s being serious. You know. He was worried about it wasn’t going to be serious for him. He knew the fish were in trouble. He didn’t know whether he was. ET: They’re dead, but it’s nothing serious. RT: Yea. But I don’t think it’s anything serious. And so I started picking up a lot of their jargon. Well we cut it off twice, but it’s still too short. And then I’ve. I had a Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 9   �pretty active program there. And I started the kind of an inspection of the stations. Boy I spent an awful lot of time on the road, sitting there drawing stuff on napkins in the coffee shops, trying to figure out how we’re going to approach this. I always used to. I always used the approach of what are we going to do? I never did say, “What can I do for you?” And I think that made a big difference for them, because I made sure that. Because they knew a lot of stuff about fish that I just. I knew how to. What we were going to have to call some of it. But they didn’t know. They knew what to do. They had a system for, when they had a leaking dam board and a raceway. You just can’t seem to stop it from leaking. They used horse manure. They called it super seal. But it’s the. And it didn’t work as well from cows because their ruminants and they break the fiber down too far. But horses they put, it’s dry. It has to be dry of course. They’ll put that in there and it sucks that in to those boards. And then it swells and it’s obsolete. ET: Oh for heaven’s sake. RG: And so. The first time I ever went looking for. Up at Kamas they were having leaky boards. And we went out and got some. I had a tech, one of the techs that was working for me. We walked: a gal. We walked out and got. I said I got a bucket and we went out and got some horse manure. And we came back and the assistant Superintendent Ron Russell. He said, what have you got? And he looked in there and he say’s I’m not sending you out for strawberries again. But they got a kick out of that. And so they started calling it super seal too. Now you can’t find horses. So there was a lot of those kinds of things. I had to take that and understand why it was working and try to bring it down into some kind of a quantifiable thing. And I loved it. I really fell in love with the work then. Because I felt that they needed me and I needed them. And then that’s always stuck with me. And it was with me when I came here. Bill Sigler recruited me down here. He called me and said that this job was open out here and that this lab was built in 61. They started building it in 61. George Post. And so he said, he wanted me. He was assigned, or asked by the State of Utah to find somebody. And so Sigler thought that I would be a good one for that. And so I came. And I thought then. I hated to leave Missouri but this was a whole new, whole new thing here. ET: What year was that? RG: That was ’66 when I came here. I was. Sigler called me in 65, the spring of 65 and I told him I wouldn’t do it unless I had at least three months to get somebody in place and trained to do the job there. So then they gave me that much time. And then I came here. But I always, quality, fish quality was central to my program. So that in 1967 I found the virus in Kamas in the Kamas hatchery. BC: And where’s Kamas at? Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 10   �RG: It’s up by the Jordan[elle], by the Heber and Kamas and Midway. Kamas is on the Provo [River]. ET: It’s up on the Wasatch back. RG: Upper Provo River yea. ET: You found whirling disease up there. RG: No IPN virus. It was one of. It was actually. He was losing everything. In little brook trout. And I looked at those fish and I says, that’s. And I wasn’t even set up for it yet. And I said “that’s got IPN written all over it: Infectious Pancreatic Necrosis.” And so I had a friend in Hagerman, Idaho who was at the Federal Hatchery there. He was a hatchery biologist who had been through and had already set up some cell culture. And so I took samples up to him and we ran it through the lab there. And it came out positive. And then I, then I started. It took me awhile to set that all up here and the get the equipment I needed. And then I started the inspections. I started inspecting all of the stations. ET: So where was the lab here that you set up? Was it on campus? RG: Yea. No it was out at the experiment station across from the landfill there. BC: On second north? RG: Yea. And that’s. You know I had a little office. Merlin Olsen came out to see me and he didn’t even fit in my office. I told him Merlin we got to go outside. ET: That’s still a fisheries office isn’t it? RG: Yea. And it’s, it’s re-expanded a lot. It’s a full. That was about 1967. Well it was ‘68. I had basically a full service pathology lab going there. I had the cell cultures and we had the bacteriology and everything. And it stayed that way. Then in [?] cause now we’re starting to get down to here you know. This was the formative stuff that got me into all this. They were having a lot of trouble. You have to back up here now a little bit and realize where fisheries were at that time. You know. Like in the ‘50s still, fisheries was pretty trial and error. Especially in Utah and places like Utah because they were damming all the. Putting it would be the large central Utah project dams or small irrigation dams. But it was getting where they didn’t have fish for that. This was, there were no lakes in Utah other than the Uintas which didn’t have fish. And so you couldn’t just dam that up and hope that the fish that are there are going to take over. Because it was a different habitat. And so, and they were doing a lot of trial and error. There wasn’t a lot of sense. Just put barracuda in you know. Oh let’s try those. They’re pretty. And then you know. Piranha you don’t have to feed them very often, you know. Oh look, you’d put a hand. Put a sign there that says keep fingers out of water and you’d Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 11   �have it made you know because that’s an invitation to. Wouldn’t have to feed them. And this was a research program. The experiment station was primarily to develop fish culture techniques and methods and equipment to get better fish and more fish. Primarily more fish. And so I took issue with that whole, that whole idea. And I told them, I can’t buy. I don’t want to go for more fish. I’ll go for better fish. And that’s more of a sensible goal than as many fish as I can raise. I’d rather get the best fish I can raise. And then also decide what you’re going to plant; what species, when you know. When do you plant them, how many do you plant. And feed. They were still feeding a little meat when I got here. You know. In Missouri I had that too. I developed diets. But that was. You would feed livers. Get a lot of livers. And they’d dye them green so that you wouldn’t sell them for. And that was the law. And nothing like ET: And you fed that to the fish huh? RG: Nothing like grinding up a bunch of green liver you know. God, that’s awful stuff. And then the. Those old superintendents told us. Always figured you couldn’t raise a trout without liver. And so a lot of times they just almost beg you for more, some liver. Because they said, I know this is going to do it. And so I’d go ahead and I’d recommend a little liver for them, just because it made them feel good. It never did do any good. But anyway the upshot was, part of this is the fact that there were no diets for trout like the pellets. Like we feed now. And we were feeding some pellets, but the diets weren’t well worked out. And they would break in 40-50 days you know. They would have trouble. They would have to feed a little meat. And everybody, there were several serious programs in the country working on diets. So a good part of my first year or so was testing, developing and testing diets. I had mixers and pelleters and everything here. And then I’d have to. In order for anybody to bid on our feed contract, it might be a million pounds of feed. They would have to, we would have to test the feed. But all of this was part of that quality. A lot of the diseases; the bacterial and virus. The microbes that we had were there because of the feed wasn’t good enough. They made them very susceptible to everything that was trouble. And so we had to work. Then we so that’s program. We even had one that we worked out with Paul Cuplin who was Chief of Hatchers for Idaho. Paul and I worked up a program on jogging, fish jogging. We’d have them pull. Take the, in the hatchery, lower the water so that the fish would have to swim harder. And let them swim for about an hour and then fill it back up. Get ‘em ready. ET: Fish exercise program huh RG: We called it jogging. And we also had programs for stamina. And stamina was a big thing. And this gets in the whole idea of fish quality which was. But the fish stamina, we had a stamina tunnel out here where you would. It would be about eight foot long and a big. I think it was an 8 inch plastic Plexiglas tube and reservoirs. And you’d put fish in there and then you would. You could pump water through it at a given velocity. You measured fish swimming speed in body Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 12   �lengths per second. And you would swim them at a given body lengths per second for a given time and find out what the. Then you could measure. A lot of times they would simply start to drop out of the picture, because they couldn’t hold. They could hold for awhile and then they’d get tired. And you couldn’t tell whether they were sweating or not. Hard to do with a fish you know. But anyway so then you measure how long it took them to fatigue and then, and then how long they could. You would have to let them rest and put them in it again. But in the streams they don’t always have a choice. So but that all became part of what you had to evaluate in order to evaluate what the quality of the fish was. ET: And was this work applied throughout Utah. Or mostly up here in the North RG: No it was. But that was the thing. My program was basically state-wide. And it was the only program. So they were beginning to pretty much do what I wanted them to do. BC: Was it a program just for the state hatcheries, or does it cover the commercial hatcheries? RG: No, the commercial. We started doing it for the commercial hatcheries later. They were hard to work with. I had a long history with White’s Trout Farm out there. [Speaking to Brad Cole] Your neighbor [at White’s Trout Farm]. Clark White had , Grant’s dad or uncle was the first one. But they’ve had meat and stuff for a long time. So there’s nothing grosser than that, a big old plop and it’d float out then [?] and then the fish just coming roaring in there to eat. ET: Really. I had no idea. So now at this point did you ever get your Ph.D.? RG: Nope. I never [did]. No. In there when I was. That’s why I came back. That was one of the reasons I came back here. But while in that time I got par planitis in my eye. They didn’t know what it was for quite a while. ET: What was it called? RG: Par planitis is a part of the eye. And it was a sterile inflammation; wasn’t a microbe. And they worked on that for quite a while. Keith Gates was my eye doctor; it took him quite a while to diagnose it. And he finally said. Discovered that in England where they have socialized medicine they keep a lot of these records in one database you know. And he said. “A hundred percent of the par planitis sufferers were smokers.” And I smoked then. And that was good enough for me you know. That didn’t mean that everybody that smoked couldn’t get par planitis. But everyone that had par planitis was a smoker. And I told him, well that could just be because of you know, that always changes things with the smokers. They get vassal construction and that sort of thing. So I quit that. But it did a lot of, a fair amount of damage and I was on steroids for about two years: Prednizone. Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 13   �And I backed off. I asked him what I was facing. And I said I don’t quite understand now what route to take in my career. It looked like I probably was going to loose the sight in that eye. And he advised me to just, it might be well to look for more administration. And that wasn’t what I wanted to do. But I dropped; I basically just gave up on the. I just decided I had some things I wanted to finish while I still had enough eye to do it. And I dropped the Ph.D. program. And still did a lot of work on it. And the funny part is I had, I already had the class work and I had taken the comps. I just, I just had still a fair amount of work to do on the research. And then it probably wasn’t smart to drop the thing when I was already, had two legs on you know. But I’ve never regretted. It never did, never made too much difference to me. I just kept. I’ve always kept. I still even now, and it’s been. I’ve been retired for eight years now. And I still read like I did when I hadn’t retired yet you know. I keep up with the professional stuff because that’s where my interests always were. I don’t ever read. Lisa [wife] can’t understand that because I’d be laying there reading. She thinks I’m reading a novel and I’m reading up on the history of western thought. She says, “You mean like west. Like Box Elder?” BC: Is there any? RG: There’s no thought over there. They haven’t got that far yet. But I’ve always been. I’ve loved information. I’ve just never been much of a novel reader. But I’ll read Garret Harden’s Tragedy Commons or something like that. And I love that stuff so. DISC Two RG: But the quality control is so important; and that all is brought into play. But what I was trying to point out was we had to develop all these other things before we did. First you had to know how to even measure the quality. We worked that out with the. We set up quite a physiology lab up there. But that was where my big interest was: measuring stress and quantifying stress you know. And measuring the same things you do in people; the same steroids and so forth. And define what the stress is and therefore help you define which were the stressors. A stress is a response and a stressor is what causes the response. So stress is good. The actual response that’s one of your ways your body has of keeping up. It’s when it has to do it too long why then it goes to distress and maladaption rather than adapting. And so then I worked up a system for quantifying that and quantifying health. I hated when we started to do the inspections for the diseases and the certification. We killed a lot of fish then just to take just to do the surveys. And I hated just coming up just whether they had these diseases or not. I wanted, if we’re gonna kill them let’s get some information out of them. And so that’s what. And so I developed what they call the HCP: the Health Condition Profile. And that’s the one I taught. That really caught on finally. I published that in the American Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 14   �Fisheries Society. And that come on. That’s the one I got, people were asking me to teach that all over the country and in Canada and in Mexico. ET: RG: So some of the work you did helped changed policies at the state and national level Yea, very much so. And I was always a member of the fisheries staff down in Salt Lake. Went to all the staff meetings and I always had a heavy impact on what they did and the directions they took. And so I knew also what the frustrations were with the legislature and a lot of times I would have to do battle with them. They didn’t. That never bothered me too much. There were a lot of times when I couldn’t come down and couldn’t make it to the staff meeting in Salt Lake. And they’d do something they knew I wasn’t going to agree with. And then they’d have to draw straws to see who had to tell me it. The secretary followed me out into the parking lot one time up there and she said, “Wait I got most of your comments, but how do you spell sucks.” You know. So the thing is that the Colorado River Wildlife Counsel asked in 1967. They asked for me to come up with some idea on. I accused them of dangling fish and that was the term. I got Harvey Willoughby going on that. I said, “You’re into fish dangling that’s what you’re doing.” And he says, “What do you mean?” And I said, “You call and say, we got IPN do you want them. Do you still want the fish? We’ve got IPN virus.” And I knew a lot of people who were really in sorry need of the fish. They’d go ahead and take them anyway. Even though they were, they carried this virus. And I said, “No.” I said, “I’m just telling you, you’re dangling the fish.” I said, “Look you can have these.” And so they actually asked me to come up with some kind of a way to how do we approach fish dangling. There were seven states in the Colorado Wildlife Council: the seven states on the Colorado. I was so involved this is hard for me to put this all in one dimension like that. But I started. It took me three years actually. I came up with the first meeting I had with them after we talked about the need to do something about this. Then I told them what I thought was going on and I wanted to, I said, “We need to start looking for this stuff. And I found out that the ones that were fighting it. I finally realized that they were afraid they already had these things, and what happens then. And I told them, “Just don’t bury the horse until you know he’s dead,” you know. “Let’s see where we are with this thing. We’ll do a survey.” We had a list of diseases; I put that together. And so they said, they appointed the Colorado River Wildlife Council fish disease committee. And we worked. And that was composed by design, one fish, federal pathologist, one state pathologist, one state fisheries manager and one state fisheries administrator. So that we got all those elements to argue it out before hand in committee and then go talk to the larger technical committee and then the council itself. Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 15   �And boy I had a real round. The first meeting then, it was in Paige, Arizona. And I really got into it with them over there in that. They used parliamentary trickery to get the floor away from me you know. And they asked if they could ask a question so they gave the floor up. I gave the floor up so they could ask this questions. And then they wouldn’t give the floor back to me. And I blew my cork, you know. And I told them, “My God, you’re gonna listen.” And they says, “Well.” They said, “We got to study this thing.” And I said, “It’s only . . . this isn’t the communist manifesto. It’s a three-page policy.” And I said, “I assumed, I guess I was misinformed. I assumed everybody could read. Everybody that comes to this meeting can read. And I really got nasty with them. And they finally agreed to read it and we come in the next day and they passed it. Now as far as that committee was concerned, and then that goes on back to each of the seven states and they decide whether they’re going to. They all have to ratify what the policy that we had developed. BC: And what was the policy exactly? RG: The policy was that basically you couldn’t, wouldn’t be able to introduce fish into the Colorado River drainage unless they’d been inspected and certified by somebody. Which they really sadly needed. They all had their own kinds of statutes. So this was the policy, they would use their statutes however they had them set up in order to comply with that policy. ET: So did this have to be accepted by legislators, or just through . . . RG: No they could do it. Well some of them did it through the legislature but some of them already were. Like Utah was enabled. We had already been enabled by the legislature to write rules. ET: So this just went to the Fish and Wildlife Service then? Or the Fish and Wildlife Department. BC: Division ET: Division. Whatever it is at the state level? RG: Well the fish. Oh at the state level. Yea. ET: That’s what you’re talking about. RG: Yea, each of the local. That’s what the council was. The council didn’t have the Fish and Wildlife Service. It only had the states. And they all agreed. They just didn’t they didn’t know how to approach it. And that’s what I had to do. But at this time, at this time we found out that the. Well I found out that we didn’t have standard methods. So if you’re going to inspect and have. You got to have some kind of standard methods and people acceptable to use them. Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 16   �ET: Now when are we talking about? When did this happen? RG: This was [19]67. It took me ‘67, ‘68 let’s see. No ‘67 was when I did it for Utah. ‘69 I did it for. I was asked to go to Colorado River Wildlife Council and then that took basically it took then through ’70; let’s see ‘68, ‘70. Yea it took me two years to get it all set up so that they would all take. And we finally passed it and it went into effect in [19]73. And from ‘73, I was on the committee for nearly 20 years. And we basically met every year and we would, we had forms they had to fill: had inspection forms that had to have standard methods in order. And people that were on our list as acceptable to do the inspection. And we had to put that all together. And then we would meet periodically to fine-tune the thing if we had problems. But it worked well. ET: Is the Logan River part of that drainage? RG: No ET: It doesn’t ago into the Colorado River does it? RG: No but the states all, what the states all did that was just [like what] that council. The states all passed it for their whole state. So that once we did that then it was the same for the Logan River and the Bear River and as it was. This is all the Great Basin here so. And the Colorado River is. Well a lot, a lot of, about half the states in the Colorado River drainage. And it’s the same way with the upper Colorado States: Idaho, Colorado and Utah kind of sit at the top of the drainage. But it was difficult because we did. And then also all this time I was also working with the American Fisheries Society. And I set up Jim Warren. We started to work on the disciplines in sections. We were trying to create a fish health section. American Fisheries Society was geographic, you know. You had a western division, a central and so on. And the states each would have a section, chapter in those divisions. But there was nothing for the disciplines. And the disciplines were too dilute. And so Jim and I worked/did the changes in the constitution of the American National, American Fisheries Society that set up the formation of discipline sections. And then when that passed, we became the first discipline section to form under that. And so we had the fish health section of the American Fisheries Society. And then fly fish culture and pollution and so forth. All these started to form. And then part of our mission was to police our ranks and to come up with standard methods. And, so we had technical procedures committees and all that stuff, you know, and certification board. And they had an unassembled exam kind of thing. What their criteria, their education and their experience. And they had to meet criteria in order to be considered a certified inspector. And this was all part of the. So, but I actually had done this for the most part before we ever got to, before they ever got to that; Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 17   �because I’d done it through the council. And when it passed the council, Colorado River Wildlife Council, it really was quite a stir because that’s the first regulations in the country. And the Great Lakes Commission filed suit. They called and they wanted some information. This was all of the states on the Great Lakes and Canada. And everybody that was on the great lakes. And so they used the Great Lakes Commission and did something very similar with little odd and end differences depending on geography and so forth. But it was the same thing; each state [province] in Canada ratifying a policy. And then the eastern seaboard states followed suit and then finally the Columbia [River]: the Columbia drainage. And so within about four years we had the biggest. We had basically the trout and salmon of North America covered. ET: Wow RG: All starting from this. For all purposes I started what they call the drainage concept of fish disease control. And so drainages mean a lot to me you know. When I was taking a test after my accident, in the LDS hospital they were giving me these little tests to find out if I was with it or not; or how I was doing. And they wanted me to name the capitals of the states. And I just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom all the way down. And she says, “How do you do that?” Lisa said too. She thought there’s got to be a mistake there. And I said, “No.” I said, "I know where the drainages are. That was so much a part of who was doing what, where and when that I never even had to think about it.” I said, boom, boom, boom. I knew what rivers they were on there, what the drainages were and where the capitals were. ET: So basically it sounds like once you got the Colorado River Wildlife Council to read your proposal RG: Yea ET: They got right on board with it. RG: Yea ET: So you didn’t have to fight that battle that much once they read it. RG: No. I set up a. You say you’ve got this centered more around the tape. I’ve got a copy of [the] resolution, very first; a resolution for their consideration. And why we should be looking at this, you know. And they bought that. They approved that one, that finding in ‘72. ET: Because there weren’t any political enemies of this policy? RG: No. There was more fear. They really were. That was serious business if they had to close hatcheries, because it meant destroying the fish. You might have to Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 18   �destroy 100,000 pounds of fish. And so, Nevada was hard. And Nevada said you can’t close. Willow Beach had IPN virus: that big national hatchery down there by Lake Mohave. I remember well we had a big knock-down drag out over that too. And I said, “If we close Willow Beach we’re not going to have fish for a season, for a whole season, which hurts. You know licensing and that type of thing. And so I said to them “Well so handle it. Handle it.” But I told them, “No I think what I would like to do then, if that’s the case. Is that the only reason you’re not going for this.” And they said, “Yea, we simply can’t. We can’t handle destroying that many fish because we won’t have fish to satisfy our program.” And I said, “If most of these programs are like ours, they’ve got surplus fish. And so let’s talk to all of these seven states and they’ll, see if we can get enough surplus fish out of all of those states to cover your needs for the loss of Willow Beach.” And that’s what we did. So it’s all having a heavy impact on Utah too. And you know we destroyed for IPN we destroyed the Kamas Hatchery and destroyed the fish: disinfected. You have to disinfect it with chlorine. You know and start over. And we did it with Springville; we did it with Logan hatchery here and the one at Loa. But [we] didn’t have to do them all in the same year. ET: So did that result in wiping out IPN? RG: Yea, never got it back again. And I had also been pushing for fish quality so hard and measuring stress that I started selling the idea that it’s a game of inches. I call it incremental degradation. Colorado says, “We call that incremental aggravation.” And I said, “How about incremental defecation.” And we was teaching that if the fish, the hatchery is properly managed, properly loaded and the fish are properly handled, you’re not going to have these diseases. Even if you have them, it won’t be too serious. We just can’t afford to have them go with that disease out where the wild fish are going to get clobbered. Let’s see I retired in 2000. Yea it was 2000. Then we had, we used to feed a lot of antibiotics you know on a grand scale. And after I started that we did the bacterial diseases and so forth. We hadn’t since 1972. Since from ‘72 to 2000 we only used antibiotics twice in that whole, that whole period. Because it was a proper approach and disciplined approach to the raising of fish that made the difference. And then when they finally, the FDA started passing laws that said you couldn’t use these drugs: antibiotics. Or you couldn’t use the stuff even to just clean the gills up you know. And I said, “I don’t.” Boy they were afraid to drop some of that stuff. And I said, “I don’t think you’re going to have, just keep doing what you’re doing and you won’t have, you’re going to have a very minor problem.” And that’s what they did. . . . But it was, we just never let up on the game of that business you know; you can’t. And then when I went to work. When Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 19   �I retired, Colorado asked me to come and talk to them. They had a problem with their fisheries managers were not agreeing with, particularly whirling disease. And I wasn’t working for Utah anymore. Eddy Coachman, who was their Chief of Fisheries; I had never been on his Christmas card list. We were kind of enemies. Because I’d never agree to what Eddy was doing. Anyway he’s the one that asked me to come and talk to them, which made me suspicious; probably going to hang me or something. But they paid the way, so I agreed to go. And for three days I fielded questions from them. Eddy just says, “I’m gonna let you handle this.” He says, “I’m, I have nothing left to say to them.” So I fielded a lot of really tough questions. That’s when they said the incremental aggravation. Anyway I told them, “You guys, you’re losing track of what, of what you’re all about.” And I told them. And I still. And I gave this lecture to Utah a number of times too. But I said, “We have, our mandate is to be stewards of the natural resource. Agriculture mandate is to be stewards of commodity. Production of commodity, they’re not always happy playmates.” And I said, “What makes it tough for us in this business, for the state fisheries programs, is that when you. A lot of ours is pure recreation. The rainbow trout and stuff that we plant, that’s in a sense it’s a commodity; because we’re selling our licenses and so forth.” But I said, “The rest of the part, the wild cut throat and all of this stuff. All of the [?] the least chubs and the humpback suckers and stuff like that in the Colorado.” I said, “That’s stewardship. And they hadn’t thought about that.” And I said, “You can, you can. The further you get away from stewardship. Over here with the rainbow, we can. There are a lot of things we can do with the rainbow. We can put them back. But over here you can’t go out and kill out all the cut throat because some of them are endangered species, you know. And in fact you couldn’t even if you wanted to.” And they had not thought about that so. I had sold all that to Utah years ago. And you’ve got, you’ve got to be concerned. The rainbow we can do something anytime. It would be costly but we can do it. But over here you’ve got these wild cut throat and there’s nothing we can do. And so that’s it. You know. ET: So your approach with the wild fish is habitat RG: Habitat, yea. Habitat and making sure that if there are any fish. I also classified all the streams in the state. And I had help from the managers to do that. And they gave them how I wanted them ranked you know. So that would go in our computer database so if this says you’re gonna plant more rainbow trout in Gunnison Lake and that’s not supposed to be there, the computer will flag that. And, so we don’t run the risk of just inadvertently putting them where we shouldn’t. And that had all become part of the operation. And so I say it’s hard because what we did had an impact on the whole state and all of the fisheries. And when we started to decide, when we wanted to say when we discovered. We didn’t know. Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 20   �When I first got here our ideas of a cut throat trout were relatively primitive including mine. No mine, yea mine were pretty primitive too. It’s nice to be primitive every once in a while. But anyway a cut throat was a cut throat was a cut throat trout you know. We knew. We knew about the Colorado River Cut Throat and the Bonneville Cut Throat and Bear Lake Cut Throat and so forth. But we didn’t treat it that way. We were getting eggs out of the Yellowstone Lake. Finding a lot of Yellowstone cut throats and then we would take a few locally. But we weren’t managing that way. And then we discovered, we found a pure strain of Bonneville cut throats in Trout Creek or in Deep Creek mountains on the, like on the Nevada border. And then we were convinced they were pure, pure Bonneville cut throat. And this point we started analyzing all the DNA and all that other stuff so we could actually identify the Bear Lake cut throat is actually a Bonneville cut throat. And that all is because this was, this was Lake Bonneville. And over on the other side, it’s the Colorado River cut throat. The Colorado cut throat they call it. And, but, so we had done so much damage through bad management and so forth. And so the certification law added a whole new wrinkle. And so if I wanted to put, I wanted to reclaim cut throat water through like . . . And we got a lot of streams like that. Where the cut throat, the cut throat are. There were cut throat up in the, really high waters. And … but you couldn’t put anything up there. You want to start it again. Get cut throat up there. But it’s got to be the right cut throat going to the. And it’s got to be a Bonneville cut throat going into Bonneville cut throat water. And then we had management populations and also recreation populations. You had to . . . that was part of the management. You often didn’t even allow fishing. But you would use that as a source to get some of the other stuff started in another place. But you had to have that all certified, those populations. And it took a couple of years to certify a population. And we would do that here. We would certify the populations. And then they were free to take eggs or fish. Usually they would take eggs. And then move them to another drainage and let them hatch in another whatever other stream. And, so that all became part of a kind of a routine operation. And we’ve, we kept the Bonneville’s off just recently, off the rare endangered species. They were, they wanted to list them as endangered species which would have: we could kiss the management good bye then. Because then you can’t do anything. But, that all becomes part and parcel of that whole. And then the system that HCP: Health Condition Profile system. That’s probably the one that I, that I’m best known for is the Health Condition Profile. And we just call it HCP. But I used to call it autopsies. And then I found out that’s not what I was doing. Did you know that? ET: Necropsies. RG: Do you know why? ET: No Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 21   �RG: An autopsy is of your own species. ET: Oh RG: So fish don’t autopsy themselves. So a human can autopsy another human; that’s an autopsy. But it is necropsy. And I told them, “But fish don’t have necks. We’ll call it necropsy.” Well they don’t have knees either. But and then I started that and that’s. When I quit or retired I had around about a thousand of them done in the state and I kept track of both the hatchery ones and the wild ones. ET: So the HCP was done on a dead fish RG: Yea. You would. EG: Okay RG: Yea. What it is. In an infinite population, more or less, a big population I would have to have 20 fish. But I could, I could take from the 20 fish and say especially if they were the same year class. I could take and I can tell what’s wrong, the condition of the whole water with those 20 fish statistically. And I had, I had done the program. I’ve got a book out on it. And I wrote and designed a computer program for it. So you entered your data and it would calculate it and then type the report form. ET: Wow RG: And so I taught that. And just, just everyone, they’re still using it. I thought probably that it would disappear. But Lisa and I went through the lab in Seattle, that big fisheries center they got up there. I know a lot of those people. And they introduced me as we were going. The gal was doing some work with one of the. And they introduced me and she says. She’s calling it the Goede index. And I said, “You didn’t get that from me.” It supposed to be the Health Condition Profile. And that’s, apparently that’s what they’re starting to call it: the Goede index. And now whether it’s a big research project or what, it’s just one of their tools. Even if you look at one fish, if you catch it up at White Pine, you can open that fish and you can get some idea where he fits in this scheme. You know, whether it’s something you should be worried about. And so, but I have people tell me that I was the chief source of mortality in the states too. I sweep down there in the north and kill all the first born and things like that once a year. ET: So I want to know if you have been inducted into the Fish Culture Hall of Fame. RG: Nope, not yet. One thing you have to do there is get someone to ET: Nominate ya. Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 22   �RG: Nominate you. I was surprised when I got in the Sneszko Award because it’s kind of the same kind of thing but for pathologist. You know. BC: I met a guy in Flagstaff that nominated himself for a Pulitzer Prize. RG: Well someone’s got to do it. ET: We’re not going to have much time left on our card I think. Doesn’t this last about an hour and a half on the high. BC: I don’t if you’re on the high end or not. RG: Is there anything that you wanted me to concentrate on. ET: You’re doing great. BC: We might have to do another session sometime. RG: There’s just so much. BC: I was sort of curious about. Tell us a little bit about Bill Sigler. RG: Okay. Well you’ve got the Mossback book. [Mossbacks by Ron Goede and Lisa Duskin-Goede: Merrill-Cazier Library, Special Collections & Archives: 925 G551] ET: Well I was going to ask you. Has Lisa. Has Lisa done the Mossback’s work. Has she, did she interview all the guys. RG: She interviewed them, yea. And she helped; she didn’t finish that whole study. (That was one of those things that, what was her name? Kathy Pearcy (was it Pearcy) in Humanities or something—for someone else. [Lisa] was doing that when she was doing gerontology and all that stuff. She thought that would be a good Ph.D. program.) ET: Well just briefly maybe you ought to mention who the Mossback’s are since we brought it up. RG: Okay. But, you have, we gave you a copy of . . . BC: Yea, I have a copy of that. ET: Just mention who are the Mossbacks. RG: Okay. The Mossback’s were: it’s a little hard to define because it started informally, you know, when Bill Sigler retired in 1974. And he was bummed out Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 23   �about retiring he didn’t like that. And, so we had a kind of a get-together. A lot of his old students got together and had a little seminar: a little symposium. Anyway that didn’t start the Mossbacks, but it got them talking about it. Well these guys are all, they were. The mossbacks were originally were old Bill Sigler’s, older students. And Sigler came out of the, retired from the war, WWII. These guys were mostly GI’s and most of them out of WW II on the GI Bill; a lot of them combat veterans. And that was a little different, not your average college freshman, these guys. A lot of them had things they still won’t talk about. So anyway, we decided to get together. About three years in a row we got together and then we just decided that you had to be in this business for a while before you got to do this. And we call them mossbacks. Because you have to be there long enough until you’ve got moss on your back. And but they’re, they’re all over. They’re not just Utah though. They’re all, most of them, are from within reasonable [distances], like Fort Collins. McConnell was from Fort Collins. He got that second Ph.D. Bill McConnell he taught at Colorado State until he retired. Bob Behnke wrote the book; this new book on trout and salmon of the world: great book. And Jay Udy is in his 90s now. And he was in mapping before the war effort: cartography and that sort of thing. Stacy Gebhards, he was here and he’s got a number of good books out. He was a good biology and he was Chief of Fisheries for a while for Idaho. He’s written a book called Wild Thing: [backcountry tales and trails] it’s about his career. He took Arthur Godfrey. There were three: Arthur Godfrey, Walter Hickel and there was one other. He took them all on a float trip down the Salmon River. I was kidding him. You know, Hickel was the one that said you can’t let nature run wild. ET: Wasn’t he Interior Secretary? RG: Yea ET: Yea RG: He was Governor of Alaska too. ET: Alaska RG: Anyway. So anyway these guys, Fred Eiserman. Fred was just inducted into the Wyoming Hall of Fame, along with Jim Bridger. I’m going wow! You’re, that’s, isn’t he a little older than you. I said, “I don’t think I’ve met him. He is a mossback?” No I’m serious. It’s in the, I’ve got the magazine and they had a big ceremony. It’s a serious award. There were four people that were inducted. It’s the Wildlife Hall of Fame or something. It’s not a Fish and Game type of thing, but Wilderness Hall of Fame. And Fred got his degree here. Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 24   �ET: Fred? RG: Fred Eiserman and he worked for Wyoming. But Wylie is a good friend of mine and he’s the youngest one. And Stew Clark just died. Eight of them are gone now. So that’s one of the problems with this kind of a group. So we have every year when one of them drops out, we have a toast. And break the glass you know. The first year, well Sigler was still alive when Bud Phelps died. We threw the glass. We decided to throw, just throw them in. Let’s do just like they do in the movies and we’ll throw the glass in the fireplace. But I found out only about half of them could hit it. We had glass everywhere, boy. It took us about an hour to clean up all the glass. So we started putting a rock in a garbage can and we’d throw them in the garbage can then finally. But there is Al Regenthal: he is about 87 now. No he’s older than that. Anyway, most of them are up there. And, I basically, when I wrote the little prologue that I pointed out that we: one thing that occurred to us as we were doing all this. And of course I was a part of that from the beginning. But these guys were the vanguard of a very young profession. They were the first ones out there actually doing some science and not just empirical wisdom. And it was kind of interesting. They were born in the depression, tempered by war. And it was serious. Some of them had some pretty tough times. So and they went into school probably couldn’t have done that if it hadn’t have been for the GI Bill. Regenthal and Essbach and McConnell all came out here together from New Jersey. And Raganthall’s still with Utah, Arizona. Essbach went to Arizona, working for their fish and game. And McConnell was at Colorado State teaching. And McConnell just died. ET: So it sounds like your career kind of, and theirs spans the transition from folk wisdom to scientific-based. Scientifically-based RG: Yea. That’s probably a good one. I haven’t used that, that’s probably a good term. I always called it empirical wisdom. You know. Just because it, a lot of it was empirical it wasn’t scientific. But a lot of it was good stuff. And a lot of the early stuff before those guys was just terrible. And it was, if it was wet it was a quality fish. So but that’s when you carp and everything else you know. So, it’s pretty important I think. But their level, I think we were good for the, our effort was good for . . . . And I’ve been told that several times by people who’ve retired since. That he felt that, that our effort through the experiment station and so forth elevated the fisheries and brought it to a different plane. And it’s hard. They didn’t have good hatchery people. I was their technical advisory because I was coming up with all the new stuff. But they had Chief of Hatcheries too, but the guys didn’t know anything. And they were regional. And this was a big thing that I changed. They were, each region like the northern region in Ogden, would have somebody. Their Chief, their fisheries manager would be in charge of the hatchery. It was a line staff organization. And I told them. I said, “These guys don’t know anything about culture.” Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 25   �So I wrote a fairly involved definition of culture. And told, let’s see Bill Geer got to be Director at that particular time, Bill Geer was director. And I told him, “We would like to, I would like to see you centralize the hatchery; because they’ve got to be working for someone who actually understands hatcheries.” And so the rest of the organization is still strictly line staff. But the hatcheries were centralized. And then there was a Chief of Hatcheries in a Salt Lake office who came out of the culture scenario. And then I knew a world-class fish culturist, Joe Valentine, who was wanting out of the Fish and Wildlife Service. He already had 18 years with them. And so, I got them to hire him. He was willing to come. Joe started the work for them. And I liked Joe. And Joe and I got along really well. So that was a big help too. So we, we had a good staff. And I think Utah led the way on fish health management because nobody had that. That drainage concept really brought the thing to the range of possibility. We’d failed many times because there was just too many, you couldn’t draw something up for Utah that fit Florida, you know, because it’s just a whole different ballgame. In the southeast water, something they pump out of their basement. And here it’s the lynchpin of survival you know. So anyway it’s very important and I felt good about it and Sigler. I point that out in the Mossback book that one phrase he always used that I coined is: That it was a privilege to serve. And so I . . . . there’s just a few things that I get emotional about. And that’s where it was: a great bunch of people. And that’s not easy to maintain that level. I don’t know if they’re at that point anymore. ET: When you say it was a privilege to serve. That’s sort of an old-school approach to public service RG: Yea. ET: So you felt, you felt the weight. I’m asking I guess. You felt the weight of the public responsibility on your shoulders? RG: Yea, this was our mandate to steward the natural resource. And do a decent job of it. And a lot of the battles were just sheer ethics. You know. Yea, boy I had some tremendous . . . Boy I remember one big battle I had with them. I got up and left the meeting. And I still had to drive back to Logan. And I was furious. And I said “I’ve bent over backwards to do a lot for this outfit. But I[‘ll be] damned if I’m going to bend over forwards.” ET: And that was with whom? RG: With the fisheries staff. And then when, over whirling disease when the Leavitt’s were, when . . . that was, those were black days. ET: Yea, we haven’t even talked about whirling disease. Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 26   �BC: Yea, we haven’t talked about whirling disease. RG: Oh wow. Well those were. That was the end of a lot of things. We got bad hurt on that: a lot of people lost their jobs. ET: Do we need to schedule another session? RG: Yea I think if you’re. Because now you’re ready to really get into some of those Things . . . There are some things there that are kind of funny too. And I even have, I got along with the Leavitt’s and then I didn’t get along with them you know. Dane Leavitt, the Governor’s brother [Mike Leavitt]. I like Dane. He’s a lawyer in Cedar [City, Utah]. BC: Did they ever try to sell insurance for the whirling disease or? RG: The Levitt Group. Yea, no. Mark who . . . they were always covering up for Mark. He was the one that was screwing things up. Young Mark. And he’s one of those guys that would always answer the phones in an important meeting and just sit there and talk. And that just really hacks me off when people do that. And so I called him, and I called his brother Dane in Cedar. Said, you know, “I said I want Mark’s phone number, cell phone number.” And he was suspicious right away because he knew I didn’t like Mark. And I told him what he was doing. And of course that even irritated Dane. And he like that so much he set it up. He decided. He had somebody call. I told him what I wanted is that we got a meeting on Thursday and I want someone to call Mark at that meeting and ask for me. And so that’s what they did. Dane set it up and Mark picked that phone up and he says, “Hello.” And then he says, “Oh.” He says, “Oh.” He says, “Here it’s for you.” Oh yea. I don’t know whether Mark ever found out that that was Dane. ET: Well let’s, why don’t we stop here. It looks like we need to talk about whirling disease, some of your ethical battles. You want to talk more about Bill Sigler? BC: I’d be curious to talk just about Logan and stuff and that. RG: Yea. ET: So we need to have another session with you I think. We don’t want to wear you out all in one. RG: Yea. ET: Are you doing okay? RG: Oh yea. It’s just that. When Eisner read that little bio sketch I did for the Mossback book he said. He said he could see. He said I could see reading that Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 27   �BC: that you had a calling. And it’s actually true. That idea of quality really was stuck in doing something. And I’ve always been very public service oriented, service oriented. I’m not interested in the other stuff. I don’t really care about the material stuff that goes along with it, because it usually doesn’t. But anyway it was so. It is hard to talk about that without setting that foundation. Yea. That’s good. ET: That was great. This has been a great session. BC: I’m afraid to turn this thing off that I’ll erase it or something. RG: You know when we joined, when we became the. Oh! When we became the Natural Resource, Department of Natural Resources and the Division of Wildlife Resources under the department, that was not a happy day either. You know. That was back in the ‘70s. Bud Phelps was Director then, and Phelps was a good friend. And the people, the guys, all the parks and forests, everyone became part of the . . . and there were, they shared a coffee room. It was the old DWR coffee room. But they said, Bud said, they were sniping at each other, always just under their breath. And Bud Phelps came out with a directive then that said, “They’ll be no sniping in the coffee rooms.” It was a directive. And so I went out in the hall with him and I said. “You know he used to have a wall committee. You couldn’t put anything on the wall unless it passed the wall committee.” BC: We had one of those in Flagstaff. RG: Oh hey. BC: The Classics committee is what they called it out there. RG: Well I told Bud. “Well you know now you’re gonna have to, now your gonna have to form a snide comment committee.” And he says, “What do you mean?” And I said, “Well someone’s gonna have to decide in whether a snide comment has in fact been made.” And he sat there and stared at me. And I said, See right now you’re wondering if I’ve made a snide comment. ET: That’s one of the things I like about you Ron, your sense of humor. RG: That’s the only thing that keeps you up and running. ET: Well, do you have a calendar available? Do you want to try and set up another appointment now or later? BC: I don’t have a calendar with me but I’m usually pretty open. ET: Let me grab mine. Land  Use  Management  Oral  History  Project:  Ron Goede, 16 October 2008 28   � Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Where else is this found? Give the URL for the item, if it is in another respository (like CONTENTdm) <a href="http://digital.lib.usu.edu/cdm/ref/collection/LoganCanyon/id/270">http://digital.lib.usu.edu/cdm/ref/collection/LoganCanyon/id/270</a> Digital Publisher List the name of the entity that digitized and published this item online. Hosted by: Utah State University, Merrill-Cazier Library Conversion Specs Recording equipment: Marantz PMD660 Digital Recorder Transcription equipment: Power Player Transcription Software: Executive Communication Systems Date Digital Record the date the item was digitized. 2012-11-12 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Ronald William Goede interviews, 16 & 28 October 2008, and transcriptions Description An account of the resource In Ron Goede's first interview he talks about growing up in Nebraska, earning a bachelor's degree from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, joining the Air National Guard in Nebraska, attending Utah State University to earn a Master's Degree in fisheries, and his work in various fisheries throughout the United States, especially in Utah at Utah State University. In his second interview Mr. Goede talks about his work as a fish pathologist in Utah, whirling disease in fish, water stewardship, politics: his fight to get good science into the Utah fisheries and water legislation. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Goede, Ronald William, 1934- Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Thatcher, Elaine Cole, Bradford R. Subject The topic of the resource Goede, Ronald William, 1934---Interviews Goede, Ronald William, 1934---Family Goede, Ronald William, 1934---Career in Fisheries Goede, Ronald William, 1934---Childhood and youth Fisheries sciences--Research--Utah--Logan River Fisheries sciences--Research--Missouri Goede, Ronald William, 1934---Friends and associates Willoughby, Harvey Morris, George Snieszko, Dennis Stanislas United States--Air National Guard Doctoral students--Utah--Logan Fishes--Diseases--Research--Utah Fishes--Quality--Research--Utah--Logan Fishes--Quality Fish hatcheries--Utah--Logan Fishery policy--Utah Colorado River Wildlife Council Fishery policy--United States American Fisheries Society. Fish Health Section Sigler, William F. Mossbacks (Club) Whirling disease--United States Whirling disease--Research--Utah Whirling disease--Research--West Virginia Utah. Division of Wildlife Resources Utah--Politics and government Fishery management--Utah Trout Unlimited Fishery research stations--Utah Fisheries--Utah--Monitoring Fishery scientists--Professional ethics Utah State Agricultural College. Wildlife Dept. Mentoring in education--Utah--Logan Student contests--Utah--Logan--Anecdotes Women in fisheries--Utah--Logan--History Medium The material or physical carrier of the resource. Oral history Interviews Spatial Coverage Spatial characteristics of the resource. Nebraska Logan (Utah) Alaska Logan Canyon (Utah) Colorado River Lostine River (Idaho) Utah Colorado Kamas (Utah) Madison River (Wyo. and Mont.) Strawberry Reservoir (Utah) Scofield Reservoir (Utah) Utah United States Logan (Utah) Cache County (Utah) Utah United States Temporal Coverage Temporal characteristics of the resource. 1950-1959 1960-1969 1970-1979 1980-1989 1990-1999 2000-2009 20th century 21st century Language A language of the resource eng Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Utah State University, Merrill-Cazier Library, Special Collections & Archives, Logan Canyon Land Use Management Oral History Collection, FOLK COLL 42 Box 2 Fd. 10 & Box 3 Fd. 1 Is Referenced By A related resource that references, cites, or otherwise points to the described resource. Inventory for the Logan Canyon Land Use Management Oral History Collection can be found at: <a href="http://library.usu.edu/folklo/folkarchive/FolkColl42.php">http://library.usu.edu/folklo/folkarchive/FolkColl42.php</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Reproduction for publication, exhibition, web display or commercial use is only permissible with the consent of the USU Fife Folklore Archives Curator, phone (435) 797-3493 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. Logan Canyon Land Use Management Oral History Collection Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context FolkColl42bx2RonGoede Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 16 October 2008 28 October 2008 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2008-10-16 2008-10-28 Is Version Of A related resource of which the described resource is a version, edition, or adaptation. Changes in version imply substantive changes in content rather than differences in format. Logan Canyon Reflections https://highway89.org/files/original/98299d89fc2600392968a9494cc4d429.mp3 c48ca7c3ba064634261bd8f333e851f0 https://highway89.org/files/original/421e7a3b1ce25ce28b62cb6bc72cccae.pdf 64dc3f1b02596da2fa51daccc2f9d384 PDF Text Text Stokes Nature Center History & Lore of Logan Canyon Podcast Series Forest Army When President Franklin D. Roosevelt entered the White House, he faced an economic crisis of extreme proportions, the Great Depression. The Civilian Conservation Corps, created in 1933, was one of Roosevelt's New Deal programs. It had two major goals: to help provide relief from unemployment and to protect natural resources nationwide. The Civilian Conservation Corps, or CCC, provided training and work for 2.5 million young men and succeeded in helping to protect, provide access to and direct attention towards America's wild places. CCC workers were paid a wage of $30 per month, $25 of which went to support their families back home. When Cache County was allotted 113 spots in the program, 275 men applied. Beginning in 1933, uniformed CCC workers labored throughout Logan Canyon. That first summer, they built a camp at Tony Grove, called Camp F-1. The camp included a mess hall, recreation hall, barracks, blacksmith shop, hospital, and several other buildings. CCC enrollees in Logan Canyon worked on projects such as planting trees, building dams and bridges, fixing roads, cleaning and repairing campgrounds, stocking fish, repairing soil erosion, and fighting forest fires. In their free time, they made belts out of snake skins, played baseball, and pranked newcomers by sending them on nighttime hunts for the “snipe,” a mythical creature which was rumored to inhabit the canyon. According to an article printed in the Herald Journal in September 1933, "One of the most completely successful of all the items on the New Deal program seems to be the forestry work of the Civilian Conservation Corps. . . So well is the project working out that a person is inclined to wonder if it might not be a good thing to make this forest army a permanent affair. . . All of this of course would be pretty expensive but it might be money well spent. . . certainly the question deserves serious consideration. This forest army is too good an outfit to be discarded off-hand." The Guinavah-Malibu campground amphitheater, completed in 1936, is part of the legacy of the CCC. The amphitheater boasts a stage of limestone surrounded by rows of benches, enough seating for up to 1,000 people. Today, the amphitheater is used for lectures, concerts, religious services, and local nature and history programs, such as those sponsored by Stokes Nature Center each summer. It also remains a standing tribute to the CCC, a group that left a lasting legacy both through their conservation work, and in the hearts and minds of Americans. Sources: Portraits in Time: Logan Canyon, a Historical Guide. Published by Bridgerland Travel Region and the United States Forest Service Logan Ranger District. Utah.gov History to Go website: http://historytogo.utah.gov/utah_chapters/from_war_to_war/the civilianconservationcorps.html. Sweeney, Michael S. Last Unspoiled Place: Utah's Logan Canyon. National Geographic Society, 2008. Utah State History website: http://history.utah.gov/research_and_collections/photos/ccc.html. � Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Where else is this found? Give the URL for the item, if it is in another respository (like CONTENTdm) <a href="http://digital.lib.usu.edu/cdm/ref/collection/LoganCanyon/id/273">http://digital.lib.usu.edu/cdm/ref/collection/LoganCanyon/id/273</a> Date Digital Record the date the item was digitized. 2012-05-24 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Forest army Description An account of the resource The Civilian Conservation Corps of the 1930s left a lasting legacy, both nationally and locally, including a well-known landmark in Logan Canyon. Voiced by Elaine Thatcher. Part of the Stokes Nature Center's podcast series History & Lore of Logan Canyon where each podcast is linked to a specific site in Logan Canyon. Includes transcription. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Stokes Nature Center Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Thatcher, Elaine Subject The topic of the resource Civilian Conservation Corps (U.S.)--Utah--Logan Canyon--History Conservation of natural resources--Utah--Logan Canyon--History Forest conservation--Utah--Logan Canyon--History New Deal, 1933-1939--Utah--History Medium The material or physical carrier of the resource. podcasts Spatial Coverage Spatial characteristics of the resource. Logan Canyon (Utah) Cache County (Utah) Utah United States Temporal Coverage Temporal characteristics of the resource. 1930-1939 20th century Language A language of the resource eng Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Reproduction for publication, exhibition, web display or commercial use is only permissible with the consent of Stokes Nature Center, (435) 755-3239. Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Podcast7ForestArmy Date Created Date of creation of the resource. Feb. 7, 2011 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2011-02-07 Is Version Of A related resource of which the described resource is a version, edition, or adaptation. Changes in version imply substantive changes in content rather than differences in format. Logan Canyon Reflections https://highway89.org/files/original/494e02ae73d2cbde70395c8b562b0013.mp3 a31635e8399cc72eaa54b984f1c6f3e5 https://highway89.org/files/original/55851099196cd0f64e536b60346ce26a.pdf 7f3fe84c0092fdb6113e93665357c2bf PDF Text Text Stokes Nature Center History & Lore of Logan Canyon Podcast Series The Naming of Logan Canyon Fur trappers came to Cache Valley in the 1800s in search of beaver. As they explored the valley, they left many place names in their wake. For example, the name Cache Valley comes from the French word “cache” meaning “to hide.” Not wanting to lug their furs around with them, trappers would “cache” or hide their furs in a hole dug into a riverbank to keep them safe until they could take them to market. The name for Logan Canyon and its river also came from these early explorers. North West Fur Company trappers were the first Euro-Americans to explore Logan Canyon. They came to Cache Valley in 1818, led by Michel Bourdon. When Bourdon was killed by Indians west of Yellowstone, his followers named Logan Canyon's river after him in his honor. Later, trappers renamed the Bourdon River for another dead trapper, Ephraim Logan. Although Logan's name is well-known, not much is known about his past. The first record mentioning Logan shows him in St. Louis in 1823 joining a fur expedition led by William H. Ashley. He signed onto the expedition at a fixed salary of $200 per year, and traveled to the Rocky Mountains to trap beaver. During the summer and fall of 1824, he trapped from the Bighorn to Bear River, and spent the winter of 1824-25 in Cache Valley. In 1826, he traded his furs at the rendezvous in Cache Valley, and the next summer, he attended the rendezvous at Bear Lake. Later that year, Logan along with 15-20 other trappers set off for the Snake River Valley. Along the way, Logan and three others diverged from the rest of the group to explore some minor rivers. They had planned to meet up with their group in a few days, but mysteriously disappeared. Nothing was ever heard from them again. Accounts differ on what exactly happened to these men, but many agree that they were probably killed by Indians. In 1828, Logan's friends named the Logan River in his honor. When the Mormon pioneers arrived in the 1850s, they learned the name of the river, but not where the name came from. When it came time to name their city, John P. Wright suggested the name Logan. There are differing accounts about whether this name came from the river on whose banks the city was built or a friendly Indian chief named Logan Fontenelle, who made great efforts to keep peace between his people and the Mormon settlers. Whichever the case, the name Logan was adopted, and now lives on as a city, river, and canyon. Sources: Sweeney, Michael S. Last Unspoiled Place: Utah's Logan Canyon. National Geographic Society, 2008. Somers, Ray. The History of Logan. Somers Historical Press, 1993. Somers, Ray, Julie Van Horn, Amy Reimann, and Clayton S. Russell. History of Cache Valley. Somers Historic Press, 2004. Simmonds, A. J. “Names Change but the Places Stay the Same.” In God’s Lap: Cache Valley history as told in the newspaper columns of A. J. Simmonds, A Herald Journal Book. Herald Journal, 2004. Record, Patricia L. “The Trapper, the Indian, and the Naming of Logan.” Utah Historical Quarterly. 75.4 (Fall 2007). “The Legacy of Ephraim Logan” presented to the Logan City Council by Steve Murdock, President, �Cache Historical Society, Dec. 1997. Hafen, Leroy R., ed. Trappers of the Far West. University of Nebraska Press, 1983: 295, 341. Christensen, Vera A. “What's Behind Names of Cache Valley Towns?” The Herald Journal 15 Nov. 1982. � Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Where else is this found? Give the URL for the item, if it is in another respository (like CONTENTdm) <a href="http://digital.lib.usu.edu/cdm/ref/collection/LoganCanyon/id/276">http://digital.lib.usu.edu/cdm/ref/collection/LoganCanyon/id/276</a> Date Digital Record the date the item was digitized. 2012-05-24 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Naming of Logan Canyon Description An account of the resource This is the story of Ephraim Logan, a fur trapper thought to be the person after whom the Logan River was named. Voiced by Elaine Thatcher. Part of the Stokes Nature Center's podcast series History & Lore of Logan Canyon where each podcast is linked to a specific site in Logan Canyon. Includes transcription. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Stokes Nature Center Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Thatcher, Elaine Subject The topic of the resource Logan Canyon (Utah)--Discovery and exploration Cache Valley (Utah and Idaho)--Discovery and exploration Logan Canyon (Utah)--Name Logan, Ephraim Logan (Utah)--Name Fur traders--West (U.S.)--History Fur trade--West (U.S.)--History Fur trade--Utah--History Medium The material or physical carrier of the resource. podcasts Spatial Coverage Spatial characteristics of the resource. Logan Canyon (Utah) Logan (Utah) Bear Lake Valley (Utah and Idaho) Temporal Coverage Temporal characteristics of the resource. 2010-2019 21st century Language A language of the resource eng Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Reproduction for publication, exhibition, web display or commercial use is only permissible with the consent of Stokes Nature Center, (435) 755-3239. Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Podcast12NamingOfLoganCanyon Date Created Date of creation of the resource. March 15, 2011 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2011-03-05 Is Version Of A related resource of which the described resource is a version, edition, or adaptation. Changes in version imply substantive changes in content rather than differences in format. Logan Canyon Reflections https://highway89.org/files/original/c436bb48af02c7fb721b2cec31781074.mp3 f5eb6d5e17b5ee875c684e92354cb23e https://highway89.org/files/original/191fb7bd48b5d4bad3992247e3fa47ba.pdf 192b70b4059006892c6798e8f56d743c PDF Text Text Stokes Nature Center History & Lore of Logan Canyon Podcast Series Plane Crash of 1953 At this location, you will see a 6 ½-foot-tall stone memorial with 40 names on it. On January 6, 1953, a military transport plane crashed at this site while transporting American Korean War soldiers from Seattle, Washington, to Fort Jackson, South Carolina. The plane was overfilled with soldiers eager to return home after having been away from their families for so long. Due to the way the military organized its transports, all the passengers had last names that started with H, J, and K. According to the flight log, the plane ended up carrying about 400 pounds more than it was designed for. Everything was fine when the pilot radioed in at Malad City, Idaho. But the plane was not heard from again. Air patrol and civilians began a search through the Bear River Mountains and found the remains of the plane in Pat Hollow. It had completely disintegrated on impact. There were no survivors, and little of the wreckage was even recognizable. When the remains were analyzed, the cause of the crash was determined to be ice that had formed on the wings, interfering with the plane's lift. The fact that the plane was overloaded added to the problem. It also appeared that the plane had entered the mountains from the southeast heading northwest, indicating they might have been trying to return to Malad for an emergency landing. Since the crash occurred in the middle of winter in an area with deep snow and low temperatures, removing all of the bodies proved extremely difficult. A base camp was set up and the site was guarded until spring when the Army removed the last of the human remains. In 1967, Gordon B. Hinckley of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints dedicated this memorial to the victims of the crash. No one was more affected by this tragedy than the relatives of the victims. In the following years, some traveled a great distance from their homes in southern states to visit this memorial site. Even today, visitors sometimes find pieces of wreckage, including items that once belonged to the passengers of the plane. Many decide to leave these tokens on top of the memorial. Sources: Sweeney, Michael S. Last Unspoiled Place: Utah's Logan Canyon. National Geographic Society, 2008. � Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Where else is this found? Give the URL for the item, if it is in another respository (like CONTENTdm) <a href="http://digital.lib.usu.edu/cdm/ref/collection/LoganCanyon/id/279">http://digital.lib.usu.edu/cdm/ref/collection/LoganCanyon/id/279</a> Date Digital Record the date the item was digitized. 2012-05-24 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Plane crash of 1953 Description An account of the resource In 1953, a military transport plane carrying American soldiers home from the Korean War crashed in Pat Hollow. Voiced by Elaine Thatcher. Part of the Stokes Nature Center's podcast series History & Lore of Logan Canyon where each podcast is linked to a specific site in Logan Canyon. Includes transcription. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Stokes Nature Center Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Thatcher, Elaine Subject The topic of the resource Aircraft accidents--Idaho--Pat Hollow (Franklin County)--History--20th century Aircraft accidents--Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest--History--20th century Aircraft accident victims--Monuments--Idaho--Pat Hollow (Franklin County) Soldiers--Idaho--Pat Hollow (Franklin County)--Death Airplanes, Military--Accidents--Idaho--Pat Hollow (Franklin County)--History--20th century Medium The material or physical carrier of the resource. podcasts Spatial Coverage Spatial characteristics of the resource. Pat Hollow (Idaho) Franklin County (Idaho) Idaho United States Temporal Coverage Temporal characteristics of the resource. 2010-2019 21st century Language A language of the resource eng Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Reproduction for publication, exhibition, web display or commercial use is only permissible with the consent of Stokes Nature Center, (435) 755-3239. Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Podcast14PlanCrashof1953 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. March 28, 2011 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2011-03-28 Is Version Of A related resource of which the described resource is a version, edition, or adaptation. Changes in version imply substantive changes in content rather than differences in format. Logan Canyon Reflections https://highway89.org/files/original/2f8fd92773c91651420defa0ad1d7c1c.mp3 1f3ea623eaca281fe390a22a4b9d15e0 https://highway89.org/files/original/aabf5ea2176340c41135a145c0911e40.pdf 047f7e90558dfa2e0aed42653957de54 PDF Text Text Stokes Nature Center History & Lore of Logan Canyon Podcast Series Too Many Sheep After 1880, sheep overtook cows as the primary livestock of Cache Valley. Herders took their flocks to the West Desert for winter grazing, to irrigated farms in the valley for spring lambing, and to the mountains for summer grazing. Between 1880 and 1900, the sheep population of Cache Valley rose dramatically to 300,000, and Logan Canyon became congested with sheep. As the herds moved, they kicked up so much dust that residents of the valley several miles to the west could see huge clouds of it rising from the mountains. During the summer months, pastures were effectively stripped of vegetation. After consuming all the plants, sheep would pack the bare soil down with their hooves as they moved. Soil compaction and the area’s low level of precipitation guaranteed that nothing could grow back. Plant cover allows snowmelt to sink into the soil and replenish the groundwater supply. It also lets the spring runoff trickle down gradually throughout the summer. Without plant cover, snowmelt plunged straight down the mountain all at once leaving the rivers and valleys below dry by late summer. The plunging waters also took the unanchored soil downstream. In spring, muddy water filled with animal waste and dead sheep flowed out of the canyon, polluting the valley's irrigation and drinking water. Mayor Moroni Price of Smithfield was disgusted by the dead sheep and other animals he had seen in the river. He said at a meeting of concerned citizens that he had just about reached a decision to “drink whiskey from now on.” This was a shocking statement coming from a Mormon community leader, for whom drinking was close to taboo. The situation prompted citizens to approach the federal government about creating a Forest Reserve to protect the watershed. After the Forest Reserve was created, grazing was limited by permits, and the canyon’s environmental health was greatly improved. Sources: Sweeney, Michael S. Last Unspoiled Place: Utah's Logan Canyon. National Geographic Society, 2008. Johnson, Michael W. “Whiskey or Water: A Brief History of the Cache National Forest.” Utah Historical Quarterly. 73.4 (Fall 2005). U.S. Forest Service website: http://www.fs.fed.us/aboutus. � Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Where else is this found? Give the URL for the item, if it is in another respository (like CONTENTdm) <a href="http://digital.lib.usu.edu/cdm/ref/collection/LoganCanyon/id/288">http://digital.lib.usu.edu/cdm/ref/collection/LoganCanyon/id/288</a> Date Digital Record the date the item was digitized. 2012-06-14 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Too Many Sheep Description An account of the resource Sheep grazing during the late 1800s led to the deterioration of Logan Canyon. Voiced by Elaine Thatcher. Part of the Stokes Nature Center's podcast series History and Lore of Logan Canyon where each podcast is linked to a specific site in Logan Canyon. Includes transcription. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Stokes Nature Center Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Thatcher, Elaine Subject The topic of the resource Grazing--Environmental aspects--Utah--Logan Canyon Sheep--Cache Valley (Utah and Idaho)--History--19th century Range management--Utah--Logan Canyon--History Rangelands--Utah--Logan Canyon Medium The material or physical carrier of the resource. podcasts Spatial Coverage Spatial characteristics of the resource. Logan Canyon (Utah) Cache Valley (Utah and Idaho) Temporal Coverage Temporal characteristics of the resource. 1880-1889 19th century 1900-1909 20th century Language A language of the resource eng Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Reproduction for publication, exhibition, web display or commercial use is only permissible with the consent of Stokes Nature Center, (435) 755-3239. Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Podcast1TooManySheep Date Created Date of creation of the resource. Dec. 14, 2010 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2010-12-14 Is Version Of A related resource of which the described resource is a version, edition, or adaptation. Changes in version imply substantive changes in content rather than differences in format. Logan Canyon Reflections https://highway89.org/files/original/177b4fd585db1b91a0bbdc0182ba4973.mp3 cd7869ef301d8f57e8664fc445a473d5 https://highway89.org/files/original/68474adccaeddcbccb02754442e402e7.pdf e7c36f0fdcb4409759ee4f3ae02eda4e PDF Text Text Stokes Nature Center History & Lore of Logan Canyon Podcast Series Road to Recreation When the Mormon pioneers were first settling in Cache Valley, recreation was very limited. Not only did the pioneers have little time to devote to recreation, they had fewer options. The canyon road at this time was not in the best shape, and recreating far up the canyon was difficult. Logan Canyon was used primarily for the resources it provided. Most of the people who ventured into the canyon were loggers, herders, hunters, or explorers. On July 4, 1873, an LDS stake led by Apostle Brigham Young Jr. spent a day of rest and recreation in the canyon. This may have been the first purely recreational use of the canyon by the pioneers. The first published account of recreation in Logan Canyon showed up in the Ogden Standard on August 17, 1888. The article stated: “Rev. Samuel Unsworth, rector of the Church of the Good Shepherd in this city, returned yesterday, in company with his brother, from a pleasure trip to Logan Canyon. Their appearance proves that the few days resticating have been of great physical benefit to them.” After this, the canyon began to receive increasing mention in the local press as a place for recreation. It is likely at this time a group of Logan’s leading citizens began to make frequent trips to a spot about six miles up Tony Grove Creek. The flowery meadow sprinkled with trees made an idyllic setting for fishing and camping. To those who used the canyon for work only, the sight of people camping just for fun invoked envy. They began referring the area condescendingly as “Tony Grove.” The word “tony” was slang for cultured or high-brow. This name was repeated so often, that it stuck…and grew to include the creek and eventually, the lake that feeds the creek. Today, Tony Grove is one of the most popular hiking and camping locations in Logan Canyon. Sources: Simmonds, A. J. “A Mountain Grove for the 'Tony Set.'” In God’s Lap: Cache Valley history as told in the newspaper columns of A. J. Simmonds, A Herald Journal Book. Herald Journal, 2004. Sweeney, Michael S. Last Unspoiled Place: Utah's Logan Canyon. National Geographic Society, 2008. � Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Where else is this found? Give the URL for the item, if it is in another respository (like CONTENTdm) <a href="http://digital.lib.usu.edu/cdm/ref/collection/LoganCanyon/id/300">http://digital.lib.usu.edu/cdm/ref/collection/LoganCanyon/id/300</a> Digital Publisher List the name of the entity that digitized and published this item online. Digitized by: Utah State University, Merrill-Cazier Library Date Digital Record the date the item was digitized. 2012-05-24 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Road to recreation Description An account of the resource In the 1870s, Logan Canyon began to be used for recreation, a novel idea that led to the naming of one of the most well-known areas in the canyon, Tony Grove. Voiced by Elaine Thatcher. Part of the Stokes Nature Center's podcast series History & Lore of Logan Canyon where each podcast is linked to a specific site in Logan Canyon. Includes transcription. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Stokes Nature Center Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Thatcher, Elaine Subject The topic of the resource Recreation--Utah--Logan Canyon--History Recreation--Utah--Tony Grove--History Land use--Utah--Logan Canyon--History Tony Grove (Utah)--Name Tony Grove Lake (Utah)--Name Tony Grove Creek (Utah)--Name Medium The material or physical carrier of the resource. podcasts Spatial Coverage Spatial characteristics of the resource. Logan Canyon (Utah) Tony Grove (Utah) Cache County (Utah) Utah United States Temporal Coverage Temporal characteristics of the resource. 2010-2019 21st century Language A language of the resource eng Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Reproduction for publication, exhibition, web display or commercial use is only permissible with the consent of Stokes Nature Center, (435) 755-3239. Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Podcast11RoadToRecreation Date Created Date of creation of the resource. March 8, 2011 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2011-03-08 Is Version Of A related resource of which the described resource is a version, edition, or adaptation. Changes in version imply substantive changes in content rather than differences in format. Logan Canyon Reflections https://highway89.org/files/original/c2bc879d31d909054da0909fac666fd0.mp3 f11ca2547bc83c84e9f284d11fe38961 https://highway89.org/files/original/c04b495f403d87adfcda6bcbb5de4ca5.pdf b1d280c0cf16d53ff3274533349f23a2 PDF Text Text Stokes Nature Center History & Lore of Logan Canyon Podcast Series Temple Sawmill In Spring 1877, Brigham Young, the president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, decided to build a temple in Cache Valley. The locals looked to the canyons to the east for the resources they needed to complete this huge task. By summer of the same year, Thomas X. Smith and C. O. Card located an appropriate site in Logan Canyon, a side-canyon then called Maughan's Fork. This was a very competitive time for lumber. Nearby, the Utah & Northern Railroad was being constructed, and Coe and Carter, a company that supplied railroad ties, had scouts looking to the mountains of northern Utah to supply the wood they would need. Upon receiving news of this, the locals took immediate action to secure the stands of trees they had chosen for the temple. Card sent out a team to begin construction of the new sawmill, and not a moment too soon. Historian Marion Everton wrote, “When the Coe and Carter outfit arrived some forty-eight hours later they found the first logs laid out for a big sawmill and men busily engaged in constructing shelters, but not too busy to tell visitors that they intended to continue the occupation of Maughan's Fork with the exclusion of any and all other outfits.” Work progressed quickly, and on November 4, 1877, the mill sawed its first board. In 1878, the side-canyon where the sawmill was located began to be called by an appropriate name: Temple Fork. The sawmill proved to be overly capable, producing more wood than was needed for the new temple. Contracts were made with the Utah & Northern to cut the extra wood into railroad ties, and, ironically, the project that once rivaled the temple became a project that helped fund its construction. The sawmill operated for 9 years, producing more than 2.5 million board-feet of lumber, 21,000 railroad ties, and many other wood products. It was closed down in 1884 and put up for sale, but there were no buyers. In 1886, the sawmill met its end when it mysteriously burned down. Two sets of men's footprints in the snow led to and from the site, which led people to suspect arson. However, no clues indicating who set the fire, or why, were ever found. Sources: Simmonds, A. J. In God’s Lap: Cache Valley history as told in the newspaper columns of A. J. Simmonds, A Herald Journal Book. Herald Journal, 2004. Sweeney, Michael S. Last Unspoiled Place: Utah's Logan Canyon. National Geographic Society, 2008. � Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Where else is this found? Give the URL for the item, if it is in another respository (like CONTENTdm) <a href="http://digital.lib.usu.edu/cdm/ref/collection/LoganCanyon/id/312">http://digital.lib.usu.edu/cdm/ref/collection/LoganCanyon/id/312</a> Date Digital Record the date the item was digitized. 2012-05-24 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Temple Sawmill Description An account of the resource The sawmill that provided lumber for Cache Valley's LDS temple survived fierce competition, had a productive life, and then met its mysterious end. Voiced by Elaine Thatcher. Part of the Stokes Nature Center's podcast series History & Lore of Logan Canyon where each podcast is linked to a specific site in Logan Canyon. Includes transcription. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Stokes Nature Center Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Thatcher, Elaine Subject The topic of the resource Temple Fork Sawmill (Logan Canyon, Utah)--History Temple Fork (Logan Canyon, Utah)--History--19th century Sawmills--Utah--Logan Canyon--History--19th century Medium The material or physical carrier of the resource. podcasts Spatial Coverage Spatial characteristics of the resource. Temple Fork (Utah) Logan Canyon (Utah) Cache County (Utah) Utah United States Temporal Coverage Temporal characteristics of the resource. 1870-1879 1880-1889 19th century Language A language of the resource eng Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Reproduction for publication, exhibition, web display or commercial use is only permissible with the consent of Stokes Nature Center, (435) 755-3239. Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Podcast9TempleSawmill Date Created Date of creation of the resource. Feb. 22, 2011 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2011-02-22 Is Version Of A related resource of which the described resource is a version, edition, or adaptation. Changes in version imply substantive changes in content rather than differences in format. Logan Canyon Reflections