Who was Bob Marshall?
Over the past century,
there have been few American conservationists whose impact and legacy can match
that of Robert Marshall. Born in 1901, Bob was exposed to the wilderness from
an early age, as his family would spend each summer at a camp in the
Adirondacks on Lower Saranac Lake. As he grew older Bob developed a strong
connection to the outdoors, and eventually attended the New York State College
of Forestry at Syracuse in 1920. During this time he continued his exploration of the Adirondacks,
further strengthening his bond with the area. In 1921 he was a member of the first
group to climb all known Adirondack peaks over 4000 feet, of which there were
42 at the time.
In the summer of 1922 he attended a summer camp on Cranberry Lake, where he spent days exploring the wilderness of the Cranberry Lake-Beaver River region and the 78 square miles of untouched forest within it. In 1924 he graduated from the New York State College of Forestry ranked 4th out of 59 students, and received the highest score in the nation on the civil test for foresters. He went on to receive a master’s degree in Forestry from the Harvard Forestry School in 1925. It was during this time that Bob became one of the first to climb all 46 Adirondack peaks over 4000 feet, and was a founding member of the 46ers club. Soon after graduating, Bob took up a post in Montana, where he worked at the Northern Rocky Mountain experiment station. He remained there for three years, where the majority of his work involved researching reproduction in forests after a fire. In 1929 he completed his education by receiving a Ph.D. in plant physiology from John Hopkins University. Once out of school Bob continued his travels across the country, visiting and working in many of the great wilderness areas it had to offer. He spent significant time in Alaska, where his experience in the town of Wiseman formed the basis for one of his most famous books, “Arctic Village”. His love for these remote areas drove him to strengthen his presence as an activist, and he would go on in 1935 to become a founding member of the Wilderness Society, which remains in operation today. His talent and determination did not go unnoticed, as Bob was appointed as both the Federal Head of the Division of Forestry and Grazing and the Director of the Indian Forest Service. In 1932, upon request from the Forest Service’s Branch of Research, Bob set out to inventory wilderness lands across the United States. Upon completion of his survey, he found 48 areas of forest that contained over 300,000 acres of wild lands untouched by roads. Of these areas, only one lay east of the Mississippi; the vast, sprawling 380,000 acre wilderness of the Cranberry Lake-Beaver River Tract, the same area in which he attended summer camp as a forestry student. Bob recognized the tremendous value of this unique area, and advocated for its preservation in a 1935 letter to the Conservation Commissioner of New York. Although Bob would die in 1939, his dream of a protected network of wild lands in the western Adirondacks lived on among conservationists and devotees of the area. In the decades that followed, these lands remarkably managed to escape the encroachment of civilization, remaining without roads and in much the same condition as Bob left it. Finally, over a half century after Bob’s death, this area was designated by New York State as the Bob Marshall-Oswegatchie Wilderness in 1990. Currently efforts are underway to create a single, unified Bob Marshall Wild Lands Complex that would ensure this natural treasure forever remain as pristine as it stands today. |