The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [179]
Remembering his childhood fishing and the glory of sunshine, Douglas decided that his life, no matter what his employment was, would be centered on protecting America’s fishing streams and forests. Conservation became his electric wire, which would produce the brightest sparks throughout his storied intellectual career. “Pinchot and Teddy Roosevelt were in my eyes romantic woodsmen,” Douglas wrote in Of Men and Mountains, his 1950 autobiography, the first of several. “I did not then know about Pinchot’s ‘multiple use’ philosophy, which, as construed, allowed timber companies, grazing interests, and even miners to destroy much of our forest heritage under the rationalization of ‘balanced use.’ I only knew that Pinchot was a driving force behind setting aside wilderness sanctuaries in an effort to save them from immediate destruction by reckless loggers. I was so thrilled by Pinchot’s example that I perhaps would have made forestry my career had the choice been made in my high school days.”17
Devoted to scholarship, Douglas received top grades at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, a first-rate liberal arts institution where he was on a full scholarship. Now he started coming into his own, intellectually. While at college, he joined the ROTC and Beta Theta Pi. But the clannishness of such outfits didn’t really appeal to him. He adopted the stance of an iconoclast, a lone mountaineer, a skirt-chaser, an impatient doer eager to see the great wide world. As a hobo, he traveled from hopyard to forest camp to orchard to earn money during the Great Depression.18 He was a young man willing to take risks—a fact historians should not ignore.
Upon graduating from Whitman College in 1920 with a BA in English and economics, Douglas became a high school teacher and debate coach. Thoreau, Emerson, and Muir became his inspirations. Impressed by their transcendentalist philosophy, he wanted to chase the sky and learn about every part of the wild Wallowa Mountains in northeastern Oregon. Pinchot stayed on his shoulder like a good angel, informing his views about the stewardship of forestlands. Douglas watched many of his friends in Yakima sinking into tedium, logging and mining for the minimum wage. Having licked polio, and having developed an iron will and newly strong legs, Douglas wanted much more out of life. Teaching English and Latin for two years at Yakima’s high schools bored him. “Finally,” he recalled, “I decided it was impossible to save enough money by teaching and I said to hell with it.”19
Distrustful of the timbering promoted by Weyerhaeuser Lumber and worried about becoming an obsolete teacher in the Rattlesnake Hills range, Douglas found liberation from Washington’s provincialism at Columbia University Law School. He was imbued with a Pacific Northwest belief in the power of mountains, stone, and rivers, and his train journey to New York City sounds like a drifter’s ballad. In the summer of 1922, Douglas signed up to escort 2,000 sheep by rail from Wenatchee, Washington, to Minneapolis, Minnesota. In Of Men and Mountains, he told of sleeping in a dirty caboose, meeting rascals in boxcars, rattling along with Montana’s fields and peaks flashing by outside the open train door. In Idaho he encountered a railroad strike. He feared the billy clubs of yard bulls, who were always trying to shake down the transients. Douglas had a vivid way of telling anecdotes about life along the train tracks and in the hobo jungles. “I needed a bath,” he matter-of-factly wrote of the adventure, “and a shave and food; above all else I needed sleep. Even flophouses cost money. And the oatmeal, hot cakes, ham and eggs and coffee—which I wanted desperately—would cost fifty or seventy-five cents.”20
Douglas unloaded the sheep from the railcars in the Minneapolis railroad yard, then bummed a train ride to Chicago, wanting to see