The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [285]
The party of twelve prospectors who discovered Crater Lake in June 1853 saw its loveliness with fresh eyes, and it cast a spell on them.4 In 1865, the Sprague and Stearns expedition reported on the amazing site to the public at large. Nearly five miles in diameter, situated in the Cascade Mountains, about two hours by horse northeast from Medford (a Klamath County depot juncture for the Oregon and California railroad), Crater Lake was the result of a volcanic eruption. No lake anywhere else was as chameleon-like blue in changing color as this natural wonder. The lake’s edges, for example, owing to the westering light, were sharp turquoise while its center appeared to be a bottomless indigo blue.5 Even colorist as fine as Marin or O’Keeffe would have been hard pressed to replicate its myriad hues of blinding blue. Everything about the elliptical site suggested geological aberration. In the pre-Columbian era a horrific eruption had capsized the peak leaving an immense cavity. Over the millennia, melting snow and rain filled the 2,000-foot-deep crater.
With a depth of 1,943 feet, Crater Lake was far deeper than any of the Great Lakes—deeper, for that matter, than any other lake in the United States. To Native American tribes—specifically the Klamath and Modoc—this freshwater lake was a sacred site, the opening to an underworld where a giant supposedly ruled with saber and spear. Myths about Crater Lake abounded. The Klamath and Modoc believed that Wizard Island, in the middle of the lake, was the giant’s decapitated head. According to another myth the ruling deity of Crater Lake was an oatmeal-colored creature like the Loch Ness monster. In still another myth, the supposedly “unreachable bottom” was where evil spirits or sea devils resided in lodges.6
Many a natural site holds a mystery, but Crater Lake was perhaps unique in that people who had looked down at the extinct volcano basin from the twenty-mile circle of cliffs often felt haunted by the visual memory, as if they themselves had witnessed the ancient cataclysm—the lava streams ripping off the mountaintop—which had occurred in the area 7,700 years before. Out of such volcanic disruption in the Cascades was born one of the prettiest lakes in America, the equal of Lake George in New York and Lake Tahoe in California and Nevada. Even though the temperature of Crater Lake was low, it seldom froze in wintertime.7
President Roosevelt himself had never visited Crater Lake—and never would. But he had heard from Gifford Pinchot about the extraordinary efforts of an indefatigable Oregonian conservationist determined to save it. Just as Yellowstone had George Bird Grinnell and Yosemite had John Muir, Crater Lake had William Gladstone Steel. Born in Strafford, Ohio, seven years before the Civil War, Steel had first heard about Crater Lake while living in Kansas as a youth. He said he had read a reverential story about the supposedly bottomless freshwater lake in a Topeka or Wichita newspaper, in which a noontime sandwich was wrapped. The story stuck with him. Steel’s transient parents, stricken by “Oregon fever,” steadily went westward, eventually moving the family to Portland, a regional hub town of about 1,000 people along the alluvial Colombia River. (In the nineteenth century Portland was often called “Stump Town” do to excessive area-wide lumbering.) After growing up in the Midwest region Steel was enthralled by the thought of exploring the green mountain valleys of the Pacific Northwest. Upon graduating from high school, between jobs, Steel took to exploring both the high and the low country of Oregon. No slope or ravine was too mundane for his hiking-boots.8
Crater Lake Nation Park in Oregon was saved by the Roosevelt administration. Roosevelt called it “an heirloom.”
Crater Lake National Park. (Courtesy of the National Park Service)
In 1881, at age twenty-seven, Steel started a promotional journal with his brother George.