Table Of Content

The Free Life of a Ranger: A Forest Service Memoir Interviewee: Archie Murchie Interviewed: 1989-1991 Published: 2002 Interviewer: R. T. King UNOHP Catalog #157 Description Archie Murchie’s action-packed career in the U.S. Forest Service began in 1929, when rangers routinely spent much of their time in the saddle, and ended in 1965 as they were becoming increasingly desk bound. The Free Life of a Ranger is Murchie’s oral history memoir of the Forest Service in its youth. It is also, indirectly, a thoughtful discourse on man’s efforts to control and shape nature in the American West. Organized, destructive and unrestrained exploitation of forestlands was an unfortunate feature of economic growth and western expansion after the Civil War. In 1891 Congress responded to this ruinous looting of a national heritage by authorizing the withdrawal of forest reserves from the public domain. To the Department of Interior went the responsibility of administering these national assets. When Congress transferred the forest reserves to the Department of Agriculture in 1905, they became national forests, and the United States Forest Service was created to manage them. Today the National Forest System encompasses almost one hundred and ninety million acres of land, the vast majority of it in western states. In the five states where Archie Murchie was posted between 1929 and 1965 (Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, and Nevada) the Service controls almost sixty million acres, upon which logging, grazing, mining, hunting, fishing, and many other activities are permitted and regulated. The Free Life of a Ranger set out to capture something of the fundamentally human quality of national forest problems and Forest Service solutions through the memory of someone who had been charged with taking direct action at the most basic level—the ranger district. Rangers operate at the point where policy encounters the reality of nature and the forces of human enterprise, human politics, and the human social dynamic. Results are often unpredictable. In the period spanned by Archie Murchie’s career, rangers had considerable latitude to interpret policy, and thus, perhaps, were more personally influential in determining how a district was managed than today’s rangers can be. As Archie might say, sometimes that was a good thing, and sometimes it was not. The Free Life of a Ranger was not intended to be biographical, and the preparation and interviewing were directed less toward learning about Murchie the man than toward other goals: recording in some detail the life of a ranger in the decades before the position became bureaucratic and office-centered; and to reveal, as much as is possible through the experiences of a single ranger, the philosophy and methods of the United States Forest Service in its management of the national forests. Part One provides the reader with a fairly straightforward chronological reading of Archie’s career, and introduces (and frequently fully develops) most of the topics and characters that are central to understanding the themes of the book. Part Two provides analysis, discussion, and more detail about previously introduced subjects. T F L R HE REE IFE OF A ANGER Archie Murchie, 1990 THE FREE LIFE OF A RANGER A Forest Service Memoir Archie Murchie, with R. T. King University of Nevada Oral History Program This second edition of The Free Life of a Ranger was made possible in part by support from the USDA Forest Service, celebrating “A Century of Service, 1905-2005” University of Nevada Oral History Program Mail Stop 324 Reno, Nevada 89557-0099 775/784-6932 [email protected] http://www.unr.edu/artsci/oralhist/ohweb/oralhist.htm Second edition © 2002 by the University of Nevada Oral History Program All rights reserved. First edition, 1991. Printed in the United States of America. Publication Staff, Second Edition Assistant Director: Mary A. Larson Production Manager: Kathleen M. Coles Senior Production Assistant: Linda Sommer Production Assistants: Brooke McIntyre, Matt Slagle, Allison Tracy, Elisabeth Williams, Kathryn Wright-Ross ISBN #1-56475-379-4 The best job in the Forest Service was a ranger’s job. A ranger was his own boss, and most of his work was out-of-doors. If it were possible, I would go back, start all over, and live my career through again—I en joyed it that much. -ARCHIE MURCHIE