During the 1930s, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was heavily involved in America’s fire policies through the construction of fire suppression infrastructure. Following the Great Fire of 1910, the federal government became increasingly concerned with the surveillance and management of wildfires. The responsibilities that arose from this concern fell at the feet of government forestry administrations, such as the Forest Service. In 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt signed the CCC into existence as part of his broader New Deal policies. The founding of the CCC both created jobs for young men struggling during the Great Depression, and provided foresters with an ample work force to help with fire suppression.

During this period, Ashley National Forest in northeastern Utah desperately needed a permanent fire tower. While mountain tops had been used as crude fire lookouts consisting of little more than campsites, no fire lookouts with living quarters had been built in the state of Utah. However, in 1937, the CCC completed the construction of the Ute Mountain Fire Tower in Ashley National Forest. It was the first and last of its kind to be built in the state.

One of the tools utilized at Ute Mountain was an Osborne Fire-Finder. This device served as an essential part of any efficient lookout facility for decades. It consisted of a circular map mounted to a table, typically at the center of a given lookout. A sighting mechanism consisting of two brass posts pivoted around the table, secured to opposite ends of one another. One post had a thin slit in it while the other stretched a single horse hair. At the direct center of the map would have been the location of the lookout. By moving the posts to line up with any smoke sighted, a lookout could record the exact location of a fresh wildfire. Ute Mountain also had a telephone and radio, and either could be used to contact Ashley National Forest’s fire command, who would subsequently rush to the site of the fire and extinguish it if possible.

Unfortunately, by the late 1960s, the tower was in disrepair. In 1967, a Forest Service survey of the structure proved that all four of the tower’s legs were rotting, and the structure soon closed. In an effort to preserve Utah’s only remaining fire lookout, Ashley National Forest nominated the tower for the National Register of Historic Places in 1980. The Service soon restored the tower, and the Forest held a rededication ceremony in 1987. However, in 2008 the Forest Service again discovered rot in all of the support beams. They considered demolishing the structure, but the local community believed it was too significant to the history of conservation in Utah. Ashley National Forest restored the tower most recently in 2014.

Today, the site is open to visitors as a historical interpretive site. Accessible by car, guests are encouraged to climb the steps of the tower and peer inside the large windows to experience the living quarters of a fire lookout.

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As early as 1907, the two-year-old Forest Service had begun to realize the potential usefulness of high vantage points to monitor fires. William Kreutzer, the nation’s first forest ranger, recommended a series of peaks in the front range of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado for this purpose. The most prominent was Devil’s Head, a rocky granite outcropping high above Pike National Forest, near Sedalia, Colorado. In the wake of the Great Fire of 1910, the Forest Service began constructing permanent stations at these points. In 1912, Colorado foresters established a crude lookout at Devil’s Head. This primitive station consisted of a small alidade table, which is an instrument consisting of a map and sighting mechanism used to pinpoint the exact location of fires around the lookout, and a tiny log cabin on an outcropping. The Forest Service has used the site continuously since the establishment of this early station. In 1919, the Service built a more permanent structure. It consisted of a ten-foot by ten-foot wooden cabin, flanked by large windows that granted the ranger within a 360-degree view of the surrounding forests. The first lookout to occupy this new station was Helen Dowe, the second woman in United States history to staff an official forest fire lookout. In the wake of World War I, the Forest Service faced a shortage of able-bodied men to operate stations. Dowe was born in Denver in 1889, and spent much of her youth working as a horseback riding instructor in the mountains around Devil’s Head. As such, she knew the area well. Dowe spotted and reported dozens of wildfires during her tenure as a lookout from 1919 to 1921, saving thousands of acres from burning. In her time at Devil’s Head, she gained widespread publicity. As the subject of numerous magazine articles, Dowe became a prominent feminist figure at the height of the national suffrage movement. According to the Denver Post, she received thousands of letters from women around the country who envied her position.  The Forest Service replaced the old observatory at Devil’s Head Lookout in 1951. The current station is the last lookout in Colorado to be staffed full-time. Pike-Isabel National Forest makes the site available to tourists and hikers, who flock to the rocky outcropping for the lookout’s history and the incredible views from the top. Visitors can access the station via a 1.5-mile hike, and parking is available at the Devil’s Head Trailhead. The last leg of the journey takes hikers up a winding wooden staircase, which works its way up massive granite outcroppings. Lucky visitors may get the chance to talk to the station’s lookout.

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It is not known what group of indigenous peoples built the Wyoming Medicine Wheel, located 60 miles outside of Sheridan, Wyoming in the Bighorn Mountains, or when they did so, but various Native American tribes have used the wheel as a sacred site for centuries. The Medicine Wheel is a circular pattern of stones surrounding a central stone cairn; twenty-eight stone pathways lead to smaller cairns as part of the wheel. Today, a six-foot-high barbed wire fence surrounds the wheel, placed by the Forest Service to protect the Medicine Wheel. Those indigenous people who consider the wheel a sacred sight view the Medicine Wheel as a holistic model for life. The different teachings of the Medicine Wheel help individuals learn to live in balance with the Creator and all of creation. A 2007 article in the newspaper Win Awenen Nisitotung described how tribes use the Medicine Wheel: “The medicine wheel is like a mirror in which everything about human condition is reflected back.” The Medicine Wheel assists people along their path of life. This sacred site is important to Indigenous people to continue their ceremonies using the Medicine Wheel. In 1970, the United States Forest Service designated the Medicine Wheel a National Historic Landmark. Tourists took to visiting the wheel, but the National Forest Service did not adequately provide protection for the site. Over the decades, some visitors removed rocks from the Wheel and vandalized the site with graffiti. In the early 1990s, tribes and coalitions fought to protect this land such damages and thefts. On June 9, 1993, tribes—including the Arapaho, Blackfeet, Cheyenne, Crow, Navajo, Shoshone, Sioux, and Southern Ute—political coalitions, and the Forest Services reached an agreement on managing the site. The Memorandum of Agreement (National Historic Preservation Act) contained several steps to curtail damage caused by tourists. The agreement reads, “The programmatic agreement will require the Forest Service in consultation with the parties to the MOA, to develop and implement a long term management plan which specifies the preservation and continued use of the Medicine Wheel and vicinity as its management priority.” Under the terms of the memorandum, the Forest Service agreed to only open Medicine Wheel to tourists between July 1 and November 1. Visitors would have to park away from the wheel itself and walk one-and-a-half a miles to the site. The government agreed to involve tribal members in discussions about managing the sacred site. The Forest Service would also close the site to visitors for three days around each equinox and solstice to “allow native practitioners undisturbed use for traditional rites and ceremonies.” This agreement set an important precedent. The government acknowledges sacred sites and protects them for American Indians. Tribes have faced difficulties persuading the Forest Service to follow through with the National Historic Preservation Act. In May 1996, Diana Tillman Mitchell, a report for On Indian Land, revealed how the Forest Service failed to comply with the agreement. They were not including the elders from tribes in their consultations or management requirements. Mitchell wrote, “The guidance and policies should have active participation and notification to all Indian people involved! This is not happening.” The negotiations between Forest Service and the coalitions and tribes continued for a little over twenty years before reaching a final agreement. The updated agreement was implemented in September 1996 which issued the protocols the Forest Service must still follow followed today. The protocols designate 23,000 acres as sacred space to Native American and have provisions allowing Native American practitioners to use the site for ceremonies. In 2011, ethnographic discoveries about indigenous people’s cultural use of the surrounding landscape prompted the Forest Service to extend the boundaries of the Medicine Wheel National Historic Landmark to include an additional 4,080 acres. With this expansion, the Service also changed the name of the landmark to Medicine Mountain. The steps taken in the 1990s to preserve the Medicine Wheel promoted a working relationship between Indigenous people and the United States government. Tribes and the federal government took steps to protect this special and sacred place. Still, the negotiated nature of this collaboration leaves some, including journalist Diana Tillman Mitchell, concerned that “the economics of a location may always outweigh Indigenous religious freedom.” Advocates like Chris Peters (Pohlik-lah/Karuk), an officer in Seventh Generation Fund, have insisted on their right to preserve sacred lands—“What’s more American: the right to drill for oil or the right to pray?—but when reviewing how the government has interacted with indigenous peoples in the past, it seems that if there is value to the land, the state will take it.

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After leaving their camp at Traveler’s Rest, the Corps of Discovery, led by captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark encountered one of the most grueling stretches of their expedition. The Shoshones advised them against descending the Snake River to the Pacific Ocean, and so their alternate route necessitated going through a mountain pass farther north. Later named “Lolo Pass,” the mountain gap the Corps crossed aided their overall westward progress but inaugurated one of the most difficult parts of their journey. Over the course of eleven days, they experienced treacherous slopes and contours of the Bitteroot Mountains. Their Shoshone guide nicknamed “Old Toby” told them their travel through the mountains would take six days. This miscalculation was, oddly enough, due in part to his guiding the party down “a wrong road,” taking them “out of [their] rout 3 miles” before falling back into “the right road.” Nevertheless, the party crossed over Lolo Pass, the currently-demarcated border between Idaho and Montana on the Continental Divide. They passed several hot springs on their way through, stopping briefly to test (and even taste) the water, and discovered that it was “hot & not bad tasted.” After Lewis’s cohort caught up with Clark’s, they set up camp near Pack Creek, specifically on the lower end of Packer Meadows in Idaho County, Idaho.

Having successfully traversed the mountains (albeit with much difficulty), the party stepped off the Lolo Trail to enjoy the hospitality, food, and shelter of the Nez Perce tribe, located at Weippe Prairie. After encamping together, the Nez Perce informed the party of travelers that the trail the party took was an older trail the Nez Perce had been using to go east to hunt for deer and bison, as well as to procure horses and rendezvous with other tribes (sometimes with the unfortunate result of combating their enemies, losing tribespeople and horses in the process). Interestingly, the expedition members noticed signs of the trail and pass being used on the first day they set out to cross the Bitterroots, as they “passed a tree on which was a nomber of Shapes drawn on it with paint by the natives,” among other signs that they supposed to be “a place of worship among them [the Indians].” They also saw “pine trees pealed as far up as a man could reach,” assuming that the natives had done so to mix the inside bark of the trees with dried fruit to eat. They also posited that at the hot springs “one of the Indians had made a whole to bathe [in].” Before leaving the Nez Perce to sail on the Columbia River, the party learned that the Nez Perce “make great use of Swetting,” referring to the tribe’s use of “hot and cold baethes,” which were used to treat skin diseases on account of the supposed healing properties of hot springs’ water. On the return trip home, some expedition members and natives “amused themselves” by fully utilizing the springs near Lolo Pass, a welcome warmth and delight after “bid[ding] adieu to the snow” and remembering the hardships they had previously experienced in crossing the Rocky Mountains.

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The Flathead Reservation is located in Northwestern Montana, surrounded by the Kootenai, Flathead, and Lolo National Forests. It is home to people from the Kootenai, Bitterroot Salish, and Pend d’Oreilles tribes, often collectively referred to as the Flathead.

The reservation was created in the 1855 Hellgate Treaty. The three tribes ceded 12 million acres of land in Montana and Idaho. 1.2 million acres were reserved for the Flathead in Jocko Valley. The treaty council included a clause that stated the Bitterroot Valley would be surveyed and the President would decide if the land were better suited for use by the Flathead or by American settlers. Likely believing that his people would be allowed to remain in the Bitterroot Valley permanently, the leader of the Bitterroot Salish signed the treaty, which was ratified in 1859.

In 1871, President Grant issued an Executive Order affirming that a survey of the land had been completed and that no land in the Bitterroot Valley needed to be reserved. The following year, the Secretary of the Interior sent James A. Garfield to negotiate the removal of the Bitterroot Salish to the reservation. The Bitterroot leader, Charlot, refused to accept removal. He and other Salish leaders argued that the government had failed to uphold their end of the Hellgate Treaty. Garfield promised that if they moved to the reservation, the government would build 60 homes and increase the reservation’s rations and annuities. Charlot still refused, but his signature was later forged. Charlot told Senator Dawes in 1883, “How can I believe you, or any white man, after the way I have been treated?” Finally, in 1889, Charlot signed an agreement to move, and two years later the Bitterroot Salish were escorted to the reservation.

Facing population loss as settlers moved to Canada, Montana government leaders wanted to open up reservation lands for American settlement. The Flathead refused to cede the land in 1901, but were forced when allotment was applied to their reservation in 1904. White settlement was officially permitted in the reservation beginning in 1910. Charlot’s grandson said, “When they opened the reservation I do not believe the Indians were in favor of it. I was not in favor of it. In the first place, they were not asked about it – it was sort of stolen from them.”

Flathead National Forest was created in 1897, followed by Lolo National Forest in 1906 and Kootenai National Forest in 1907. The Flathead continued to hunt in the areas surrounding their reservation citing rights given them in the Hellgate Treaty. They began to clash with game wardens, and in 1908, a small hunting party of Pend d’Oreilles were killed by a game warden and his deputy in what became known as the Swan Valley Massacre. Completely surrounded by federal lands and consequently unable to hunt outside their reservation, the Flathead grew increasingly dependent on government aid. Today, tribal members living on the Flathead Reservation are outnumbered by residents of other ethnicities.

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