To add onto this the Klamath peoples were notoriously individualistic and “industrious” in comparison to their neighbors and during the reservation period they did, comparitively, exceptionally well as there were similar cultural virtues around “profit”. Thanks, in part, to both location and pre-contact culture they build a thriving lumber industry and by 1950 were one of the wealthiest tribes within the US and were the only tribes in the United States that paid for all federal, state and private services used by their members.
Obviously a ‘worst case’ for “raping the land for profit” right?
No. By 1950 the reservation has turned the “undesirable woodland” into a highly productive, healthy and sustainable forest and pastureland with by far the largest remaining stand of ponderosa pine in the west.
This, of course, could not stand and so the 1954 Klamath termination act was enacted. Originally the plan was to sell it all to private industry like Crown-Zellerbach, however the “lumber industry’s concern with how the increase in Klamath Forest timber would saturate the industry” resulted instead in creating the Winema and Fremont National Forests. Which of course have been heavily logged and largely mismanaged, but not nearly as bad as the plan was and certainly worse than when humans were more active in helping to maintain it.
To add onto this the Klamath peoples were notoriously individualistic and “industrious” in comparison to their neighbors and during the reservation period they did, comparitively, exceptionally well as there were similar cultural virtues around “profit”. Thanks, in part, to both location and pre-contact culture they build a thriving lumber industry and by 1950 were one of the wealthiest tribes within the US and were the only tribes in the United States that paid for all federal, state and private services used by their members.
Obviously a ‘worst case’ for “raping the land for profit” right?
No. By 1950 the reservation has turned the “undesirable woodland” into a highly productive, healthy and sustainable forest and pastureland with by far the largest remaining stand of ponderosa pine in the west.
This, of course, could not stand and so the 1954 Klamath termination act was enacted. Originally the plan was to sell it all to private industry like Crown-Zellerbach, however the “lumber industry’s concern with how the increase in Klamath Forest timber would saturate the industry” resulted instead in creating the Winema and Fremont National Forests. Which of course have been heavily logged and largely mismanaged, but not nearly as bad as the plan was and certainly worse than when humans were more active in helping to maintain it.
Thank you for sharing this info! I’ll have to look up more about the Klamath and their history, it sounds really interesting