Wilderness Visions: Arthur Carhart's 1922 Proposal for the Quetico-Superior Wilderness

H istorians examining the origins of the wilderness movement in the United States have recognized as especially significant the pathbreaking work of two Forest Service employees, Arthur Hawthorne Carhart and Aldo Leopold. While Carhart was convincing his agency in 1919 to keep the shoreline of a Colorado lake free of cabins and roads, Leopold was contemplating large-scale preservation. In 1924 Leopold persuaded a district ranger in Arizona's Gila National Forest to create the nation's first wilderness area. The argument over which of the two men was the first to think of wilderness preservation came to a head in 1972, when Donald Baldwin published a doctoral dissertation on the origins of the wilderness movement. Baldwin stated emphatically that "the wilderness concept was the brain child of Arthur Carhart not Aldo Leopold." 1 But as Roderick Nash has pointed out, "the 'Father of . . : approach is always suspect in the history of ideas:' Curt Meine's seminal biography of Leopold concludes that the two men influenced each other. The evidence of their contact with each other is scant, David Backes