“... Recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain... ”

These inspiring words from the 1964 Wilderness Act are a mantra for those who appreciate and revere nature in places like Montana in the  sixty years since wilderness areas have become a welcome and necessary part of our lives.

Around Bozeman, we know that when someone says “The Park,” they are referring to Yellowstone. I am certain that the same phrase spoken up in the Flathead would refer to Glacier. But what is “The Bob?” Montanans will immediately know that name refers to a huge wilderness complex in the Northern Rockies, northwest of the Yellowstone ecosystem and just south of the Crown of the Continent. Most would also know that “The Bob” is short for the Bob Marshall Wilderness. But many of us might be a bit hazy on who that guy is.

It has been over 500 years since Europeans came to the Western Hemisphere and began to transform it. These continents were wilderness at the time. But they were fully inhabited by people who had a way of life that maintained that wild state. The Europeans were determined to change the land to match their concepts of home. This meant altering or eliminating the people who were here and thriving in that wildness. It took some time but the task was pretty much complete by the end of the 19th century. There is irony and tragedy in the fact that during that century some began to regret the grinding down of the land while only a few felt compassion for the native people, most of whom had lost their culture, if not their lives.

There is a direct generational connection between the outstanding figures of the conservation and wilderness movement, from Henry David Thoreau to John Muir to Teddy Roosevelt and Aldo Leopold. Between them and the people in the 1960s responsible for the passage of the Wilderness Act (David Brower, Olaus and Mardy Murie, Howard Zahnizer, and others) the most important interim person was Robert Marshall.

Oddly, for a wilderness lover and champion, Bob Marshall was born in New York City. However, his father, a well-known attorney, was counsel for the groups which preserved the Adirondack Mountains. Bob and his brothers spent their childhood summers at the family cabin paddling lakes and climbing peaks. Within his family (indeed, among all who enjoyed the Adirondack wilderness), Bob Marshall was known, from a young age, as the most energetic and most accomplished climber and explorer. He kept extensive lists of peaks climbed and lakes paddled in literally hundreds of forays. The only thing better for him than a 30-mile hiking day was a 40-mile hiking day.

While still in his mid-teens, Marshall decided on a career as a forester, saying that he would hate to spend the greater part of his life indoors in an office or in a city. He graduated magna cum laude from Syracuse University in 1924. He spent his college summers in the Adirondacks and elsewhere camping, climbing, paddling, and honing his outdoor skills.

A year later, after working in forests in the Pacific Northwest for the summer, he added a master’s degree in Forestry from Harvard.

Bob began his career with the USFS in 1925. His quick mind, sense of humor, and nearly superhuman physical prowess in the mountains made him popular with his fellow foresters. That initial stint with the Forest Service lasted three years, the last one in Missoula. It was there that he consolidated his views on forestry, conservation and wilderness with practical experience. Hungry for more knowledge, he enrolled at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore to earn his PhD. However, the city failed to contain Bob; he realized a dream with trips to Alaska over several summers. He traveled the Brooks Range and named the Gates of the Arctic. The result of these Alaskan trips was the book, Arctic Village, published by Marshall in 1933.

That year he took a job as director of the forestry division of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, where he was able to combine two of his passions, human rights and conservation. He worked with tribes to secure and preserve their land, and their rights as Americans. He succeeded in securing wilderness designation for millions of acres of tribal lands. He continued to advocate with the Park Service and the Forest Service on wilderness, writing position papers for the Roosevelt administration. Marshall returned to the Forest Service in 1937 as director of Recreation and Lands. In this final position with the Forest Service, he identified hundreds of areas comprising millions more acres of wilderness for protection.

The death of his father in 1929 had left Bob Marshall independently wealthy, but he continued in government jobs. He found time to advocate for and fund causes including civil rights, labor issues, and socialist organizations. But his great love was the outdoors and, in 1934 Marshall, along with several others including Benton MacKaye, the organizer of the Appalachian Trail, founded The Wilderness Society. The presidency was offered to the great forester, Aldo Leopold, who declined the position. The obvious choice, Bob Marshall, felt that because of his government employment, he should “do the work and let someone else get the title.” Still, for the initial years of the Society, virtually all the funding for the new Wilderness Society was provided by Bob.

Wilderness as a concept was discussed for a long time in this country. The benefits of wild places were espoused by poets, philosophers, scientists, and scholars. Bob Marshall was the person who converted these romantic and philosophical musings into an on-the-ground reality. His position with the USFS enabled him to accomplish this. His role with the Wilderness Society allowed him to publish articles and opinions advocating for wild places. He counted and categorized as many of the tracts of wilderness as he could find. Most of them he visited personally. Aldo Leopold had famously gotten the first wilderness designation for the Gila area in New Mexico in 1924. There are now 112,000,000 acres in 806 protected areas.

Bob’s tireless government work in the 1930s preserved these lands. Yet these wilderness designations were not permanent. It took 25 years to pass the Wilderness Act of 1964.

The primary organization that advocated and accomplished this legislative effort was The Wilderness Society, which Robert Marshall had co-founded and funded in 1934. His legacy, and the memory of his dedication inspired Society members, who worked equally hard in the 1960s. The land that has been preserved seems vast when one encounters it, yet it represents just two percent of our country. This was a generational and worthwhile struggle.

Bob Marshall’s amazing energy and optimism may have contributed to his early death.
He died during a night train ride from Washington to New York in 1939 at the age of 38. It appears that the cause was heart failure. He had ignored or minimized several ailments that had occurred during his final years. His will left all of his considerable fortune to wilderness preservation, socialism, and civil liberties.

Just after his death, Marshall was eulogized by the head of the Forest Service, F A Silcox, who had served as a district forester in Missoula. He wrote; “He had the mental and physical vigor to drive ahead and to inspire and arouse enthusiasm in others. His capacity for friendship knew no bounds... If there is a Valhalla for the spirits of men, may Bob’s spirit find there one of his beloved wilderness areas...”

The Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex is located on either side of the Continental Divide southeast of Glacier Park. It consists of the Bob, the Great Bear Wilderness, and the Scapegoat Wilderness. It was declared with the first wilderness areas in 1964; later, additional land was added. The complex covers over one and a half million acres.

My own experience with The Bob has been limited. The first time, I was in the middle of the wilderness before I set foot on it. We flew into Schafer Meadows to float the Middle Fork of the Flathead, in the early 80s. Six of us in two rafts, an epic trip; we survived. Ironically, that airstrip was the sole remnant of several that Bob Marshall lobbied to have removed from the forest in the 1930s. He felt that even Forest Service airstrips utilized for worker transport violated the spirit of the wild country. A second float trip on the Sun River from the Benchmark access down to the Gibson Reservoir occurred later. We camped several times at a Forest Service campground north of Lincoln and walked briefly into the wilderness. But mostly I have gazed toward the Rocky Mountain Front from the Choteau area and wondered what lay up in those hills. Writing here inspires me to plan a trip to cast that gaze on the Chinese Wall on the Continental Divide from close up. In The Bob.