ARIZONA RANGE CRUSADER

Lee Kirby is an Arizonan, born and bred. For the past eleven years he has been the Supervisor of the two-and-one-half-million-acre Tonto National Forest in the central part of his state. The magnificent Tonto country, without question, is one of the most picturesque and rugged wilderness areas in America and Kirby fits the picture like a glove. In fact he is part of the Tonto, and one with its colorful traditions. The region looms large upon the map with names like Midnight Mesa, Deadman's Gulch, Bloody Basin and Shirt tail Springs. As one might expect, there has been plenty of drama-packed action in this land in by gone days, and even more activity wherein the changing forces of Nature have ceaselessly worked to provide natural scenery ranging from 9,000-foot-high Ponderosa Pine Forests to the cactus-strewn desert, far below. This is Kirby's country. The soft-spoken, tall, brown-eyed, active Forest Supervisor was born at Pima in the Gila Valley late in the last century and spent part of his youth beside the present-day shores of Roosevelt Lake, well within the Tonto's borders. Although Forest Service activities took him into many states he eventually returned to his native region and assumed responsibility for the land of his first allegiance. He spent a brief time in an adobe schoolhouse at Livingston, just a wide place in the road in the heart of the cattle land. At the tender age of thirteen, he went to work driving a team of horses in connection with the construction of the Salt River canal. He worked for elev en hours each day, seven days a week and drew a "man's pay" of $2.25 per day. Before this, in order to augment his income he killed cottontail rabbits and sold them to restaurants for twenty-five cents apiece. Even at this age he was a dead shot, if only with a 22 rifle. "I always took my time and got in the shot I wanted," said Lee, many years afterward. This statement of policy might well be applied to other and far more significant projects that occupied the Arizonan's life at a later date.

At one time in his early career, after a cowboy job had come to a sudden termination, Lee found that his pockets were empty and his stomach too. It was punishing hot and his belt was as tight as he could draw it. He interviewed a foreman on the Northern Line at Globe and was hired as a teamster hauling supplies. This sort of thing went on for several years, accompanied by the struggling of horses, the creaking of taut leather, much perspiration and the aching but toughening muscles of a hard-working, growing boy. As the seasons changed and inches were added to his height, Lee's eyes were turned more and more often to the hills and mountains he has always loved so well, to the Tonto, magic land of Arizona. A friend of Lee's father was employed as an Assistant Supervisor in the Forest Service and the solemn young man who, as he says, never had a chance to play, was eventually given a position as a Forest Guard, commencing his association with the type of work which was to occupy him for the following forty years work in the forest and desert that has always called him since the time when, scarcely more than an infant, he had first thrown his legs over a horse and had journeyed into the open country.

He was placed in charge of a ranger district and entrusted with the work of handling applications for grazing permits, the sale of timber and the filing of claims for homesteaders who sought sanctuary and fortune in the frontier region. At the time he knew very little about civil engineering and surveying and many were the difficulties encountered determining the exact boundaries for land seekers who were quick to argue their rights whether or not they were certain of the extent of property lines. This activity resulted in night work, poring over books and tables and reporting as accurately as he could upon the disputant's claims. At this time he decided to take the examination for the job of a full ranger, and successfully embarked upon a career as a correspondence-course man, ultimately passing the examination. He was helped along through his knowledge of roping, saddling and wilderness "know-how," an important requirement wherein the examination was concerned.

Being a full-fledged Forest Ranger was quite an advancement but soon it was discovered that the old problem of "who owns what" was to plague him again. In plain language, Lee felt that unless he could set up a surveyor's transit and settle the homesteaders claims of property boundaries, scientifically, once and for all, he was headed for more trouble than he cared to encounter. Among other things he figured that a knowledge of surveying would be good for his health, for some of the property seekers were very handy with the six gun, so he took another correspondence course in surveying and mapping.

Right in the middle of his educational pursuits, he was transferred to the wild Galiuro Mountains in the Crook National Forest with headquarters at Klondyke in Graham County. There he met a man who had been an old Texas Ranger and the two outdoorsmen became great friends. The Texan, John Greenwood, took the ambitious, friendly Forest Ranger into his home and proved to be a life-long supporter of the serious-minded younger man. Within a few days of his arrival at the new post, Lee was suddenly sent, alone, on a nineteen-day pack trip far into the mountains to report on forest conditions. He was determined not to give up his studies however, so he managed to put in a few good hours of work over his books, beside the camp fire, when the day's work was done.

It was cold up in the high altitudes. When one faced the fire his back would freeze and a rear position meant a cold face. Also the flickering light was hard on one's eyes. The Ranger finally hit on a good scheme; he secured one of the pair of wooden boxes used to hold food and cooking utensils and designed to balance upon either side of a pack animal. The box was known as a "kyack" and was covered with green rawhide. He placed this contraption empty, on its end and placed a lighted candle within. Then he covered himself in the bedroll and lay beside the box. The candle was sheltered from the wind and provided a steady, adequate flame. Lee's head was close to the light and this gave him the added advantage of sheltering the pages of his books and papers from the vagrant breezes.

One night the tired Ranger read until he fell asleep and right there is one of many occasions where this narrative might well have come to an abrupt end. The candle burned on until the kyack was set afire. Lee awoke with a start to learn that a premature halo had suddenly been added. His hair was afire, his eyebrows burned off and, in general, he awoke to a very warm situation demanding immediate action. His pillow was ablaze and that was the first object he tossed away. Then, regaining his vision, he extinguished the blaze, only to find that his precious papers and books had been badly scorched in the conflagration. Dousing his head with water, he recovered what was left of his correspondence course and decided that, fire or no fire, his student days were not over. When the scorched ranger returned to his base, his Texas friend could scarcely recognize him.

On still another pack trip into the same region, Lee had a particularly cantankerous horse and a plodding mule, used as a pack animal. As the trip progressed into more difficult country and the canyons became deeper, Lee's horse suddenly had the misfortune to bump into a yellow jacket's nest and the results were not good. The animal shied into an oak tree, scraped Lee off into the brush, pulled the mule after him and before the rout was over, both the mule and Lee had been stung as well as the horse. Bedding and other supplies were dislodged and fell down into the canyon. Everything was at sixes and sevens with tangled ropes and snarled leather. The cast dutch oven had clanked down into the mountain fastness, and broken. As Lee says, "all Hell was to pay." Like many misfortunes one event had followed another so swiftly that there was nothing in particular that could have been done to halt the succession of accidents. With his side well lacer-ated by the oak tree's rough and unfriendly bark and his feelings considerably ruffled, Lee painfully recovered his animals and whatever of his equipment he could find and continued on his way.

With many forest-management experiences back of him, in some of the largest National Forests in the State, Kirby, in 1935, came back to the Tonto. His previous work, including two supervisorships, had taken him into the great Sitgreaves Forest region and the Coconino, both in his home state, and the Datil National Forest in New Mexico where he had been in charge for five years. Lee said that during all of this time he had enjoyed practically no formal recreation whatsoever. "I used to go to the movies once in awhile but the Western pictures were not true to life, too much shooting and too many fancy clothes to suit me," he said, and remarked further that Will Rogers was his idea of a real entertainer and man. Life on the Tonto was far from being all beer and skittles. Problems were endless in scope and in importance to the land itself. It was about ten years ago that Kirby began to really see the overall significance of his position. It was the kind of discovery that one can make only as a result of years of experience and observation, a decision and an awakening that comes to a true outdoorsman after a great deal of thinking has taken place, thinking in the councils of other men and during many a lonely vigil in the wild-erness. Kirby began to think about his job in the terms of the land itself and right there is where he began to prepare himself for his true mission in life. All the rest had been preparation, education and training to do and to see the largest feature of all, the picture that would determine a new career and would result in the greatest good to the greatest number of those whom he served. It was also to lead to many a bitter argument, the loss of friends of long standing, and the praiso of leaders from all over the Nation who were, like himself, primarily interested in preserv-ing the land for the use of all the people rather than for the few.

Before his conservation activities got under way in earnest and gave Lee the opportunity he looked for to correct some of the evils on his range, there was another event in his life that nearly spelled the end of his earthly endeavors, an event, like many another, that only served to stimulate and build his new-found philosophy of live and let live as it applied to the land. Like all supervisors and other members of the Forest Service, Kirby had at all times to keep himself in readiness to answer the call of the forest fire-fighter, practically anywhere at any hour. Fire was an ever-threatening enemy to be attacked whenever it raised its destructive head. This time the call came from California and Kirby went, as fast as he could go. The conflagration had killed people and had destroyed much property, so swift was its advance. The fire raged in the vicinity of San Gabriel, near Los Angeles. Lee arrived on the scene to take charge of a group of men who combatted the fire as it spread into a place known as Robert's Canyon. As the ninety men under his direction toiled and sweated and became exhausted, the fire suddenly broke into two sections, one behind and the other directly in front of the fire fighters. Kirby, quick to sense the danger of woodland fires in all their treacherous aspects, knew that action was imperative if tragedy was to be averted. He at once sent a fleet-footed messenger to warn the men and to order them to run for it while escape was possible. As a sign that the fire fighter had been contacted and warned, the messenger, by prearrangement, had agreed to remove his shirt and wave to Kirby from a prominent rock. Kirby waited impatiently for the signal that would tell him his men had been in-formed of their danger, but when the signal did not come, he plunged forward through the mounting smoke columns bent on giving the warning himself. Presently he saw the place where the men had last been working. Lunch boxes, tools and jackets were dropped in an area not yet reached by the advancing flames. The wind came whipping through the canyon with renewed force and Kirby suddenly re-alized that while the men had succeeded in fleeing to safety he was surrounded by a wall of flame with every avenue of escape cut off. The fire created its own draft as it advanced and the spot was soon an inferno. Only one thing saved the Forester's life. Providentially, there was a small pool in the very bottom of the canyon. Old timers later said that it was the only pool within miles. Kirby plunged into the eighteen inches of water as blazing brands fell upon him and the heat seared his lungs and ignited his clothes. He reached safety not a moment too soon for now the flames swept above him. No living creature could have survived its intensity. There he lay, gasping for breath as the smoke rolled over him. He kept dashing water over his head and back and waited for some fresh air to follow the smoke. After what seemed like hours the atmosphere began to clear and the man, more dead than alive, crawled weakly out of the pool and lay down. It must have been about this time, at one o'clock in the morning, when the Associated Press in Phoenix phoned his wife and told her that her husband had been given up for lost in the fire. At daylight a rescue and searching crew found him struggling toward camp. He had lain where he was for five hours, for in addition to being weak from near suffocation, he had also been blinded by the smoke and, of necessity, had to wait for returning vision before finding his painful way up the mountainside. He insisted on being taken to a telegraph office where he could, in person, wire his wife that he was safe. Such are the experiences of Forest Service men who as Lee says, often exist for more than fifty hours without sleep and with scarcely more than coffee to sustain them as they slave to quench fire, only too often started by the carelessness of others. It was no wonder that Mrs. Kirby, stalwart that she is, many times considered herself a "Forest Service Widow," so often was her husband gone on duties both dangerous and of long duration.

As Lee remarks, "Forest fires are by no means the most serious threat to our National Forests, hard and dangerous though they may sometimes be wherein fighting them is concerned." He referred to something far more widespread, insidious and of more lasting consequence-overgrazing and the general abuse of the land itself. As time went on and he travelled the Tonto increasingly until every aspect of it was as familiar to him as the palm of his hand, he began to see new things and to view familiar scenes with a new awareness. The grass was gone, permanently gone from too many places where it once flourished. There were new and increasing numbers of gullies and washes where none had been before. The very appearance of some parts of his range was beginning to change and the Supervisor did not like it, to say the very least. He discovered, for himself, that there were too many cattle in too many areas and he set about the reduction of the herds, as indeed he was supposed to do. Only with him, it was not just a matter of trying to establish the proper number of "head" upon an adequate number of acres where the cattle would thrive and the grass would not be destroyed.

To be certain, Lee's principal objective was to operate and manage his ranges to the best interests of all concerned. Not for a moment did he lose sight of the fact that his obligations were many, to the cattlemen, the sportsmen and the farmers of his region, and to the American people as a whole, who after all, had a large stake in the welfare of the terrain under his control. Kirby was ever one to feel his responsibilities heavily and to act accordingly. Furthermore he has all the courage needed to handle recalcitrant persons who refuse to comply with requests to reduce their herds.

In areas where grazing had been too heavy, Lee's sworn duty was to have the cattlemen reduce their herds. This action often brought about trouble, for while some of the stockmen saw the light and cooperated in every way to save the range, others did not. Some of the old-time cattlemen who knew their ranges, voluntarily removed cattle, giving the grass a chance to come back. They were the ones who knew the cattle business from the ground up, and who realized that to overgraze was eventually to eat themselves literally out of house and home, but the othersthere was the rub.

So Kirby reached his decision to educate rather than to fight. He organized groups of cattlemen and others, taking full advantage of the scientific studies of staff members of the Department of Agriculture who had been concerned with adequate range management for years. He secured the best information available to impart to his followers. He lectured with colored slides, made by himself, before men's and women's clubs wherever and whenever they would invite him to do so. Then, most important of all, he took groups of cattlemen and other interested persons on trips through the Tonto to show them the dangers to the range that he had seen and to indicate the remedies. He showed the people how overgrazing in certain areas, had pulled up the very grass roots, how in other localities, grazing had so reduced the health and vigor of the grass that it was no longer able to survive and thus failed in one of its most important services to mankind the binding of the vital soil.

Kirby pointed out that when the grass was gone the heavy and infrequent rains deluged the land and the soil, with nothing to hold it in place, rushed away with the streams caused by the downpours. Acres and acres of the most valuable of all earthly commodities, soil, thousands of years in the making was going down the mountain-sides and the slopes, reaching the arroyos and rivers, discoloring streams that were once clear and, in many instances,filling the reservoirs with silt. He showed how the Roosevelt Reservoir, one of the largest in the country was becoming filled with sediment.

filling the reservoirs with silt. He showed how the Roosevelt Reservoir, one of the largest in the country was becoming filled with sediment.

Lee Kirby became a crusader, a crusader for the land. The far reaching consequences of his patient, friendly and intensely earnest teachings and persuasions have resulted in far more good than he himself realizes. Nevertheless he is still opposed by men whose better judgment has been warped by hopes for a quick profit, men who still want to graze more cattle than the ranges will safely support, and so the work of first-hand education goes on and Kirby's job is never done. He has made many friends among those who see eye to eye with him wherein the basic soundness of his convictions is concerned. One of the most telling of his arguments, relating to soil, grass and watershed conservation and propagation, has to do with a number of fenced areas within the Tonto. Here one sees plots of varying acreage where, on one side of the barrier the cattle cannot forage and there is good grass, and on the other side of the fence, practically no grass is visible at all where the cattle have over-grazed the herbage to a bare ground cover. Conditions both inside and outside of the fenced regions vary, but in every instance protected spots show what grass can do in preventing erosion and in reestablishing itself when given an opportunity, in time, to recover from over-grazing. It is a telling story and demonstration, one which must be very hard to deny even on the part of the most stubborn holder-outer against modern and safe grazing practices.

Kirby is a salesman for the land as well as a crusader and he will, like all born instructors, repeat the examples until the lesson is thoroughly drilled home and the pupil, whether he be cowman, politician or just plain John Q. Public, is convinced by his own observations, that unless the right moves are made wherein grazing is concerned, the people as a whole will lose and lose mightily. Kirby's "pupils" see almost at once, that one of our most vital natural resources is seriously threatened and that no one, regardless of his convictions to the contrary, should be permitted to ruin our ranges in any way whatsoever. These are the things that Kirby knows to be true and that he lives to forward. It is small wonder that, for the concluding years of his long association with the Forest Service, he had been selected to go to Washington as a Range Inspector of the eleven Western States. He took up this new and very great responsibility on June first of this year. He will be back to the Tonto from time to time however, for after all, it is his first love and there will be range inspection work to be carried out in this region too!

Kirby's philosophy of the range needs to be broadcast more widely. Only by hard, common sense will the problems of the range ever be solved. Kirby has common sense in large doses and he can pass it on to others and therein lies his value to his Government. The days when he shot rabbits for a living are far behind, but if the need ever arises again, one feels certain that the cottontails had better watch their step, for Lee is a patient person! He always takes his time and gets in the shot he wants!