In 1964, the Wilderness Act drew little local notice

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act. But there was little fanfare locally when it was signed into law by President Johnson on Sept. 3, 1964.

The Hungry Horse News made no mention of its passage until weeks later. The Daily Inter Lake did not include it in its coverage the following day. But the Billings Gazette ran a story on its front page.

“It was a little anti-climatic,” Stewart Brandborg, an author of the bill, said in an interview last week.

Brandborg, who now lives in Hamilton, worked under Howard Zahniser, then executive director of the Wilderness Society. Zahniser had been working on the legislation for eight years.

“He wrote the first draft of the bill on a tablet at his dining room table,” Brandborg recalled.

The Wilderness Society worked tirelessly to get the bill passed.

“I gave my life to it,” Brandborg said.

The political struggles have familiar tones. President Kennedy wanted the bill passed, but it was being held up by Rep. Wayne Aspinall a Democrat from Colorado.

Aspinall was the chairman of the House Interior and Insular Affairs Committee. A land-use bill was doomed if it didn’t get his OK. But Kennedy leaned on Aspinall, Brandborg recalled and Kennedy’s will prevailed.

Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, Zahniser died in May 1964, and Brandborg missed the signing ceremony.

“I was in an annual meeting,” he said.

Locally, the Wilderness Act’s impact was somewhat diminished. The Bob Marshall Wilderness made up nearly 10 percent of the 9.1 million acres originally protected by the act, but the “Bob” was treated as wilderness prior to that.

Bob Marshall hiked through the area from Aug. 28 to Sept. 4, 1928 when he worked for the Forest Service in Missoula. He wound his way through the Jewel Basin, the South Fork and Sun River drainages and the Mission Mountains Wilderness, covering 288 miles in eight days.

He was an incredibly fast hiker — today he’d be considered an ultramarathoner. He averaged 36 miles a day. The Mission Mountains section was primarily off trail in rugged terrain.

Marshall died in 1939 at the age of 38. The South Fork of the Flathead region that he explored was named after him the following year. On Aug. 16, 1940, the Secretary of Agriculture named nearly 1 million acres along the Continental Divide in Marshall’s memory.

Hungry Horse News editor Mel Ruder went on several trips into the Bob well before the Wilderness Act passed and touted its scenic beauty.

“This is the 950,000 acre section of the Continental Divide at the headwaters of the Flathead River’s South Fork and Sun River that has been set aside as the Bob Marshall Wilderness,” Ruder wrote after a journey through the Bob in September 1959 with Forest Service and local officials. “Objective, in part is to preserve this area in its wild state so that generations to come will know what the land looked like.”

In 1963, Ruder also wrote an editorial supporting the Bob Marshall Wilderness, but he didn’t favor expanding it. In 1964, after an historic flood heavily damaged both sides of the Divide, there was more talk of building dams than there was of designating wilderness.

After the 1964 Flood, local support for the Spruce Park Dam on the Middle Fork of the Flathead surged, and Ruder took a photo of a petition gatherer with more than 4,200 signatures in support of the dam. The dam and its reservoir would have been located in what is the Great Bear Wilderness today.

The Great Bear added 286,700 acres to the north end of the Bob in 1978. The Scapegoat Wilderness added nearly 240,000 to the southeast portion of the Bob in 1972. Collectively, the wilderness complex covers more than 1.5 million acres. Two bills in Congress that would add more to that total.