In the past we have explored the topic of control burns by the Red River Lumber Company. With the fire situation at hand, this is going to be discussed widely across the West.

First a bit of background. Clinton Walker, a member of the family owned Minnesota based Red River Lumber Company came to California in 1899 to examine timberland as part of a westward expansion. By 1908, the Company had acquired nearly 800,000 acres of timberland primarily in Lassen, Plumas, Shasta and Siskiyou Counties. Long before the Company cut down a single tree, it had been conducting light/control burns throughout its holdings.

In the spring of 1912, Clinton Walker had planned to do a control burn at Clear Creek, Lassen County. He invited both state and federal foresters to observe. Coert DuBois of the U.S. Forest Service led the call to inform Walker to cease and desist and not do it. Walker ignored their pleas and it went ahead as schedule. He did invite those foresters to attend and they reluctantly showed up. They documented the event by taking notes and photographs (would that be a treasure to locate). Dubois who had been critical of the Walkers and their methods, routinely wrote opinion pieces in the west coast newspapers. He did a 360 degree, and complimented Walker on his systematic light burning approach.

Things changed quickly. The following year, Clinton Walker left Red River over a dispute with the family about its operations. Thus, the light and control burns were suspended. Twenty years later, Clinton would return. At that he time lamented about the neglect of their forests and wrote: “I have never been able to understand why, when we had successfully proven the feasibility of the work of control burns and its advantages, that we discontinued it. In this regard I think we committed a grevious error that has already caused us staggering losses and now have our forest in a very precarious condition.”

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While I have touched upon this topic before, I came across an interesting letter and how Red River was managing its forest. There are a number of institutions that search this site for all kinds of information, natural history being one. As public service, I bring this bit of information to the surface for future researchers.

On August 10, 1935, Clinton Walker wrote to his brother Archie, who resided in Minneapolis. Archie was stable figure in the Red River Lumber Company’s management, since the company had vast holdings there as well.

Clinton was involved in the initial timber acquisitions in California. In 1913, he resigned over a family dispute on the future operations. He came back into the fold during Red River’s financial crisis of the 1930s. Enough background and onwards to Clinton’s commentary.

”It is regrettable that the house of Walker has no forest man. Kenneth [Walker] covers the nearest, but he seems to be absorbed in the performance of log contracts; our annual fire and insect losses are staggering. A systematic annual light burning at the right season of the year would reduce an ultimately eliminate these sources of loss and the cost would be insignificant as compared to the loss and yearly fire hazard conditions in the forests. Burning by means of power burners on or dragged behind tractors could be done very cheaply and the prospective danger of injuring hollow hulled trees could be eliminated by following the burning with a few shovelers. For the entire period of the Walker family timber operation we have centered our attention exclusively to lumber operation. We are doing nothing but slash down that wonderful forest and letting the fire and beetles burn and eat us down year by year without raising a hand to afford protection from these annual staggering losses.”

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