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Book Review
| Voyageurs National Park: The Battle to Create Minnesota's National Park. By Fred T. Witzig. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. vii + 301 pp. Maps, notes, legislative chronology, bibliography, index. Paper $24.95.
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| Fred T. Witzig chronicles the labyrinthine process to establish the thirty-eighth national park in the United States, Voyageurs National Park. This conscientiously detailed legislative history reveals the long struggle from 1962 until 1974 to create Minnesota's national park. Located along the border lakes region of the state, Voyageurs lies at the western end of a federal recreation corridor linking the historical transportation route of the fur trade era known as the "Voyageurs Highway." How this park was established and the cast of politicians, nature enthusiasts, timber-industry representatives, and local residents form the subject and characters for this noteworthy regional history. |
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While Witzig's narrative focuses primarily on events in the 1960s and 1970s, he finds that the roots of the movement to establish a national park in Minnesota reach back to late-nineteenth-century conservation efforts. These early efforts to protect the border lakes region began with the creation of the Superior National Forest (1909), Ontario's Quetico Provincial Park (1913), and the Quetico-Superior Council (1927). |
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The national park movement in Minnesota commenced with National Park Service (NPS) director Conrad Wirth's survey of the Kabetogama Peninsula in 1962 and ended with the formal establishment of Voyageurs National Park in 1974. For this period, Witzig outlines the major obstacles and challenges that park supporters had to overcome through a prolonged and complicated legislative process. Throughout the campaign for the park, the NPS came into conflict with the United States Forest Service (USFS) over concerns that the new national park would encroach upon USFS land in the Superior National Forest, particularly in the Rainy Lake area. |
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The second major obstacle to the establishment of the park came from the largest private landowner in the Kabetogama Peninsula, the Boise Cascade Corporation. Boise Cascade was reluctant to exchange its holdings within the boundaries of the proposed park, posing a formidable challenge to park supporters. The strongest opposition to the park proposal came from local residents in the northeast who viewed the park as another federal land-grab in a region that already included a national forest and the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. These opponents tended to favor the multiuse policies of the USFS over the preservation mandate of the NPS. |
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Witzig gives due acknowledgment to the role of many individuals who were prominent in the park movement during this period. Former Governor Elmer Andersen, Sigurd Olson, and Rita Shemesh were crucial park advocates who worked through the Voyageurs National Park Association throughout the legislative process combating efforts to stall and delay the creation of the park. Local congressman John Blatnik played a key role in introducing the authorizing legislation in Washington. Finally, Witzig notes the work done by the first project manager and park superintendent, Myrl Brooks, in completing the land acquisitions and designing the draft master plan for Voyageurs. |
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Although this book is mostly concerned with the legislative history of this park, it points to several important themes for historians of national parks in the United States. First, Witzig demonstrates the continued departmental rivalry between the USFS and the NPS and the impact this had on park formation into the 1970s. Second, his analysis of the struggle to establish Voyaguers points to the complexities of the park movement during the advent of the modern environmental movement. Finally, this regional approach to park history shows the difficulties the NPS encountered in establishing parks in the eastern half of the country where settlement patterns were more firmly established and populations were denser. This book offers a useful and detailed look at the creation of a single park that environmental historians of parks can use for both its unique regional aspects as well as its broader representative qualities. |
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Sean Kheraj is a doctoral student in environmental history at York University. His dissertation research is on the environmental history of Stanley Park in Vancouver, British Columbia. |
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