Les Joslin Writes, Edits, and Publishes Forest Service History

Les Joslin, known to U.S. Forest Service retirees throughout the Pacific Northwest as editor of the region's retirees' OldSmokeys Newsletter for the past three-plus years, has carved out a niche writing, editing, and publishing Forest Service history these past couple decades. His take on this history focuses on individuals and their lives in that storied outfit.

Joslin's most recent title, a reprint of John Riis's 1937 book Ranger Trails for which Gifford Pinchot wrote the introduction and Joslin wrote a prologue and an extensive epilogue, was published last year. Riis was and wasn't the typical early-day forest ranger. Born in 1882 in the Bronx, New York, to famous investigative journalist and social reformer Jacob A. Riis-whom Theodore Roosevelt called "the most useful citizen in New York"-and his wife Elisabeth, young John grew up in Richmond Hill, Queens, New York. He went West in 1902 and worked on Nebraska ranches, served as a Denver juvenile court probation officer, and resumed ranch work in Utah. From 1907 through 1913 he served in Pinchot's new Forest Service as a ranger and forest supervisor of the La Sal National Forest in Utah, a ranger on the Santa Barbara National Forest in California, a ranger on and deputy forest supervisor of the Cache National Forest in Utah, and a ranger on the Deschutes National Forest in Oregon. He returned east in 1914 and eventually became a journalist. While a reporter for the Richmond, Virginia, News Leader, he wrote Ranger Trails.

Joslin ran across Ranger Trails in the early 1990s, and knew the book had to be reprinted. It took him a dozen years to track down Riis's descendants-all on the East Coast-to get their approval and assistance in preparing the prologue and epilogue that, along with a 12-page collection of historic photographs, completed the project.

Professor Char Miller, author of Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism, reviewed this Ranger Trails reprint in the October/November 2008 Journal of Forestry. Miller called Riis's "compelling memoir, most of which is focused on this experiences as a ranger in the early Forest Service, arguably the single best recounting of that pioneering life."

The original edition of Ranger Trails was praised by John D. Guthrie, another pioneering Forest Service officer, in the October 18, 1937, issue of the U.S. Forest Service's Service Bulletin. Known among other things for editing two volumes of Forest Service poetry, The Forest Ranger and Other Verse in 1919 and Forest Fire and Other Verse in 1929, Guthrie sent a copy of Riis's book to Walter J. Perry who had been one of his Carson National Forest rangers, encouraging him to write such a book. Coincidentally, Perry had transferred in 1925 at Guthrie's instigation to Riis's old Deschutes National Forest stomping grounds to manage its western yellow pine timber.

Guthrie prevailed. "I yield to the urgings of my friends...to put on paper some of my experiences," Perry wrote in early 1938. "There is much that might be found interesting, but putting it into readable shape comes not too easy for me, particularly as it has not been my habit to look back over my shoulder very much." There was "much to be found interesting" in Perry's memoir, but it collected dust until coincidence struck again. A granddaughter of Perry who had read Joslin's now-out-of-print 1995 book Uncle Sam's Cabins: A Visitor's Guide to Historic U.S. Forest Service Ranger Stations of the West took the manuscript along with supporting documents and photographs to Joslin in 1998. "Can you do anything with Grandpa?" A year later, Perry's book, Walt Perry: An Early Day Forest Ranger in New Mexico and Oregon, was published. The book old out, but there has been a recent limited second printing.

Without knowing it, Joslin had practiced for putting together these memoirs by writing his own memoir, originally published in 1993 and revised and republished in 2006 as Toiyabe Patrol: Five U.S. Forest Service Summers East of the High Sierra in the 1960s. Miller's review of Toiyabe Patrol in the September 2006 Journal of Forestry recommends "an unpretentious and straightforward narrative" of a young fire guard's summers in a very different time not too long ago. Toiyabe Patrol, of course, was inspired by Ranger Trails.

Ranger Trails and Toiyabe Patrol are available through the publisher's website at www.wildernessheritage.com or from Wilderness Associates, P.O. Box 5822, Bend, Oregon 97708, for $15.00 each, including postage. Walt Perry, recently reprinted in a very limited quantity, is available through the same website or by mail for $20.00 postpaid.