Belly River Ranger Station Historic District

Transcription

I'm standing in the office that was built by the first ranger of the Teton Division, Rudolph Rosie Rosencrans at the Blackrock Ranger Station, Bridger-Teton National Forest. Rosie was the ranger here from 1904, one year before the Forest Service was created. So one year under the old Forest Reserve. And until 1928 he was the ranger here. And it was actually only failing eyesight that forced him to retire. He lived out his life in Jackson. And he didn't pass away until 1970. So he lived until he was 95 years old. And remained connected to this ranger district his entire life. If you kind of look around this office, you'll see some of the tools that Rosie would have used as an historic ranger and of course in the early days of the Forest Service, a ranger was it on the ranger district. They took care of everything. Rosie used snowshoes and skiis in order to patrol his district in the winter months. He did not hole up in the office in the winter months. Among his duties was responsibility for wildlife management. So I've been told that he would skii or snowshoe back up into the Teton Wilderness on patrol for poachers and the like in the dead of winter. This has a flat side, it's used for shaping logs, to do things like the corners of a cabin, planks on a bridge, that sort of thing. Here's a log rolling tool.See right here with the hook on the bottom. This is an old cruisers axe. It has the US brand on the back so logs would be piled or put on a trailer or a train car and the forest ranger would come along, measure the logs, and then to show that they had been officially measured, would stamp the backs of the logs with this stamp like that. This is a fire finders map. And so you'll see a number of compass roses on this old map. And there would have been fire lookouts during the fire season posted at these look outs. Then what they would do is call in, if they spotted a smoke, then they would call it in, ususally by a hard wired telephone rather than the two way radio. There would be a phone line running down from the fire lookout down below. And so they would call in, if they saw a smoke, they would give a location. You see these strings attach. So Rosie would take the compass location from this fire look out. And then we'd get a cross reference from this fire look out. And those two, when they gave their compass heading, that would be the exact location of that smoke.And so at that point, if the smoke was substantial enough, then Rosie might go into Jackson, however long that took, and round up crew of firefighters. To go up and take care of this fire up here. Once again, Rosie stayed on this district until he had to retire in 1928 because of his eyesight. He was totally blind before he passed away. But the legacy that he left here is something that all of us that work on this forest, particularly this district treasure.