Your National Heritage
 For more than 6,000 years, people have played a part in the ecology of the Gifford Pinchot National Forest. The earliest Native Americans hunted in meadows below receding alpine glaciers. As the climate warmed, descendants of these early hunters gathered an abundance of food and other necessities. Familiarity with the Forest's resources allowed larger, more settled populations, and the natives began to manage the landscape for game and other food. One method the natives used was burning areas to increase huckleberry production. Archaeological investigations on the Forest continue to discover new and exciting information about the lives of the first Americans.
The first Europeans to earn their living from the forest were the trappers of the British Hudson's Bay Company who came for the beaver and other fur-bearing animals that abounded on rivers and streams. The first permanent European settlement near what is now the Gifford Pinchot National Forest was Fort Vancouver, founded in 1824. By the 1890's miners and loggers were tapping the forest's wealth. Homesteaders and ranchers moved into the forest to farm the river valleys and graze cattle and sheep in the meadows and prairies. In 1897, the area became part of the Mount Rainier Forest Reserve. The area was reorganized and its name changed several times before 1908, when the Columbia National Forest was established.
Gifford Pinchot, the first Chief of the Forest Service, played a key role in developing the early principles of environmental awareness. Pinchot's philosophy is made clear in his farsighted statement that the forests should be managed for "..the greatest good of the greatest number in the long run." In honor of his leadership, the Columbia National Forest was renamed for Gifford Pinchot in 1949.
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