By all accounts, the Wilderness Act of 1964 had its charismatic leaders, but it was the result of a wide, enthusiastic grassroots movement.

The consequential legislation was signed into law 50 years ago on Sept. 3 and it has since led to the protection of more than 109.5 million acres of land in the United States, including 3.4 million acres in Montana.

A substantial portion of that Montana wilderness is in Northwest Montana: the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex alone accounts for 1.5 million acres of land preserved.

The opening passage of the Wilderness Act reads: “It is hereby declared to be the policy of the Congress to secure for the American people of present and future generations the benefits of an enduring resource of wilderness.”

Howard Zahniser, the man who primarily drafted the Wilderness Act, once said there was no stronger support for wilderness than in Montana, according to the Montana Wilderness Association.

One of the early grassroots supporters for the concept of wilderness was George Ostrom, the longtime Flathead Valley newsman and radio broadcaster.

Ostrom, 86, was a legislative aide to Lee Metcalf, the Montana senator who along with Idaho Sen. Frank Church led the drive to pass the Wilderness Act.

But well before he joined Metcalf’s staff in 1962, Ostrom recognized the need to protect special backcountry places such as the Bob Marshall Primitive Area from the steady encroachment of logging, mining and roads.

“It had to be done. It was a religious feeling. I was battling here for anything I could do to have better management of our wildlands,” said Ostrom, who was fairly well known as an early-day smokejumper for the U.S. Forest Service.

He recalls that momentum had been building toward wilderness legislation for years before it passed, and at one point he was invited to be a featured speaker at a regional logging convention in Spokane.

“I explained to them what the movement was. I told them what was coming and that they needed to clean up their act,” said Ostrom, adding that logging camps were often left looking like “city dumps” and that poor forest road building and unbridled logging were causing widespread damage.

“I got booed and some of them left the building,” he said. “But many of the younger guys, I sat down with them and explained ... that there was a tide towards conservation, to save what we had left and make it better.”

Ostrom met Metcalf after doing a parachute demonstration for President Dwight Eisenhower during a 1954 dedication of the smokejumper center in Missoula. He got Metcalf’s ear, telling the congressman about how forests were being mismanaged. 

In 1961, Metcalf called Ostrom, telling him how he hadn’t forgotten what he had said, and he invited Ostrom to join his staff just prior to a re-election campaign.

“He said if we are elected one of the first pieces of business we’re going to take on is a wilderness bill,” said Ostrom, who joined Metcalf’s staff in 1962 and went to work mainly on wilderness research.

The lion’s share of work on the Wilderness Act was carried out by Zahniser and Stewart Brandborg, both leaders in the Wilderness Society. 

“It was a tough uphill battle to contend with the oil, gas, mining, grazing and lumber interests of our nation,” said Brandborg, who now resides in Hamilton.

Brandborg’s father, Guy Brandborg, was the Bitterroot National Forest supervisor, and in that position he resisted pressures to increase logging on public land and was in favor of giving all citizens a voice on how public lands are managed, according to the Montana Wilderness Association. Brandborg’s mother also had a great interest in nature.

“They were quickly enlisted as supporters of the Wilderness Bill because of their appreciation for wild country,” said Brandborg, who moved to Washington, D.C., in 1954 to work for the National Wildlife Federation and serve on the council for the Wilderness Society. 

Brandborg worked closely with Zahniser, who wrote the first draft of the Wilderness Bill.

“Zahniser drafted it on his dining room table at home on a lined tablet,” Brandborg said. The draft was dispersed to wilderness advocates. It was then introduced in the House and Senate and an eight-year political battle got underway. 

Zahniser died about four months before the Wilderness Act was signed into law, completing the vision of original wilderness advocates such as Bob Marshall and Aldo Leopold, who had founded the Wilderness Society in 1935.

Marshall was famous for his long hikes in the northern Continental Divide region and after his death at age 38 in 1939, the South Fork Flathead River drainage was recognized as the Bob Marshall Primitive Area.

Marshall hiked through the area from Aug. 28 to Sept. 4, 1928 when he worked for the Forest Service in Missoula. He wound his way through the Jewel Basin, the South Fork and Sun River drainages and the Mission Mountains Wilderness, covering 288 miles in eight days.

The Bob Marshall Wilderness made up nearly 10 percent of the original 9.1 million acres in 54 wilderness areas originally protected under the Wilderness Act. In Montana, there were four other wilderness areas designated: the Anaconda Pintler, the Cabinet Mountains, Gates of the Mountains and Selway-Bitterroot.

Wilderness advocacy continued, and Ostrom was deeply involved in the push for the Great Bear Wilderness addition at the north end of the Bob Marshall Wilderness. 

“I started gunning for the Great Bear Wilderness and I had loggers helping me,” he said. “A lot of the top loggers in this area were pleased with it.”

Ostrom surmises that their support was for practical reasons. 

“The thinking had changed,” he said. “They realized the logging industry had to be more efficient, they found out they were getting the logs they needed [outside proposed wilderness], and they liked having a wilderness area to go hunting and fishing in too.”

On a national level, Brandborg was leading the charge for more wilderness designations as the director of the Wilderness Society. “Brandborg and I crossed paths all the time,” Ostrom recalls.

Because there was a 10-year deadline to propose wilderness areas to Congress after the Wilderness Act was passed, Brandborg says there was urgency involved.

“That forced me to build teams of people in some 40 states,” Brandborg said. “We scrambled to go to the grassroots of people in each of those states.”

The Scapegoat Wilderness was designated in 1972 at the southern end of the Bob Marshall Wilderness, becoming the first citizen-led designation in the country.

Ostrom recalls writing to Sen. Metcalf urging that the Schafer Meadows airstrip in the Middle Fork Flathead drainage be allowed to remain active within the Great Bear Wilderness Area. That came to pass when the 286,700 acres was designated in 1978, an addition to what is now as the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex that covers more than 1.5 million acres.

The Associated Press and the Hungry Horse News contributed to this story.

Reporter Jim Mann may be reached at 758-4407 or by email at jmann@dailyinterlake.com.