The Story of a Forest Ranger 1954 USDA-US Forest Service

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“The work of forest ranger: forest management, maintenance, fire suppression. Firefighting sequence…”

Public domain film from the Prelinger Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and mild video noise reduction applied.
The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).

A park warden, park ranger or forest ranger is a person entrusted with protecting and preserving parklands – national, state, provincial, or local parks. “Parks” may be broadly defined by some systems in this context, and include protected culturally or historically important built environments, and is not limited to the natural environment. Different countries use different names for the position. Warden is the favored term in Canada, Ireland, and the United Kingdom. Within the United States, the National Park Service refers to the position as a park ranger. The U.S. Forest Service refers to the position as a forest ranger. Other countries use the term park warden or game warden to describe this occupation. The profession includes a number of disciplines and specializations, and park rangers are often required to be proficient in more than one…

History

Rangers were officials employed to “range” through the countryside providing law and order (often against poaching). Their duties were originally confined to seeing that the Forest Law was enforced in the outlands, or purlieus, of the royal forests. Their duties corresponded in some respects with that of a mounted Forester…

The earliest letter patent found mentioning the term refer to a commission of a ranger in 1341. Documents from 1455 state that England had “all manner and singular Offices of Foresters and Rangers of our said Forests”…

Rangers in North America, 1600s-1800s

In North America rangers served in the 17th and 18th-century wars between colonists and Native American Indian tribes. Rangers were full-time soldiers employed by colonial governments to patrol between fixed frontier fortifications in reconnaissance providing early warning of raids. In offensive operations, they were scouts and guides, locating villages and other targets for task forces drawn from the militia or other colonial troops. During the Revolutionary War, General George Washington ordered Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Knowlton to select an elite group of men for reconnaissance missions. This unit was known as Knowlton’s Rangers, and was the first official Ranger unit for the United States, and are considered the historical parent of the modern day Army Rangers.
Early Conservation and Park Rangers in the United States, 1866-1916

The word was resurrected by Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from the old British use for the Wardens – royally appointed – who patrolled the deer parks and hunting forests in England.

There is much debate among scholars about which area was the world’s first national park (Yosemite or Yellowstone), so not surprisingly there is little agreement about who was the first national park ranger. Some argue that Galen Clark was first when, on May 21, 1866, he became the first person formally appointed and paid to protect and administer Yosemite, thus become California’s and the nation’s first park ranger. Clark served as the Guardian of Yosemite for 24 years. Others point to Harry Yount who worked as a gamekeeper in Yellowstone National Park in 1880-1881. Prophetically, Yount recommended “the appointment of a small, active, reliable police force…[to] assist the superintendent of the park in enforcing laws, rules, and regulations.” The first permanent appointment of rangers in a national park occurred on September 23, 1898, when Charles A. Leidig and Archie O. Leonard became forest rangers at Yosemite National Park.

One of the earliest uses of the term ranger was on badges with the title “Forest Reserve Ranger” which were used from 1898 to 1906 by the U.S. Department of the Interior. These badges were probably issued to the rangers working in the national parks as well as those in the national forests, since both were known as Forest Rangers at that time.

The term ranger was also applied to a reorganization of the Fire Warden force in the Adirondack Park after 1899 when fires burned 80,000 acres (320 km2) in the park.[citation needed] The name was taken from Rogers’ Rangers, a small force famous for their woodcraft that fought in the area during the French and Indian War in 1755…