Photos submitted to the Times Observer Above, Howard Zahniser on a canoeing trip on the Allegheny River in 1937. Below, a Pennsylvania Historical Marker loacted on Rt. 62 near Hwy. 36, north of Tionesta. It reads: “Conservationist and architect of the National Wilderness Preservation System Act of 1964. Although he died four months before President Lyndon Johnson signed the bill his efforts led to the preservation of over 100 million acres across the nation. Zahniser was born in Franklin, Pa., and Tionesta became his hometown. An advocate of preserving wilderness area, he was executive dierctor of The Wilderness Society and editor of its journal.

Editor’s Note: With the Allegheny River a finalist for 2017 Pennsylvania River of the Year, the Times Observer has elected to publish this testimony from environmental activist Howard Zahniser to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers regarding the potential for what became the Kinzua Dam. Our thanks go to Kirk Johnson, executive director of the Friends of Allegheny Wilderness, for sharing it with us.

On the Allegheny River

I have been told that all who come to Warren and go on up the Allegheny River to study the area around Kinzua go away with the impression: “It’s too bad to have to do anything with such a beautiful valley.” And that, I understand, includes engineers and many others whose reason for visiting the area is to see what CAN be done to this valley. I too say it is too bad to have to do anything with it, but if something must be done I wish to suggest some important values to have in mind when choosing between the alternatives.

I speak as the executive secretary of The Wilderness Society, a nationwide, nonprofit, nonpolitical organization with headquarters in Washington, D.C., and also as one who has known and enjoyed this valley since boyhood. We of The Wilderness Society believe – with the support of an increasing number of Americans throughout the country – that the more natural an area is the greater is its stability and long-time value to its inhabitants. Our prime concern as a society, our distinctive interest, is in preserving the remnants of the American wilderness free from all artificial developments, but we believe also that on all natural areas the artificial measures should be held to a minimum. In this fine, still highly natural valley of the upper Allegheny we would say, adopt only an absolutely necessary program of change and then hold the artificial measures in such a program to a minimum. Personally I would recommend that the proposed detailed navigation survey be made and that it include careful attention to the recreational values of this area.

There are not many valleys like this upper Allegheny left in the United States. For those who know it, it has great sentimental value. Some men are at times likely to call sentimental values impractical and to substitute for them what they call “practical” considerations. Yet men fight to preserve their sentimental values, fight and die for them, and to the nation their service in doing so is a highly practical thing. There is something practical too about recreation. The strains of our high-pitched civilization are such that the provisions for recreation in natural areas are becoming more and more a matter of social concern. As individuals we know already the tonic values of getting away from it all and recuperating from nervous tension in quiet natural scenes. It will not be long before we will all recognize such excursions as matters of real practical social concern, and we are going to need our quiet valleys more and more. Yet right now we are doing the impractical thing of making such areas fewer and fewer.

From Warren to Salamanca the Allegheny valley can well become, with proper planning and restraint in development, the scene of a kind of recreation that would be unique in this region. There is now pending in Washington a proposal for a bill that would establish “wilderness belts” or belts of wildlands along interstate stretches of mountain ranges and river valleys. If this bill is successfully introduced in Congress and enacted, this Pennsylvania-New York stretch of the Allegheny might well become such a belt of wildland for hikers from as far away as Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Baltimore, Washington, Philadelphia, and New York who would wish to traverse the trail between the railroad stations at Salamanca and Warren. There is no such provision for the increasing number of hikers in the entire East. The nearest thing to it is the trail system along the tops of the mountain ranges, and I am sure that an Allegheny River trail would far surpass any mountain trail in enjoyment for many hikers.

The value of this stretch of the Allegheny River for canoeists has never yet been fully realized either. Canoeists go far away to the canoe country of Minnesota. They go into the Adirondacks. For many of their purposes they could find nothing better than the upper Allegheny – as I once found out to my great delight when my wife and I, finding it impossible to travel to Canada or Minnesota, spent three weeks with canoe and pup-tent on the upper Allegheny, from Olean to Tionesta. Dr. William N. Fenton of the Smithsonian’s Bureau of American Ethnology has described in the Living Wilderness a one-day canoe trip that he with his wife and Charles E. and Richard B. Congdon of Salamanca made from Salamanca to the State line in 1941. In his article, called “A Day on the Allegheny Ox-Bow,” copies of which I have here, Dr. Fenton says, “Surely anyone who could have made even this one-day voyage with us might have been aroused to an appreciation of the still existing natural features of this valley, not forgetting the present Indian inhabitants. Conservationists will have may things to consider, when they come face to face with concrete plans to inundate this quiet, wild valley of the upper Allegheny.”

Such considerations, I trust, will be very much in mind when the decisions are finally made with regard to this valley. However we may be compelled to deal with flood waters, whatever provisions we may find profitable for navigation to improve our transportation system, we certainly should do everything possible to preserve the heritage of natural beauty we have here for recreation, enjoyment, and inspiration. Such scenes are getting fewer and fewer, and our needs for them are becoming greater and greater.

-Howard Zahniser, The Wilderness Society, Warren, Pennsylvania, May 15, 1946