A Cry Of Defiance -- Three Generations Of Pioneers Duked It Out With The Federal Government Over Control Of The Pristine Olympic Peninsula. Time And Again, They Lost.

MARILYN LEWIS' RANCH is the last one you pass on the Hoh River Road before you enter Olympic National Park on your way into the rain forest. Her roots on the Hoh run deeper than those of the towering Sitka spruce.

Lewis' grandfather was John Huelsdonk, the "Iron Man of the Hoh," a farmer, trapper and hunter who homesteaded on the Olympic Peninsula nearly a half-century before Congress created the park.

He was a man of legendary strength and hunting prowess, the peninsula's answer to Paul Bunyan. Early in the century, one story goes, the Iron Man packed a cookstove in to his isolated homestead on his back. It must be heavy, a friend he encountered on the trail remarked. The stove wasn't so bad, Huelsdonk reportedly answered - but the 50-pound sack of flour inside it kept shifting around.

The Iron Man died in 1946, when Lewis was 4. His descendants on the peninsula are so numerous they seem to outnumber the stumps.

The Lewis Ranch, just upriver from Huelsdonk's homestead, is a wet, wild, isolated place. Cougars killed eight of Lewis' cattle a few years ago. She's a hardy woman, a one-time hunter and hiker, a former horse packer, truck driver and mill worker. But Lewis says she has grown so wary of the big cats that she no longer will venture outside unarmed.

The ranch has no TV. If Lewis hadn't been spending the night in Port Angeles, there's no telling when she might have heard the latest news about her next-door neighbor, Uncle Sam.

Her congressman, encouraged by environmentalists, was proposing to reintroduce another predator, the endangered gray wolf, to the park.

Later Lewis would reflect on the irony: Her grandfather helped wipe out the peninsula's native wolf population, and everyone applauded him for it. But her reaction that winter night was more visceral than reasoned. She jumped from her chair. "No!" she shouted at the screen.

It was a cry of defiance against federal authority that has echoed through the Iron Man's family, and across the Olympic Peninsula, for three generations. The wolf is but the most recent flare-up.

A few years ago it was the spotted owl. Now many peninsula people are battling the government's plans to tear down the Elwha River's aging dams. Restrict recreation at Dungeness National Wildlife Refuge. Perhaps create a new marine sanctuary in the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

They're all threats to the peninsula's economy, some say. Or its heritage. Or both.

Such animosity isn't that surprising when you consider the federal government owns most of the peninsula. Nowhere else in Washington has it moved so aggressively to preserve so much.

It began in 1897, exactly a century ago, when President Grover Cleveland signed an order establishing the Olympic Forest Reserve, today's Olympic National Forest. Olympic National Park, five national wildlife refuges and the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary followed.

Those attractions have lured millions of tourists to the Olympic Peninsula. Thousands have returned to stay.

But leaf through any history of the Olympics, and two truths quickly emerge: Outsiders usually led the fights to preserve the peninsula. And the dominant voices on the peninsula usually resisted them.

Seattle environmentalist Carsten Lien is a student of peninsula history. "None of the things that happened on the Olympic Peninsula would have happened if the local people had not been defeated," he says.

People like the Iron Man and his kin.

JOHN HUELSDONK came to the Hoh in 1892 to clear the virgin forest, build a home and tame the wilderness. The federal government approved of such dreams, even encouraged them.

Five years later the government shifted gears on him.

For most of the 19th century the government, intent on civilizing the Wild West, did everything possible to rid itself of its vast holdings. Any homesteader who cleared and cultivated 160 acres, for instance, could have it, free.

The nation's values, however, were beginning to shift by the time Huelsdonk homesteaded on the Hoh. The infant conservation movement argued that some land deserved to remain under federal control, its resources husbanded, wilderness cherished rather than subdued.

The Olympic Peninsula - only recently explored, just getting settled - was the last frontier. Nowhere else did so much that was so spectacular remain so wild. The Olympic Forest Reserve that Grover Cleveland proclaimed in 1897 encompassed most of it.

When he came to the Hoh, the Iron Man dreamed of a valley of small farmers wresting a living from the land, together building a community that one day would support enough people who would pay enough taxes to bring civilization to their doors: schools, roads, perhaps railroads.

That dream may have been unrealistic, given the area's geography. Huelsdonk and his descendants never got a chance to find out.

Cleveland's order closed 2.2 million acres to further homesteading. Most settlers within the reserve's borders, weary of the isolation and monsoons, abandoned their claims, convinced that with no hope of more population, roads and civilization never would arrive.

The Iron Man stayed, his dream shattered. He was well past 70 before a road finally found its way to his homestead. Some called him a hermit. It wasn't the life he had planned.

"At a very early age (we) were left without neighbors and playmates," his oldest daughter, Lena, wrote later, "in what was a million acres of wilderness . . . "

PROPRIETORS BOB and Mary Huelsdonk call their place down the Hoh from Marilyn Lewis' home Hoh Humm Ranch. They raise llamas, cattle, sheep and goats here, run a bed-and-breakfast in summer. They're not only husband and wife, but distant cousins: The Iron Man was Mary's grandfather, Bob's uncle.

Bob, a retired electrical engineer, worked for 30 years in Seattle, returning each weekend to the Hoh. He used to tell people he lived on the peninsula, only existed in the city.

Hoh Humm Ranch is a 10-minute drive from Ruby Beach, one of the most scenic spots on the Olympic coast. In 1931, when Highway 101 around the peninsula finally opened, the Iron Man's daughter Elizabeth opened a resort there with her husband, John Fletcher. They built cabins and a dining room, installed a gas pump, stocked some groceries.

Ruby Beach later became part of Olympic National Park's coastal strip. No trace of the resort remains.

John Fletcher shot home movies of the place in its heyday, the 1930s. In 1985, shortly before Fletcher died, Bob Huelsdonk transferred that film onto videotape and sat his aging relative down to narrate it. The resort comes back to life on the Huelsdonks' TV screen; tidy, busy, bright. Tourists fish for perch from the rocks, dip for smelt, boil just-caught crab in a big kettle on a driftwood fire.

Fletcher tells of whales spouting offshore. Glass Japanese fishing floats washing up on the beach. A regular guest they nicknamed Balboa who would stand by the hour looking at the ocean, "as if he had just discovered it."

Mary Huelsdonk's older sister, Elizabeth "Missy" Barlow, an artist, worked summers at the resort as a teenager and college student. Now 76, she, too, still lives on the Hoh. She delivers her own commentary as the tape slides through the VCR.

See that road down to the beach? That's where Barlow learned to drive. Those curtains in the resort's dining room? They still hang in her studio at home.

Bob Huelsdonk turns off the tape. "They were heartbroken when they lost the place," he says.

"I'm still mad," Barlow adds. "It's only been 57 years."

In 1940, exercising the authority Congress had given him when it established Olympic National Park two years earlier, President Franklin D. Roosevelt increased the park's size by more than one-third. On the advice of his interior secretary, Harold Ickes, FDR added the rain forests of the Bogachiel, Quinault and Hoh. The timber industry and its peninsula allies would spend the next 30 years trying to remove them.

Roosevelt also ordered the Interior Department to acquire a corridor down the Queets River from the mountains to the sea, plus a long strip along the Pacific shore including Ruby Beach.

Unlike the rain forests, most of the strip was private land, owned by settlers or timber companies. Some sold their property to the government willingly. Others fought, led by John Fletcher.

The aged Iron Man himself traveled to Olympia for a rally in support of his daughter, son-in-law and other landowners. "This isn't Russia," his sign read. "Sec. Ickes has no right to take our homes away from us."

His protest had little effect. The government condemned Ruby Beach Resort. Eventually, Barlow and the Huelsdonks say, the Fletchers tired of the legal battle and took the government's money, finally moving to the Iron Man's homestead up the Hoh.

Ruby Beach has reverted to nature. The coastal strip, the longest stretch of wilderness shoreline in the continental United States, is among the park's jewels.

Such protection came at a price, however, a legacy of hostility that some descendants of the Iron Man and other pioneers continue to spread across the peninsula. "The newcomers, we always indoctrinate 'em," says Mary Huelsdonk.

Park rangers? "They have pointy hats and pointy heads," she says.

Barlow read a few weeks ago that Harold Ickes' son, until recently a top aide to President Clinton, was under investigation for possible campaign-finance irregularities. "It kind of tickled me," she confesses.

Suspicion greets every government plan that surfaces on the peninsula, says Bob Huelsdonk - even the good ones. He's sympathetic, for instance, to a federally funded draft plan for the Highway 101 corridor and thinks it may provide the momentum and money for a new visitor center where 101 intersects the Hoh River Road.

Some say the plan may limit logging in sight of the highway, perhaps even dictate what color people paint their houses. Huelsdonk says those concerns are based on half-truths and misunderstandings.

But he also says he can understand where such fears originate. "The people over here have been burned a few times," he says. "They're always waiting for the other shoe to fall."

WHEN PAUL CRAWFORD joined the staff at Olympic National Park 25 years ago, park veterans advised him to watch his back when he wore his uniform, especially in Forks, the timber town north of the Hoh. One memento of those years adorns the bulletin board in Crawford's Port Angeles office: a small park-boundary sign, riddled with bullet holes. "I keep that up there to keep me humble," he says.

But Crawford says he never experienced any hostility personally. Then, as now, he says, lots of people on the peninsula liked the park - if not its policies, at least its people.

He suspects their numbers are growing. Crawford remembers when the first park naturalist assigned to Forks, in the early 1980s, struck up a casual conversation in a bar. He mentioned he worked for the park and promptly got decked.

A park ranger now serves on the Forks school board. It may be one sign of changing times and changing attitudes.

That doesn't mean that distrust and resentment of the federal government have disappeared. They remain palpable and politically potent forces on the peninsula. The sons and daughters of pioneers have found new allies among newcomers who moved to the last frontier in hopes of escaping big government.

Martha Ireland, who chairs the Clallam County board of commissioners, arrived just eight years ago. She argues that the Olympic Peninsula's economy and environment both would be better off if the federal government didn't own an acre. She talks of appraising all the county's federal lands and sending the government a tax bill, "just to make a point."

George Rains, one of Clallam County's largest landowners, buys occasional full-page newspaper ads that contend each government move, past and present, is part of a grand conspiracy to take over the entire peninsula, turn it all into a park and throw its residents out.

But people are flocking to the peninsula, not moving away from it; the population of Clallam and Jefferson counties grew nearly 20 percent in just the past six years.

Some of those newcomers came partly for the scenery and recreational opportunities the federal government protects. They know little of the peninsula's historic battles with Uncle Sam. The Port Angeles newspaper conducted man-in-the-street interviews on wolf reintroduction a few weeks ago. To Marilyn Lewis' dismay, just one person in six objected to the idea.

Timber, source of much of the friction between the government and local people, no longer dominates the peninsula economy as it once did. Some veterans of the spotted-owl wars in Forks say many loggers and mill workers have left, their places in the community taken by workers at nearby state prisons.

Clallam County's economic-development director says the national forest and national park are among the area's greatest assets, drawing cards for new business.

Tourism is one of the peninsula's economic mainstays. "Obviously, our No. 1 draw is Olympic National Park," says Diane Schostak, director of the Forks Chamber of Commerce.

She is yet another descendant of the Iron Man of the Hoh, a great-granddaughter, one generation removed from Lewis, Missy Barlow and Mary Huelsdonk. Like them, Schostak spent her first years on the Hoh. So did her husband, Ken, a corrections officer at the state prison in Clallam Bay.

Schostak has heard the stories from her relatives about Ruby Beach Resort, about the family's battles with the government. They don't resonate as deeply with her. "I respect what they went through," Schostak says, "but the urgency is removed. It's not us that's threatened."

Changing federal policies did disrupt her life a few years ago, when the spotted owl reduced timber sales on the Olympic National Forest to a trickle. Ken's logging business shut down.

Those were tough times, Diane remembers, but she doesn't blame the government. The Forest Service was simply responding to shifting public opinion, she says; the timber industry didn't do a very good job explaining itself.

Schostak does wish the federal agencies would do more to help promote Forks-area tourism enterprises. And she shares Marilyn Lewis's concern about wolves, worries they may scare tourists away.

But she doesn't resent the Park Service and Forest Service people in Forks. They're part of the community, she says. The wife of the district ranger, the town's top Forest Service official, teaches her children karate. "People adapt and survive," Schostak says, "and learn to get along."

Marilyn Lewis, too, says she gets along fine with the federal workers she knows. The rangers at the Hoh rain forest have keys to her ranch. She says the park helped her and other landowners when floods washed out the Hoh River Road two winters ago.

Lewis even spent five years in the 1980s on the park payroll, cleaning up the Hoh campground. Her extended family nearly disowned her, she remembers.

But she says she didn't betray her heritage, didn't betray the Iron Man. Occasionally, when some unsuspecting camper complained about the clear cuts he had driven through to reach the park, Lewis would let him have it.

She'd ask him if he knew the film in his camera was made from wood. She'd tell him clear cuts, and the people who create them, aren't really all that bad.

Eric Pryne is a reporter for The Seattle Times. Harley Soltes is Pacific's photographer.