T.H. Watkins; Historian Had Conservationist Views

T.H. Watkins, a conservationist and historian whose best known works examined the Great Depression and the life of New Dealer Harold L. Ickes, died of cancer Wednesday in Bozeman, Mont. He was 63.

Watkins, the Wallace Stegner Distinguished Professor of Western American Studies at Montana State University, was the author of more than 20 books. His “Righteous Pilgrim: The Life and Times of Harold L. Ickes, 1874-1952” was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the 1991 Los Angeles Times book prize for biography.

Born in Loma Linda in 1936, Watkins worked his way through the University of Redlands bundling newspapers at night. After earning his bachelor’s degree in 1958, he moved to San Francisco, where he worked in the mail room of the San Francisco Chronicle and wrote what he described as several unpublishable novels.

He eventually enrolled in graduate history studies at San Francisco State University, where a professor recruited him to write for American West magazine. He soon dropped out of school to become the magazine’s managing editor.

There he met the man who would become his greatest influence, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Wallace Stegner, then American West’s editor in chief. Stegner, who once praised Watkins’ “attractively cavalier way with the solemnities of objective history,” became Watkins’ mentor and friend.

“I loved Wally as much as I’ve loved any human being,” Watkins said after Stegner’s death following a car crash in 1993. “I miss him more than I can say.”

Among Watkins’ first books were four in a series published by American West on such topics as gold and silver mining and the history of the Mississippi and Colorado rivers.

Much of his writing offered a conservationist viewpoint, intermingling history, geography, biology and personal memories of once pristine areas. Notable examples of this approach were his “On the Shore of the Sundown Sea,” a 1973 Sierra Club book about the California coast, and “Time’s Island: The California Desert,” published in 1989.

“In his writings he was as much a conservationist as a historian--pretty much like his hero, Wally Stegner,” said John G. Mitchell, senior assistant editor of National Geographic magazine, who knew Watkins for three decades.

He had a particular love for Southern Utah’s canyon country, which he called “the very home of my heart.” Mitchell said his writing drew attention to Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante, which President Clinton declared a national monument in 1996.

Watkins’ interest in Ickes began in 1983 when he was asked by Audubon magazine to write an article comparing the New Dealer with James Watt, who was the secretary of the interior during the first Reagan administration. Ickes, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s forceful secretary of the interior, bucked fierce opposition to double the size of the national parks system. He also shepherded the creation of the Bureau of Land Management to supervise the nation’s public range lands.

Arthur Schlesinger, writing in the New York Review of Books, said that Watkins’ 1,000-page biography “brings to his subject not only thorough scholarship, critical detachment, and affectionate understanding, but the expertise of a professional conservationist.”

He also was the author of “The Great Depression: America in the 1930s,” a companion book to the 1993 PBS documentary series of the same name produced by Blackside Inc., the Boston-based film company that created the acclaimed “Eyes on the Prize” series about the civil rights movement.

Last year he published “The Hungry Years: A Narrative of the Great Depression,” which combined oral history, memoirs and autobiographies of the famous and the obscure for an intimate look at the 1930s. Although some reviewers found its interpretation of the period weak, they praised Watkins’ prose, which the New York Times’ Michael Kazin said “has the intensity and warmth of a photo by Dorothea Lange or a novel by John Steinbeck.”

Watkins, who once described writing as an enormous “compulsion,” wrote most of his books while working on magazines. Before his 15-year stint as editor of Wilderness, he was a senior editor at American Heritage in New York. He worked as an editor at American West during the 1960s and early 1970s.

He is survived by his wife, Joan; a daughter, Lisa Pless, of Pinole, Calif.; a son, Kevin, of Beaverton, Ore; his father, Thomas F. Watkins, of Yucaipa, Calif.; two sisters; three brothers; and four grandchildren.