William Heritage was born August 27, 1888 at Campbell, Dakota Territory (later South Dakota) to John Wesley Dewees Heritage (1862-1946) and his wife Josephine (Minster) Heritage (d.1938). The family later lived on a rented farm near Perlee, Iowa and in 1902 settled on a claim near Ray, Minnesota, in Koochiching County.
Heritage attended the Columbia School of Drafting in Washington, D.C., where he studied to become a topographic draftsman. He estimated timber (1908-1910) for the E.A. Engler Lumber Company (Baudette, Minn.), and later worked for the firm as a cruiser-walking boss (1917-1918). From 1910 to 1917 he worked for the U.S. Forest Service as a district forest ranger in the Superior National Forest at Ely, Minnesota.
From 1918 until his retirement in 1958 Heritage worked for the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), where he was involved with logging and the management of forests on Indian reservations. He began as a timber cruiser (1918-1919) at the Bad River Indian Reservation (Ashland, Wisconsin), and held various positions at the Red Lake (Red Lake, Minnesota) (1919-1921), Flathead (Dixon, Montana, 1921-1925), and Warm Springs (Warm Springs, Oregon, 1925-1927) reservations. From 1927 to 1929 he worked at Albuquerque, New Mexico and at the Menominee reservation in Wisconsin. Around 1929 Heritage was moved to the BIA office in Minneapolis, where he worked as a logging engineer (1929-1938) and held the positions of regional forester (1938-1946, 1948-1950) and district forester (1946-1948). Occasionally he was given special assignments in such places as Tennessee and Arizona. Heritage served as area forester from 1950 until 1958.
From the guide to the William Heritage papers., 1879-1962., (Minnesota Historical Society)
