The National Park Service

William Everhart

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367309695
• eBook ISBN: 9781000303742
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Relazioni internazionali

Since the first edition of this book was published ten years ago, the U.S. national park system has more than doubled in size, and the National Park Service (NPS) has been subjected to more political manipulation than at any time since the agency was established in 1916. Before 1972, no NPS director had ever been removed for political reasons; sinc

1
The First Parks

Tracing the origin of the national park idea is like nailing jelly to the wall. The author of a recent study of the subject detected certain proclivities toward parks in the Greeks and Romans, not to mention the royal gardens of the Persians, but concluded that the national park concept, with its insistence upon both protection and public use, is a relatively modern invention.

It was the misfortune that blighted Niagara Falls, at one time the most famous and popular tourist attraction in the United States, that convinced a good many people the nation should take steps when one of its scenic marvels was being desecrated. Soon after 1800 the land around the falls began to slip into the hands of tourist promoters. Eventually the rim was almost filled with blocks of dreary and vulgar shops and catchpenny booths. Travelers were hustled and harassed and fleeced. By 1860 there was no point on the U.S. side from which the falls could be seen without paying some sharpie a fee. The commercialization and defacement of Niagara Falls became the country’s first environmental disgrace.

Still missing, as Americans began to voice appreciation for nature and regret at the passing of the frontier, was a sense of purpose. It was supplied in part by acts of national vandalism. In California, frontier entrepreneurs in search of quick profits stripped the bark from a giant sequoia, exhibiting the reassembled specimen in eastern cities and, in 1854, at the Crystal Palace in London. There, ironically, disbelieving spectators accustomed to much smaller trees jeered the display as a fraud. The incident, widely reported in the U.S. press, angered many people who damned the wanton destruction of the 3,000-year-old tree for a shilling a show. The danger to these unique forest giants was reported by Harper’s Weekly, which declared the tree had been cut and peeled “with as much neatness and industry as a troupe of jackals would display in cleaning the bones of a dead lion.”

At the end of the eighteenth century the romantic movement in Europe began to articulate a new attitude toward nature, that it was beautiful and restorative rather than stem and oppressive. Witnessing the effects of industrialism in New England in the early nineteenth century, the conversion of once lovely villages into grimy factory towns, the prophets of transcendentalism, Thoreau and Emerson, found a receptive audience when they preached that a return to nature was the only remedy.

Also influencing the national park movement was the country’s need to establish a national identity. Recognizing that the United States could not match the cultural achievements of the Old World, as manifested in its cathedrals and castles and ancient cities, Americans began to take pride in their own natural monuments, the awesome mountains and canyons of the West that far surpassed the more tranquil scenery of Europe. Landscape painters produced huge spectacular canvases; photographs taken by government surveys appeared in the press. It gave a young nation considerable self-assurance to realize it had something unique to contribute to world culture.

Yet in the mid-nineteenth century there was nothing resembling even an embryonic conservation movement, no organized sentiment for protecting scenic wonders in some systematic fashion, no mention anywhere in the world of setting aside outstanding landscapes as public parks. The prospectors, cattlemen, and lumber operators moving into the virgin lands of the West were followers of manifest destiny, not transcendentalism.

Then in the midst of the Civil War, on June 30, 1864, as Grant launched his Wilderness campaign against Lee, President Abraham Lincoln signed a bill transferring jurisdiction of Yosemite Valley and a grove of giant sequoias to the state of California. Yosemite was an important precursor; the argument is even advanced, mostly by Californians, that it was in fact the first national park. The valley had been discovered in 1851 by a volunteer brigade of soldiers in search of hostile Indians. Although Horace Greeley returned from an 1859 trip proclaiming it to be the most majestic natural feature on earth, the general public was barely aware of Yosemite in 1864. There is no evidence the Yosemite legislation was the result of careful planning or popular support or represented any considerable forethought.

It was in fact more curious than illustrious. The congressman who introduced the legislation explained only that “certain gentlemen in California, gentlemen of fortune, of taste, and of refinement” had suggested the measure. There being no one so churlish as to demand further details, the measure passed Congress without debate. Grants to the states from the federal government were not uncommon at the time, although the stipulation that the lands “shall be held for public use, resort and recreation” was significant and unprecedented. Had the valley remained in the public domain it would undoubtedly have been taken up by those recognizing its future tourist potential, perhaps preempting later national park designation. Even before the valley was ceded to the state, settlers had filed claims and a couple of primitive hotels had been erected.

Yellowstone

One of the spaces in the West that attracted early notice was that mysterious area lying at the headwaters of the Yellowstone River. John Colter, the legendary mountain man, is believed to have been the first white man to see that country during his astonishing 500-mile journey, in winter and alone, through the northern Rockies in 1807. Walled in by mountain ranges and far from the major travel routes, Yellowstone was inaccessible, which partially explains why it remained a shadowy province for so long. Fur trappers passed through Yellowstone almost every year, but they were a special breed, not much given to writing things down.

They regarded story telling as a form of camp fire entertainment, constantly embellishing favorite tales of deeds they had performed and sights they had seen. Jim Bridger was a master of this frontier drama, but his recitals only strengthened general disbelief among sober citizens as to the existence of a land where the earth shook and smoked from subterranean fires and exploding waterspouts. (Not to mention mountains of glass and petrified birds sitting on petrified trees singing petrified songs!)

Prospectors wandering through the Yellowstone country in the 1860s brought back reports, mostly hearsay, that excited the citizens of Montana Territory. There were several unsuccessful attempts to obtain more reliable information (one returning explorer told a welcoming committee “he was unwilling to risk his reputation for veracity by a full recital, in the presence of strangers, of the wonders he had seen”). Then, in 1870, a full-scale expedition was organized.

With packers, cooks, forty horses and mules, a dog named Booby, and rations for thirty days, the company of some twenty gentlemen-adventurers (mustered from the local business community plus a few townsmen temporarily between jobs) rode out from Helena in late August. It was under the command of Civil War general and former congressman Henry D. Washburn, the surveyor-general of the territory, who had arrived in Montana on a wagon train and heard tales of Yellowstone from Jim Bridger. A small cavalry detachment, under Lt. Gustavus C. Doane, guarded the civilian explorers against the unpredictable tendencies of the Crow and Blackfeet.

A nine-day ride brought the party to the boundary of the present park. Yellowstone, they discovered, was a wonderland surpassing their most optimistic hopes, and they spent a month marveling at the curiosities: geysers and hot springs, waterfalls and canyons. Accounts written by several of the explorers bordered on the rhapsodic:

I can scarcely realize that in the unbroken solitude of this majestic range of rocks, away from civilization and almost inaccessible to human approach, the Almighty has placed so many of the most wonderful and magnificent objects of His creation, and that I am to be one of the few first to bring them to the notice of the world.

One of the most memorable experiences for the party, as for most Yellowstone visitors since, took place almost at the end of the journey. As the horsemen rode along the Firehole River, they abruptly came out of a dense lodgepole pine forest. Only a few hundred yards away, in an open basin marked by rising clouds of vapor, a column of steam and water was shooting more than 100 feet into the sky. Displaying impeccable timing, the geyser that the party named “Old Faithful” emerged from fable to become the symbol of Yellowstone.

Returning expedition members wrote articles about their adventures, which were widely reported. Denver’s Rocky Mountain News headed the Washburn story a “Mountain Romance,” suggesting it might tax a reader’s credulity, but the New York Times called its account “unpretentious eloquence.” The publicity prompted the Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories to send a party of scientists to Yellowstone the following summer. Included in the party were the pioneer photographer William Jackson and the artist Thomas Moran, whose pictures and sketches went on display in the nation’s Capitol (Moran’s most famous painting, “The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone,” was promptly purchased by Congress and hung in the Senate lobby). Lt. Doane’s official report contained a prediction: “As a country for sightseers, it is without parallel; as a field for scientific research, it promises great results; in the branches of geology, mineralogy, botany, zoology, and ornithology, it is probably the greatest laboratory that nature furnishes on the surface of the globe.”

On March 1, 1872, President Ulysses S. Grant signed the act establishing Yellowstone National Park, setting aside 2 million acres “as a public park or pleasuring ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.” Reserving so large an expanse—larger than the two eastern states of Rhode Island and Delaware combined—with all of its potential wealth of water power, timber, and grazing lands barred from private use was so dramatic a departure from the public land policy of Congress that in retrospect it almost seems to smack of the miraculous.

The explanation is probably not all that complex. The public domain still seemed endless, no commercial interests were immediately threatened, and creating the preserve cost the government nothing. Agitation for the park came from a handful of enthusiasts, members of the several Yellowstone explorations, and a few individuals in Congress, including the far-sighted senator who warned that if Yellowstone were not protected some chiseler would “plant himself right across the only path that leads to these wonders, and charge every man that passes along between the gorges of these mountains a fee of a dollar or five dollars.” Yellowstone was the work of a relatively small group of activists and Congressmen, supported by publishers and conservationists. The pattern hasn’t changed much since 1872.

Yellowstone’s early history was unpromising. Believing the park should somehow be self-supporting, Congress provided no appropriations, and the superintendent served without salary or staff. The purpose of the park was clearly defined by the enabling act, but the legislation did not include any legal means for protecting features or wildlife. When his appeals for funds and a set of regulations were ignored, the superintendent went back to his duties as a bank examiner in Minnesota.

Traveling through Yellowstone in 1875, the secretary of War found that poachers were roaming freely. With elk hides bringing six dollars, more than 4,000 animals had been slaughtered the previous winter, their antlers scattered along every hillside and meadow. The report of another military expedition the same year indicates vandalism in a national park is not a modern phenomenon. People who had made the difficult journey to Yellowstone were writing their names in the pools and chopping and hacking off ornamental work from the formations. Just in time, a woman was diverted as she was about to bring her ax down on the tip of a geyser cone. Few geyser formations escaped some multilation. Everyone who visited the park agreed that it could not survive unless someone was given authority to stop the devastation.

On the evening of August 17, 1886, Troop M, First United States Cavalry, jogged into Yellowstone, relieving the civilian superintendent of his duties. Orders were promptly issued—and enforced—against defacing or removing curiosities, hunting or trapping, commercial fishing, or stock grazing. Although Congress had been unwilling to provide funds to the secretary of the Interior, it now supported the military administration. For the next thirty years the army was responsible for Yellowstone. The Corps of Engineers was in charge of developments, including the construction of a road system. The thesis of a book entitled How the U.S. Cavalry Saved Our National Parks (army management was also extended to other parks) may be slightly overblown, but the military supplied effective control of the parks at a critical time, earning a well-deserved tribute from John Muir: “Blessings on Uncle Sam’s soldiers. They have done the job well, and every pine tree is waving its arms for joy.”

The Beginnings of Conservation

Born in Scotland, Muir arrived in Yosemite in 1868. It was to become his personal sanctuary, and until his death in 1914 he was “great Nature’s priest,” the first of the conservation prophets, an explorer, advocate, and writer. Because the original Yosemite grant included only a few thousand acres, Muir led the fight to set aside a much larger area of the Sierra range, his beloved “mountains of light,” and in 1890 Congress established a Yosemite park nearly the size of Yellowstone.

Congressional action next shifted to preservation of the giant sequoias. Logging of the great redwoods by hack and slash methods, typical of the callous disregard of the public interest during the period, had almost wiped out the accessible groves. Much of the destruction, in the words of the secretary of the Interior, was “useless, wasteful, lamentable.” The wood of the giant sequoia (as opposed to that of the coastal redwood) is so brittle as to have only minimal commercial value. Much of the wood was lost when the giant trees were brought crashing down.

In the Converse Basin, one of the largest of all the giant sequoia groves, it is estimated that fewer than one half, probably only one third, of the trees that were felled ever reached the mills. Once as splendid as the Giant Forest in Sequoia National Park, the grove was completely gutted, with many of the trees left behind after they were blasted with gunpowder, sawed apart, and burned over. Perhaps the crew foreman had one final twinge of conscience; he left a single tree standing, named for himself, measuring more than 100 feet in circumference. Sequoia and General Grant (later part of Kings Canyon) National Parks, both created to protect the giant sequoias, were authorized in 1890.

In the early 1890s Congress did make an important distinction between national parks and national forests. The Forestry Reserve Act of 1891, consisting of only a few lines added to an omnibus public land bill, was one of the most far-reaching conservation measures ever enacted. It gave the president unilateral authority to establish national forests from the public domain; no congressional approval was required. This was a significant advantage, for each national park has required a separate act of Congress, dictating that parks would come along slowly. Before this executive authority was abolished by Congress in 1907, four presidents set aside 175 million acres of national forest lands, considerably more than twice the acreage of the present national park system, even including the recently established Alaskan parks.

The original park idea was considerably stimulated in 1906 by legislation that indicated there could be other than scenic values in the parks. Beginning in the 1880s, many people were outraged by the widespread looting of the cliff dwellings and pueblo ruins of the Southwest, the remains of a civilization the Indians had abandoned—for reasons not yet clearly understood—about a.d. 1300. Discovered by cowboys, army officers, explorers, and, occasionally, ethnologists, the sites were looted to supply the demands of collectors. Major sites now in the park system were plundered and vandalized. Parties of pot hunters camped in Cliff Palace for several winters, blasting down the walls, using ceiling beams for firewood.

Mesa Verde National Park, set aside in 1906, established the precedent of historic preservation on the national level. It also gave permanent protection to that matchless tableland 2,000 feet above the surrounding country, broken by deep, winding canyons holding hundreds of cliff ruins, the largest concentration in the Southwest. Photographs by William Jackson, of Yellowstone fame, helped generate public support for the legislation.

The Antiquities Act was passed the same year and proved one of the most far-reaching pieces of park legislation ever enacted. For the first time, protection was given against removing or destroying any historic object or excavating any historic or prehistoric ruin on the public lands. Perhaps of even greater significance, the act empowered the president to declare as national monuments any sites on federal lands containing outstanding historic, scientific, or scenic values.

Before the year was out President Theodore Roosevelt created four national monuments: Devils Tower, Petrified Forest, Montezuma Castle, and El Morro. Between 1906 and 1970, eighty-seven monuments were established by eleven presidents; thirty-six were historical preserves and fifty-one were scientific. The Antiquities Act permitted a president to recognize a significant area as a national monument—which Roosevelt did at Grand Canyon—until Congress could be persuaded to make it a national park. The brief and vague phrase in the Act, “and other objects of historic or scientific interest” was liberally interpreted by the chief executives, perhaps beyond the imaginations of those who wrote the act (and who almost established a maximum limit of 640 acres). Glacier Bay and Katmai National Monuments in Alaska, each nearly 3 million acres, were larger than Yellowstone. And national monuments were proclaimed to preserve caves, forts, canyons, battlefields, pueblos, and the birthplaces of famous men.

As the nation moved into the twentieth century, there were some faint signs of a changing attitude toward natural reserves. The census of 1890 had sounded America’s earliest environmental warning, announcing that for the first time the country no longer had a frontier—a term long synonymous with free land, abundant resources, and prosperity. After nearly 300 years the continent was conquered, but, as some people were beginning to realize, at considerable cost. The finest stands of virgin timber in the East and Midwest had been ravaged by lumber companies whose slogan was “cut and get out.” Hundreds of millions of tons of coal and barrels of oil were being wasted each year by inefficient or reckless methods of extraction.

Theodore Roosevelt, the first president to make conservation a national goal, convened a Conference on Conservation at the White House in 1908 that brought together one of the most distinguished assemblages of national leaders ever gathered, including most of the members of Congress and the Supreme Court and the governors of thirty-four states. The president opened the proceedings with a disturbing declaration: “It seems to me time for the country to take account of its natural resources, and inquire how long they are likely to last.”

His was a lone voice during an era when exploitation of the country’s resources was the watchword and establishment of the early parks was a concession to a minority, rather than an expression of national purpose. The parks w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword
• Prologue: “For the Good of the Service”
• 1 The First Parks
• 2 The New Bureau
• 3 The Organization and Its People
• 4 Park Service Functions and Activities
• 5 Has Success Spoiled the National Parks?
• 6 Threats to the Parks
• 7 Wilderness Management
• 8 The Problem of Concessions
• 9 The Alaskan Park System
• 10 The Politicizing of the Park Service
• 11 Parks Around the World
• 12 A Forecast
• Appendixes:
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Book and Author