Historians have identified many motives for the designation of early national parks. Yellowstone became the first truly national park in 1872 (Congress had designated a Yosemite Park in 1864 and ceded it to the state of California, but since in 1872 the Yellowstone area was in a territory rather than a state, it became a national park by default). The origins of the idea for Yellowstone National Park were for many years attributed to a September 1870 campfire discussion in the soon-to-be park in which a group of idealists pledged to protect the unusual landscape they were exploring. The story was that after visiting the Yellowstone country, members of the Washburn-Langford-Doane Expedition speculated about how they could profit from tourism in the area but then rejected that selfish idea in favor of the land's preservation as a public park. They then took the idea to the world, and soon the world's first national park came to be. While this is an inspiring story of altruism, there is much more to the origin of the national park idea than the story suggests.1
According to Roderick Nash and other historians, there is no evidence that the initial advocates of Yellowstone National Park, whatever their motivations, were primarily interested in preserving wilderness.2 Not that the idea of wilderness preservation was absent in American society in 1870. Voices had been raised for fifty years, among them the artist George Catlin, who had written in 1833 of the Great Plains that these regions “might in future be seen (by some great protecting policy of government) preserved in their pristine beauty and wildness, in a magnificent park.”3 Henry David Thoreau wrote famously of the value of wildness in Walden, arguing, “We need the tonic of wildness.… At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable.… We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.”4 Thoreau in 1858 asked, “Why should not we … have our national preserves … in which the bear and the panther, and some even of the hunter race, may still exist, and not be ‘civilized off the face of the earth.’ … Or shall we, like the villains, grub them all up poaching on our own national domain?”5 Catlin and Thoreau linked wilderness and the idea of park and preserve, but protecting wilderness, of which there was much in 1872, was not prominent among the motives of Yellowstone advocates.
One public-spirited motive for protecting the unique features of the headwaters of the Yellowstone River was to prevent private exploitation of this unique area.6 Truly remarkable natural features like Niagara Falls had, some thought, been damaged and the experience of them cheapened by the exploitation of private entrepreneurs. Six years earlier Yosemite Valley had been given a measure of protection because of fear that it would fall into private hands and that its natural features would be defaced or destroyed by exploitation.7 A measure of high-minded concern for the common good was present in the establishment of Yosemite Park and in the Yellowstone movement as well.8 Other motives at work in creating Yellowstone were profit, as in the mind of Jay Cooke of the Northern Pacific Railroad, and even a search for national identity. Americans found in places like Yosemite and Yellowstone an architecture of landscape that they thought equal to European monuments and sought to promote these landscapes as cultural icons.9 Historian Robert Utley summarizes the motivations of early national park founders, observing that “altruism and materialism warred in the Yellowstone proposal, have warred in virtually every park proposal since, and war more or less regularly in most existing parks.”10
The debate among scholars about what led to the Yosemite and Yellowstone parks reveals the ideas and forces at work in the 1860s and 1870s that brought about emergence of the national park idea. Thoreau's notions about the value of wilderness were present in the discourse of the time, but in the West there was still so much wilderness that preserving it seems not to have occurred to those thinking about Yosemite and Yellowstone. Initially there was little or no linkage between the ideas of national park and wilderness preservation. Soon, however, an articulate transplanted Scot would make the connection.
JOHN MUIR LINKS WILDERNESS AND NATIONAL PARKS
John Muir arrived in the Sierra Nevada of California in 1869. After herding sheep during his first summer there, he returned in 1869 to become a year-round mountain dweller, living mostly in Yosemite Valley until 1873. As he explored, climbed, botanized, and studied the geology of the landscape around him, he reflected long on the qualities of the place and his experience of them. As he tramped the high country, traversed canyons, and climbed mountains, he was increasingly impressed by the wild grandeur he encountered and he fervently embraced the wildness of California's lofty granite mountains.
During his early years in the Sierra—what might be called his “bohemian period”—Muir searched for his personal identity and concluded that he was a mountain man and would devote himself to wilderness. He wrote to his friend Jean Carr in 1874, when he realized that his days of year-round seclusion in Yosemite were coming to an end, that “I am hopelessly and forever a mountaineer … and I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature's loveliness.”11 He decided to interpret and advocate for wilderness, to preach a gospel of nature. After years of self-absorbed exploration of nature and mountains, he would take what he had learned to the world. He would work to protect what wilderness remained. Muir was not leaving Yosemite and wild places for good, though he would spend long periods away from them. A journal entry expresses the insight gained in this phase of his life, now ending, that he was by nature a man of the wilds: “Some plants readily take on the forms and habits of society, but generally speaking soon return to primitive simplicity, and I, too, like a weed of cultivation feel a constant tendency to return to primitive wildness.”12 He might leave the wilderness, but he knew he would return.
Muir married, managed his father-in-law's fruit ranch in California, started a family, and for seven years (1881–88) did not visit the wilderness. Restlessness grew in him, and at the end of this period of self-imposed exile he visited the Cascades of Washington and Mount Shasta in northern California. On this trip he found much wild nature, but he also found that the destruction of wildness he had observed years before in Yosemite was progressing rapidly in many places. He had written essays in the 1870s that won a national audience. At this moment of return to his beloved wilderness, Robert Underwood Johnson, associate editor of the prominent Century magazine, came into Muir's life. Johnson shared his concern about destruction of wild lands, knew the power of Muir's pen, and thought he would be the ideal spokesman for an effort to protect wild nature in places like the Sierra. He sought Muir out and the two made a trip to Yosemite, where they found, as they expected, the valley's “garden wilderness” still under siege. They agreed that an effort to stem the degradation of the place was necessary, and Johnson suggested they begin with a campaign to preserve the federal land around Yosemite Valley. Why not, he proposed, model a reserve here on Yellowstone National Park? They agreed on a plan. If Muir would write two essays for Century about Yosemite and the idea of reserving land around the valley, Johnson would lend editorial support and push the necessary political campaign in Washington, DC, for Yosemite National Park.13
Muir took up his pen, and in “The Treasures of the Yosemite” he made the case for what he called “the range of light.”
And after ten years in the midst of it, rejoicing and wondering, seeing the glorious floods of light that fill it … it still seems to me a range of light. But no terrestrial beauty may endure forever. The glory of wildness has already departed from the great central plain. Its bloom is shed, and so in part is the bloom of the mountains. In Yosemite, even under the protection of the Government all that is perishable is vanishing apace.14
He published “Treasures” in Century in August 1890 and followed it with “Features of the Proposed Yosemite National Park” in September. The essays extolled especially the waters of Yosemite, arguing that “all the fountain regions above Yosemite … should be included in the park to make it a harmonious unit instead of a fragment, great though the fragment be.”15 He described his adventures in this wild and holy place and made it clear that part of what must be saved was wildness, the opportunity to experience raw, powerful, even dangerous nature. Muir biographer Michael Cohen writes of Muir's “Features” essay that “in showing his reader how he discovered himself as a part of the power of the wilderness, Muir presented the strongest possible argument for national parks as wild places where each man could seek, according to his ability, direct, unmediated intercourse with the elemental forces of nature.”16
In “Features” Muir wrote more descriptively of what precisely he thought the boundaries of the proposed park should include. He described a 250-square-mile reservation that was mostly wilderness, beginning this description with the Big Tuolumne Meadows in the northern drainage. This was the more “improved” and accessible part of the proposed park. The second part of the essay described Hetch Hetchy Valley, which, unlike Yosemite Valley, remained wild. Cohen and others have argued that Muir was thinking strategically here: “Thus Muir hoped to save Hetch Hetchy by making it a wild and inaccessible hinterland of a larger, improved park.”17 Yosemite Valley would not be part of the proposed national park (at least in this round of preservation politics; Muir and others would later seek recession of the valley to the federal government and would achieve their goal in 1905 when the valley became part of the national park). The tourist seeking easy access to the improved temple of nature could go to Yosemite Valley. Someone seeking to know the wild would work harder and find it in Hetch Hetchy. Cohen goes on to say that “while he [Muir] realized that there was no such thing as large-scale recreational use and wilderness in the same place, he was willing to sacrifice Yosemite Valley if he could preserve Hetch Hetchy.”18
While Muir was writing, Johnson was carrying out his end of the agreement by organizing the lobbying effort for the park in Washington, DC. He did his work well, and by the time Muir's essays appeared in Century, a bill for Yosemite National Park was well on its way to an October 1 approval. The Yosemite bill was preceded on September 25 by approval of a Sequoia National Park, which, along with a General Grant Park included in the Yosemite legislation, protected magnificent stands of giant sequoia from the axes of loggers. The concept of national park established by the Yellowstone precedent had borne abundant fruit in 1890, and part of the rationale for the new Yosemite National Park was protection of its wildness. John Muir had made wilderness protection a central national park value.
Muir's advocacy of wilderness preservation was not finished with this Yosemite work; he was only beginning. He next argued, unsuccessfully, for a Kings Canyon National Park. He founded the Sierra Club and devoted much of the twenty-four years remaining to him to park and wilderness preservation. Muir came to be called, perhaps unfairly in the eyes of his many allies like Robert Underwood Johnson, the “father” of the national park system. He did not argue only for national parks, also arguing for forest reservations in the 1890s, and he did not advocate any separate designation of wild places as would others later. As Michael Cohen has noted, in the 1890s the distinctions among national park, forest, monument, and wilderness had not been established. In Cohen's words, “These artificial distinctions would be made only as a result of the increasing power and complexity of the bureaucracies which would administer federal funds.”19 In Muir's thinking national parks, and even for a time forest reservations, were the means to protect wilderness.
Muir published Our National Parks in 1901 and in it gave his readers a tour of Yellowstone, Sequoia, General Grant, and, of course, Yosemite national parks. The opening chapter is titled “The Wild Parks and Forest Reservations of the West,” and it begins:
The tendency nowadays to wander in wilderness is delightful to see. Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.20
Later in the book Muir celebrates the wildness of Yosemite, writing that “the Yosemite Park region has escaped the millmen.… it is still in the main a pure wilderness.”21 In 1912, as he approached the end of his life (he was seventy-four that year), Muir wrote to Howard Palmer, secretary of the American Alpine Club, regarding a conference on national parks called in Yosemite by the secretary of the interior. Muir had attended and told Palmer that the principal topic of discussion had been whether automobiles (which he called “blunt-nosed mechanical beetles”) should be allowed into the park. He wrote sarcastically that “a prodigious lot of gaseous commercial eloquence was spent” on this topic. Among all such eloquence, wrote Muir, some spoke “on the highest value of wild parks and places of recreation, Nature's cathedrals, where all may gain inspiration and strength and get nearer to God.”22 The ideal park, in Muir's view, must contain wilderness, and the range of “mechanical beetles” must be strictly limited.
John Muir was a prolific writer who, in his long life, filled sixty journals with his reflections and wrote hundreds of letters, eleven books, and many articles. Sprinkled through forty-six years of writings are hundreds of allusions to the “wild” in nature and the experience of it and to “wilderness.” All Muir biographers document his dedication to wilderness preservation and his linkage of such preservation with national parks. His ideas and example inspired other park advocates. His work was widely read, and he became a national figure in the emergent “conservation” movement. A part of that movement aimed to preserve wild and beautiful places.
THE EVOLVING WILDERNESS IDEA
Roderick Frazier Nash, in his classic Wilderness and the American Mind, has traced how, as Muir traveled the Sierra finding himself and developing his ideas about wilderness, other events were contributing to the idea of national park wilderness. Noting that Congress was not thinking of wilderness preservation when it established Yellowstone National Park, he observes that “gradually later Congresses realized that Yellowstone National Park was not just a collection of natural curiosities but, in fact, a wilderness preserve.”23 A Northern Pacific Railroad proposal to build a branch line into the park in the 1880s was defeated in Congress and the decision was, in Nash's view, a milestone. “Never before had wilderness values withstood such a direct confrontation with civilization.”24
Legislators in the state of New York, convinced that preservation of forests in the Adirondacks was necessary for the long-term welfare of the growing New York community, created a “Forest Reserve” in 1885 and in 1892 made this part of a 3-million-acre state park. A state constitutional convention and public vote stipulated in 1894 that public forests in this park would be kept “forever wild,” and, as Nash notes, while watershed protection for utilitarian purposes was the most powerful motive for this action, nonutilitarian arguments were also important. “The rationale for wilderness preservation was gradually catching up with the ideology of appreciation.”25 This action in New York boosted the conceptual linkage in the minds of preservationists between “park” and “wilderness.” Ed Zahniser recently made the point that New Yorkers were the first to inject into the nature preservation movement the notion that what was needed was to preserve not just forest but “wild forest lands” and not just for a while but “forever.”26
Thus the idea of wilderness preservation was strengthened and given protective power, and the goal of protecting wilderness in perpetuity was added to park making. Not even Muir had argued for the level and nature of wilderness achieved in New York. He perhaps assumed that designation of a national park meant such protection, at least for such wild places as Yosemite's Hetch Hetchy Valley. Even as the Adirondack campaign was unfolding, Muir was advocating that presidents use the new power granted them by Congress in the Forest Reserve Act of 1891 to proclaim forest reserves in the West, believing that this action would protect wilderness. He soon saw the error of this notion as Congress opened the reserves to commercial activity in 1897. Then, in 1914, congressional approval of a dam in Hetch Hetchy demonstrated how wrong Muir had been about the level of wilderness protection national park designation might provide. In the Adirondacks, precedent had been set for a stronger government commitment to wilderness preservation.
Part of the park wilderness story at this stage involves wilderness rhetoric. When a politician like Congressman William McAdoo, in debate over the railroad proposal for Yellowstone National Park, spoke of “sublime solitude” and “virgin regions,” or when John Muir wrote of the “wild” and “wilderness,” were they thinking of wilderness in the modern sense of an area unmodified by human activity? They were indeed thinking of landscapes that they assumed had not been changed by human activity, settings in which people could know a place as God or nature made it. McAdoo spoke of a park like Yellowstone as a place where people could achieve “closer communion with omniscience.”27 Muir used religious references throughout his arguments for wilderness. They perceived wild land, in the West at least, as entirely unmodified by human activity, generally ignoring the quite obvious fact that Native Americans had been or were present in such landscapes. At Yellowstone and Yosemite (and presumably other national parks to come), the nature-changing ways of “civilization” could be excluded, and people could experience “sublime” nature. The absence of human-induced change defined, for these men, the wilderness ideal.28
There is no doubt that the dominant force driving Americans in the West at this time was conquest. The goal was to conquer and use nature, and this involved changing it—killing the wildlife, mining the mountains, and “taming” the land by making it accessible with roads, railroads, and other developments. But this taming usually changed the landscape so much that the experience of the sublime or the “omniscient” was prevented. A person using the rhetoric of “wild” and “wilderness” in the late nineteenth century was indeed thinking of qualities like those of modern wilderness preservationists who still aim to keep loggers, miners, road builders, and other change agents out of the as yet “natural” and wild places.
On the other hand, many who used the term “wilderness” in the nineteenth century were thinking less of untouched places than of scenery and a genteel experience of a more natural setting than that of their daily lives. American travelers might go in search of “divine rapture and terror” found in such places as Yellowstone and Yosemite, but many of them hoped for “the accouterments of tourist travel [that] would allow them to view Yellowstone's spectacular features without trepidation; its sublimity known more than feared.”29 These travelers might speak of the wilderness as they gazed from the windows of a railroad car or a luxury hotel, referring to a “wild” place and their experience of it in a very different sense than would a solitary John Muir wrapped in his blanket in the far reaches of the Sierra. Use of identical words conveyed quite different interpretations of the meaning of “wild” and “wilderness.”
This rhetorical situation is important because, as one looks for evidence that wilderness preservation was on the minds of late-nineteenth-century national park advocates, there is no denying that they often used “wilderness” to describe the goal of their efforts. Attraction to a mythical untouched and sublime nature brought the wilderness traveler like Muir and the more genteel tourist to Yosemite, Yellowstone, and later Mount Rainier, Glacier, Rocky Mountain, and other “nature” parks. All of these visitors embraced an idea of wilderness, but all did not have the same idea. Still, in search of evidence that wilderness was part of the motivation of early national park advocates, one finds that an idea of wilderness protected in national parks was widespread. It was not the only idea, or even the foremost rationale for park making; but, as historian Theodore Catton has noted, it “is misleading to look for a single value at the core of the national park idea” because that core is “more aptly construed as a shifting constellation of value.”30 One value in the constellation was wilderness in its many meanings.
THE DRIVE FOR MORE NATIONAL PARKS
The success of campaigns for national parks in the Sierra inspired similar efforts in other places, with this wilderness rhetoric present in crusades for all of them. The case of Enos Mills in Colorado is an example of how Muir's ideas influenced national park advocacy and how wilderness rhetoric continued to be important. The campaign for Rocky Mountain National Park began in 1908. The area around Estes Park and Longs Peak had, since the early 1890s, become increasingly popular with tourists who came to escape the hot and humid summers of the Midwest and East. Resorts and hotels and private summer cabins appeared. One resident was Enos Mills, an energetic, articulate, and entrepreneurial fellow who had come to Estes Park as a teenager and stayed to become a mountain guide, innkeeper, and ultimately a leading proponent of Rocky Mountain National Park. For many years Mills made his living as a miner each winter and as a guide for tourists in the summer. His mountain travels exposed him to many adventures and misadventures, and he became a storyteller, weaving his tales of wilderness wanderings into lectures and books. His writings (eventually sixteen books and dozens of articles) brought him to prominence. In 1907 he was appointed “Government Lecturer on Forestry,” a job that took him across America lecturing about the wisdom of government management of forests as it was emerging in the new national forest system under the Forest Service.
As he lectured, Mills became increasingly disenchanted with forest reserves that, in 1906, became national forests. He realized, as had other preservationists, John Muir foremost among them, that the forest reserves/ national forests would not offer the protection necessary for preservation of natural landscapes. Mills proposed a national park in 1908 for the Rocky Mountains around Estes Park, and the battle to carve a national park out of forest reserves began. The Rocky Mountain Park, like proposed parks before it at Mount Rainier and Crater Lake, was opposed by people who wanted unfettered development of the natural resources of proposed parklands. These opponents found an ally in the Forest Service. Formed in 1905, this agency had already asserted itself across America's public domain forests, regulating stockmen and timber harvest, building trails and ranger stations, and generally asserting its “gospel of efficiency” and “wise use” philosophy of land management.31 While the Forest Service under its first chief, Gifford Pinchot, had not embraced recreation as one of the multiple uses it focused on in its first years, it would soon do so.32 Pinchot and his Forest Service colleagues thought national parks unnecessary, arguing that they could do a much better job of managing areas of “park” quality as parts of the national forests. There was no national park bureau and no consistent management policy for national parks at this time. Underlying Forest Service opposition was the prospect that a Rocky Mountain National Park would mean a loss of territory for them, because the park would be carved out of national forests. It would go back under the jurisdiction of the Department of the Interior from which it had only recently been transferred when Pinchot and Theodore Roosevelt had succeeded in bringing forest reserves to the Department of Agriculture and placing them under the management of the newly created Forest Service.
To Enos Mills and other park advocates, the Forest Service priorities were wrong. Park advocates sought more protection and less development, or at least a different sort of development, than was likely under Forest Service management. The campaign for Rocky Mountain National Park grew, eliciting support regionally and nationally. The first park bill was introduced into Congress in 1910. Five years of debate, discussion, and compromise followed until, in January 1915, President Wilson signed the bill establishing the park. Enos Mills was disappointed that only one-third of his original park proposal had made it into the park, but he was satisfied, confident that he could add the missing portions later.33
Wilderness preservation was one among many motives cited by Rocky Mountain National Park advocates. Mills knew John Muir and his work, and he embraced Muir's wilderness philosophy. He told the Denver Chamber of Commerce in a 1905 speech that “people are feeling the call of the wild. People want the wild, wild world beautiful. They want the temples of the Gods, bits of the forest primeval, the pure and fern-fringed brooks.”34 There is little doubt that wilderness preservation was a cause close to Mills's heart and one of the goals of his park advocacy. Yet, as his biographer Alexander Drummond notes, Mills's wilderness advocacy was “ambiguous.” He wrote books about wilderness, extolling its virtues. Yet he advocated development in national parks while calling them “wilderness empires … snatched from leveling forces of development.” And, writes Drummond, Mills “could advocate mass visitation, yet assure his readers that parks would remain ‘forever wild, forever mysterious and primeval.’”35
Can this ambiguity be reconciled? Could one both love wilderness, advocate for its preservation in national parks, yet at the same time support development of them? Mills and others at this time did just that, believing that national parks could and must serve both people and wilderness preservation. Wild land would be better protected in national parks than in national forests, in their view, yet parks would need to be accessible. The American people must benefit from them in order to support the parks. Some advocates were not purists and believed that people and wilderness could coexist as long as development did not degrade the values on which the park was founded. They were not troubled by what today might seem contradictory goals. Most were anthropocentric in their thinking. John Muir expressed his conviction that nature had intrinsic value, and even rights, but he did not argue for preservation on these grounds. As Roderick Nash notes, “Muir knew very well that to go before Congress and the public arguing for national parks as places where snakes, redwood trees, beavers, and rocks could exercise their natural rights to life and liberty would be to invite ridicule and weaken the cause he wished to advance.”36 National park advocates like Mills and Muir might extol the virtues of pristine wilderness, but they knew, at this stage of the wilderness idea, that Congress would not set aside any part of the public domain if it remained so wild that people could not gain access to it.
Wilderness was one in an array of park values that fueled the drive for new national parks in the two decades before the National Park Service was created. Wilderness preservation was one among several goals of park preservation, as John Muir made clear in his advocacy. The lands included in early parks were, for the most part, wild and primitive and primeval, unchanged by the hand of “civilized” man. Wildness was in the eye of the beholder, and advocates for wilderness preservation did not notice, or did not think significant, the changes in the land caused by aboriginal people. Nor did they consider diminished wildlife or effects of grazing to have reduced the “primeval” nature of the places they fought to protect. Wild parks would be places where people could find nature as God made it, where the works of loggers and miners and other nature changers would be prohibited. For some they were places where the unique experience of nature unchanged could be realized. For others parks were protected scenery to be enjoyed, economic opportunity to be reaped, objects of scientific interest and curiosity to be preserved. The campaigns for early nature parks were often long and involved many people, ideas, and objectives. Always present in some form, explicit or implicit, was “wilderness,” an idea that meant different things to different people. In this early stage of the national park movement, the idea of wilderness became part of the conception of “national park” and was embedded in the consciousness of the American people.
LINKING NATIONAL PARK AND PRESERVATION
Other forces were at work on the idea of park wilderness during this period. One of them was the forest conservation movement. Since the 1870s, people had tried to protect forests for various reasons. One was that the public's forests were often being stolen. Another was the growing recognition that forests were important to water quality and quantity, which was a key concern for the people of New York in preserving “forever wild” the Adirondack Park. There was uneasiness at the prospect of a “timber famine.” The campaign to conserve forests reached a milestone with the Forest Reserve Act of 1891, which allowed presidents to proclaim forest reserves. Presidents Harrison and Cleveland exercised this new power and set aside over 38 million acres of reserves in the West. Between 1891 and 1897 these reserves were closed to all entry and commercial activity, which infuriated Western business interests and their representatives in Congress. They tried to open the reserves to logging, grazing, and other commercial activities, but Cleveland blocked them. William McKinley, Cleveland's successor as president, supported legislation to suspend forest reserves for a year while commercial interests pursued claims they believed the reserve designation had denied them. When the year was up, the reserves were reinstated but with a difference— resource development and commercial activity were allowed. This change convinced John Muir, and later Enos Mills, that national parks were the vehicle for protecting wild nature.
Gifford Pinchot was all for opening the forest reserves to “wise use,” as he later called the management program his Forest Service implemented on these forest lands. In his view the decision to open forest reserves to management (rather than simply reserve them from entry under land laws on the books) “was and still is the most important Federal Forest legislation ever enacted.”37 Pinchot worked for years to define what this management should be, ultimately setting forest policy and management direction as the first chief of the Forest Service. The importance of this forest conservation story to the history of national park wilderness is that it helped differentiate the national park idea from other “conservation” initiatives. Though it took time for the definitions of national park and forest reserve to become clear, the different roles forest reserves (which became national forests in 1907) and national parks would play in conservation emerged from and were clarified by Pinchot's efforts. Pinchot campaigned for national parks to be returned to Forest Service supervision and to assert his management philosophy in national parks should they remain outside the national forests. The Hetch Hetchy case, in which Pinchot supported a dam on the Tuolumne River in Yosemite National Park, is the most famous case of the latter. During the first fifteen years of the twentieth century, it gradually became clear to those trying to protect naturalness and wildness on public lands that national parks offered a better prospect to achieve these goals than did national forests.
A conception of preservation emerged at this stage of wilderness history that associated national parks with the maximum level of resource protection. Carsten Lien, in his history of timber politics in the Olympic Mountains of Washington State, credits Pinchot with being “the father of the National Park Service.” Pinchot's attacks on national parks, Lien argues, built support for them. People wanted wilderness protected and saw Pinchot's efforts to weaken national parks as a threat to the last bastion of preservation. His support of a dam in Hetch Hetchy Valley brought this threat to national attention. Pinchot inadvertently, according to Lien, “succeeded in creating the political constituency that would create a National Park Service. That constituency would take lands away from the Forest Service continually … and preserve them.”38 When Hetch Hetchy became an issue, the meaning of “national park” was not yet clear. If a dam could be built in such a place, then protection of wilderness there was not likely. Conservationists rallied to protect a wild Hetch Hetchy and lost, which served to strengthen their resolve to find a way to bring national park and wilderness preservation together.
All of this contributed to the definition of “national park” early in the twentieth century, and that definition involved a strong association with preservation of naturalness and wildness as well as beauty and uniqueness. The emerging distinction between national park and national forest in the years from 1897 to 1916 is of critical importance to the story of national park wilderness. When the National Park Service appeared, the association of national park with preservation was clear and taken for granted by many people. As statements by park advocates like Muir and Mills make clear, the goals were to preserve scenery, unique natural features, recreational opportunity, and the wild and primeval character of parks. Eventually the objects of preservation broadened significantly, but at this stage natural features and qualities were principally what were to be protected.
Landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. was a central figure in the drive to create a national park bureau. Writing in 1916 as part of the campaign for this legislation, Olmsted summarized the distinction that had evolved between national park and national forest. He asked why, if both could be used for recreation, there should be separate administrations for each of them.
The National Forests are set apart for economic ends, and their use for recreation is a by-product properly to be secured only in so far as it does not interfere with the economic efficiency of the forest management. The National Parks are set apart primarily in order to preserve to the people for all time the opportunity of a peculiar kind of enjoyment and recreation, not measurable in economic terms and to be obtained only from the remarkable scenery which they contain—scenery of those primeval types which are in most parts of the world vanishing for all eternity before the increased thoroughness of the economic use of the land.39
Olmsted went on to say that whatever economic returns parks might provide were of marginal importance and that the principal goal of a national park was always “preserving essential esthetic qualities of their scenery unimpaired as a heritage to the infinite numbers of the generations to come.”40 He emphasized aesthetics in this but was clear that park scenery was “primeval” and best when “unimpaired.” This quality was an important part of its aesthetic value. The case for a separate administration for national parks was that a different point of view was essential to administer areas in which economic values were secondary to aesthetic values. Scenery defaced by logging, mining, or other economic activity, as seemed likely under Forest Service management, was scenery lost. Landscape preservation was necessary, and a park bureau would be dedicated to that goal. Olmsted was, as his article was published, working on the wording of legislation to create the park bureau. A few months after his article appeared, Congress passed legislation establishing the National Park Service. Olmsted's word “unimpaired” was a core value stated in the service's mandate.
There is irony in the fact that Pinchot's pursuit of his utilitarian goals of forest management may ultimately, as Lien argues, have boosted the national park movement and the later wilderness preservation movement that involved national forests. As wilderness preservation would develop, Pinchot in some ways enabled it as much as did John Muir. While Muir offered eloquent rationales for preserving wilderness values, Pinchot successfully campaigned to allocate public land for forest reserves, portions of which would eventually become national forest (and national park) wilderness. By his aggressive anti–national park (and by association anti-preservation) stance, Pinchot strengthened the resolve of park advocates. He did not intend this, of course, but such was the result. All of this suggests that during the nearly two decades between the Civil Sundry Act of 1897, which opened the forest reserves to use and management, and the National Park Service Act of 1916, the preservationist nature of “national park” became more clear in the minds of the American people. In virtually all discussions of national parks, as in that by Olmsted above, a quality of the place to be protected involved its primeval and wild character. Preservation of this character became an integral part of the mission of those advocating and caring for national parks.
THE DRIVE FOR A NATIONAL PARK BUREAU
From the moment Gifford Pinchot arrived at the Department of Agriculture to head the Division of Forestry, one of his goals was to transfer the public forests (including the national parks) to his bureau. President Roosevelt and his interior secretary supported this ambition, but conservationists interested in preserving the “primeval” character of parks gradually understood that Pinchot meant to manage all forests for development. They sought a separate bureau that would have a preservation mandate.41 Representative John Lacy introduced legislation as early as 1900 to create a bureau to manage national parks. Similar legislation was introduced in 1902 and 1905 but went nowhere, largely because of Pinchot's opposition.42 Lacy, in turn, from his power position as chair of the House Public Lands Committee, thwarted Pinchot's efforts to transfer national parks to his domain in 1906 and 1907.
National park supporters campaigned for a park bureau to block Pinchot's ambitions, but they also did so because national parks needed more attention and consistent management. No full-time staff attended to park affairs in Washington. There was little funding for any of the parks. The U.S. Army administered some of them, and others were overseen by people with various backgrounds and agendas. The aggressive forest lobby led by Pinchot accused park advocates like Muir and J. Horace McFarland, leader of the influential American Civic Association, of peddling “sentimental nonsense” in the advocacy of scenic and wilderness preservation.43 With the advent of the Forest Service and the polarization of the conservation movement by the Hetch Hetchy controversy into the “wise-use” versus “nature-loving” factions, the drive for a park bureau intensified.
McFarland led the campaign and garnered powerful support for the park bureau proposal after Roosevelt left office and Pinchot was fired by his successor, William Howard Taft. Both the Taft administration and its successor, the Wilson administration, supported the park bureau idea, and Wilson's interior secretary, Franklin Lane, appointed Adolph Miller to oversee national park administration. Miller, a Californian like Lane, brought a young assistant named Horace Albright with him, and in 1915 Stephen Mather was recruited and replaced Miller. With Albright's help, Mather stepped up the campaign to promote the parks and create a national parks bureau. Legislation creating the National Park Service was passed in 1916.
Three national park conferences were convened during the campaign for a park bureau: one in 1911, another in 1912, and a third in 1915. The thrust of these meetings, which convened many national park stakeholders, was to define what the proposed park bureau should do. The first conference, at Yellowstone, focused on parks as tourist destinations and the development that would be necessary to attract tourists to them. While railroad interests dominated the Yellowstone conference, the 1912 meeting convened at Yosemite was a forum to discuss the prospect of the automobile in the national parks. Should it be let in? The head ranger at Sequoia, Walter Fry, commented that “the American people, in my opinion, have outgrown the stagecoach habit, and the automobile is a factor that will have to be recognized.… I strongly advise that its admission be encouraged.”44 The Sierra Club representative, William Colby, stated that “we think the automobile adds a great zest to travel and we are principally interested in the increase of travel to these parks.”45 The arrival of the automobile in national parks seemed inevitable, and those present at Yosemite saw both challenge and opportunity.
Mather called the third conference, which he hosted in Berkeley, California. He wanted to learn as much as possible about the problems with park administration as part of his campaign for a park bureau. He saw from the start what would be necessary to improve administration of the parks, and that was money. This would come only with park visitation. According to Albright, Mather “believed that Congress had the cart before the horse, that it wouldn't appropriate money until proof was furnished that the parks were being used. Yet with no roads, trails, or other facilities, the parks couldn't be used. The only way to get ahead was to show that people were actually using the parks.”46 All of these conferences concluded that national parks, whatever their values, needed better management and more access. The principal charges to a new park bureau would be to address these challenges.
Preserving wilderness was not on the agenda at these meetings. The problem was, in the thinking of most in attendance, that the national parks were too wild in the sense that the facilities necessary for the American people to access and enjoy their parks were inadequate. Perhaps reflecting this reality, the language of the legislation creating the National Park Service did not explicitly mention wilderness. Reflecting on this in one of his memoirs, Horace Albright mentions the absence of any overt policy statement about wilderness in the National Park Service Act (which he calls the “Organic Act”). He writes that “we didn't specifically state policy about wilderness at this time because we concluded it was understood. Every previous act demanded that the parks be preserved in their natural state. Their natural state was wilderness.”47 Though Albright may have been reacting in hindsight in the 1980s, when the Park Service had become a major player in wilderness management, to questions raised about lack of specific wilderness preservation language in the act, there is no reason to doubt his account. Even wilderness advocates like Muir and Colby said little about wilderness in their speeches and writings in the park bureau campaign, perhaps assuming (as Muir had earlier in his support of forest reserves) that the presence of wilderness as a park value would be protected. The goal was a government bureau to help preserve the parks in the face of attacks on them by utilitarian conservationists like Pinchot and his followers. The goal was also to build public support for the parks, and that support would depend on the ability of people to visit them. Paradoxically, this would require development, and everyone, even the hard-core preservationists, recognized this.
Albright wrote that conservationists like McFarland, Colby, Mather, and himself lived in a time when the general philosophy toward resources was “use.” “No use of resources, no change in the general state of national park areas,” he wrote. The automobile was changing the nature of travel and would affect the future of national parks and wilderness. If a park bureau was to be of any significance it would need public support, and that support would depend upon visitation. If roads were necessary for visitation, then roads would be built. According to Albright, roads were accepted as essential to help people “enjoy the outstanding, easy-to-visit features of a park while leaving most areas in wilderness.”48 Wilderness was an assumed national park value that would not be served by adherence to a pure doctrine of preservation.
Historians have argued about when wilderness preservation entered into thinking about national parks. The record indicates that this goal became primary when John Muir began his national park advocacy. Looking back from the twenty-first century when the category “wilderness” is a defined public land unit and the concept “wilderness” is an idea honed by a century of debate and experience, one sees that the wilderness concept was not as clear back in the days of Muir, Pinchot, the Adirondack Park, and the early clash of ideologies between national forest and national park advocates. Nonetheless, there is evidence to support the claim that the idea of wilderness and the goal of its preservation were foundational elements of the national park movement. As forest conservation developed power as a political movement, driven by strongly utilitarian ideas about wise use and long-term resource development, the conviction grew in the minds of Muir, Mills, and others that national parks would provide the greatest protection of wild, primeval nature. Since many of the resources to be preserved in national parks—scenery, unique natural features, opportunity for adventure and recreation—depended upon maintaining this primeval and wild character of landscapes, the park and wilderness preservation goals came together. Thus in the mid-1910s, when the National Park Service Act was drafted, its architects tried to incorporate the reality that parks must be used with the goal that wilderness values must be protected.