3   WILDERNESS BECOMES AN ISSUE FOR THE PARK SERVICE

As the 1920s began, the United States entered a period of prosperity and change. The postwar economy began to heat up. Automobiles became more common, and road-building projects to accommodate them were under way all across the nation. People took to the roads as tourists and outdoor recreationists on an unprecedented scale. They sought out the national parks and, increasingly, national forests for their outings. For many Americans, these were good times. The world war with its restriction of domestic resources was past, and the economy was growing into its “roaring twenties” period of boom prosperity for many. As people's economic fortunes improved, they bought automobiles. Urbanization had been increasing rapidly for decades, and many city dwellers headed into the countryside for relief from the growing stresses of urban life. If a national park or forest was within range, they went there.

Stephen Mather had recovered from his illness and was vigorously leading the National Park Service. His 1920 Annual Report revealed that national park visitation was rising substantially with each year, passing 1 million in 1920.1 He was improving the staffing and professionalism of the Park Service, but the agency's growth was not keeping up with increasing demands upon it. Even as he noted the rate of growth and the strain on staff, he called for more park promotion to sustain the increase in visitors and more development to accommodate this visitation. More roads, hotels, camps, and transportation facilities needed to be constructed. A “touring division” needed to be set up to work with the travel industry to meet increasing demand upon national parks and monuments. This 1920 report reiterated Mather's long-held goals: raise the consciousness of the American people about their national park system and its value; do so by encouraging them to visit the parks (where they would find facilities inadequate and demand better ones); translate the increasing numbers and appreciation into a rationale for a bigger national park system and a stronger National Park Service.2

Mather had much work to do. New parks in Alaska and Hawaii needed to be set up. No money had been appropriated for national monuments, protection of which was minimal, and archaeological treasures were quickly disappearing from monuments in the Southwest. Proposals were floating in Congress for irrigation projects in Yellowstone National Park, and the Federal Power Act of 1920 created a commission with power to authorize water development on public lands, including parks. Prospects for expanding the national park system were ripe in the Tetons and at Sequoia National Park. He had to mount park promotion, protection, and expansion schemes simultaneously.

Expansion of the national park system had in the past and would in the future come at the expense of the Forest Service, and the conflict between the two agencies continued. In his annual reports Mather seems to have been putting the Forest Service on notice that the Park Service coveted lands in the northern Rockies and Sierra that were in national forests. Chief Graves resigned and was replaced in April 1920 by forty-one-year-old William B. Greeley, a clever administrator and bureaucrat who had been with the agency since 1904. Greeley would prove to be a strong leader and crafty adversary of Mather and the Park Service as they wrestled over issues involving outdoor recreation and national park system expansion.

A national election also brought change in 1920 as the Republican Party returned to power with the administration of Warren G. Harding. Mather worried that the new administration, which held a very different view of conservation than the Wilson administration or its progressive Republican predecessors, would replace him and other Park Service leaders. At the least he expected change in policy that would be less supportive of national parks and the Park Service. Harding had no interest in conservation and believed the government should interfere in business and individual enterprise as little as possible.³

National park friends lobbied to keep Mather in place and to continue development of the Park Service, and they were successful. Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall, a former senator from New Mexico with strong leanings toward resource development (as was true in general of the Harding and subsequent Coolidge administrations), was surprisingly supportive of Mather and his agenda. As Mather wryly observed, there were “certain conspicuous holes in Fall's philosophy of land use” that would cause problems for the Park Service, but the momentum of its programs was not slowed.4 The 1920s would prove a challenging decade for conservation because of political support for unfettered private enterprise, reduced government regulation, a policy favoring states’ rights and state responsibility over federal activism, and an emphasis on individual rather than government action. Yet much was accomplished as “the conservation bureaus carried on unobtrusively and, in general, effectively.”⁵ Mather and the Park Service flourished during this period. He was a businessman, comfortable with the realities of limited government support for expansion of the park system. Always entrepreneurial, generous with his personal fortune when it came to the parks, and successful in interesting philanthropists in his cause, he forged ahead.

A NEW CONCEPT OF WILDERNESS EMERGES

While Mather and Albright worked to get the Park Service firmly established, forester and nascent ecologist Aldo Leopold began thinking about wilderness in ways that would change the course of national park history. Leopold was, of course, with the Forest Service at this time, and one of his first assignments was to visit and report on recreation conditions at the Forest Service's Grand Canyon National Monument. He and his partner in this investigation documented many problems resulting from increasing tourist use of the monument. They recommended that growing conflict between scenic appreciation and satisfaction of visitor desires for convenience be addressed through regulation, zoning, and establishment of clear business standards. The importance of this experience for Leopold was that he came to appreciate the growing challenges posed by commercial tourism to the West's public land and to land managers like the Forest Service.⁶

The pressure to make recreation a recognized use of national forest land was growing. The Forest Service was engaged in its internal debate about how to do this while attending to its other priorities. One response to Frank Waugh's recommendation on this challenge, which was to consider some parts of the national forests as primarily useful for recreation, was to bring in a landscape architect to plan how this recreation service might be provided. Arthur Carhart was hired and one of his assignments was to lay out sites for summer homes around Trapper Lake in Colorado's White River National Forest. He was to plan a road around this lake, but Carhart was struck by the beauty of the place and concluded that the best use of the lake would be to preserve its exceptional scenery. Carhart's supervisor agreed with this recommendation.

In December 1919 Aldo Leopold met Arthur Carhart, and the two men discussed what Carhart had achieved at Trapper Lake and how a policy to preserve similar pristine places might be achieved in other national forest areas. Carhart later sent some of his ideas about preservation in the national forests to Leopold, who continued to think about recreation and preservation. Carhart soon left the Forest Service, and Leopold published an article in 1921 in the Journal of Forestry in which he raised a question about Gifford Pinchot's doctrine of “highest use.” Had the process of development of national forests, he asked, “already gone far enough to raise the question of whether the policy of development (construed in the narrower sense of industrial development) should continue to govern in absolutely every instance” or might it “not itself demand that some portions of some forests be preserved as wilderness?”7 Writers in sporting magazines, said Leopold, had been groping with “reconciliation between going back to nature and preserving a little nature to get back to.” This conflict was, he thought, “the old conflict between preservation and use … just now coming to be an issue with respect to recreation.”⁸ Here, in Leopold's view, was the crux of the problem. Recreation was posing a threat to wild nature, to wilderness, and had become industrial development not unlike other economic uses of natural resources.

Leopold wrote mostly of national forests in this essay but did mention national parks:

It may be asked whether the National Parks from which, let us hope, industrial development will continue to be excluded, do not fill the public demand here discussed. They do, in part, but hunting is not and should not be allowed within the Parks. Moreover, the Parks are being networked with roads and trails as rapidly as possible. This is right and proper.⁹

Leopold is not criticizing national park development, but here relegated the parks to tourism and recreation of the industrial sort he saw as a threat to wilderness. He did not see national park management as directed toward preservation of wilderness and the type of recreation he thought wilderness could provide. This being so, he suggested, the Forest Service must preserve wilderness and the wilderness experience, as he defined them, if they were to be preserved at all.10

Leopold defined wilderness as “a continuous stretch of country preserved in its natural state, open to lawful hunting and fishing, big enough to absorb a two weeks’ pack trip, and kept devoid of roads, artificial trails, cottages, or other works of man.”¹¹ His emphasis was upon the sort of recreational experience one could have in a wild place. He extolled “primitive modes of travel and subsistence” as essential to wilderness experience.¹² This definition of wilderness might be understood and embraced by John Muir, but those using the term in the fashion of McFarland, Olmsted, Albright, and park watchdog Robert Sterling Yard might not grasp what Leopold was describing. In Leopold's opinion, wilderness could not be experienced from the window of a hotel or automobile. When a road penetrated a landscape, it was not wilderness. Fortunately the government still owned areas “scattered here and there in the poorer and rougher parts of the National Forests and National Parks, to make a very good start [in preserving wilderness]. The one thing needful is for the Government to draw a line around each one and say: ‘This is wilderness, and wilderness it shall remain.’”¹³

Leopold worked for the Forest Service as he wrote these essays and was thinking principally of national forests. Still, he often mentioned national parks. The threat of roads was great in the national forests where recreation use was growing and in national parks where Mather's administration was ever striving to increase access. While many in the National Park Service believed that the directives in the National Park Service Act established a policy of wilderness preservation, Leopold seems not to have agreed. He thought wilderness needed to be identified and designated by drawing lines around it. He added that “the action needed is the permanent differentiation of a suitable system of wild areas within our national park and forest system.” The forests could serve wilderness recreation needs as “public hunting grounds,” while national parks could be “public wildlife sanctuaries, and both kinds [serving] as public playgrounds in which the wilderness environments and modes of travel may be preserved and enjoyed.”¹⁴

Leopold acted on his ideas, seeking protection for one of his favorite areas in New Mexico's Gila River country. He succeeded in 1924, convincing his district forester to draw lines around what became the first wilderness area in a national forest. Soon similar lines were being drawn in other forests. Chief William B. Greeley took Leopold's ideas seriously, issuing an in-house discussion of them in 1926. He could not support a preservation approach that excluded all economic uses because, as Paul Sutter argues, “what Greeley and other foresters feared was that permanently preserved wilderness areas would become equivalent to national parks, which might work to remove them from Forest Service control.” Leopold, on the other hand, “saw wilderness as a form of preservation uniquely adapted to Forest Service administration.”15 So in the mid-1920s the Forest Service and Park Service wrestled with the implications of Leopold's idea.¹⁶

In an unexpected twist, at the beginning of the 1920s, a new and important concept of wilderness had emerged from the agency founded by Gifford Pinchot. John Muir, dead seven years, would have been surprised and probably suspicious. He would have understood that Pinchot had nothing to do with this development and that the Forest Service was unlikely to enthusiastically embrace wilderness as he conceived of it, even if it had come from one of the Forest Service's own. He would likely have grasped immediately the significance of this new thinking for national parks. It raised at least the potential for a new standard of judging national park preservation policy. He would likely also have felt more kinship with Leopold than with Mather and Albright. The “blunt mechanical beetles” he had worried about in 1912 were not yet everywhere in the national park system, but national park policy seemed bent on accommodating them at the expense of wilderness. Muir would have approved of Leopold's call to designate wilderness, to draw lines around the parts of the public domain allocated for this protective purpose. What, Muir would have wondered, would be the Park Service response to Leopold's idea?

THE PARK SERVICE FORGES AHEAD

The Park Service did not directly respond to the challenge posed by the wilderness ideas coming from its rival agency. Still, at this early stage in its history, Mather and his staff were well aware that Park Service survival was not assured. Some lawmakers, they knew, thought the Forest Service could do a better and less expensive job of managing scenery in the national parks.¹⁷ A 1922 meeting of national park superintendents at Yosemite drafted a resolution on overdevelopment in which they stated that park development was necessary but should be carefully limited. The resolution was a response to critics who were accusing the agency of compromising its resources by development of various sorts. The resolution stated that some development of national parks was necessary. They were the people's parks, and the people should be given access to them. This thought was not new. What was new was the admission that parks could be overdeveloped. The Park Service wished to assure its critics that it was aware of this possibility and would strive to define how much development was enough or too much.

It is the intention to make the chief scenic features of each park accessible to the average visitor, but to set aside certain regions of each park, which will not be traversed by automobile roads, and will have only such trails or other developments as will be necessary for the protection of the area.18

The superintendents were sure no park had yet developed over 10 percent of its area, and they thought it a conservative estimate that 90 percent of the visitors never went far from roads. They insisted that “at present the educational and economic value of national parks to the nation is restricted by insufficient development.” But they sought to reassure the public that they would not build roads all over the parks and thereby presumably threaten the wildness that lent parks some of their value. “Some portions will be fully developed,” they wrote, “others partly developed, and still others will be left in their natural, wild condition.” Some level of development was necessary, for “if there were no development, no roads or trails, no hotels or camps, a national park would be merely a wilderness, not serving the purpose for what it was set aside.”¹⁹ The purposes were recreation, education, and inspiration. The superintendents’ resolution indicates that they were caught in a struggle between park visitors who wanted roads and those who did not. The resolution was a response to the same challenge that inspired Leopold's thinking involving issues of outdoor recreation and road building, but the superintendents were not convinced that any lines needed to be drawn around areas from which roads would be excluded. They stood “for adequate development, but against over-development.”

Developing parks was not the only work the Park Service was doing at this time. It was fighting off schemes to dam Yellowstone National Park streams for irrigation. A bill to create a Federal Power Commission with authority to site power developments on federal land was moving toward congressional passage, and lobbying to exempt parklands from such siting was needed. Substandard park proposals abounded, with one coming from Secretary Fall himself. These needed to be squelched and usually were. Stephen Mather wrote in his 1920 annual report that he had agreed to be National Park Service director “to undertake in the public interest the development of the national parks into a smoothly running, well-coordinated system.”20 He brought in strong leaders, men like Roger Toll, John R. White, and Owen Tomlinson, who would shape the agency in its early years. As he developed parks he saw the need for planning and landscaping, and began hiring landscape architects to accomplish this. He supported initiation of educational programs in the parks and built a ranger force as the core of the agency in the field. He put the rangers in uniform so they would be visible and develop an esprit like that of Forest Service rangers.²¹ Mather believed to his core in the importance of his work, and biographer Robert Shankland describes how much fun he had out in the parks. Field people understood how much he cared about “his” parks and the men who tended them, and there was a shared respect and affection. A Park Service “family” was the result.

Work was also ongoing to expand some of the parks and the park system. Attempts to enhance Yellowstone National Park by annexing the Tetons and Jackson Hole met strong opposition. Expansion of Sequoia National Park was also controversial, with opposition coming not only from the Forest Service but also from the city of Los Angeles, which coveted the water and power potential of the Kings River. The conflict between the Park Service and the Forest Service was heating up and now contained the ingredient of wilderness introduced by Aldo Leopold.²² Fuel was added to the fire when Secretary of the Interior Fall drafted an executive order for President Harding's signature that would transfer the Forest Service back to the Department of the Interior. Nothing came of this but a greater uneasiness on all sides about who should be overseeing outdoor recreation on the public lands.

Fall's initiative and growing Park Service ambitions brought increasingly tense relations between the Park and Forest services. Back in 1919 Henry Graves had suggested there was a need for a national outdoor recreation policy that would address some of the issues causing the interagency competition. He had, in his policy letter, supported the national park idea, but he raised questions regarding national park standards and the respective roles of the two agencies administering to the outdoor recreation needs of the American people. No step toward formulating a national policy was taken until 1923, when Charles Sheldon, a big-game hunter, leader of the successful effort to create Mount McKinley National Park, and friend of Henry Graves, decided the time had come to tackle the outdoor recreation policy issues. In drafting a policy statement for the Boone and Crockett Club addressing public land issues, he closed as follows:

The Club believes that the President should cause to be made a complete survey of the question with a view to a definitive [policy] which will finally include a determination of the areas to be included in national parks, national monuments, and other regions with recreational possibilities.… Only by the establishment of such a National Recreation Policy can maximum recreational opportunities be given to the nation and the numbers of people who will then be increased.23

President Coolidge responded by appointing a Committee on Outdoor Recreation, which recommended that a national conference be convened to formulate policy. The president called together a conference in May 1924 and asked it to find a way to achieve better coordination between agencies engaged in providing outdoor recreation at all governmental levels. It was also charged with surveying and classifying outdoor recreation resources, especially those on federal lands. The meeting convened on May 22 with 309 delegates from 128 organizations.

THE NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON OUTDOOR RECREATION

The 1924 conference spent little time on wilderness, addressing broad outdoor recreation policy issues, but it made itself a “permanent conference” and reconvened in January 1926. This time wilderness was on the agenda. John C. Merriam, a distinguished scientist and national park advocate, compared the roles of national parks and forests, noting that for him “the parks are not merely places to rest and exercise and learn. They are regions where one looks through the veil to meet the realities of nature and of the unfathomable power behind it.” He did not think that “complete conservation,” which he defined as “unbroken maintenance of primitive conditions in national parks,” would be achieved if the parks were viewed only as sites for recreation and even education. Only if their value to inspire and lift the spirit was recognized would their “complete conservation” be achieved.²⁴

Aldo Leopold reiterated to the conference his belief that wilderness areas should be “a specialized form of land use within our existing or prospective forests and parks.” He now recognized a role for national parks. Two types of wilderness areas should be provided: “one kind in the national parks devoted to the gunless type of wilderness trip, another kind in the national forests devoted to all types of wilderness trips including hunting.”²⁵ Leopold spoke also to the movement afoot at that time to establish national parks and forests in the East, and he stated unequivocally that some parts of them should be dedicated to wilderness recreation. Wilderness in those areas might not be as large or “absolute” as those in the West, but he challenged the assumption that “an area is either wild or not wild, that there is no place for intermediate degrees of wilderness.”²⁶

While on the subject of eastern wilderness, Leopold challenged the commonly held assumption that only mountainous lands were appropriate as wilderness. Would not “swamps, lakelands, river routes, and deserts” also provide opportunities for wilderness experience? “Surely our sons are entitled to see a few such examples of primeval America, and surely the few nickels which exploitation would put into their pockets are less important than the fundamental human experience which would be taken out of their lives.”27 In this talk Leopold was extending his thinking about wilderness and was responding to concerns being raised by the National Parks Association, Robert Sterling Yard in particular, that eastern national parks were a threat to national park ideals and standards. These skeptics were arguing that areas in the Shenandoah and Great Smoky Mountains, which were being discussed for national park status at the time, could not be as large, as “pristine,” and thus as wild as the great national parks of the West. Leopold did not share their concern. There was no absolute wilderness, in his view. Types of wilderness experience could be enjoyed in diverse areas.

Here Leopold shifted from his definition of wilderness as space that would allow a two-week pack trip without encountering roads. Wilderness was still defined by the absence of roads, but the presence of human activity that did not severely degrade the wild character of a place should not prohibit that place from being considered a resource for wilderness recreation. Nor were mountains essential to having a wilderness experience. Leopold made the case for eastern national forests, parks, and wilderness, all of which were eventually to be established.

Other business of the conferences involved recreation resource inventories, and this huge job was assigned to a joint committee of the National Parks Association and the American Forestry Association. The committee issued its large and detailed report in 1928. It asserted that wilderness was a value of both national parks and forests. National parks were, in its view, mostly wild and should remain that way. The decision to create a national park had been tantamount to establishing wilderness. The Joint Committee did not resolve the controversy of which agency should administer wilderness. It recognized that national parks were mostly wild but also that scenic wild lands under Forest Service management provided an opportunity to preserve wilderness.

The committee report emphasized the threat of roads to wilderness, whether it be in national parks or forests. Wilderness areas “are disappearing rapidly, not so much by reason of economic need as by the extension of motor roads and the attendant development of tourist attractions.”28 It listed potential designated wilderness areas, all in national forests, three of which at the time were being touted for national park status—the Tetons, the High Sierra near Yosemite and Sequoia national parks, and the Olympic Mountains in the state of Washington. Finally, the report concluded with the assertion that wilderness recreation was preferred by a growing minority of users of national parks and forests. These people “have as legitimate a claim as those who desire any other forms of outdoor recreation,” and any national outdoor recreation policy “which does not provide for wilderness recreation … would be inadequate.”²⁹

By 1928, only seven years after Leopold had introduced the idea in his Journal of Forestry essay, the wilderness idea was the subject of national discussion. This discussion focused primarily on national forests because, as indicated by the words of the committee report, most people considered designation of a national park as virtually a designation of wilderness. At the same time, some powerful voices, the National Parks Association among them, were concerned that even though most of the national parks were wild at that point, the prospect of growing automobile traffic with consequent demand for roads threatened park wilderness. The National Conference accepted the fact that most national park land was wild but raised doubts about National Park Service claims that it would always remain so under the Organic Act.

The Joint Committee inserted a chapter in its report, “Relation of National Parks and National Forests.” The Park Service's mission in outdoor recreation was “to provide safety, comfort and facilities for observation to visitors of all kinds … to these superlative national spectacles; that of the Forest Service to afford visitors to national forests the completest possible freedom in enjoying the wilderness each after his own chosen fashion.”30 The distinction made between “spectacles” and “wilderness” suggests that the committee saw the recreational attractions of the two systems as being very different. Also, committee members wrote that “for the thorough protection of park areas from disturbance of natural conditions, their use by the public in ways involving possible damage is carefully directed and controlled at all times. Camping places … are assigned in every case.” In national forests, on the other hand, “People use the forests without restriction or restraint … except in rare cases of emergency or fire danger.”³¹ Decades later, as “wilderness management” became a recognized discipline of outdoor recreation, regulating people to minimize resource damage would be a core principle of such management. The Park Service, by the late 1920s, was already practicing this approach, though it did not call it “wilderness management.” Park rangers were simply managing their parks to leave them “unimpaired,” and this required a level of people management the Forest Service did not feel necessary on its vast domain.

The importance of the National Conference on Outdoor Recreation lies not so much in direct results of the deliberations as in what they reveal about how people were thinking about park wilderness at the time. No resolution of the conflict between the Park and Forest services was achieved. Some overlap in mission seemed inevitable, even acceptable. Parks and forests, even in the arena of outdoor recreation, served different goals. The experience of one, the parks, was more strictly regulated than the other. The wilderness experience of parks embraced scenery, inspiration, and education. That of forests involved long outings, exercise of primitive living skills, even hunting. The Park Service was doing an acceptable job protecting its resources, but prospects of more roads and attendant development threatened that record. The issues addressed by the National Conference would continue to wax and wane until, in the late 1950s, they were addressed again by the Out-door Recreation Resources Review Commission and deliberations about the Wilderness Act.

National park advocates in the 1920s fought hard to expand the national park system, especially in the East. Their efforts raised issues of purpose and purity, as alluded to in the National Conference by Aldo Leopold. Stephen Mather believed it critically important to bring national parks closer to the American people, and since most of the population of the United States was in the East and the Midwest, parks there were essential to his campaign to build the park system, the Park Service, and support for both. Purists objected, arguing that parks should be “pure” examples of nature, places where humans had not changed the natural world so much that students of it could not see a clear picture of nature and its purposes. Places like the Shenandoah and Great Smoky Mountains had been changed by generations of settlers (and before that by Native Americans, though the “purists” were not thinking of them). They did not qualify for national park status.

Purists were often opposed to recreation development but admitted that some outdoor activities like hiking and camping were necessary for the public to enjoy the educational and inspirational qualities of the parks. A minimal level of convenience was necessary. The argument was over how much convenience was enough. John Merriam once remarked in a talk to the National Parks Association about his experience of Yosemite that “I like to sit at my hotel and enjoy the view. There are a good many hundred other people enjoying the view also. I would like to discover some means by which human beings could be made invisible in the national parks.”32 Perhaps he said this in jest. The best park would be one in which there were no people (or effects of people). Yet how he and they could become learned and inspired in national parks without affecting them was not explained.

In the argument over national park standards—over what qualified for national park status—purists like Robert Sterling Yard and John Merriam constantly used words like “primitive” and “primeval” in explaining why one area should be a park and another not. The qualities of the primitive and primeval were an essential qualification for national park status. If they were absent, park status for an area was questionable. Mather and his Park Service colleagues disagreed, believing that natural park values could be protected by using techniques of landscape planning and architecture and careful engineering of park development. The fact that 90 percent of the parks remained wild in the opinion of the National Conference experts seemed to confirm that the Park Service approach had been successful. Furthermore, this level of protection was being achieved without any lines being drawn to designate wilderness.

In 1928 Horace Albright, then National Park Service director, with the help of a freelance writer named Frank Taylor, published an article in the Saturday Evening Post in which he responded directly to “anxious inquirers who want to know if we propose to checkerboard the last wilderness with highways.” One inquirer had written, “Let us not destroy the few remaining bits of wilderness in the national parks by building paved highways through every one of them.” Albright's response was that “this is a sentiment which the National Park Service endorses without a single reservation.”33 He described at length and with abundant statistics precisely where the roads were, where any new roads would be, and how both old and new roads would be blended wherever possible into the landscapes by the work of landscape architects. The Park Service was, he argued, steering a “middle course” between those “who want no roads into the parks” and the automobile tourists and business interests “whose appetites for road building are never appeased.” The statistics revealed, he assured his readers, that most of the national park system remained wilderness. There were many tourists and considerable road work in parks like Yellowstone, he admitted, but “nine-tenths of Yellowstone is still—and we hope it always will be—an everlasting wilderness.”³⁴ These reassurances did not placate the purists, but they indicate that Albright was sensitive to the criticism his agency was receiving on the wilderness issue and was confident that the wilderness preservation part of the national park mission was being accomplished.

WILDERNESS ISSUES IN THE FIELD

Even as Albright was issuing his reassurances, events in the field cast doubt on them. A long-simmering struggle over roads in Mount Rainier National Park was reaching a boil. Plans for the park, if carried out, would place more roads in Mount Rainier than had so far penetrated any park. If all of these roads were built, the concerns of those to whom Albright had addressed his article would be legitimized. Yet while those who would develop Mount Rainier pushed hard for that goal, forces were at work within the Park Service that would thwart them and advance the cause of national park wilderness.

Tourist development had begun even before Mount Rainier National Park was established in 1899. A railroad reached close to the park in 1904 and work on road access to it was well under way by then. Hiram Chittenden, who had built the Grand Loop Road in Yellowstone, proposed a scheme for a “round-the-mountain” road at Mount Rainier that would circle the glaciated peak just below its glacier line. By 1913 preliminary surveys had been done for this ambitious project. By 1915 a road had been built to Paradise at an elevation near 5,000 feet, and a major approach to the park named the National Park Highway was soon completed by the state of Washington. The Rainier National Park Company was formed and in 1916 was granted the tourist concession for the park. It opened Paradise Inn in 1917, and in 1918 6,000 cars entered the park over the new highway.

The state funded a highway project in 1916 that would reach to the park's White River entrance in its northeast corner. Mineral springs at Longmire in the park's southeast corner had been the original attraction for development there, and more hot springs were found in the Ohanopecosh River region just southeast of the park. With a road and railroad reaching toward the Carbon Glacier region of the park's northwest corner, by 1919 all four corners of the park showed potential for tourist development. Meanwhile the Mountaineers, a large and active mountaineering club in Seattle, had hiked the proposed route of the round-the-mountain highway, and in 1916 a trail had been completed roughly over the route of this proposed highway. Many members of the Mountaineers were opposed to this trail becoming a road, and concern was growing about the level of development proposed for “their” park.

In the early 1920s, Congress responded to Stephen Mather's campaign to build roads to accommodate the growing auto tourism in the parks. The Going-to-the-Sun Road was funded for Glacier, the Generals Highway for Sequoia, and the Carbon River Road for Mount Rainier. Mather and Mount Rainier superintendent Roger Toll favored connecting the four corners of the park with roads and revived Chittenden's round-the-mountain road idea. Toll's successor as superintendent drew up a budget for the project in 1921.

The Rainier National Park Company, with its investment in visitor facilities at Paradise, pushed aggressively for the roads. The Mountaineers, in response, in 1922 accused the Park Service of administering the park more for the concession than for the public. The company replied, tempers flared, and charges flew. Roger Toll, now superintendent at Rocky Mountain but an enthusiastic mountaineer himself, was brought in to calm the waters, which he did. He pointed out to Park Service critics that it was not unreasonable for the concession to wish to make some money—it had so far spent more money developing the park than had the government. Calm was restored, though preservationists among the Mountaineers were not placated. The clash between those who thought the national parks should be preserved and those who thought they should be developed for the ever-growing tide of auto tourists continued to grow throughout the national park system.

Construction of the Carbon River Road was begun and soon ran into serious difficulties. Realizing that road building was not a strong suit of the Park Service, Mather negotiated an inter-bureau agreement with the Bureau of Public Roads. They took over the park road work, increasing the concern of those who feared too many roads in the parks. The inter-bureau agreement began to change the Park Service's thinking. To this point it had been employing its own staff of engineers and landscape architects. Bureau of Public Roads engineers were not as concerned as their Park Service counterparts about the aesthetics of their projects, and as road projects in the parks progressed, landscape architects increased their influence. They began to raise questions not only about how roads should be sited and built, but whether some should be built at all.

Ethan Carr describes the intensified debate over roads in the mid-1920s.35 He points out that by this stage in national park history, the nature of the parks and the pressures on them had changed from the days when Yellowstone's Grand Loop was conceived by Chittenden. The Grand Loop was a carriage road that could be built to less environmentally damaging and aesthetically intrusive specifications than a modern auto road. Also, parks like Yellowstone and Yosemite were on a different scale than Mount Rainier or Rocky Mountain, and loop roads would affect much more of these smaller parks than the roads in the larger parks. The potential impacts of roads on national park values were much greater in parks like Mount Rainier, as preservationists argued and landscape architects came to see.

At the 1925 superintendents’ conference at Mesa Verde, Horace Albright and Arno Cammerer, Mather's assistant director, suggested that it was time to begin comprehensive planning of national parks. With the Bureau of Public Roads involved and more money flowing from Congress for park road building, a clearer picture of what parts of the parks should be developed and what parts preserved was necessary. Albright and Cammerer were thinking of zoning the parks, an idea being applied in town planning at the time. The Park Service, forced by public opinion and the discussions of the National Conference, realized that it had to be more systematic about its decisions as to what should be preserved, how it should be preserved, and what to call portions of the parks protected from development. The Mount Rainier situation brought this to a head.

At Mount Rainier, the Rainier National Park Company continued to push for more roads. It proposed yet another road, a scenic loop road around Paradise Valley. Superintendent Owen Tomlinson and the Rainier Park Advisory Board gave their approval. Once again the Mountaineers protested vehemently, comparing the likely consequences to what was happening to Yosemite Valley, where development, in their opinion, was out of control. Tomlinson, responding to the call for planning, drafted an Outline for Planning that was reviewed by Mather and by Thomas Vint, who at that time had become head of the Park Service landscape architecture division. Tomlinson and Vint agreed that any road across the north side of the mountain connecting the Carbon River region to the White River areas was not a good idea. It would be too intrusive and costly. Their decision dashed the hopes of those advocating a round-the-mountain road and unofficially allocated the northern part of the park to wilderness. At the same time, Tomlinson outlined a road-building plan for the rest of the park that was, despite loss of the round-the-mountain scheme, still the most ambitious yet proposed for any national park.

The Mountaineers responded to Tomlinson's plan with a resolution from its board in April 1928 claiming that the proposed road plan would subject three-quarters of the park to development and leave only one-quarter of it in wilderness. Tomlinson did not agree with their characterization of the plan but endorsed the Mountaineers’ proposal that a portion of the park be declared a wilderness. He suggested, in a letter to Director Mather, that “such action would be in entire accordance with national park policies and ideals, and it would have the effect of assuring those concerned with the preservation of national wilderness areas that the National Park Service is guarding against over-development of the national parks.”36 Mather was away, and Cammerer and others in the Washington office were uncertain how to respond to this proposal. The precedent in the park system for a “wilderness area” was a small tract that had been set aside for scientific study in Yosemite National Park. No recreation was allowed in this Yosemite area, and this was obviously not what the Mountaineers had in mind. They were thinking of a designated road-free area where they could hike and climb— wilderness recreation of the sort described earlier by Aldo Leopold. Cammerer and his assistant Arthur Demaray suggested that the area not be called “wilderness” but instead be designated on the planning maps as “to be free from road and commercial development.”³⁷ Tomlinson did as they advised, sending them a map that identified the area to be so designated. When Mather returned, he approved this approach, and thus did the Park Service designate its first “wilderness,” though it could not bring itself to use the term. The incident did, however, initiate internal debate about what to call areas to be kept free of roads. It was also significant because for the first time (the small off-limits Yosemite area excepted) the Park Service admitted that more than general policy statements such as the Organic Act were necessary to achieve the level of protection being called for by wilderness advocates at this time. Specific designation of areas to be kept wild might need to be made. They could not take the step to officially call the north side of Mount Rainier a “wilderness,” but they could identify a specific area that would “remain free of road, hotel, pay camps and all commercial development.”38

While all of this was happening at Mount Rainier, the situation in Yosemite National Park also had bearing on the park wilderness story. The issues there did not so much involve wilderness designation and terminology as broader questions about priorities. The first stirrings of yet another view of wilderness were appearing, a view defined by concerns beyond recreation and scenery. Yosemite National Park was, in the minds of national park boosters like Mather, a great success story. People loved the park and flocked to it in ever-increasing numbers. Alfred Runte has chronicled the situation there, noting that by the late 1920s the park averaged nearly a half-million visitors each year. Runte writes that “the Park Service greeted each visitor as a measure of success, proof that the American public wanted and supported its national parks.”³⁹ Yet these ever-increasing visitors caused new clashes between preservation and development. Runte describes how, in the 1920s, external criticism of Park Service policy at Yosemite came principally from Joseph Grinnell, a biologist and director of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California at Berkeley. Grinnell became increasingly critical of what he perceived as too much emphasis on recreation at the expense of Yosemite's wildlife. He thought park officials were catering to the needs and desires of visitors and concessions at the expense of other park values. Events were being staged that were simply entertainment rather than contributions to education or appreciation of the park. A growing “bear problem” exemplified, for him, the difficulty.

Wherever bears were present in the park they were an attraction, and in the 1920s visitors expected to see bears at Yosemite, Yellowstone, and other national parks. Concessionaires at Yosemite built platforms and put meat on them to attract bears on schedule so visitors could see them. Visitors fed bears and, as more bears were attracted to these sources of easy fare, incidents involving bears and visitors increased, always to the detriment of the bears. When bears injured people, concessionaires feared bad publicity and demanded that the National Park Service control the bears. This spotlighted a “conflict of interest between profit and preservation.”40

The Yosemite concessionaires had contributed to the bear crisis and now wanted the Park Service to control the situation. The Yosemite superintendent seemed inclined to do so. Writing to the Washington office, he commented that “while I am personally opposed to killing off bears if there is any other practical solution, conditions are fast reaching the stage where we must determine whether the Valley is being administered for the use and enjoyment of the people or for the use and enjoyment of the bears.”⁴¹ For the Park Service and concessionaires the bears seemed to be props useful for entertaining visitors, but for Grinnell and park naturalists the bears were part of the ecological system and deserving of protection. Runte explains how the issues involved in managing Yosemite Valley in the 1920s reveal the slowly emerging role in park management of biology and ecology. New interpretations of the meaning of the Organic Act's mandate to “conserve … unimpaired” were emerging. Manipulating parts of the landscape for visitor entertainment without careful consideration of the consequences to the ecology of the park's natural systems was not, contended the critics, good management.

In 1928 a Yosemite National Park Board of Expert Advisers was appointed, which agreed that there were problems and suggested where the Park Service should draw the line regarding development. Wilderness figured in the board's recommendations in a back-door sort of way. The line on development should be drawn, argued advisory board member Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., inside the valley, thereby protecting the heart of the park. In this recommendation he pulled the veil off the argument used by Horace Albright and others that development was acceptable in places like the valley because, after all, the rest of the park was wild. Runte writes of Olmsted's point:

In fact there was not more room for the common brand of subterfuge, for the argument that development, because it was concentrated in the valley, somehow was insurance that the rest of the park would remain wild.… The challenge of preservation was to protect the entirety of the park, not just those parts—however large— that were previously undeveloped.⁴²

Runte argues that in this way wilderness was being used as an argument against preservation. “The irony of conservation was perfectly mirrored in Yosemite Valley, where those favoring greater development already commonly invoked the argument that wilderness enthusiasts had the rest of the park (that is, the high country) practically all to themselves.”⁴³ If all that conservationists were concerned about was having their own wilderness playground, which was certainly the case with some, such an argument might satisfy them. But others, like Grinnell, were concerned about the entire park as an ecological unit. The bear situation, for them, revealed the folly of thinking that the park's nature, its wilderness, could be preserved by freely manipulating nature in one area while arguing that preservation was being served by leaving other parts relatively untouched (at least for a while). Olmsted, Grinnell, and others argued for a change in thinking about park preservation that would move away from the primacy of recreation. They were not, as will be seen, successful.

Still, Yosemite National Park was, as noted earlier, the site of the first “wilderness reserve” in the national park system. The park had, in 1927, designated such a reserve of roughly seven square miles of the high country that would be used only for scientific study of the area in its “natural state.” In a token way the reserve, its name later changed to “research reserve,” was a response to calls from scientists for reservation of natural areas for scientific purposes. Back in 1918 the Ecological Society of America had appointed a committee to study how natural areas might be preserved for science. One conclusion of this committee was that neither national forests nor national parks qualified as scientific reserves given the potential for development of them. The Park Service responded slowly to this, mounting a research reserve program that, for various reasons, never amounted to much.44

The Mount Rainier and Yosemite episodes illustrate how, during the 1920s, the Park Service was being nudged to pay attention to wilderness preservation. In the case of Mount Rainier the concept of wilderness as a place for a specific type of recreation, developed by Leopold, was in play. At Yosemite, an emergent concept of national park as more than simply a place for outdoor recreation or even human education and inspiration was appearing. As Richard Sellars has amply documented, the ecological awareness that was stirring in the minds of scientists and that manifested itself in Yosemite's “research reserve” was not to become significant in park management for decades, but the seed of an ecological definition of wilderness and of its importance to national parks was planted.⁴⁵ The idea of wilderness was being thrust into policy deliberations of the National Park Service in new and important ways.

THE FOREST SERVICE RELUCTANTLY EMBRACES WILDERNESS

While the Park Service danced around the problem of its wilderness policy, the Forest Service addressed its wilderness challenge more directly. Forced by public pressure to embrace recreation as part of its mission, it struggled to decide how that use should be balanced with other forest uses. In 1925 Assistant Forester Leon F. Kneipp wrote that “the National Forests are the richest of all land areas in the United States in terms of recreation value.”⁴⁶ Despite such statements it could not bring itself to say that recreation would be the exclusive or even primary resource value anywhere. A list of recreation “principles” was drawn up in 1925, and one of them advocated “the retention under National Forest management of all areas of recreation value, except where Congress considers that the value so completely transcends all others and is of such public importance as to require a separate and specialized management.”⁴⁷ This suggested that should some part of a national forest be judged (by Congress, not the agency) to be of exclusively recreational value, then perhaps it should be transferred to the Park Service. The Forest Service, of course, would contest such a judgment.

Chief Greeley addressed the idea of forest wilderness, issuing a general policy statement on wilderness preservation in 1926. He called for a review of forest road development plans “to make sure they do not contemplate a needless invasion of areas adapted to wilderness forms of use.”48 He suggested that district foresters might designate wilderness areas but left it to their discretion. Each area would be considered on its own merits, and the welfare of timber-dependent communities was always to be considered. The policy was so vague that by 1928 the district forester for Colorado and Wyoming had created forty-two wilderness areas totaling 2.5 million acres, while the district forester for nearby Montana had created none. Greeley also ordered an inventory of all national forest roadless areas larger than 230,400 acres. In his 1926 and 1927 annual reports he affirmed that the Forest Service was examining the wilderness issue and would, after careful study, take steps to give some areas wilderness status.

Historians disagree about how much of Greeley's attention to wilderness was an attempt to foil Stephen Mather's national park expansion plans. There is anecdotal evidence that this was part of Greeley's motivation. James Gilligan, for instance, interviewed Greeley in 1952, and Greeley recounted how at a congressional hearing where he was testifying a veteran congressman leaned forward and shook his finger at the chief. “I know why you set up these wilderness areas, Greeley. Just to keep them out of Mather's hands.” Greeley did not deny it.⁴⁹ Gilligan also observes that when the Forest Service issued regulations in 1929 regarding what it called “primitive areas,” a term that for a time replaced “wilderness” in its official lexicon, it did not establish a minimum size for them. Leopold had suggested a minimum of 500,000 acres, and the inventory of roadless areas ordered by Greeley used a 230,400 acre minimum. Perhaps the flexibility on the size of primitive areas was calculated to give the Forest Service the opportunity to designate a primitive area when it was faced (as it was at the time and expected to be in the future) with national park proposals for national forest land.

A 1927 article by Greeley in Sunset magazine, in which he strongly supported wilderness, indicates how much the threat from the Park Service was on his mind. In a tone more strident than usual for this veteran bureaucrat, Greeley criticized the Park Service preservation policy. Recalling his trip to Yellowstone with Stephen Mather and the president's Coordinating Committee on National Parks and National Forests, which was in 1926 examining a proposal to expand the national park, Greeley wrote, “Let us add it [the Upper Yellowstone River–Two Oceans Pass area] to the national park if that is where it belongs; but curses on the man who bisects it with roads, plants it with hotels, and sends yellow buses streaking through it with sirens shrieking like souls in torment.”50 Greeley may have let his guard down here, but there seems little doubt that he was piqued at the aggressive efforts of Stephen Mather to expand his domain at the expense of the Forest Service.

The most definitive step yet by either agency toward a wilderness policy was the Forest Service's 1929 issuance of its L-20 regulations. These defined management priorities for designated primitive areas and required the drafting of a management plan for them. They created a stir because they appeared to offer more permanent protection for wilderness than was acceptable to many foresters. Leon Kneipp, who had drafted them, softened them and Chief Roy W. Stuart issued them in 1929. Primitive areas and “research reserves” would be established in national forests, but “establishment of a primitive area will not operate to withdraw timber, forage or water resources from industrial use.”⁵¹ Thus the Forest Service gave the appearance of protecting wilderness when the regulations in fact provided little prospect of permanent protection. Gilligan notes that the instructions from the forester to the field were much more liberal than the restrictions suggested by the text of the regulations, and in effect the Forest Service gained public relations benefits in its competition with the Park Service without alienating its usual clients in the West, the loggers, grazers, and miners.⁵²

The Forest Service actions on the wilderness front are brought into the national park wilderness story here because the interplay between the two agencies affected development of Park Service wilderness policy. From the moment the Forest Service accepted, however reluctantly, the idea that it had some responsibility to preserve portions of its domain as wilderness, it laid a challenge before its rival. The Park Service could not claim to be the preservation agency as compared with the development-oriented Forest Service. It now had competition in the preservation realm. John Muir, Enos Mills, and others had once believed the forest preserves would protect natural landscapes, but when the reserves were opened to development and the Forest Service was formed to administer them, preservationists embraced the national park idea as their best chance of preserving natural landscapes. This group was an important original constituency of the Park Service, but when Mather and his associates began to develop some of the national parklands to serve visitors, some of them became critics. Aldo Leopold formulated his ideas about wilderness, suggesting that the “highest use” of some national forest land might be wilderness recreation. This gave foresters a tool they could use to blunt what they saw as raids by national park interests on national forests.

During the 1920s the increased Forest Service interest in wilderness pushed the idea increasingly into the consciousness of the Park Service. Biologists, preservation activists, and even some of its own field officers pressed for a sharper definition of resource preservation policy in the national parks. When Stephen Mather retired as director, the Park Service was well along toward establishing itself in the world of government bureaus. His efforts had effectively assured a future for the young agency. He had elevated the national parks in the minds of the American people, encouraged visitation to them, and made progress toward assuring that when visitors arrived they would have access and services necessary for enjoyment. To achieve these goals he had, without apology, emphasized the “provide for the enjoyment of “ part of the 1916 Organic Act more than the “conserve … unimpaired” part. He had not ignored the latter but had prioritized the former. Mather began, by using landscape architects and comprehensive planning, to deal with the conservation mandate. The growing profile of the wilderness idea posed new challenges and opportunities to address that mandate. One challenge came from Forest Service designation of wilderness: the drawing of a line around areas allocated, if only temporarily, to wilderness preservation. Leopold had argued for the necessity of this, and the Forest Service had done it. The Park Service had not.

The Park Service began to evolve a policy that might be called the “all that is not developed is wilderness” policy. As Director Horace Albright said repeatedly, the parks were 90 percent wilderness. He did not think the Park Service faced any dearth of wilderness or that it was doing more development than was necessary. Why designate one part of a park, like the north side of Mount Rainier, as wilderness and not other undeveloped parts? What would such designation mean for the other parts? This question, of course, is what concerned the conservationists who had a clear idea of what it should mean—no roads or “commercial” development. Albright, with his growing interest in comprehensive park planning, undoubtedly believed that the Park Service and the national park system were not ready for zoning. More informed thought needed to go into a decision such as designating a wilderness at Mount Rainier, thought that involved the entire park resource and probably more experienced and mature understanding of the parks than the young Park Service had so far acquired. The Landscape Engineering Branch of the service was only just being organized under the strong leadership of Thomas Vint. The Park Service cannot be excused for not more aggressively addressing the “conserve … unimpaired” part of its mission, but its position can be understood by considering the factors that came into play at this time.

As the National Park Service moved into the 1930s, it faced many unresolved issues, wilderness among them. The new decade would bring many new challenges and opportunities. All of the dimensions of the wilderness issue that emerged in the 1920s—confusion about terminology, activist pressure, competition with the Forest Service, internal debate about priorities, standards for new parks—would continue into the next decade. New issues would arise as outdoor recreation continued to evolve, the Park Service mission broadened significantly, and park development progressed at an increasing pace as part of the Great Depression–driven conservation, jobs, and public works programs. Huge new parks would be proposed that contained vast tracts of wilderness but that were part of national forests. Important new players interested in wilderness would appear.