The Columbia Guide to American Environmental History

A core topic for environmental history is the formation of land, water, and conservation policies: how land was allocated as the country was being settled; how land use policy developed; and what laws allowed people to gain title to land as private property. By the late nineteenth century, most of the unsettled land had been allocated and people began to press for the conservation of natural resources for efficient use and to join a growing national movement to set aside wilderness areas for recreation. This chapter looks at the history of land use policy as it developed in the colonial and national periods, and at the emergence of resource conservation and wilderness preservation at the turn of the nineteenth century.

American land was the lure for the greatest human migration in modern history. Nowhere else was such a bounteous environment—fertile in soil and temperate in climate, well-watered, amply wooded, and richly stocked with minerals—so ready to wrest from its native inhabitants. Until the conservation movement of the late nineteenth century, an exploding populace of European immigrants and their descendants reveled in unfettered exploitation of this favored land as private property. The New World’s abundance of cheap land held out opportunities unimaginable in an Old World where land was too scarce and expensive to meet the needs of the many for subsistence or the ambitions of the few for wealth, status, and power. The American Eden offered the independence, comfort, and security of subsistence farming for most colonists, and the wealth of large-scale staple production for many others. Yet the opportunities that drew a flood of voluntary immigrants from Europe also entailed a flood of involuntary immigrants from Africa. Because the ready availability of land for private ownership made Euro-Americans reluctant to work for others, many soon discovered that the wealth of large-scale production could be realized only through the enslaved labor of Africans.

In all the English colonies, however varied in other respects, abundant American land quickly subverted the traditional European notion that people should accept their inherited class positions and communal obligations in a rigidly stratified society. The Virginia Company that founded Jamestown discovered that profits could not be made from the labor of settlers sent over as company servants. The colony began to flourish only when the company gave settlers land to work for themselves. Immigration soared when a “headright” of 50 acres for every new settler was given to whoever paid for their ocean passage. The immigrant who could pay his family’s passage was guaranteed an ample farm on arrival, while planters could swell their landholdings by buying indentured servants or slaves off arriving ships. As slavery grew, this system produced enormous concentrations of land in the hands of great planters.

In the next colony, Plymouth in New England, the Pilgrims similarly discovered that not even their intense religious commitment to communal labor could sustain them, and shifted to private property. Like the larger Massachusetts Bay Colony that soon arose next door, they were trying to establish a holy commonwealth as a refuge from English oppression of Puritans. Both of these colonies were composed of self-governing farming towns that parceled out free land to families according to traditional norms of need and status. Each family was given a large lot for a house, garden, and orchard near the church in the town center, as well as ample strips for cultivation in outlying communal fields, and grazing rights on the town common. But as population thickened in the eighteenth century, communalism declined, land became a marketable commodity, and new towns were promoted as land speculations.

The lessons of these early examples was not lost on the royal favorites who competed to attract settlers as the proprietors of later colonies. Lord Baltimore of Maryland, the eight Lords Proprietors of Carolina, and William Penn of Pennsylvania all tried to make their colonies attractive by offering generous land policies as well as religious freedom. In the eighteenth century, the rising power of representative assemblies in all the colonies ensured an accelerating transfer of lands to private hands on liberal terms. Exploitation of the land as private property became the basis of Anglo-American society, and the British effort, through the Proclamation of 1763, to restrict land-hungry colonists from encroaching on western Indian lands helped to precipitate the American Revolution.

With independence from Britain assured as the Revolutionary War drew to a close, American leaders conceived a visionary land policy to realize their conception of the new republic’s destiny. In 1780, the Continental Congress called for converting the lands west of the Appalachian Mountains into a great public domain, to be parceled out to citizens under federal authority and eventually erected into states fully equal with the original thirteen. This plan required much hard bargaining to secure cessions from the seven states that claimed territory extending westward to the Mississippi River under their colonial charters. By 1786, New York, Virginia, Connecticut, and Massachusetts ceded their overlapping claims to the territory northwest of the Ohio River, with Virginia reserving much of present south-central Ohio for grants to its Revolutionary veterans, and Connecticut retaining land rights to a broad strip along Lake Erie for sale to its citizens. In 1792, the rest of Virginia’s western territory entered the Union as the state of Kentucky, and by 1802, the Carolinas and Georgia had ceded the western territory south of Kentucky. The southwestern cessions were obtained only by federal promises to honor the extensive claims already awarded to land speculators by the ceding states, and to clear Indian claims from Georgia’s remaining territory.

In the Land Ordinance of 1785, the Confederation Congress provided for the orderly conversion of this vast public domain into private property. A rectangular system of surveying the public lands as settlement advanced prepared them for sale to the highest bidders at periodic auctions. Federal surveyors superimposed on the topography a grid of east-west and north-south lines at one-mile intervals. These divided the landscape into numbered townships that were six miles square, and each township into 36 numbered sections that were one mile square (640 acres). Section 16 at the center of each township was reserved to support a public school. In the Northwest Ordinance two years later, the Congress provided for temporary territorial governments north of the Ohio, which would evolve into full statehood when a sufficient population was reached. Slavery was prohibited here, but not in the later territories established farther south. In 1812, the General Land Office was established within the federal government to administer the disposition of federal lands, to conduct land surveys, and to process and record sales, entries, withdrawals, reservations, and leases on the public lands.

The regime of freehold property and representative government—an empire for liberty, Thomas Jefferson called it—spread all the way across the continent in three generations of aggressive expansion. It was extended west to the Rocky Mountains by Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase from France (1803); south to the Gulf of Mexico by the purchase of Florida from Spain (1819); and southwest to the Rio Grande River by the annexation of Texas (1845). The continental domain was rounded out to the Pacific under President James K. Polk by the Oregon Treaty with Great Britain (1846) and the conquest and purchase of the Southwest from Mexico (1846–48). A final chunk of Mexico was acquired by the Gadsden Purchase (1853) to obtain a favorable route for a transcontinental railroad through present southern Arizona.

Although the basic system of selling public lands through rectangular survey and auction continued unchanged throughout the period of expansion, constant conflict occurred over the minimum amount that had to be bought, and the minimum price that had to be paid. High minimums were favored by wealthy land speculators, by eastern interests averse to the westward migration of cheap labor, and by politicians and financial interests anxious to raise revenues for paying off Revolutionary war debts and restoring American credit. These high-minimum forces prevailed at first. The Ordinance of 1785 required a minimum purchase of an entire mile-square section (640 acres) at a minimum price of $1 per acre, and the Land Act of 1796 raised the minimum price to $2 and the minimum purchase for half the tracts on sale to 5,760 acres.

But the tide turned in favor of small purchasers with the rise of the more democratic and pro-western forces that elected Jefferson to the presidency in 1800. Although the Harrison Land Act of that year kept the minimum price at $2, it lowered the minimum purchase to a half-section (320 acres) and spread the payment over four years. In 1804, Congress reduced the minimum price to $1.64 and further reduced the minimum acreage to a quarter-section (160 acres), conventionally regarded as enough for a viable family farm. When the minimums were further reduced to 80 acres and $1.25 per acre in 1820, Congress also ended the credit system, since a financial crisis had forced so many purchasers into default.

Meanwhile, poor settlers had increasingly taken matters into their own hands by squatting on the public lands, building a cabin, clearing fields, and pasturing livestock without a formal title. When the land came up for sale at auction, squatter associations intimidated potential bidders, arguing that people who had put their labor into improving the land should have a right to hold it. After Congress granted temporary relief to such squatters in the 1830s, the Preemption Act of 1841 legalized squatting by any citizen who was the head of a family (of any age), a widow, or a single man over the age of 21. He or she, under this “Log Cabin Law,” could obtain up to 160 acres of any surveyed public land by settling on it, building a house, and paying the minimum price of $1.25 per acre when it came up for sale. With this act, the settlement of the public domain by family farmers became the primary object of public land policy.

The implications of the Log Cabin Law were not fully implemented until southern opponents of a liberal land policy disappeared from Congress during the Civil War. The Homestead Act of 1862 made it possible to preempt a farm on public lands free of charge, and extended the privilege from heads of families to unmarried women as well as unmarried men. Any citizen “who is the head of a family, or who has arrived at the age of twenty-one years,” in the language of the act, could occupy 160 acres of public land “for the purpose of actual settlement and cultivation,” after filing for entry at a cost of $10. Full title to the land would issue without further cost when it could be “proved by two credible witnesses that he, she, or they have resided upon or cultivated the same for the term of five years.”¹ At last, it seemed, anyone could own a farm. But by the time railroads carried immigrants from Europe and the East Coast to settle the Plains, the best land had already been claimed under the Log Cabin Law, and that available for homestead entry lacked the fertility, water, timber, or other resources necessary for farming.

A land policy shaped by the agrarian ideal in the well-watered and wooded East often proved disastrous when settlement pushed onto the arid plains beyond the 100th meridian. Traditional farmers lured too far west by wet years in the climatic cycle were devastated when more normal drought years followed. Moreover, the cattle ranching, dry-land wheat production, and mining that could be practiced in the arid West required far more land to support a family than the 160-acre norm of federal land policy. During the cattle boom of the late nineteenth century on the high plains, ranchers typically grazed their stock without cost on vast reaches of public lands by controlling the only water sources where settlement was possible. Range wars and intimidation of intruders by armed cattlemen’s associations were not uncommon, but where possible ranchers and miners sought title to strategic sites.

Symptomatic of this problem were the extensive frauds perpetrated under both the Log Cabin Law and a provision of the Homestead Act allowing a homesteader who did not want to wait five years for his farm to buy it after six months for $1.25 per acre. Ranchers and others needing large tracts hired people to file claims with the local land office, enter and cultivate the land, and live there for six months. The “homesteader” would then pay for the land with the rancher’s money and turn over the title in return for a fee. The meanings of “settlement,” “cultivation,” and “house” were abused. A “house,” for this purpose, could have four walls but no chimney, or lack a floor, or even measure 12 by 14 inches in size. In addition, many land offices in western townships were staffed with people who accepted bribes to write fraudulent titles and file fraudulent claims.

In the 1870s, Congress sought to adapt land policy to the special circumstances of the arid West through a series of special land acts. The Timber Culture Act of 1873 allowed a person to claim title to 160 acres of land by planting trees on one quarter, or forty acres, of it. Most of that land was on the prairies and plains of the arid West, and although planting trees was a worthy objective, most settlers lacked information on planting, cultivating, and watering trees. The government soon reduced the requirement to ten acres, but even with that modification, the law was largely unsuccessful.

In 1877, the Desert Lands Act made 640 acres of desert land available for $1.25 per acre if it was irrigated in three years. But irrigating arid land was very labor-intensive. One had to find land near a river and dig irrigation ditches to divert the water to the soil. Again the results were not often successful.

In 1878, the Free Timber Act gave people the right to cut timber on public lands reserved for mineral use in order to obtain timber for building farmhouses and towns. A related act of the same year, the Timber and Stone Act, stated that 160 acres of land valuable for minerals or stone as well as timber could be purchased from the federal government. Both these acts were bonanzas for timber companies, who hired people to stake claims to forest lands and then turn the lands over to the lumber company.

The land acts by which people acquired property for homesteading were differentiated from acts for acquiring mineral lands, beginning with the General Mining Act of 1872. The law stated that “all valuable mineral deposits in lands belonging to the United States, both surveyed and unsurveyed, shall be free and open to exploration and purchase, and the lands in which they are found to occupation and purchase, by citizens of the United States.” On mineral lands, one could simply stake a claim—that is, put stakes or monuments in the ground, and then extract the minerals. While this gave one claim to the gold, silver, or other minerals on the land, the title to the land itself had to be obtained through the land laws. One could obtain title to the land around a placer, lode, or gravel mine by paying $2.50 an acre or, in the case of hard-rock mining, $5 an acre, prices still in effect. Although the law was meant to encourage development of the land and its minerals for the public good, environmentalists today consider it questionable policy, while mining companies consider it essential to their success.

Federal lands were granted not only to individuals, but also to states and railroads. In addition to the federal government, most of the western states deeded lands for railroad development. Railroads were granted a right of way of 100 yards and then 20 square miles on either side of the track in alternate one-square mile sections, creating checkerboard patterns. The sections could then be sold to homesteaders. Agents for the railroads went to Europe and the East Coast to encourage people to travel west by rail and settle the alternate checkerboards they had acquired. They offered land to immigrants by giving them incentives on transportation costs for specific crops, such as corn or wheat, to be grown on the Plains. This practice dovetailed with the federal government’s policy of encouraging the transportation, marketability, and internal development of the country.

Another purpose of the disposal of the public domain was for education. Each state acquired school lands to establish agricultural and technological colleges for farmers and mechanics—the yeoman and the artisan, mainstays of the democratic ideal. The goal was to educate them for good citizenship and to continue to develop the crops and technologies that would advance the country. The Morrill Act of 1862, which established land grant colleges in each state, was followed by the Hatch Act of 1887, which created the agricultural experiment stations. The mission of the experiment stations was “aiding and acquiring and diffusing among the people of the United States useful and practical information on subjects connected to agriculture.” Research done by agricultural colleges would benefit the people of each state. Departments such as soils, plant pathology, entomology, and nutrition hired professors to conduct research on solving practical problems for the benefit of family farmers. Cooperative extension agents then took the results and disseminated them to farmers.

By the late nineteenth century, most of the land and natural resources of the western United States had been entered, claimed, and developed under the federal government’s liberal land laws. Historian Frederick Jackson Turner, in his 1893 essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” argued that the frontier had come to a close. “In a recent bulletin of the Superintendent of the Census for 1890,” he wrote, “appear these significant words: ‘Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line.’” Only small areas of land throughout the West remained to be claimed, and however significant the frontier had been for the emergence of American democracy, “never again will such gifts of free land offer themselves.”²

The perception of abundant unexploited lands teeming with wildlife and fertile soils began to turn to one of wasted resources and inefficient use. Timber companies cut the best trees and moved on without reforestation, leaving slash and litter behind. Ranchers exploited the perennial grasses of the open range, leaving sagebrush and eroded soils. Settlers discovered that periods of drought made farming in the arid West unreliable and that dams and canals for irrigation were costly to construct and maintain. Market hunters and fishers depleted supplies of fish and game and decimated bird populations for feathers for women’s hats. Rivers, lakes, and air were polluted from industrial development.

George Perkins Marsh (1801–82), one of the earliest advocates for the wise use of land, warned that American lands might suffer the fate of the ancient civilizations of the Mediterranean world, where once abundant forests had turned to denuded slopes and eroded soils. His book Man and Nature, published in 1864, sold 100,000 copies in a few months, testimony to the level of concern over the waste of resources in the United States. “Man,” Marsh wrote, “has too long forgotten that the earth was given to him for usufruct alone, not for consumption, still less for profligate waste.… [M]an is everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discords.” Marsh proposed that the pioneer settler “become a co-worker with nature in the reconstruction of the damaged fabric.… He must aid her in reclothing the mountain slopes with forests.…”³ Marsh’s concerns were echoed by a growing number of eastern elites who hiked in the Appalachian Mountains, western sportsmen who hunted and fished in the Rockies, women’s groups, birders, nature writers, artists, scientists, and foresters who saw wild nature vanishing under ax and plow and valuable resources wasted under exploit-and-move-on policies.

By the late nineteenth century, laissez-faire capitalism, which had supported the free market’s development of natural resources, began increasingly to be scrutinized and curtailed. The initial period of disposition of the public domain was followed by a second period of withholding lands for forest reserves, game refuges, national parks, and wilderness areas. During the Progressive Era of the early twentieth century, the government passed laws that regulated both corporations and land use, initiating a shift away from the policy of unregulated development, characterized by the term, laissez-faire, a French phrase meaning “let it be.” The Division of Forestry’s first chief, Bernhard Fernow (1851–1923), in his 1902 book Economics of Forestry, proposed instead a policy of faire-marcher, another French term, meaning “to make it work,” or to give direction or guidance to development through resource conservation.

Utilitarian conservation began to displace the earlier policies of “free” disposition of federal lands between the 1880s and the beginning of World War I. Utilitarianism, an ethic developed by philosophers Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806–73) in England, was based on the idea of “the greatest good for the greatest number.” “Utility” meant putting the land to work to promote people’s happiness. The conservation ethic of the early twentieth century added the idea of time, captured in the phrase of conservationist WJ McGee (1853–1912), “the greatest good of the greatest number for the longest time.” ⁴

The concept of conservation was promoted in 1908 by forester Gifford Pinchot and President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House Conference on Conservation. It brought under one rubric the various strands of the movement toward resource efficiency in the use of forests, water, and rangelands that had developed separately during the prior three decades. Resource conservation came to mean the wise and efficient use of natural resources. “Conservation above all,” states environmental historian Samuel Hays, “was a scientific movement.… Its essence was rational planning to promote efficient development and use of all natural resources.”⁵

Pinchot followed Fernow as the Chief of the Division of Forestry (now the Forest Service). The Division, established in 1886, managed the forest reserves, established in 1891 through the Forest Reserve Act. During this period, certain lands within the public domain were reserved from homestead entry as forest reserves. In 1905, Pinchot transferred the forest reserves out of the Department of the Interior and into the Department of Agriculture, on the grounds that forests ought to be managed as if they were a crop. He also advocated allowing controlled grazing in the forest reserves. He instituted a sustained yield process in which timberlands must be reforested after cutting. With the work of Fernow and Pinchot, the twentieth-century forestry movement, devoted to the efficient use of natural resources and sustained timber yields, was launched.

Water reclamation and development were likewise of paramount importance in settling the arid American West. “In the East,” states water historian Marc Reisner, “virtually every acre received enough rainfall.… [M]uch of the West … suffers through months of habitual drought.” ⁶ In his 1878 Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States, John Wesley Powell (1834–1902) identified the amount of annual average rainfall as constituting a fundamental difference between the lands of the western and eastern United States. Lands west of the 98th meridian were characterized by erratic rainfall in amounts from 5–20 inches per year. Less than 20 inches of rain a year was insufficient to grow crops reliably. Powell classified western lands into irrigable lands and arid lands. For an irrigated farm, 80 acres, or one-half of the quarter section that the Homestead Act had set out as the basic unit, would be enough for a homestead. Fertile land existed in the river valleys and adjacent lowlands, where water could be easily diverted, for use by irrigated farms.

But Powell also recognized that many lands throughout the West did not have easy access to water. Here pasturage farms, devoted not to crops but to grazing, would need 2,560 acres, or four sections of land. A third classification was forested land in the high mountains as far as the timberline, valuable for commercial purposes and for buildings, housing, and fencing. Timberlands, he proposed, should be set aside and reserved for commercial use.

Powell’s 1878 report was not received with enthusiasm by members of Congress, and he retreated to pursuing science, as head of the Bureau of Ethnology (1881–1902) and as head of the U.S. Geological Survey from 1881–1892. But toward the end of the century, in 1902—the year that Powell died—his ideas began to gain favor. Francis Newlands (1848–1917) of Nevada, after winning a seat in the House of Representatives, introduced Powell’s recommendations into Congress. At first his bill was couched in terms too radical for Congress to accept, but President Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919), who had by then gained office, urged Newlands to rewrite his bill, and in 1902 the Reclamation Act was passed.

The Reclamation Act of 1902 established a fund from the sale of public lands to be used for the construction and maintenance of irrigation works in the western states. The Act set up the Bureau of Reclamation (BuRec) to oversee the construction of federal water systems, and continued the tradition of 160 acres as the basic farm unit. The irrigated farm supplied with water from federal projects would be the key to farming in the West. Single people could obtain 160 acres for an irrigated farm, married couples 320 acres, with the acreage limitation intended to privilege the family farmer. But farming interests found ways to subvert the Reclamation Act’s 160-acre limitation law, just as speculators had found ways to undermine the 1862 Homestead Act.

Western water law had developed differently from that in the eastern states, which initially was based on the riparian doctrine, stemming from English common law. Under riparian law, farms that abutted a river had the right to use the water. Owning the adjacent land conferred the right to use the stream, a right that inhered in the property. The water could be used for drinking, farming, or watering animals, but there was no obligation to use it. Because one could simply sit beside the stream and contemplate its flow, riparian law was known as the “Rocking Chair Law.” The owner, however, could not build a dam or construct a mill that would alter the river’s flow for those downstream.

With industrialization, eastern water law began to change toward a policy of appropriation, a doctrine that developed in the nineteenth-century mill towns of New England and New York. According to legal historian Morton J. Horwitz, “When American judges first attempted to resolve the tension between the need for economic development and the fundamentally antidevelopmental premises of the common law, the whole system of traditional rules was threatened with disintegration.”⁷ In the late eighteenth century, courts in Massachusetts and Connecticut had refused to recognize the right to interfere with the flow of the water, but by the early nineteenth century, a number of cases in New York and New England began to challenge the common-law doctrine of using, but not altering the river, and instead allowed capitalist development to take place if the flow was altered for a beneficial purpose. The case of Palmer v. Mulligan (New York, 1805), followed by a second case in New York in 1818 and another in New Hampshire in 1823, modified riparian law to allow for the appropriation of water for beneficial use. If factories needed water, or dams were constructed to operate mills, looms, and spinning jennies for the textile industry, it was permissible to alter the downstream flow on the grounds that the “natural rights of all” would prevail.⁸

In the arid West, appropriation became established in Colorado by 1882, and henceforth was known as the Colorado Doctrine. The eight mountain states of Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming rejected riparian rights in their constitutions in favor of state control over water. As applied to surface waters, the doctrine of prior appropriation is the concept of “first in time, first in right.” The first person who begins to use the water for a beneficial purpose, such as growing crops, has the right to divert it to their land. The senior appropriator, or the first individual to use the water, has the first right to use or divert it. The person who follows in time is the junior appropriator, and even if located upstream from the senior appropriator, he or she cannot divert all the water from the river, leaving nothing for the first user. The water may be used for growing crops or watering cattle, but in times of drought is also allocated on the basis of the rule, “first in time, first in right.” Second, in contrast to the riparian doctrine, appropriation is based on the concept of “use it or lose it.” If the water is not used, the appropriator loses the right to the water. Third, water use is quantified, and appropriators can sell water among themselves.

The California Doctrine, a dual riparian-appropriation system, resulted from a famous water law case, Lux v. Haggin, filed in 1879 and decided by the California Supreme Court in 1886. According to environmental historian David Igler, “Lux v. Haggin served as a public forum for a wide range of ongoing conflicts in California’s arid San Joaquin Valley—‘land monopolists’ against ‘small farmers,’ San Francisco control of hinterland resources, and perhaps most notably, ‘riparian’ landowners versus water ‘appropriators.’”⁹ Henry Miller (1827–1916) and Charles Lux (1823–87), immigrants engaged in the San Francisco butchering business, needed to maintain an adequate supply of beef cattle to serve their customers. They therefore formed the Miller-Lux Land Company, eventually becoming the wealthiest landowners in the West, with holdings in California, Oregon, and Nevada. In the process, they acquired land along the Kern River. Because they were ranchers, they could drive their cattle to the river and water them at the stream itself. They claimed their water on the basis of the California state constitution, which granted water rights under riparian law. But they soon came into conflict with upstream farmer Ben Ali Haggin (1821–1914), who claimed water rights on the basis of prior appropriation. Haggin argued that he had appropriated the water and was diverting it to his crops through irrigation. The conflict that developed was between ranching under riparian law and irrigated farming under appropriation.

The court case that established the California Doctrine was resolved in 1886 when the California Supreme Court ruled that both sides had rights to the water. Riparian rights prevailed if a person had private land along the river, but appropriation prevailed over riparian rights if the appropriator was the first user. Both the riparian and appropriation laws were, therefore, valid, but it was timing—when the river was first used to draw off water versus when the land abutting the river was purchased—that determined who had first right to the water in the event of a conflict. With the legal issues settled, Miller and Lux went into business with Haggin and the parties built a dam together. The California Doctrine, however, became the basis for water law in nine western states—California, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, and Washington.

As development proceeded throughout the country, pristine areas of wilderness vanished. The movement to preserve wilderness arose during the second half of the nineteenth century and commanded national attention in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Environmental historian Roderick Nash writes: “All the nineteenth-century champions of wilderness appreciation and national parks in the United States were products of either urban Eastern situations or of one of the West’s most sophisticated cities, such as San Francisco.”¹⁰

During the last half of the nineteenth century, many upper- and middle-class Americans came to view wilderness as a threatened national asset. Wild nature was a treasure to be cherished and preserved, rather than an evil to be eliminated. Mountains, waterfalls, valleys, and even deserts took on characteristics of the sublime, associated in the public mind with the awesome power of God. Nature writer John Muir (1838–1914), among others, viewed mountains as God’s cathedrals.

Wilderness was also associated with the formation of the American character, especially the male character. It was an arena in which men could reassert and reaffirm their masculinity. According to Nash, “wilderness … acquired importance as a source of virility, toughness, and savagery—qualities that defined fitness in Darwinian terms.”¹¹ The more wealth people acquired and the more a middle-class lifestyle seemed attainable by large numbers of people, the more that way of life came to be considered soft. As an antidote, the outdoor movement arose, exemplified by groups such as the Appalachian Mountain Club (1876), the Boone and Crockett Club (1885), the Mazamas of Portland, Oregon (1894), the Sierra Club (1892), and the Campfire Club of America (1897), whose members camped in the outdoors and hiked in the mountains in the summertime. As more people acquired access to wilderness, they came to appreciate its value. Books celebrating the virtues of the wilderness sold in increasing numbers, and people displayed pictures in their homes of beautiful mountains, lakes, and meadows.

Among those who promoted the idea of wilderness was landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903) who visited California’s Yosemite Valley in 1863–4 as a commissioner appointed to manage the grant of the Yosemite Valley to the state of California. His report, presented in 1865 to his fellow commissioners, argued that exposure to the wilderness was an important complement to city life, especially as therapy for the mind. As people became caught up in the pressures of ordinary urban life, they developed “softening of the brain, paralysis, palsy, monomania, or insanity, mental and nervous excitability and moroseness, melancholy and irascibility.”¹² These psychological and physical problems could incapacitate people and prevent them from exercising their “intellectual and moral forces.” The antidote was to get out into the wilderness. Olmsted was especially adamant that poor people, unable to afford vacations in the mountains, should have access to city parks through public transportation. Olmsted’s 1866 design for New York City’s Central Park reflected this vision by rejecting formal design in favor of wooded hills, lakes, and undulating pathways.

The rapid destruction of the enormous redwoods, which had graced California’s coast ranges and the Sierra Nevada range for thousands of years, heightened interest in wilderness preservation. At the time, redwood lumbering was on the rampage throughout California, and the plight of the redwoods became known worldwide, as images and even bark from the trees were displayed in cities as far away as London.

Many mountain lumber companies did business on the basis of the Timber and Stone Act of 1878, which permitted individuals to file claims to land that had timber of commercial value. Agents for the lumber companies looked for people they could hire to enter forests and stake claims to 160 acres of land. They then took them to a local land office to file a claim. After the deed was paid off in six months, the title would be transferred to the timber company for a sum of money paid to the participant. Thus much of the western wilderness was disappearing under axe and saw, as lumber companies harvested the giant trees.

The preservation of California’s coastal redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) became a cause célèbre by the turn of the nineteenth century, as lumbering proceeded unhindered along the northern California coast from Santa Cruz to Humboldt County. Because there were few roads and railroads, logs and lumber were hauled to docks on the Pacific Ocean and sent down shoots or dragged onto wharves, whence by chains and pulleys they could be loaded onto schooners offshore. They were then shipped to San Francisco Bay and eastward by train.

A major issue that mobilized redwood preservationists was the proposed cutting of the Calaveras Big Trees (Sequoia gigantea) in California’s Stanislaus River Valley, which Europeans discovered in 1850. In 1900, women in San Francisco—members of the California Federation of Women’s Clubs, spearheaded by Laura White—began a campaign to save the trees. The result was the passage of a bill curtailing tree-cutting in 1900, followed by an authorization to exchange the Calaveras Grove for lands of equal value in 1909. Although cutting was halted, the preservation project took many more years to complete. Additionally, in 1901, the Sempervirens Club, named for the coastal redwood, Sequoia sempervirens, was successful in persuading the state to set aside Big Basin, south of San Francisco, as a park. In 1918, the club became the Save the Redwoods League, which spearheaded the creation of state and national redwood parks in California throughout the twentieth century.

In addition to hiking and outdoor clubs, women’s clubs, such as the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (1890), the Women’s National Rivers and Harbors Congress (1908), and the Daughters of the American Revolution Committee on Conservation (1909) promoted the wilderness ideal and the preservation of parks. Other preservation organizations included the American Civic Association (1900), the National Audubon Society (1905), and the railroads, which immediately saw that tourism would be to their financial benefit.

The movement to preserve areas for their aesthetic and recreational benefit led to the establishment of state and national parks. Between the creation of Yellowstone National Park in 1872 and the passage of the National Park Service Act in 1916, thirteen National Parks were set aside to “conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such a manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”¹³ The states also began to preserve lands for watershed and recreation. In 1885, the state of New York approved a 715,000-acre “Forest Preserve” in the Adirondacks, to be “kept forever as wild forest lands.”¹⁴

The first national park to be created was Yellowstone in Wyoming. In 1870, an expedition to the region was led by Henry D. Washburn (1832–71), surveyor general of Montana, with a second in 1871 authorized by Ferdinand Hayden (1829–87), head of the United States Geological Survey. Soon thereafter a movement to preserve the area as a park was mounted. At the forefront of the process was A. B. Nettleton, spokesperson for Northern Pacific Railroad financier, Jay Cooke. The bill was shepherded through the legislative process by Hayden, and the Yellowstone Park Act was passed in 1872. With the country in depression at the time, a proposed railroad extension from Cooke’s Northern Pacific Railroad into the park was not completed until 1883. But by 1915, almost 45,000 people were arriving by train in Yellowstone each season and staying in hotels financed by the railroad.

Yosemite National Park in California was created through a sequence of acts. First, in 1864, during the Civil War, President Lincoln ceded Yosemite Valley to the state of California for the purpose of its preservation. The mountains around the valley were designated a National Park in 1890, and then the valley was re-ceded to the federal government to become part of Yosemite National Park in 1905. The first tourists had entered Yosemite Valley in 1855, four years after the Mariposa Indian War resulted in the removal of the Yosemite Indians. Soon thereafter, some 400 visitors came by steamboat and stage. By 1869, when the transcontinental railroad was completed, tourists arriving in San Francisco were offered trips into the park. By 1875, wagonloads of supplies were taken to park hotels to supply the needs of tourists. The great champion of Yosemite was naturalist and writer John Muir (1838–1914), who helped to found the Sierra Club in 1892 and was its first president. He encouraged people to visit Yosemite and to hike in the mountains as he had done.

The preservation of Yosemite, however, became the source of national controversy over the proposal to build a dam within the park in Hetch Hetchy Valley. After the 1906 earthquake, San Francisco needed a more reliable supply of water than that available in the coastal mountain ranges and turned to the Sierra Nevadas for new sources. San Francisco mayor, James Phelan, hired agents to survey all suitable water sources. The use of Cherry Lake or Lake Eleanor were two of the most viable alternatives to damming the Tuolomne River in Hetch Hetchy Valley. The issue came to national attention in 1909, the year in which Muir split with Gifford Pinchot over the latter’s advocacy of the Hetch Hetchy site as a dam for public power. The conservation movement’s ethic of “the greatest good of the greatest number for the longest time” reinforced Pinchot’s goal of providing water for the public good.

The debate over whether or not to dam Hetch Hetchy was spearheaded by Muir, who wrote in florid terms about the valley as “sublime rocks whose walls glow with life” and described “the birds, bees and butterflies [that] would stir the air into music.” Muir’s ethic, in contrast to that of the public power advocates, was couched in theocentric terms. The mountains were God’s cathedrals, and Hetch Hetchy Valley ought to be preserved on those grounds alone. People who had never visited Yosemite National Park or the Hetch Hetchy Valley wrote to Congress, urging that the valley be saved. Muir described the valley in a number of articles, and women’s clubs throughout the country rallied to his side, denouncing Pinchot, whom they had supported on most conservation issues. The battle over Hetch Hetchy was lost, however, with the passage of the Raker Act in 1913. The O’Shaughnessy Dam across Hetch Hetchy’s Tuolomne River, built between 1915 and 1920, became the centerpiece of San Francisco’s effort to bring water and electricity to the city.

In 1916, after Muir’s death, the National Park Service began to administer the thirteen parks established by that date and formerly managed by the U.S. Army. The list included well-known parks in the western United States, such as Yellowstone (1872), Yosemite (1890), Sequoia (1890), General Grant (1890), Mt. Rainier (1899), Crater Lake (1902), Mesa Verde (1906), Glacier (1910), and several smaller parks. Henceforth, the National Park Service administered all national parks, monuments, and historic sites set aside for their natural and scenic value, a list that grew to more than 350 sites by the late twentieth century.

Grand Canyon National Park (1919) was the first to commemorate the stark beauty of the desert. John Wesley Powell, on his expeditions through the Grand Canyon in 1869 and 1871–72, described the canyon’s sheer walls, magnificent cliffs, and panoply of colors. Geologist Clarence Dutton’s Tertiary History of the Grand Cañon District (1882) subsequently brought the science, aesthetics, cartography, painting, and photography of the canyon to public attention. Environmental historian Steven Pyne, in How the Canyon Became Grand (1998), writes: “By the time Dutton finished his inquiry, the Grand Canyon, essentially unknown twenty years before … had become … an exemplar of landscape aesthetics.”¹⁵ Pyne attributes the park’s popular appeal to descriptions by scientists such as Dutton and Grove Karl Gilbert (1843–1918) and to paintings by artists such as Thomas Moran (1837–1926) and Gunnar Widforss (1879–1934). The Grand Canyon became a national monument in 1908 and a national park in 1919. While the Grand Canyon is perhaps the country’s most spectacular national park, it is in desert country, and as such was a departure from the magnificent forests and snow-capped mountains that characterized the Adirondacks, the Rockies, and the Sierras. The preservation of the Grand Canyon was an acknowledgment that not only could the southwestern rocks and canyons be beautiful, but also that the arid landscape of the deserts was worthy of preservation.

Over the years, the railroads built trunk lines to the national parks. The Union Pacific and Northern Pacific had lines going into the Yellowstone area. The Great Northern Railroad crossed the top of the country through Glacier National Park. In Utah, Bryce and Zion National Parks were served by the Union Pacific. The Southern Pacific had a route into Yosemite National Park, and the Yosemite Valley Railroad reached nearby El Portal. Mount Rainier was served by both the Northern Pacific and Great Northern railroads, and Crater Lake, in southern Oregon, was accessed by the Southern Pacific. The Grand Canyon could be visited by taking the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe railroad’s trunk line into the canyon just off its main route. Abandoned in 1969, it was restored in 1989 to became the Grand Canyon Railway. The idea of seeing the Great West, in the company of the railroads, has been a significant part of the preservation of America’s scenic heritage.

Throughout the twentieth century, debates over the preservation of wilderness areas versus the need to exploit water and forests for the public good continued. Controversies over whether to dam the Colorado River in Glen Canyon and the Grand Canyon and the Green River in Dinosaur National Monument aroused the passions of the nation. Whether to cut the ancient forests of the Northwest for timber or to preserve the Headwaters redwood forests of California have spawned citizen demonstrations and legal battles. Such issues keep alive the concerns raised by early twentieth-century conservationists and preservationists over the vanishing West and the vanishing wilderness.

Federal land policy moved from the acquisition of territory during colonial times through the mid-nineteenth century to the encouragement of rapid settlement between the American Revolution and the closing of the frontier in the 1890s. With much of the best land allocated by the turn of the century, the nation’s focus shifted to resource conservation and wilderness preservation. The conservation movement stressed the efficient use of natural resources for “the greatest good of the greatest number for the longest time.” Forests, rangelands, and water were managed for productivity, sustained yield, and year-around conservation. The preservation movement aroused the nation to the need for setting aside sublime and picturesque areas for aesthetic appreciation and recreation. Supported by citizen’s groups, hiking clubs, and the railroads, 13 national parks were created by the time the National Park Service Act was passed in 1916. Throughout the twentieth century, additional parks were added to the system, many amid controversy over dam construction for water conservation versus preservation for wilderness appreciation.