I&M Administrative History: Pleasing the People

“To know exactly the consequences of what we are doing, we must know all about the animals and their interrelations.”

—Yellowstone researcher Milton Skinner, 1927

In 1915, Yellowstone National Park got something it never had before: a list of bird species known to live in the park. The list was compiled by Milton P. Skinner, a chemist by training, who in 1920 would become the first Park Naturalist hired by the National Park Service (NPS). Like countless other eventual NPS employees, Skinner had visited Yellowstone for the first time as a teenager, then returned numerous times both as a tourist and to work, doing stints for a park concessioner, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the Bureau of Biological Survey (BBS, today’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service).

On his own time and in the course of his work, Skinner obtained permission to conduct scientific investigations of the park’s flowers and geology. He spent September 1911 exploring Yellowstone on foot, keeping a daily diary of his observations in the manner of other natural historians of the time.¹ Skinner returned to Yellowstone each year, expanding his studies to include wild game, pursuing photography, and even making “moving pictures” in the summer of 1914. Along the way, he shared what he learned with the park’s U.S. Army administrators by contributing to the park’s “general information circular,” a soft-cover guide that was the century-ago equivalent of today’s park website. The annual circular told people about Yellowstone’s sights, geysers, animals, rules, administration, weather, transportation, lodging, and where they could camp and buy gas, and provided maps so they could get around. One of Skinner’s contributions was the bird list.

By 1920, Yellowstone’s information circular included some 29 pages of species-specific life-history information on the park’s fish, mammals, birds, and trees, some of which was written by Skinner’s BBS colleagues. That same year, superintendent Horace Albright created the position of park naturalist and appointed Skinner to the job. Skinner found himself “in charge of the information office and all scientific work carried out in the park”—as well as inspecting forests for disease, overseeing timber operations, and editing and updating park publications. In short order, he established a park museum and instituted a monthly series of reports on “seasonal changes, natural phenomena, animals, birds and flower”—what came to be known as the “Yellowstone Nature Notes.”²

From 1920 through summer 1922, Skinner moved, opened, and administered the park museum; delivered interpretive lectures; extinguished wildfires; did some reconnaissance at other museums and zoos; and wrote the Nature Notes, among his other duties as park naturalist. He also conducted studies of park wildlife, publishing a manuscript on the white pelican and completing a 10-day survey, report, and map of antelope on the park’s Northern Range.

Of all his varied assignments, it was this last one—scientific investigation—to which he was most devoted. But he was dismayed that it did always seem to come last. In September 1922, Skinner resigned, to focus his energies on science. He went to work for Charles C. Adams, a friend to Theodore Roosevelt and director of the Roosevelt Wild Life Forest Experiment Station in Yellowstone’s Lamar Valley. Along with Berkeley scientists Joseph Grinnell and Tracy Storer, Adams is credited with developing and promoting the idea that as places largely set aside from human influence, the national parks were ideal locations to study ecological relationships.³

At the field station, Skinner was able to do the research and writing he desired. By 1926, Yellowstone’s information circular cited five of his published works, including studies of birds, bears, elk, antelope, and “The Yellowstone Nature Book.”⁴ In 1927, the Roosevelt Wild Life Bulletin published Skinner’s “The Predatory and Fur-Bearing Animals of the Yellowstone National Park,” an influential piece arguing against NPS predator-control policies. In line with the thinking of Adams, Berkeley professor Joseph Grinnell, and other contemporary ecologists, Skinner posited that to properly manage the park, its caretakers needed to understand its natural relationships as they existed prior to human contact: “. . . the ideal policy would be to preserve the Yellowstone Park essentially as nature has evolved it. . . . To know exactly the consequences of what we are doing, we must know all about the animals and their interrelations.”⁵

But to know all about the animals in their care, park managers first needed to know which animals were in their care. Even before a research station was established in Yellowstone, universities and other government agencies had undertaken wildlife surveys in some of the national parks. At Yosemite, Joseph Grinnell and Tracy Storer surveyed vertebrates for the University of California in 1914.⁶ Vernon Bailey, chief field naturalist for the Bureau of Biological Survey, and one of its most prolific researchers, surveyed wildlife at Yellowstone, Glacier, Grand Canyon, and Carlsbad Caverns national parks.⁷ Bailey’s wife, Florence, was an ornithologist, and together they produced Wild Animals of Glacier National Park in 1918; he writing of the park’s mammals, she of the birds.⁸ Two years later, W.P. Taylor and W.T. Shaw published a survey of mammals, birds, and life zones of Mt. Rainier National Park.⁹

Rocky Mountain National Park was known to be a spectacular game reserve, having previously been the Earl of Dunraven’s private hunting grounds, but no biological survey had been completed there by 1919, when University of Colorado zoologist T.D.A. Cockerell and his wife spent a week in the park collecting and classifying bees. Of this knowledge gap, Cockerell wrote:

The Park is new, and awaits development in various directions. One of the principal items on the program should be a Natural History Survey. The intensive and scientific study of such an area would produce results of the greatest interest to all biologists, and would make possible many interpretations of natural phenomena instructive to ordinary non-scientific visitors. The indiscriminate collecting of specimens should not he encouraged, but materials must be gathered in a systematic manner to determine the character and distribution of the biota.¹⁰

Cockerell was describing what today’s NPS calls a biological inventory—a systematic, point-in-time effort to determine the location or condition of resources. Biological inventories provide a snapshot of the plants and animals present in a given area at a given time, and record where and how many they are. They provide a baseline of ecological knowledge about a place and are a springboard for asking more complicated questions about how an ecosystem works. They respond to the Enlightenment notion that places and systems are knowable through scientific observation; America’s most famous example was completed by Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery, instructed by Thomas Jefferson to observe “the animals of the country generally,” as well as “the dates at which particular plants put forth or lose their flower, or leaf, times of appearance of particular birds, reptiles or insects.”¹¹

But in 1919, natural surveys were not a high priority for the National Park Service (NPS). There was a strong and lasting belief, on the part of agency leaders, that once lands had been set aside as national parks, the vast majority of their area and wonders were, de facto, “preserved forever in their natural state.”¹² With park rangers deployed to discourage poaching and vandalism, NPS director Stephen Mather and his assistant, Horace Albright, believed the best way to ensure continued protection of the parks’ wonders—and the nascent National Park Service—was to build public support through visitor-based development and improvements. Roads and developed areas, they argued, would concentrate people in very limited areas of the parks, leaving the rest to wilderness.¹³

Taken in its historical context, this faith in “preservation through development” was not as paradoxical as it might seem today. Just eight months after the NPS was established in August 1916, US entry into World War I had tested its protection mandate. Requests to devote park lands and resources to the war effort poured in, based on what historian Richard Sellars referred to as “the patriotic rationale.”¹⁴ The NPS Organic Act had allowed for limited grazing of livestock on national park lands, except in Yellowstone. But now, so many people were requesting permission to graze sheep on park lands (one request would have placed 50,000 domestic ovids in the Yosemite meadows) that Interior Secretary Franklin Lane stepped in to clarify that although limited cattle grazing would be permitted, domestic sheep were strictly prohibited in the national parks. Enterprising individuals also petitioned the national parks to allow harvesting of fish, game, and timber to support the war effort—all without success.¹⁵

Secretary Lane’s domestic sheep ban appeared in the 1918 “Lane Letter,” a broad-ranging statement of NPS administrative policies that was written by Horace Albright and sent to Lane for conveyance back to the NPS via Director Mather.¹⁶ Though the letter began by unequivocally stating that every action taken by the NPS was subordinate to its mandate to preserve the parks “in essentially their natural state,” it then instructed Mather to provide the public with opportunities to enjoy the parks in whatever manner suited their “individual tastes,” and to encourage recreational use of the parks “in every practicable way.” Visitor use and enjoyment were to be facilitated in part through construction of roads, trails, and accommodations ranging from free campsites to luxurious hotels. To boost visitation, the NPS was told to collaborate on promotional efforts with railroad companies, chambers of commerce, tourist services, and automobile associations.¹⁷

Developing and promoting the parks to shore up their public support was a project Mather and Albright had begun immediately after the NPS was created in 1916, and which took on new import after the parks’ attempted wartime plunder.¹⁸ Increasing visitation was also seen as a means of ensuring the parks were properly funded. According to Albright, “We knew the Congress would count tourist visitation to decide how much money our Service would get to operate the park system. Dollars would be doled out according to the number of visitors.”¹⁹ Railway companies had already built iconic grand hotels in the parks, like Yellowstone’s Old Faithful Inn (1904), Grand Canyon’s El Tovar (1905), and Glacier’s Many Glacier Hotel (1915). They would be joined by Yosemite’s Ahwahnee Hotel (1927) and others, along with car camps designed to encourage auto-touring. By the end of Mather’s tenure in 1929, the NPS itself had overseen the development of “1,298 miles of roads, 3,903 miles of trails, [and] 1,623 miles of telephone and telegraph lines, in addition to countless buildings, campgrounds, and support facilities like sewer and water systems and power plants.²⁰

Mather and Albright saw the ranger corps as “the core of park management.”²¹ They established a hierarchical structure in which a park’s chief ranger was essentially its second-in-command to the superintendent, and a bureau management model that concentrated power in the field, with guidance from a small Washington directorate. This combination gave rangers a considerable amount of power in park management decisions and an established career ladder that is still evident in the propensity for park superintendents to come from the ranks of law enforcement. Sellars argued that these early policies “became a fundamental aspect of . . . the internal politics of the Service.”²² These dynamics would make it difficult to establish new management models later on; six decades after they were established, historian Gerald Wright observed, “some rangers believe that only they represent the true values of the NPS,” and that the tendency of superintendents to come from the ranger corps perpetuates this “feeling of superiority.”²³

At this early stage in NPS history, rangers were responsible for almost everything the NPS did on the ground in the parks. In addition to enforcing the law, they interpreted park resources and some specialized in natural-resource protection. As conceived at the time, the job of these “wildlife rangers” was to protect popular park attractions from anything that might threaten their ability to be enjoyed by visitors. In the case of wildlife, this meant cultivating “desirable” species the public liked to see and destroying species thought to impede their proliferation. The NPS officially practiced predator control from its inception into the 1930s; to protect favored species, such as deer, elk, and fish, wildlife rangers killed mountain lions, wolves, coyotes, otters, porcupines, and other small predators, as well as birds including goshawks and pelicans.²⁴

Because visitors took pleasure in watching and interacting with them, bears were a singular exception to the predator policy. Yellowstone’s hoteliers had dumped their garbage in the park since the 1880s. The dumps inevitably attracted bears, who became accustomed to the nightly food supply. Around 1891, staff from Yellowstone’s Fountain Hotel realized they could provide visitor entertainment by hauling each evening’s trash to a site within walking distance of the hotel. When curious visitors started to follow the trash wagon, a tradition was born. Tourists would continue to congregate to watch grizzlies eat garbage in Yellowstone—including at a specially built amphitheater with spectator seating and a concrete feeding pad hosed clean each night—until after the summer of 1941, when the “bear shows” finally ended for good.²⁵

The early days of NPS resource management, then, were characterized by active manipulation for people-pleasing, built on the assumption that setting aside park lands was enough to ensure their conservation under the Organic Act. Trees were cut to improve vistas and help destroy pests. Fires were suppressed to preserve existing forests. Park waters were stocked with hatchery trout to create fishing opportunities. Some animals were killed, others propagated. Grizzly bears feasted on human garbage and black bears begged for food at park roadsides. The Lane Letter had called for the parks to be preserved “in essentially their natural state,” but it was getting harder and harder to recognize it.

In some cases, the premium placed on public enjoyment led to problems that threatened it instead. In Yellowstone, where roadside feeding of bears was nominally against the rules but also enormously popular, a “wink-wink, nudge, nudge” approach to enforcement led to 78 reported injuries and 209 incidents of property damage from bears in 1931.²⁶ And at the same time Yellowstone’s rangers were busy attempting to exterminate its predators, the park was already facing concerns that its elk herd had outgrown its habitat on the northern range.²⁷ Some in the bureau began to suspect that the Service’s successful campaign of people-pleasing was coming at the expense of the very wonders people came to see—in short, to think maybe “conservation” was not enough.

One group began to look to science for answers. In 1929, the Service’s Educational Division, based in Berkeley, California, held its first conference of park naturalists. The meeting took place amid a general sense that, as Yellowstone naturalist Milton Skinner had believed, the naturalists lacked the scientific information they needed to adequately and accurately interpret the parks to visitors. The naturalists also recognized that scientific research could help park managers solve problems related to predators and wildlife, and address concerns about overdevelopment in the parks. In the following year, the Educational Division was reconfigured as the Branch of Research and Education, whose purpose was “to gather the scientific information necessary to the development of the museum, educational, and wild-life administration programs of the national parks.”²⁸ The new branch was led by Harold C. Bryant, a former student of Joseph Grinnell at the University of California at Berkeley and, more recently, director of the Yosemite School of Field Natural History, which provided training to park naturalists.²⁹

In the past, when park managers needed scientific answers to resource problems, the NPS had relied on specialists borrowed from other government agencies and conservation organizations. This practice of seeking outside expertise was recommended in the Lane Letter and thereby established as NPS policy. At a time when the NPS was building in-house capacity in engineering, landscape architecture, and law enforcement, the Service was content to seek external support for resource issues, employing just one research scientist: William Rush, assigned to study Yellowstone’s elk herd.³⁰ This first meeting of park naturalists represented a glimmer of recognition that the bureau needed a coherent natural resource policy, especially where wildlife were concerned, and that science should help inform it. The events that followed helped both those notions to take hold, and brought the Service to the brink of paradigm shifts in thought and policy. The NPS would soon begin a groundbreaking, if short-lived, experiment with using a centralized group of in-house scientists to investigate and recommend solutions to park management problems at a servicewide scale. The results would be mixed, and lay bare the tensions between conservation and enjoyment, science and management, and interdivisional power struggles the bureau still wrestles with today.

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Research and writing by Alice Wondrak Biel, Writer-Editor, National Park Service Inventory & Monitoring Division

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¹Amanda Shaw, “Finding Aid: Milton P. Skinner Papers, Circa 1900–1937, 1955” (Yellowstone National Park, August 2017), https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/historyculture/upload/MSC116SkinnerUPDATED.pdf.

²Shaw, “Finding Aid: Milton P. Skinner Papers.” The Yellowstone Nature Notes, which would persist in the park until 1958 and be revived in different forms for decades after that, documented observations of park birds and wildlife that, examined across the years, comprise a long-term record of anecdotal phenological information. They also came to include historical essays, poems, drawings, and reports on geysers and hot springs, among other park miscellany the authors thought would be of interest to the park’s staff and public audiences. Paul Schullery and Lee Whittlesey, “Yellowstone Nature Notes: A Neglected Documentary Resource,” Yellowstone Science Winter (2000): 2–5.

³James A. Pritchard, Preserving Yellowstone’s Natural Conditions: Science and the Perception of Nature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 39; R. Gerald Wright, Wildlife Research and Management in the National Parks (Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 37.

⁴U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, “Rules and Regulations, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming” (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1926), http://npshistory.com/brochures/yell/1926.pdf.

⁵Shaw, “Finding Aid: Milton P. Skinner Papers.”

⁶C. Frank Brockman, “Park Naturalists and the Evolution of National Park Service Interpretation through World War II,” Journal of Forest History, January 1978, 24–43.

⁷David J. Schmidly, William E. Tydeman, and Alfred L. Gardner, eds., United States Biological Survey: A Compendium of Its History, Personalities, Impacts, and Conflicts, Special Publications, Museum of Texas Tech University 64 (Lubbock, Texas: Museum of Texas Tech University, 2016), 38–40.

⁸Bailey was also an expert on rodents and achieved a notable amount of success at, quite literally, building a better mousetrap. https://oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/bailey_vernon/#.XhkSAMhKjcs.

⁹Brockman, “Park Naturalists and the Evolution of National Park Service Interpretation,” 26.

¹⁰T. D. A. Cockerell, “The Bees of the Rocky Mountain National Park (Hymenop.).,” Entomological News XXX (December 1919), 286.

¹¹Thomas Jefferson to Meriwether Lewis, “Jefferson’s Instructions to Meriwether Lewis,” June 20, 1803, https://www.monticello.org/thomas-jefferson/louisiana-lewis-clark/preparing-for-the-expedition/jefferson-s-instructions-to-lewis/.

¹²Richard West Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 93.

¹³Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks, 92–93, 106–7.

¹⁴Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks, 85.

¹⁵Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks, 44, 57; R. Gerald Wright, Wildlife Research and Management in the National Parks (Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 10.

¹⁶Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks, 56–57.

¹⁷Franklin K. Lane to Stephen T. Mather, “Secretary Lane’s Letter on National Park Management,” May 13, 1918, https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/anps/anps_1j.htm.

¹⁸Stephen T. Mather, “Progress in the Development of the National Parks” (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1916), https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/59020#page/7/mode/1up.

¹⁹Alice Wondrak Biel, Do (Not) Feed the Bears: The Fitful History of Wildlife and Tourists in Yellowstone (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2006), 12.

²⁰Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks, 59.

²¹Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks, 54.

²²Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks, 55.

²³Wright, Wildlife Research and Management in the National Parks, 11.

²⁴Pritchard, Preserving Yellowstone’s Natural Conditions, 36, 53, 83; Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks, 72–75.

²⁵Biel, Do (Not) Feed the Bears, 17–18, 40–41.

²⁶The injury numbers were likely far higher, given that to report you were injured while feeding a bear was an admission you had violated park regulations. Biel, Do (Not) Feed the Bears, 30–31.

²⁷Pritchard, Preserving Yellowstone’s Natural Conditions, 127.

²⁸Wright, Wildlife Research and Management in the National Parks, 13.

²⁹Lowell Sumner, “Biological Research and Management in the National Park Service: A History” (National Park Service Office of Natural Sciences, May 1967), http://npshistory.com/publications/nr-general/nps-sci-history-1992.pdf; William H. Sontag, ed., “Dr. Harold Bryant, 1886-1968,” in National Park Service: The First 75 Years (Eastern National Park & Monument Association, 1990), https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/sontag/bryant.htm.

³⁰Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks, 70; Wright, Wildlife Research and Management in the National Parks, 13.

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