Chapter Five:
Selling Sequoia: The Early Park Service Years (1916-1931)
THE FOUNDING OF THE NATIONAL PARK SERVICE brought
radical and immediate change to Sequoia and General Grant, as well as
the rest of the fledgling system. For the first time this loose
aggregate of land withdrawals had a unified and dedicated
administration. For the first time, they escaped the shadow of the
Department of Agriculture, its principal land management agency, the
Forest Service, and their entrenched philosophy of multiple use. And for
the first time, a group of men zealously committed to preservation for
recreation would administer the parks; they were a very different breed
from the conservationists of the Forest Service. However, the Park
Service was weak and the system of lands it inherited were insignificant
compared to the Forest Service and its vast tracts. In addition, the
Park Service faced a complicated problem of blending two nearly
incompatible purposesrecreational use and preservation.
These challenges demanded men who would be
extraordinary in their skills and devotion, for upon their shoulders
would fall the very future of the national park system. The decisions
they made, the policies they adopted and the infrastructure they
approved would become a permanent legacy for the future.
From 1916 to 1931, the Park Service would find four
such men at the national level and in the two parks of the southern
Sierra Nevada. They were Stephen Mather, first director of the Park
Service who ran the agency from 1916 to 1929; Horace Albright, his
trustworthy assistant, who became the second director during the years
1929 to 1933; Walter Fry, first civilian superintendent of the two
parks; and Colonel John White, the second, longest-tenured, and most
important superintendent. During the first decade and a half of the Park
Service, these four men would define park goals, establish patterns of
visitor use and development, and create two administrations, national
and local, that would guide the parks through the remainder of their
first century.
Among their tangible accomplishments at Sequoia and
General Grant were elimination of nearly all private land holdings,
especially in Giant Forest; the enormous expansion of Sequoia to near
its present boundaries; establishment of a highly successful natural
history program incorporating the familiar and popular campfire talks
and ranger-led hikes; installation of a unified and financially stable
concession monopoly with vastly improved and expanded infrastructure;
and construction of nearly all the significant roads and trails found
today in the two parks. Products of their time, these men favored
development of parks for visitor use and their greatest accomplishments
lie in that realm. Yet it was also these remarkable leaders who first
questioned the wisdom of such practices and who took the first tentative
steps away from relentless tourism development and toward control or
even elimination of some recreational activities and the construction
necessary to promote them. [1]
Stephen Mather combined the rare and fortunate
qualities of a preservationist philosophy, extraordinary dedication and
ambition, and a considerable personal fortune. Horace Albright, his
young second-in-command, matched that dedication and intelligent ability
and added uncommon persuasive skills, particularly in the arena of
Washington, D.C. politics. Upon successful conclusion of the battle to
create the Park Service, the two men returned to the business of putting
the system's house in order. For decades the parks had suffered from a
lack of purpose and a shallow, almost aimless philosophy of management.
One of the earliest and most far-reaching accomplishments of Mather and
Albright was firm establishment of a management philosophy for the park
system. They performed this through the curious but politically typical
technique of composing a letter for Interior Secretary Franklin Lane in
which he would instruct them on the rules and practices of national park
management.
Over the years historians have argued about who wrote
this letter, Mather or Albright. However, Albright himself has
maintained that he wrote the letter basing it primarily on the ideas of
Mather, but also on those of William Colby, Francis Farquhar, and Joseph
LeConte of the Sierra Club, Gilbert Grosvenor of the National Geographic
Society, J. H. McFarland and Harlean James of the American Civic
Association, Robert Marshall of the United States Geological Survey, and
Robert Sterling Yard of the National Parks Association. This cast of
advisors gave the letter a considerable tilt toward preservation values,
very much a minority opinion in those early Park Service days. Mather
and Lane both approved the document which then reappeared on the
director's desk dated May 13, 1918. It embodied ". . . an outline of the
administrative policy to which the new Service will adhere . . ." and
has subsequently been called the "creed for the National Park Service."
[2]
Secretary Lane recommended three basic management
"that the national principles to shape future park policy. First, parks
were to be preserved unimpaired for future generations," a restatement
of the earlier congressional act; second, "that the parks were to be
used for the observation, health and pleasure of the people;" and third,
"that the national interest must dictate all decisions affecting public
or private enterprise in the parks." Because the statement of
preservation preceded that of popular use in the letter, it has provided
justification over ensuing decades for administrative changes toward
preservation and away from recreational use.
The letter went on to give twenty-three specific
directives on various issues ranging from grazing permits to concession
activities. The general tenor of the letter reflected the limited
knowledge of ecology at the time but made a strong statement toward
object and scenery preservation both still novelties in this recent
frontier country. Tree cutting, cattle grazing, and construction of
roads and buildings were to be permitted, but only if these activities
proved absolutely necessary and harmonized with the natural setting.
Camping, concession operations, and automobile use were to be encouraged
within the limits required for persistence of "natural conditions." Park
rangers were to encourage educational use of the parks in every way
while allowing "appropriate" recreation. In addition, the Lane letter
addressed issues of expansion of the park system, maintenance of proper
standards within each unit, acquisition of adjacent park-quality lands,
and elimination of private in holdings within existing parks. [3]
At Sequoia and General Grant the directives of the
Lane letter were greeted by Superintendent Walter Fry as welcome
confirmation of most existing practices and affirmation of ambitious and
worthy goals. Since taking over the superintendency in 1914, Fry had
established a reputation based on his knowledge of the two parks and his
total dedication to their protection. Now, he skillfully implemented the
new Washington office policies and helped establish Sequoia and General
Grant under the new Park Service in those first few critical years.
However, Fry's real love lay not in administration but in the forests
and among the wildlife of his park home. Over his years in the parks, he
had become obsessed with nature study, an obsession that would soon pay
rich dividends for the visitors. His opportunity came in 1920 when he
was offered the position of U.S. magistrate at Sequoia and, two years
later, leadership of an incipient natural history program. At age
sixty-one, Fry accepted the new challenges and for the next two decades
helped build the nature guide service at Sequoia, a program which became
a model for other parks. [4]
Mather, meanwhile, had been searching for a younger
generation of men with "the right stuff" to operate his parks and carry
out his philosophy. He found such a man for Sequoia and General Grant in
Colonel John White, late of the Philippine Constabulary and arguably the
most important individual in the history of the two parks. John Roberts
White was born in England and attended Oxford University before joining
the American Army as a lowly private in 1899. Assigned to the U.S.
garrison trying to pacify the Philippines, White soon found himself a
colonel in the Philippine Constabulary, commanding a small army of
Filipino soldiers with distinction during the guerrilla war in that
turbulent place. However, in the process White contracted malaria and
tuberculosis which forced his retirement. He rejoined the U.S. Army
during the First World War and rose again to the rank of colonel while
serving in Europe. In 1919, he retired again from the military, and
looking for outdoors work which would maximize his administrative
talent, as well as restore his health, White stumbled across Albright
and Arno Cammerer, later directors of the Park Service. Although
Albright had nothing available that he thought proper for a colonel,
White persisted until Albright offered him a position as ranger at newly
established Grand Canyon National Park. Within a year he assumed the
superintendency of Sequoia, the second oldest of America's national
parks. [5]
In White, Mather had a man committed to the
principles of nature appreciation, preservation of park resources, and
encouragement of visitor use and education, ideas the director himself
espoused. With Mather and Albright directing policy from Washington,
White tirelessly operating his benign dictatorship within the two parks,
beloved Walter Fry building one of the nation's great natural history
and public interpretation programs, and with a codified creed of
policies and philosophical tenets, Sequoia and General Grant entered a
new era of development and popularity and a new level of debate over the
two purposes for which they and the youthful agency were
foundeduse versus preservation.
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© Photo by Lawrence Ormsby
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