One of the first problems Mather and his staff tackled in Sequoia and General Grant was acquiring privately held lands within the two parks. From the earliest days of the military administration, superintendents and civilian officials had pleaded with Congress to appropriate money for purchase of these lands which included many of the finest meadow tracts in the sequoia belt. Indeed, the options Captain Young had obtained in 1903 on all 3,877 acres held in the parks were for a paltry $73,000 or $19.00 an acre. However, not until 1916 did Congress finally appropriate $50,000 to buy just 670 acres in Giant Forest owned by two Tulare County ranchers. Unfortunately, this appropriation still fell well short of the ranchers' $70,000 asking price. Here Mather's great personal skill and persuasive ability combined to carry the day. The director appealed to friend Gilbert Grosvenor and his National Geographic Society for the remainder and was rewarded with a well-publicized $20,000 donation in November 1916. Once the purchase of this important tract of Giant Forest was complete, the first for any national park using a congressional allocation, Mather turned his attention and his own personal fortune to other plots. From 1919 to 1927, the Park Service acquired another 2,166 acres, relying heavily on contributions from the National Geographic Society, the Tulare County Board of Trade, wealthy industrialists like George Eastman, and Mather himself who spent more than $55,000.

In addition to buying and donating lands within the parks, Mather was instrumental in obtaining title to Redwood, Wet, and Funston meadows outside Sequoia, but within the area to be included in a hoped-for park expansion. The Sierra Club and its directors held title to the land until 1926 when Sequoia was enlarged to include the area surrounding these choice meadows and sequoia groves. During this period the National Geographic Society and the Save-the-Redwoods League provided the beneficial publicity that encouraged landowners to maintain or even depress their prices until Mather, his friends, and the government could gather the funds. During the decade, Giant Forest was entirely freed of private lands and many other popular visitor areas also came into the fold. Southern California Edison donated outright its large holding at Wolverton Meadow, which it had absorbed along with the remainder of the Mt. Whitney Power Company assets. The only piece of highly desirable private land that the government failed to get was a 160-acre plot in General Grant which was developed for summer cabins beginning in 1919. That private enclave still exists today as Wilsonia Village in Grant Grove near the park's visitor complex. [6]

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As Stephen Mather and his wealthy associates endeavored to eliminate private holdings from the two parks, a much larger and more important battle swirled around the floors of Congress and the meeting rooms of local businessmen and preservationists. Since the establishment of the parks in 1890, successive superintendents and secretaries of the Interior Department, prodded by preservationists, had campaigned for enlargement of Sequoia to include the majestic high country to the east. Indeed, for years it was confidently expected that the new additions would be forthcoming momentarily. However, park proponents underestimated the variety and numbers of anti-park forces. Local farmers, cattlemen, timber interests, and even recreation advocates were leery of Park Service control and the restrictions that would inevitably be placed on commercial and personal activities. The Forest Service, on the other hand, imposed few limitations on mining, lumbering, summer cabins, or even reclamation projects. It was the preferred agency among those who stood to benefit from the tangible resources of the region, or to lose upon their withdrawal for preservation. Not incidentally, Forest Service men lost no opportunity to foster this attitude and cling to their territory against what they perceived as aggressive land-grabbing by the new Park Service.

The principal problem in the initial proposals by Mather and other park backers was the magnitude of their suggested enlargement. Sequoia National Park contained 252 square miles of woodland, meadows, and chaparral. Under the proposals offered from 1916 to 1919, a new Roosevelt-Sequoia National Park would contain more than five times that much land encompassing the Kern drainage south to Coyote and Kern peaks, the South and Middle forks of the Kings River westward nearly to General Grant, and part of the San Joaquin drainage in and around Evolution Valley. (The Roosevelt portion of the name came from attempts to make the enlarged park a memorial to Theodore Roosevelt.) The component of this huge proposed park that presented the greatest controversy was the Kings River drainage which we will look at in depth in a forthcoming chapter. Another area of contention was the Mineral King Valley where dozens of private cabins formed a popular summer recreation zone for residents of the San Joaquin Valley. Still another problem arose from the potential commercial timber lands on the western and southern edges of the proposed park. Indeed, lumbermen and the Forest Service were already casting covetous eyes on the timber resources of the southernmost and rarely visited portion of the existing park.

Mather initiated efforts to enlarge the park immediately upon his appointment. As director of the new Park Service, he engaged in a series of meetings with Chief Foresters Henry Graves and William Greeley aimed at hammering out some sort of compromise. Both Forest Service men drove hard bargains, but in 1921 it seemed that a solution was imminent. Mather agreed to sacrifice the three southern townships of the existing park, the same area that had first inspired George Stewart to work for creation of the park, as well as the J.O. Pass area of the proposed parkland. Greeley looked forward to receiving the valuable timber lands within the park in exchange for a huge tract of worthless rockland. Accordingly, local congressman Henry Barbour, who had earlier opposed any notion of park expansion, introduced the compromise bill to Congress. Unfortunately, irrigation proponents had not been consulted in these negotiations and they sent up a crescendo of opposition to withdrawal of the Kings River area. In addition, an assistant curator of the American Museum of Natural History, one Willard Van Name, flooded the media and Congress with letters and bulletins opposing exclusion of any portion of the existing park. Proposed exclusions included the Garfield Grove of giant sequoias, one of the finest and largest groves, as well as Hockett Meadow, an area that was far more popular for visitors in the early years of the park than it is today. Van Name vilified the Forest Service as greedy and unprincipled and saved enough anger to accuse the Park Service of irresponsible dereliction of its duty. The combined outrage of these dissimilar opponents crushed the Barbour Bill and delayed park enlargement for nearly five years.

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Immediately Mather, Albright, and White took up the negotiations again. After some years of delicate discussion it became apparent that the Kings River addition was simply too embroiled in controversy and counterclaims to be acquired. Likewise, the Mineral King Valley drew too much antagonism and presented too much of an administrative headache. Hence, in early 1926 Mather, the Sierra Club, the Forest Service, and most irrigation proponents agreed to a compromise bill that would expand Sequoia National Park to include the Kern River drainage and readjust the park's northern boundary to follow the divide between the Kaweah and Kings watersheds. On July 3, 1926, President Calvin Coolidge signed the bill which increased the park's acreage by 140 percent to 604 square miles. The bill also designated 25 square miles in the Mineral King area as the "Sequoia National Game Refuge," but left that area under Forest Service control; this was meant to protect the wildlife in the area, which moved freely in and out of the surrounding park. The loss of the Kings River country was a particularly bitter pill for the park men and Mineral King remained like a knife of potential development plunged into the southern boundary. Nevertheless, the 1926 act retained the southern townships for which Van Name had campaigned and added a vast and magnificent new area to the park. Assistant Superintendent Dan Tobin later gleefully wrote that the addition made Sequoia not only the "biggest tree" national park but also the "biggest mountain one as well. [7]

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