Chapter Six:
Colonel John White and Preservation in Sequoia National Park (1931-1947)
(continued)
The Contribution of John Roberts White
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The state of Sequoia National Park's resources in
1947 reflected unmistakably the imprint of Colonel White and his full
quarter century of responsibility. The Colonel had worked hard in his
early years to create a national park for the use of the people, and he
had succeeded so well in that task that all his later efforts to control
and even undo his early successes were largely ineffective. Nowhere is
this better represented than in the endless failures of the 1930s and
1940s to control the concessioner in Giant Forest.
The battles of Giant Forest were not total defeats,
however, for they sensitized park officials to the concept of too many
visitors, and brought the beginning of formal development limits.
Critical as these accomplishments were in the long run, they did little
to reduce the continuing damage to the Big Trees. The state of Giant
Forest in 1947 was better than it had been in the early 1920s, but not
much better. Physical limits had been placed on development, it is true,
and camping had been organized and confined to certain areas, but
congestion in those areas remained as bad as it had ever been. On an
average summer night in the late 1940s several thousand people slept in
Giant Forest, a rustic city in a fragile forest, and a city with only
marginally adequate infrastructure.
Yet, if the 1930s and 1940s saw no improvement in the
protection of Sequoia National Park's best-known single feature, other
portions of the park benefited from stunningly significant victories by
the stubborn superintendent. Of these victories, by far the greatest was
White's successful containment of the road-building urge that swept over
America during the 1930s. Once the Generals Highway was completed in
1935, the Colonel held the line successfully, preventing construction of
the new Middle Fork Highway to Giant Forest and the Sierra Way south
from Giant Forest to Mineral King. Had these roads been built, the
entire future character of Sequoia National Park would have been
drastically altered.
In his anti-backcountry-roads campaign Colonel White
prevented a full third of Sequoia Park's later formal wilderness from
being lost. Yet, he was not opposed to appropriate, low-level
development, even in the backcountry. We have already documented his
trail-building efforts, and it was in 1933, while he was still smarting
from his first serious attempts to remove facilities from Giant Forest,
that Colonel White and George Mauger rode together out the new High
Sierra Trail to choose a location for the park's first
concessioner-operated High Sierra Camp at Bearpaw Meadow.
Ultimately, Colonel White was no scientist. When
given the chance in 1936 to summarize his ideas to his peers, he spoke
not of resources but of "atmosphere." In this he was very much a man of
his times. The 1930s were the great era of National Park Service visual
managementif a park looked good, it must be successful in its goal
of resource protection. Often during the 1930s the Colonel railed
against landscape architects, but ultimately he thought much like they
did. And so, during the two final decades of Colonel White's reign, the
true resources of the park, the forests, the wild life, and the natural
systems which connect them into functional patterns, suffered locally in
areas of out-of-control development. Yet, they survived generally
because the Colonel had come to see the critical necessity of limiting
the geographical spread of visitor congestion with its inescapable
impacts. This was the Colonel's greatest contribution to the generations
that have since come to the parks. John Roberts White did not understand
in late-twentieth-century terms what was critically important in Sequoia
National Park, but he knew instinctively, after his early experiences in
Giant Forest, that visitors were best sustained as small, widely
dispersed groups.
Later, it would be apparent that Sequoia National
Park's greatest feature was its grand and spacious backcountry. Other
national parks started with equally grand wilderness resources, but
projects like Going-to-the-Sun Highway in Glacier National Park and
Trail Ridge Road in Rocky Mountain drastically limited future options
for wilderness. In Sequoia, the Generals Highway avoided the high
country, and the Middle Fork Highway and Sierra Way were never built.
For these reasons, and many others, Colonel White deserves grateful
remembrance.
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