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 management—if 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.