Chapter Seven:
Two Battles for Kings Canyon (1931-1947)
(continued)
Retrospect on Kings Canyon
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The battles fought in the 1930s and 1940s over the
creation and proper development of Kings Canyon National Park
represented a full collision between two equally valid but completely
incompatible concepts of federal land use, each with its own view of
what constituted a valuable resource. In the nineteenth century, despite
considerable searching, only a few shepherds had found resources of
significant value in the rugged maze of canyons forming the Kings River
watershed. By the turn of the century, another value had been
establishedwilderness recreationbut its practitioners
remained small in number, if not always in visibility.
By the early 1920s, however, the resource value of
the region had risen significantly. Two sets of perceived resources,
only barely related, were clearly defined; two sets of resource users
awaited the opportunity to implement their schemes, and two sets of
potential managers sought either to maintain or obtain control of the
region. The Forest Service, together with competing irrigation and
hydroelectric interests, defined their resources through a utilitarian
world view. Kings Canyon would best serve America by being tamed, by
sharing its water and power with the country's economic mainstream.
Opposed to this utilitarian vision were the descendents of its ultimate
criticJohn Muir. The Sierra Club, after several decades of
organized and individual recreational use of the Kings River country,
saw the region's resources not as potential contributors to industrial
America but rather as an antidote. To the club and others who loved the
wild Sierra, the valuable resources of the region were not water power,
and grazing potential, but wild surging rivers and fields of alpine
wildflowers. Sharing the view of the Sierra Club was the National Park
Service.
To the true physical resources of Kings Canyon, the
ecosystems and their natural inhabitants, the decisions of the Kings
Canyon political wars were of paramount importance. Ultimately, the
preservationists won most of their goals, despite the initial handicap
of Forest Service management of the area. Passage of the Kings Canyon
Park Act seems in hindsight as much a political accident as a carefully
moderated political decision. Without Congressman Elliot's decisive
blunder, Kings Canyon National Park might never have come to be. Had the
park not been created, the alternative conservation vision would have
altered the landscape and its inhabitants severely and permanently.
More than either Sequoia or Yosemite both of which
were created before the twentieth-century resource values of the Sierra
Nevada had become apparent, Kings Canyon National Park was a commitment
of valuable resources. From that commitment came a half century of
wilderness recreation, and, at the same time, a partial recovery from
the impacts of early grazing and trapping use. Many individuals and
organizations helped to create Kings Canyon National Park and to
determine its destiny once it was established; but it was the membership
of the Sierra Club, over nearly five decades of exploration, publicity,
and lobbying, that played the single biggest role and deserves ultimate
credit.
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