Preface
NATIONAL PARKS ARE MORE THAN LAND, more than just
protected resources, more than policy or law, more than their histories,
more than the people who use and love them. Our national parks are
places where the people of the United States have undertaken a great and
still-evolving experiment. Can a modern society preserve "unimpaired"
not just isolated natural features, but entire natural ecosystems while
at the same time intensively using them for recreation? Further, should
these idealistic goals be pursued through gentle, hands-off protection,
or through intense and persistent management? Is it possible to define
at what point human use begins to conflict significantly with effective
resource preservation? Should the natural ecosystems in national parks
be allowed to evolve unimpeded towards some uncertain, but natural,
future, or should they be stabilized or frozen to perpetuate the
features or systems that attracted public attention to the park in the
first place?
More than a century after the initiation of this
grand American experiment, none of these questions has really been
answered. Perhaps in the definitive sense they never will be. Each
national park, however, has contributed in its own way to the ongoing
debate about what parks really are and how they should be managed. The
national park system and the Service that operates it have received
increasing attention from scholars in recent years, yet few of these
studies have focused in depth on the history of individual parks. It is
a premise of this book that our understanding of the national park
system can be significantly improved by detailed appraisals at the
individual park level. There are two reasons for this: first because the
origins of many systemwide policies can be found in episodes and
conflicts within individual parks, and second, because the addition of
park-level detail refines the picture we have of the entire parks system
and the political forces that spawned it. In this light the histories of
the oldest national parks are perhaps the most significant. Created well
before the national park idea was clearly codified and long before the
dawn of ecological biology, these parks have been the scenic
battlegrounds where the critical and defining issues that still haunt
the parks were first articulated and considered.
Several early national parks, notably Yellowstone and
Yosemite, have received prolonged and serious attention from historians
and other students of the national park idea. Other parks have not been
so fortunate, although their stories are every bit as important. Two of
these occupy and protect the spectacular southern climax of California's
Sierra Nevada. Here on the rugged flanks of the highest mountains in the
forty-eight contiguous states, grow the largest living things of our
planetthe incomparable giant sequoias. And surrounding them is a
land of enormous scenic and biological fascination, a land that has
captured the imagination and spirit of uncountable numbers of
people.
Today, the two national parks of the southern Sierra
Nevada are know as Sequoia and Kings Canyon. In 1890, when the U.S.
Congress first set them aside as the second and fourth parks of the
system, they were known as Sequoia and General Grant national parks. A
century has now passed since that event. During that century, much more
than is realized, Sequoia, General Grant, and later Kings Canyon
repeatedly played critical roles in the evolution of modern national
park philosophy and management. Within these parks precedents were set
that still bear fruit throughout the American park system. This book is
the story of these two parks and their first century of existence.
If the critical question about national parks is "how
has humanity perceived and modified the land according to its evolving
values," then the state of the land itself becomes the primary
historical record. Thus, in this book we shall describe through time the
changing state of the lands and ecosystems that are now Sequoia and
Kings Canyon national parks. Over a century, how have individual people,
and the societies they lived in, acted upon the southern Sierra? What
did they assume? What did they value? What impact did they have on the
land and the ecosystems; and how did this affect subsequent perception
of resources and values? Our geographical focus, as noted, will be the
lands now within the two national parks we seek to understand. But just
as the modern national parks cannot stand fully divorced and separated
from the surrounding worlds, neither can our study of them ignore
adjoining lands. We shall, therefore, out of necessity, place the two
parks in a larger historical and geographical perspective. We will watch
and document the fate of the mountain lands which now surround the
parks. We will observe also the valley lands to the west of the parks,
for their fates also are inseparable from the parks.
The two parks themselves fall mostly into three
definable regions or watersheds. The western half of Sequoia, west of
the rugged alpine ridge known as the Great Western Divide, is drained by
the five forks of the Kaweah River. East of the Great Western Divide,
the other half of Sequoia National Park is the headwaters of the North
Fork of the Kern River. The main portion of Kings Canyon National Park
is drained by the Middle and South forks of the Kings River, which join
a few miles west of the park boundary, while the Grant Grove section of
Kings Canyon Park occupies the forested divide between the Kings and
Kaweah rivers and provides water to both river systems. Small portions
of northern Kings Canyon and southern Sequoia are drained, respectively,
by the San Joaquin and Tule rivers. It is upon these lands, together
with the downstream canyons and valley delta regions of the Kings and
Kaweah rivers, that we shall focus.
Several themes will appear so regularly that they
must be introduced before we can begin. One, already stated, is that
this is a history of the land and its ecosystems. Another, basic to
understanding the late-twentieth-century state of the parks, is that
contrasting land management goals have worked inexorably to make the
parks an increasingly isolated biological island. Yet another theme is
that although the parks are places where national policies were
executed, they also were the birthplaces of policy, where management
philosophy and procedures were created and refined.
Finally, we must introduce one other extremely
pervasive theme. We bring to this project the outlooks of two academic
disciplines: Lary M. Dilsaver is a geographer; William C. Tweed a
historian. We both believe, however, that only an interdisciplinary
combination of these two perspectives can adequately explain the reality
of Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks. Ultimately, the natural and
human worlds cannot be separated.
We wish to establish one additional point. Despite
the significant cooperation of the National Park Service in preparation
of this history, the opinions and interpretations presented here are
solely those of the two authors and in no way those of the National Park
Service or any other organization.
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