Chapter 1
Creating Tradition:
The Roots of National Park Management (continued)
Resorts, Spas, and Early National
Parks
From the very beginning, the Northern Pacific Railroad Company's
interest in the Yellowstone legislation anticipated the direction that
national park management would take. The legendary 1870 campfire
discussion itself foretold that the public would want to see
Yellowstone-that "tourists and pleasure seekers" would visit the area.
Certainly during the more than four decades between Yellowstone's
establishment in 1872 and the creation of the National Park Service in
1916, management of the parks for public use and enjoyment was the
overriding concern. The enthusiastic promotion of recreational tourism
in the parks generated a tradition that the Park Service would eagerly
embrace. [18] Given the extraordinary
dominance of this concern, surely it reflected the chief intent behind
the national park concept.
By the time of Yellowstone's establishment in 1872 as a "public park
or pleasuring-ground," tourism activity in other parts of the country
had established important precedents for development in the national
parks. To accommodate tourism in scenic areas or around health-giving
thermal springs, entrepreneurs, often backed by railroad companies, had
built resort facilities, some of them fancy, others primitive. Although
early national park management seems not to have looked collectively to
such resorts for guidance, a pattern nevertheless evolved as, more than
anything else, park development simulated resort development. Areas
selected for intensive public use in the national parks took on the
appearance of resorts, and effectively served that purpose. [19]
Emerging soon after the era of canal building, railroads played a
major role in boosting tourism in the United States. Completed in 1825,
the Erie Canal had made Niagara Falls more accessible to East Coast
populations; and the coming of the railroad to western New York soon
secured for Niagara its position as the nation's premier resort. More
comfortable and faster than stagecoaches and canal boats, railroads
enabled tourists to reach scenic attractions at increasing distances
from the principal population centers. The growth of urban middle and
upper classes after the Civil War, the desire to escape the summer heat
of cities, and feverish postwar railroad construction accelerated
interest in traveling for pleasure. In addition to Niagara, resorts and
spas were developed in the Catskills and the Adirondacks, and at Lake
George, Saratoga, White Sulphur Springs, and other scenic areas. Hotels
and cabins were clustered near thermal springs, or situated with views
of spectacular scenery. Relatively primitive at first, facilities
improved as the popularity and prosperity of resorts increased; in some
resorts, accommodations evolved into imposing, luxurious hotels. Yet
also present at many scenic spots were ramshackle souvenir shops or
cabins-the very type of small-time entrepreneurial activity that Jay
Cooke sought to exclude from Yellowstone through establishment of a
government "reservation."
At midcentury, railroads began to penetrate the upper Midwest, making
this area accessible to travelers and extending farther west the
phenomenon of popular tourist resorts. [20]
Beyond the Mississippi River, early resort development (much of it in
California and Colorado) included two places that would become important
in national park history: the thermal springs of Hot Springs, Arkansas,
and the Yosemite Valley of California. These sites-one a spa and the
other a dramatically scenic valley-formed the nuclei of the only
present-day national parks that were in some way set aside before
Yellowstone. Both places experienced intensive resort development.
In the decades after the 1832 establishment of the Hot Springs
Reservation, primitive bathhouses were clustered around the springs, but
the Civil War stalled development. Yet by 1873 the city of Hot Springs
had six bathhouses and two dozen boarding houses and hotels. The first
luxury accommodations appeared when the Arlington Hotel opened in 1875,
about the time the first railroad line reached the city. By the late
nineteenth century, the reservation's "Bathhouse Row" would begin to
undergo extensive renovation, including a landscaping program of formal
gardens and promenade and the replacement of older structures with
imposing new bathhouses. The new Bathhouse Row became a national
attraction and launched the heyday of therapeutic bathing at Hot
Springs. [21]
Meanwhile, the Yosemite Valley also was experiencing extensive
development. The 1864 federal grant to the State of California required
that the valley and the nearby Mariposa Grove of big trees be managed as
a park for the public's "use, resort, and recreation." Surrounded by a
dramatic, vertical landscape of granite cliffs and majestic waterfalls,
Yosemite's rather flat valley floor served as a kind of viewing platform
from which to enjoy the scenery. And despite the cautionary
recommendations of Frederick Law Olmsted's 1865 report on the new state
park, much of the valley floor was developed to satisfy the whims of the
tourist industry. Under lax state management, the Yosemite Valley
emerged as a crazy quilt of roads, hotels, and cabins, and pastures and
pens for cattle, hogs, mules, and horses. Tilled lands supplied food for
residents and visitors, and feed for livestock; irrigation dams and
ditches supported agriculture; and timber operations supplied wood for
construction, fencing, and heating. Amid the clutter of development
stood one "luxury" hotel, the three-and-a-half-story Stoneman House,
built in 1886. [22
Mackinac National Park underwent a similar assault. The park was
created for the "benefit and enjoyment of the people," and was further
dedicated as a "national public park, or grounds" for the people's
"health, comfort, and pleasure"-the public enjoyment factor receiving
even more emphasis than it had in the Yellowstone legislation.
Accordingly, this small park underwent heavy resort development.
Construction of summer homes, cottages, and hotels in and adjacent to
the park (including the impressive thirteen-hundred-bed Grand Hotel,
which opened in 1887) made Mackinac a popular destination for
vacationers from midwestern and eastern cities. [23]
Yellowstone, however, provided the most striking example of
resort-style development in a national park. Its potential was
recognized not only in the Madison Junction campfire discussion, but in
public statements prior to passage of the Yellowstone Park Act. To
Congress it was claimed that the park would become a "place of great
national resort" and should be dedicated to "public use, resort and
recreation." The New York Times editorialized that "in all
probability" the mineral springs "with which the place abounds" would
soon prove to "possess various curative powers," and claimed that
physicians believed the park would "become a valuable resort for certain
classes of invalids." Yellowstone could become a spa rivaling those in
Europe and attracting people from "all parts of the world to drink the
waters, and gaze on picturesque splendors." Such potential fostered the
declaration in the Yellowstone Park Act that the area was to be a
"public park or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the
people," and the provision allowing the secretary of the interior to
lease park lands for "building purposes" and for "accommodation of
visitors." [24]
Although eschewing private ownership of Yellowstone, the Northern
Pacific anticipated profits from its virtual monopoly on travel into the
park. Extensive development did not occur as quickly as the railroad
company hoped, however. The national financial crisis of 1873 forced the
company to postpone construction of its rail line across Montana. But
even as early as 1871, before the park was established, small, primitive
hotels (some including thermal-water bathing facilities) were in place
near Mammoth Hot Springs and the Lower Geyser Basin. Soon a few crude
log structures sprang up near other park attractions. Precisely the kind
of development that Jay Cooke disdained, these meager efforts ultimately
failed. Not until 1883 did the Northern Pacific rails penetrate to
within a few miles of Yellowstone's northwestern boundary. There
tourists could transfer to stagecoaches and be driven into the park.
Within the year, a consortium backed by the Northern Pacific opened the
park's first large hotel at Mammoth Hot Springs. [25]
A parsimonious and often indifferent Congress gave Yellowstone
minimal support during its earliest years. Then, in 1883, army engineers
began to oversee construction of park roads. Shortly thereafter, to
better organize and strengthen park operations, the army was assigned
overall management of Yellowstone, its troops arriving in August 1886.
(In the 1890s the army also would be placed in charge of Yosemite,
Sequoia, and General Grant national parks.) The engineers soon began
construction of permanent buildings for Fort Yellowstone, adjacent to
the new hotel at Mammoth Hot Springs. The major construction effort was
the Grand Loop Road, a 152-mile system routing visitors from one
spectacle to another-Mammoth Hot Springs, Norris Geyser Basin, Old
Faithful, Yellowstone Lake, the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River,
and others. By the early part of the twentieth century a system totaling
approximately four hundred miles of "mountain roads" (primitive to
improved) was nearly complete in Yellowstone.
With the development of the road system and with the backing of the
Northern Pacific, large, imposing hotels were built near scenic wonders
such as Yellowstone Lake, Old Faithful, and the Grand Canyon of the
Yellowstone. Tourists could thus travel safely through the park's vast
wilderness landscapes to enjoy civilized pleasures in a variety of grand
hotels featuring the kinds of amenities already familiar to the
traveling public in the East and Midwest. To promote its investments,
the Northern Pacific advertised its route as the "Yellowstone Park
Line." By 1910 expenditures for tourist-facility improvements reached a
million dollars; and by about 1912 the facilities had produced an
equivalent amount of revenue. The federal government also paid its
share: by 1906 it too had invested one million dollars in the road
system. [26] Hotel and road construction in
Yellowstone-far and away the primary management accomplishment during
the early decades-essentially paralleled nineteenth-century American
resort development.
Other national parks soon experienced the kind of development under
way in Yellowstone. Indeed, the enabling legislation for subsequent
national parks provided for leasing land to be used for public
accommodation, in some instances with wording taken verbatim from the
1872 Yellowstone Act. Roads, trails, public accommodations, and
administrative facilities were constructed in the new parks. Usually
primitive at first, such developments were followed by well-engineered
and architecturally impressive construction. For instance, before the
creation of Glacier National Park in 1910, several small tourist
accommodations opened in the area. Soon after, the Great Northern
Railway Company (principal lobbyist for the park) began construction of
large rustic-style hotels and smaller mountain chalets. At a cost of
about half a million dollars each, the Great Northern built the Glacier
Park Lodge and the Many Glacier Hotel. Its chain of attractive chalets
enabled visitors to sleep comfortably overnight while on their way by
horseback across the mountainous park. [27]
Clustered village-type developments, as at Yellowstone's Mammoth Hot
Springs, emerged as the norm. Typically located near favored scenic
attractions, these developed areas featured splendid hotels. By 1915,
just over a decade after establishment of Crater Lake National Park, a
large rustic hotel, the Crater Lake Lodge, opened to the public. Along
with other facilities, this stone, log, and frame hotel was perched on
the crater rim, overlooking the deep, sapphire-blue lake. Mount
Rainier's picturesque Paradise Inn, with gabled roof and rustic lobby,
was completed in 1917 and became a showpiece of the park. Beginning as a
very modest accommodation, Sequoia's Giant Forest Lodge, located in the
Giant Forest Village, would be enlarged and modernized in the early
1920s. [28] Prior to the establishment of
Platt National Park in 1906, that area's thermal springs had already
spawned a popular health and recreation resort. Soon after it gained
national park status, Platt was further developed, in an architecturally
picturesque style, with roads, trails, pavilions, landscaped grounds,
and quaint bridges. [29]
Parkwide planning gradually emerged, guiding the placement of roads,
trails, tourist accommodations, and administrative facilities.
Construction of the Yellowstone road system marked the earliest
broad-scale approach. Other parks soon followed, and in 1910 Secretary
of the Interior Richard Ballinger called for "complete and comprehensive
plans" for national parks. The importance of carefully controlled
tourism development was underscored by the 1914 appointment of Mark
Daniels as first "general superintendent and landscape engineer" for the
national parks. [30] Daniels, a landscape
architect and designer of subdivisions in San Francisco, became
extensively involved in park planning in Sequoia, Mount Rainier, Crater
Lake, Glacier, and especially Yosemite.
In remarks to a 1915 national park conference, Daniels stressed the
need for systematic planning. Tellingly, he explained how the
implementation of park plans depended in part on the successful
promotion of tourism. He commented that the parks "can not get a
sufficient appropriation at present from Congress to develop... plans
and put them on the ground as they should be, therefore we are working
for an increase in attendance which will give us a justification for a
demand upon Congress to increase the appropriations that are necessary
to enable us to complete these things." Daniels' comments suggested a
kind of perpetual motion that would become a significant aspect of
national park management, where tourism and development would sustain
and energize each other through their interdependence.
Already, increasing tourism meant to Daniels "the inevitableness of
creating villages in the parks." He stated that the Yosemite Valley was
almost in "the category of cities," and that it needed "a sanitary
system, a water-supply system, a telephone system, an electric light
system, and a system of patrolling." It was clear to him that several
national parks would soon "absolutely demand some sort of civic plan" to
take care of their visitors. [31]
In the early part of the century, with the rising power of the newly
created U.S. Forest Service the need to develop the national parks
gained a particular sense of urgency. It was vital to ensure the parks'
popularity and prevent their transfer to the Forest Service, which
stressed extraction and consumption of natural resources rather than
protection of natural conditions or scenic landscapes. [32] Furthermore, as the automobile era rapidly
advanced, the national parks would face demands for use and enjoyment
from a public more mobile than ever. This situation would foster the
continuation of development trends begun by early park management.
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