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The Story of the US National Parks

May was a good time to be on the Great Plains, and 1832 was the best of years. The sky reached forever across a landscape flowing with lush young prairie grasses and vibrant with life. Great herds of bison fattened on the greening land–still virgin, untouched by the plow. Endless flocks of birds swept northward toward their nesting grounds, and prairie dogs yipped in the warm breezes.

Most Americans know little of this landscape–the ever-encroaching frontier was still far to the east–but some were learning fast. One of these, an artist named George Catlin, who specialized in paintings of American Indians, was enjoying the experience immensely. On this particular day in May he was writing in his journal about what he had seen along the Missouri River in what is now South Dakota, slightly east of today's Badlands National Park. As he wrote of strange peoples and endless plains, an idea took shape – a unique and prophetic idea, one far ahead of its time.

"What a beautiful and thrilling specimen," he wrote, "for America to preserve and hold up to the view of her refined citizens and the world in future ages! A nation's Park, containing man and beast, in all the wild and freshness of their nature's beauty!"

A nation's park? In 1832 a park was a carefully cultivated landscape, an estate maintained by gardeners, with gentlefolk in residence–not a raw expanse populated by shaggy buffalo and wild Indians.

Explorers and Dreamers
Almost forty years passed. The nation's border reached westward to California and Oregon, but it was a leapfrog expansion. Between the true frontier and the goldfields of California lay unmapped mountains, unknown canyons, and murderous deserts. It was a time for adventurers; among the greatest of them was Maj. John Wesley Powell. A scientist as well as an explorer, he spent the summer of 1869 navigating and mapping the Green and Colorado rivers as they sliced and raged through the mighty canyons of the Colorado Plateau.

In May of that same year, as Powell was preparing to embark on his momentous journey, a 31-year-old man, lanky, bearded, and full of life, walked eastward across the beautiful Central Valley of California. His name was John Muir, and he was to become the most important single individual in the national park saga. He reveled in the vast meadowlands and scattered oak groves, the wildflower tapestries that touched the horizon ("bee pastures," he called them). Yet it was the great snowy range to the east that beckoned him–the Sierra Nevada, a mammoth, weathered block of granite that he would soon call the Range of Light. There, in the valley of the Yosemite, a roar with great waterfalls and rimmed by cliffs that framed the deep blue California sky, the young man was ecstatic. In the springtime of his life he had found pure delight.

During the next decade he was to immerse himself in the grandeur of the place, hiking the high country, climbing cliffs, almost freezing on mountains, testing the limits of endurance. Once he climbed a 10-story-tall Douglas fir during a winter gale and swayed for hours, exhilarating in "the passionate music of the storm."

Meanwhile, in September 1869, a week after Powell had emerged from the Grand Canyon, three men from Diamond City, Montana–David E. Folsom, Charles W. Cook, and William Peterson–gazed with awe at the wonders of a region known as Yellowstone. The three said little to others about their discoveries, but what they did say whetted people's appetites. For decades, tales of steaming fountains and petrified trees had been repeated over campfires. Confirmation awaited the word of more reputable and eloquent men.

A year later, in August of 1870, another group visited Yellowstone. This expedition bore the stamp of authority: a small detachment of U.S. cavalry served as escort, and the leader was Henry Washburn, surveyor general of Montana. For six weeks the men explored, crossing high snowy passes, gazing into the depths of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, skirting the immensity of Yellowstone Lake, and finally setting up camp in the unique, steamy land of the geyser basins.

When they left Yellowstone, they carried with them the conviction that this magnificent wilderness should never fall prey to private exploitation: a national park must be established there. In the following months the expedition's members spoke often about their conviction, and the next summer a much larger party, led by the explorer-scientist Ferdinand V. Hayden, was sent to Yellowstone. Hayden knew the value of documentation, so he took with him the photographer William Henry Jackson and the celebrated painter Thomas Moran. By the end of the summer, Jackson had produced the first photographs of Yellowstone and Moran had made sketches for a huge painting that has to hang for decades in the lobby of the U.S. Senate.

Soon every member of Congress knew about the wonders of Yellowstone. On March 1, 1872, after a short, vigorous lobbying campaign, the Yellowstone Park Act became law. The region was "…reserved and withdrawn from settlement, and dedicated and set apart as a public park or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people." The world's first national park had been born. Moreover, a precedent had been set; other parks would follow.

At the urging of friends, John Muir had begun to write about his beloved Yosemite, and his books and magazine articles rang with enthusiasm. At first he wrote only of beauty, but later a sense of mission was to seize him. In 1889, after a decade away from Yosemite, he returned, bringing with him Robert Underwood Johnson, an editor of The Century, one of the most widely read magazines of the time. The two were appalled that overgrazing by sheep had all but denuded the high country and the glorious valley. Even the area's groves of giant sequoias seemed threatened.

Johnson immediately began a campaign. At his urging, Muir wrote two articles for The Century: "The Treasures of the Yosemite" and "Features of the Proposed Yosemite National Park." Thomas Moran was hired to illustrate the articles. Having appealed to the public, Johnson then went personally before Congress.

America responded, Congress voted, and on October 1, 1890, the high country of Yosemite became a national park. Caught up in a wave of public opinion, Congress also voted that day to protect a magnificent grove of giant sequoia trees by establishing General Grant National Park (now part of Kings Canyon). A week earlier, other big trees had received protection through the establishment of Sequoia National Park.

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