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The Story of the US National Parks - Saving the Wilderness

John Muir had become the father of our national park system. The later establishment of Mount Rainier, Petrified Forest, and Grand Canyon national parks was also due, in large measure, to his efforts. In 1903, after being guided by Muir on a four-day trek through Yosemite, President Theodore Roosevelt was convinced that the park should be expanded; before his term in office ended, its boundaries included Yosemite Valley.

By the time of Roosevelt's presidency, the frontier was gone. No longer did bison roam the plains; never again would Indians follow their old ways. The thought bothered people. The challenge of new horizons had been a mighty force behind America's vitality; suddenly, the distant mountains and canyons that embodied that spirit took on new meaning.

Roosevelt's special love for the West had been born of tragedy and nurtured by personal renewal. On February 14, 1884, both his wife and his mother died, leaving him, at age 25, a man overwhelmed by sorrow. "The light has gone out of my life," he wrote in his diary. He soon went west to the Little Missouri River in Dakota Territory, a place that is now a national park bearing his name. There, astride his house Manitou, he recovered from his sorrow by living the strenuous life of a working cowboy. The land gave him the gift of rebirth.

Later in his life, Roosevelt returned the gift. As president he worked diligently so that others could find vigor and health in the West he loved. Those were years in which such a man was needed. Magnificent groves of giant sequoias were being turned into shingles, and jewellike petrified trees were being blown to pieces by souvenir sellers. Something had to be done, and it was often Teddy Roosevelt who did it. Crater Lake, Mesa Verde, and Wind Cave became parks during his term of office, and he preserved other huge tracts of land, including the Grand Canyon, Mount Lassen, and Petrified Forest, later become national parks.

The ranks of those who worked for the national parks were swelling rapidly. In Colorado, a writer named Enos Mills became the champion of the great soaring ridges and peaks of the Rocky Mountains in much the same way that Muir had been on Yosemite. In Oregon a judge named William Gladstone Steel fought for Crater Lake. The Grand Canyon had its champion in George Horace Lorimer, editor of The Saturday Evening Post. To remind him of the canyon's grandeur, he kept a huge Thomas Moran painting in his office. He even used it to judge the character of visitors; anyone who failed to appreciate the painting was in trouble. "I can tell 'em by that picture," he would say.

George Bird Grinnell, editor of Forest and Stream, argued for national parks as wildlife sanctuaries. First on his list of deserving places was a land of sharp-spined peaks and deep lakes in northern Montana. There grizzly bears and mountain goats found refuge, and a person could stand with one foot on the western edge of the Great Plains and the other on the front slopes of the Rockies. On May 11, 1910, after much work by Grinnell, the area became Glacier National Park.

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