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During a journey in 1832 to the Dakota region, American painter George Catlin worried that America’s expansion westward would have destructive effects on Native American livelihood, wilderness, and wildlife. He wrote and wished for their preservation, “by some great protecting policy of government . . . in a magnificent park . . . a nation’s park, containing man and beast, in all the wild and freshness of their nature’s beauty!”[1] His vision, along with other romantic writers and painters helped change the perception of nature from something to overcome to something to admire. This new image would create fifty-eight national parks and 124 national monuments.
In March of 1872, Congress passed the Yellowstone Act, which established Yellowstone as America’s first national park. The government intended these lands to serve “as a public park or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.”[2] Yellowstone’s creation coincides with a wide variety of publications about nature. Many writers, such as John Muir, and painters, like George Catlin, depicted the majestic landscapes of the West. Many organizations and groups sprung up to protect and aid wilderness areas. Even the government took action. The United States Geological Survey began mapping and examining these regions.[3]
Almost two decades passed between the establishment of Yellowstone and the next national park. The Progressive Era, a period defined by extensive social activism and political change, created the conditions for environmental conservation to occur on an unprecedented scale. The quick expansion of industrialization and the sprawl of urbanization resulted in a burgeoning appreciation for nature and a want for places to escape all the commotion.
In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Organic Act which created the National Park Service (NPS), a new federal bureau belonging to the Department of the Interior. At the time, they were responsible for the protection of the thirty-five established national parks and monuments. “The service thus established shall promote and regulate the use of the Federal areas known as national parks, monuments, and reservations . . . by such means and measures as conform to the fundamental purpose of the said parks, monuments, and reservations, which purpose is to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life.”[4]
In spite of this effort and government support, the national parks and the conservation movement received some resistance. The inadequacies in policies and the absence of coordination between the government and park administration caused many problems. For almost fifty years the nation’s parks and monuments fell under the supervision of a variety of different departments, including the departments of the Interior, War, and Agriculture.[5] None of the departments coordinated well, which resulted in the mismanagement of the parks and many unforeseen problems.
Historians and other scholars have widely discussed the national parks. In a broad sense, the conservation movement and the creation of the national parks and monuments had good intentions. Yet, these intentions seemed only to benefit a particular group of people: white Americans. The American government used laws and policies in an attempt to preserve nature for “the enjoyment of future generations”, but ended up in the expulsion of native and other occupying groups from park lands and had dramatic effects on the wildlife of the parks.[6] The issues with the creation of and early administration of parks have caused scholars to view these events in a negative way.
In order to fully grasp this negativity, we need to examine the mindset of the people involved in the history of the national parks and conservation. Roderick Nash’s “The Value of Wilderness” does the perfectly. To Nash, the wilderness provided a state of mind for the American people. The United States sprung out of the wilderness. Europeans settled in it, natives that occupied North America for 20,000 were unfortunately considered wild animals. “The American attitude wilderness was highly unfavorable. Wild country was the enemy.”[7]
Until the development of the national parks, the word “park” meant something closer to a garden, where one could bask in the pleasantries of nature. Maintaining a garden meant cutting the grass, clearing undergrowth, trimming hedges, and planting preferred flora and fauna. It was something man could control. The creation of the national parks gave man an area he could control. The man versus nature dichotomy swung dramatically in man’s favor.[8] The understanding of this relationship is crucial to the historiography because it explains why humans take conservation and the environment seriously, and why nature’s role is no longer the enemy.
Yellowstone is, by far, the oldest national park on the planet. After its establishment in the early 1870s, the park had over four decades of government administration before the National Park Service inherited its vast and varying landscape. Alston Chase’s Playing God in Yellowstone: The Destruction of America’s First National Park narratives the long and contentious history of the NPS in Yellowstone. He depicts how the Park Service’s rigorous, petty, and hard-lined policies led to the mismanagement of not only wildlife, but tourists and other NPS personnel. Policies on wildlife management hurt the ecosystem of the parks. First, the NPS wanted to protect big game animals by killing predators.[9] In turn, this caused elk and other animal populations to increase. The NPS responded with another policy to kill off thousands of elk.[10] Chase continues to charge the NPS with mishandling of funds and even visitor policy at the cost of maintaining the landscape.
Playing God in Yellowstone is a perfect example of how the historiography of the parks is moving towards a polemic mindset. Chase has nothing positive to say about the National Park Service. His acerbic language attempts to discredit the NPS, but also highlights to delicate mission the parks was tasked with in 1916. They must maintain a difficult balance of preserving nature while maintaining the parks for the public and future visitors. Chase takes this mission into little consideration.
Chase’s book is well-researched. He includes a plethora of sources from newspapers and interviews to NPS and government documents. However, many of his materials come from anonymous or unidentified accounts. So many of these questionable sources bring his story into question, and often creates a conflicting dialogue within his narrative. A lot of the sources seemed cherry-picked to prove his point that the NPS did little to help the park. Chase takes a lot of information out of context, such as his information on the treatment of fauna. He says the NPS instructed the park to “preserve indigenous aquatic and terrestrial fauna and flora.”[11] This implied the NPS deliberately managed on a species-by-species basis. However, according to Chase’s source, a park regulatory book, the entire park biologists were supposed to interpret this as the whole ecosystem.
Aside from the weaknesses, Chase’s tirade does have an important message. No one can assume an area governed and modified by humans will be as pristine as before this interaction. We all “play God,” but Chase wants us to consider NPS actions more carefully.
Yellowstone remains the tinderbox for conservation history. James Pritchard’s Preserving Yellowstone’s Natural Conditions: Science and the Perception of Nature continues along the same path as Chase’s critiques of the Park Service. Pritchard examines the arena in which biologists and other scientist must contend in. They and park management walk a fine line between conservation and public opinion. He brings up the same issues of the early park that disgusted Chase so much: predators being shot, the explosion in elk population and subsequent control, introduction of exotic species such as trout, and the treatment of native species like cattle, such as the bison.
Pritchard does not condone park management and the NPS for not listening to scientists on how to preserve nature. Park administrators would rather have their legacies remembered by the people who visit the park than preserve the delicate ecosystem it was to protect. Pritchard noticed that park policy is often dictated by the public, “the outcomes we desire in national parks are to a significant degree culturally determined.”[12] Pritchard differs from Chase in that he has hope for the park despite all of the scientific mismanagement. The park was, is, and never will be urbanized, therefore it will maintain natural characteristics.
The destruction of wildlife is a common theme among the history of the parks and the environment. Michael Milstein’s “The Quiet Kill” focuses on the problem of poaching in the parks. While more of a broad historical overview of the topic, Milstein’s short article highlights a key issue within the historiography: nature is the victim. The field needs to remove this aspect and make nature a player in the development of conservation and the national parks.
Poaching within the parks has and is a huge problem and Milstein targets the National Park Service’s policies towards poaching as the main issue. Again historians and scholars trap the NPS in an unfortunate position. The NPS can be scrutinized for some of the decisions it makes, however, we cannot put every action and policy under a microscope to determine if they benefit nature or not. Historians and scholars need to understand the relationship of where the NPS fits between its scientific advisors and the bureaucrats who govern it.
Pritchard, Chase, and Milstein contain a pessimistic point of view of park administration. The mismanagement has caused too much damage to reverse. Bob O’Brien’s Our National Parks and the Search for Sustainability introduces many of the environmental problems that have plagued parks for almost a century. He examines six parks, four which originate in the Progressive Era or earlier: Yellowstone, Denali, Yosemite, Canyonlands, Grand Teton, and the Grand Canyon. The book covers many topics ranging from visitation to wildlife to management. However, O’Brien’s argument is repetition of others, much of the material he gives is old and unoriginal.
O’Brien uses history as a spring board for critiques on the current park system. While not useful for historians, politicians, environmentalists, and scientists could use his ideas to create a better future for the parks. His ambitious plan starts with increased funding. Next he moves onto to improving education in and about the parks. He also wishes to slow tourism to the parks and rely on public transportation, which will help the environment by having less human impact to worry about. Remove politics from the parks by having scientists have more say in policy, like Pritchard. Hopefully, all of this will allow the parks to return to pre-European form. Then he wants to national park system expanded. While insightful, this plan is naïve at best. Too many contradictions exist within this blueprint. However, one thing is for sure, somewhere in the parks long history, administration created problems it could not fix. At best, O’Brien’s work serves as an introductory guide to issues that have plagued the parks for decades.
Most conservationist histories focus on the environment and what man and government can do to protect it. However, conservation and environmental histories have their opponents, who often get cast aside for a cleaner version of history. Benjamin Heber Johnson’s article “Conservation, Subsistence, and class at the Birth of Superior National Forest” “reconsiders the history of environmental conflict in Northeastern Minnesota in light of the impact of Superior National Forest’s establishment in 1909 . . . by examining the effects of state conservation on local resource use and economic hierarchies in the nearby town of Ely.”[13]
The expansion of government systems in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries allowed elite individuals to use policy to their advantage, in this case conservation policy. Ely’s merchant elite was able to introduce state conservation for their own interests. This threatened the town’s poorer residents, who relied upon these protected areas for subsistence. This resulted in “a deepening of the gap between the way these two groups perceived the natural world around them and the bureaucracies that were increasingly regulating it.”[14]
Environmental histories do not always have to incorporate a dichotomy between man and nature. As Johnson has shown, the battle often exists between those who benefit from conservation and those who do not. Johnson also highlights the power structure in place that effects park, and in this case forest, development. Environmentalism and anti-environmentalism “raise questions about the place of humans and nature in a modern economy.”[15] Johnson’s work does a good job at demonstrating these problems, even to the extent that he does not know where the solution lies. On a historiographical approach, Johnson wants more of a focus on the involvement between pro-conservationist and anti-conservationist, mostly because the man versus nature dichotomy removes the agency from nature.
Conservation comes with the idea that the North American landscape was vacant and there for white Americans to control it. However, many of these now national parks were occupied by natives. Mark David Spence’s Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks rejects this idea that nature always lacked human intrusion. The land inherits the American notion of wilderness, like Nash’s “The Value of Wilderness” talks about, “uninhabited wilderness had to be created before it could be preserved, and this type of landscape became reified in the first national parks.”[16]
Native Americans have occupied park lands for centuries. Spence carefully scrutinizes Yellowstone, Glacier, and Yosemite national parks for mistreatment of Indians. The peoples have become symbols of the former wild American landscape. To strengthen his argument, Spence uses a plethora of sources from ethnographies of native peoples from the park to detailed accounts on the creation of each park discussed. His use of visual sources such as maps and photographs really bring his argument to life. Spence’s most important contribution to the historiography of the national parks is how historians and scholars need to examine the “history” of the parks. Park history does not only incorporate what happened from the time the American government deemed it as such. Many peoples occupied these lands for centuries, way before Europeans “discovered” the New World.
Karl Jacoby’s Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation offers an audacious new depiction of the conservation movement. He focuses his study on law and social relations at a local level at three national parks: Adirondacks, the Grand Canyon, and Yellowstone. He shows what the consequences of conservation policies had for ordinary people.
For most, historians included, the wilderness consists of areas untouched by humans. Many of the lands now considered national parks take on this definition. Jacoby shows that this was not always the case. Native American and rural people had long histories of utilizing these spaces for fishing, hunting, and gathering either food or items they waged for profits. Along with these activities came common sense. Many of these occupiers realized the ecological impact they could have on the land. The American government’s idea of conservation often interfered with the different ways these people used the land. In turn, the government turned these traditional acts into crimes, and most objected to this authoritarianism.[17] This highlights to key aspects of his book: state simplification and moral ecology.
Jacoby confronts the idea of how historians and scholars should confront environmental history. Scholars debate widely on the ecological impact of conservation. However, Jacoby speaks directly to the social justice that is absent from the historiography. Along with a small contingent of historians, Jacoby brings this aspect of environmental history into the discussion. He also has some insights to how the field should practice their trade. As stated before, conservation and environmental history overwhelmingly highlights the positive improvements of the conservation movement and Progressive Era, but the field usually stays away from the discourse of power dynamics. Crimes against Nature hones in on this aspect of the field by focusing its analysis at the local level and providing a “bottom up” history. He wants the reader to focus on the relationship between social justice and government environmental control. His work will certainly open the doors to those who usually stray away from environmental histories.
The bulk of the historiography tends to look parks ideals and their conservation policies negatively. They identify a particular problem and criticize it. This pattern, as shown, repeats the same arguments over and over. The next two books move away from this repetition to look at other aspects about the parks.
After their establishment in 1916, the National Park Service needed stations and roads to house and transport their personnel on park lands. Linda Flint McClelland’s Building the National Parks: Historic Landscape Design and Construction shows how architects incorporated natural designs into their projects. Over the next three decades, the NPS developed unofficial policy to construct all buildings and infrastructure in this manner in order to be less abrasive towards nature. Even the campgrounds received extensive planning.
Lynn Ross-Bryant’s Pilgrimage to the National Parks: Religion and Nature in the United States analyzing the meanings visitors associate with the national parks. Along with these meanings come specified histories, some more dominant than others. However, according to Ross-Bryant, the national parks embody “the narratives of nation and nature and help people place themselves in these cultural worlds.”[18] The parks create a window for visitors to view the past, but also create spaces for people to reenact histories and create their own. Ross-Bryant turns the space of the park from natural to religious and euphoric. As stated in the introduction, the parks created spaces for people to escape the business of urban life. Pilgrimage to the National Parks examines this aspect of the park.
The historiography of the national parks narrows itself to looking and the environment and how the NPS and other government agencies managed and mismanaged the parks. Others attempt to focus on other aspects, but these approaches are few in numbers. In recent years, history as a whole has undergone a shift towards a cultural approach. Approaching the history of the parks as a cultural component in America could shed different light on the interpretation of policies and other decisions made by park administrators.
The Organic Act of 1916 created and tasked the National Park Service with conserving “the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein.” Essentially to protect and preserve the current status of the land. However, often forgotten is the second part of that clause, “and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”[19] The parks served two purposes: to protect nature and create spaces for people to enjoy it.
Many of the early acts and legislation concerning national parks or the NPS created this bi-fold language of protecting nature and displaying it for the public. The United States’ first act concerning the national parks, the Yellowstone Act of 1872, establishes Yellowstone “as a public park or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.”[20] This language clearly shows that with the establishment of the parks, the government wanted the American public to visit these sites. The Antiquities Act of 1906 took this idea one step further by allowing the excavation and preservation of artifacts and archaeological sites. This included that these findings received examination by “reputable museums, universities, colleges, or other recognized scientific or educational institutions” and be on “permanent preservation in public museums.”[21] The government actively pursued the idea that parks lands and objects of historical or scientific importance were for public enjoyment and education.
What do historians and scholars do with this information? Personally, moving away from a strict environment history and shifting towards a cultural interpretation provides a good starting point. The historiography should examine the cultural impact and significance of the parks on the American public. This gives nature agency by showing that it can affect people, like Ross-Bryant’s Pilgrimage to the National Parks shows, and effectively removes the dichotomy of man versus nature. The very idea of a national park has cultural implications. The word “national” implies that it is meant to be shared by all within the nation of America, therefore giving it an American identity. A cultural lens would allow the parks to assume some national or local identity as a social and cultural space.
[1] Harpers Ferry Center National Park Service, “The National Parks: Shaping the System,” U.S. Department of the Interior, Washington D.C., 2005, 12-13.
[2] Yellowstone Act, 16 U.S.C. § 21 (1872).
[3] “Brief History of the National Parks,” Library of Congress, accessed December 8, 2016, https://www.loc.gov/collections/national-parks-maps/articles-and-essays/brief-history-of-the-national-parks/.
[4] Organic Act, 16 U.S.C. § 1 (1916).
[5] “Brief History of the National Parks,” Library of Congress.
[6] Organic Act, 16 U.S.C. § 1 (1916).
[7] Roderick Nash, “The Value of Wilderness,” Environmental Review 1, no. 3 (1976), 15.
[8] Nash, “The Value of Wilderness,” 16-17.
[9] Game here refers to an overall theme that the parks were to benefit white Americans. Chase uses game as a hunting term.
[10] Alston Chase, Playing God in Yellowstone: The Destruction of America’s First National Park (New York: Harvest Books, 1987), 27-37.
[11] Chase, Playing God in Yellowstone, 234.
[12] James Pritchard, Preserving Yellowstone’s Natural Conditions: Science and the Perception of Nature (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 310.
[13] Benjamin Heber Johnson, “Conservation, Subsistence, and class at the Birth of Superior National Forest,” Environmental History vol. 4, no. 1 (January, 1999), 81.
[14] Johnson, “Conservation, Subsistence, and class at the Birth of Superior National Forest,” 81.
[15] Johnson, “Conservation, Subsistence, and class at the Birth of Superior National Forest,” 95.
[16] Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 4.
[17] Karl Jacoby, Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), 198.
[18] John Schelhas, “Book Review,” review of Pilgrimage to the National Parks: Religion and Nature in the United States, by Lynn Ross-Bryant, in Society and Natural Resources vol. 27, 783.
[19] Organic Act, 16 U.S.C. § 1 (1916).
[20] Yellowstone Act, 16 U.S.C. § 21 (1872).
[21] Antiquities Act, 16 U.S.C § 432 (1906).
Bibliography
Antiquities Act, 16 U.S.C § 432 (1906).
Organic Act, 16 U.S.C. § 1 (1916).
Yellowstone Act, 16 U.S.C. § 21 (1872).
Chase, Alston. Playing God in Yellowstone: The Destruction of America’s First National Park. New York: Harvest Books, 1987.
Harpers Ferry Center National Park Service. “The National Parks: Shaping the System.” U.S. Department of the Interior. Washington D.C., 2005.
Jacoby, Karl. Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation. Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2001.
Johnson, Benjamin Heber. “Conservation, Subsistence, and class at the Birth of Superior National Forest.” Environmental History 4 (January 1999): 80-99.
McClelland, Linda Flint. Building the National Parks: Historic Landscape Design and Construction. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1998.
Milstein, Michael. “The Quiet Kill.” National Parks 63 (May-June 1989): 19-25.
Nash, Roderick. “The Value of Wilderness.” Environmental Review 3 (1977): 14-25.
O’Brien, Bob R. Our National Parks and the Search for Sustainability. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1999.
Pritchard, James. Preserving Yellowstone’s Natural Conditions: Science and the Perception of Nature. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.
Ross-Bryant, Lynn. Pilgrimage to the National Parks: Religion and Nature in the United States. New York: Routledge, 2013.
Schelhas, John. “Book Review.” review of Pilgrimage to the National Parks: Religion and Nature in the United States. by Lynn Ross-Bryant. in Society and Natural Resources vol. 27, 783-786.
Spence, Mark David. Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.