Happy Birthday to our National Park Service!

Long time no see! This Thursday (August 25, 2016) the National Park Service celebrates its 100th birthday. Normally I try to limit my biases, but in this case I'm going to make an exception because I love our National Parks. So far I have visited Great Smoky Mountains, Mammoth Cave, Joshua Tree, Death Valley, Carlsbad Caverns, and Everglades, and one of my bucket list things is to visit them all!

The National Parks are huge, and attract a massive number of visitors. The NPS administers more than 400 sites across the US. In addition to the parks themselves, they're also responsible for national monuments, battlefields, scenic trails, seashores, and more. All together, they comprise a total land area nearly the size of Nigeria. And they're extremely popular; in 2009 well over 320,000,000 people visited NPS sites, not even including visitors to NPS administered trails. This is 11 million more people than the total US population for that year! In 2015, the National Parks proper hosted a staggering 307 million visitors, and this year they are shaping up to blow that record out of the water.

Great Smoky Mountains NP is the most popular park, with more than 10 Million visitors annually.

For a long time in the United States nature was an obstacle to be overcome; a wild place where starvation, native attacks, aggressive predators, disease, and more were all a fact of life. However, as the west began to be settled in the years before the Civil War, this perception began to change thanks to a number of Romantic artists and authors such as Thomas Cole and Henry David Thoreau. Slowly, at least among a small group of intellectuals and artists, the American wilderness began to be perceived of as not a threat, but a great treasure to be admired and protected. It was in these natural places that man could return to his true self, away from the constraints of "civilization".

George Caitlin

George Caitlin is considered by many to be the first to conceive the idea of a national park. Caitlin was an artist who specialized in traveling west to paint portraits of American Indians and depicting their lives and the environment in which they lived. In 1832, while traveling in the northern Great Plains, Caitlin became concerned about the expansion of settlements into the interior of North America and their detrimental effects on native groups and the environment. He believed that a great government policy would be required to protect the people and nature in these areas, to preserve them for all time. Initially his ideas received very little support; native attacks were still common and the Indian Wars were still in full swing. Growing concerns over slavery and government control were leading to an increasingly unstable political situation, and few in the years leading up to the Civil War were concerned with preserving nature, native culture, or giving the federal government direct control of large swathes of prime real estate.

Ayres depictions of Yosemite started a popular movement to
preserve the area. 

Meanwhile, the Yosemite valley in California was becoming increasingly popular as a site for homesteaders and tourists. The artwork of Thomas Ayres brought the regions natural beauty to an increasingly large audience, and the government of the new state of California began efforts to preserve the area. Finally, in 1864, with the Civil War raging in the east, legislation was brought before the US congress. In that year a bill was signed by president Abraham Lincoln, establishing Yosemite under the protection of the state government of California, provided that it was preserved for public use, resort, and recreation for all time.


The success of Yosemite helped to begin a movement to establish more parks.Perhaps the east's most famous natural area, Niagara Falls in the pre-Civil War years had become a tacky tourist trap, surrounded by hotels, shows, and shops which marred the natural beauty of the area. In 1871 geologist Ferdinand Hayden led a large, federally-funded survey of the region around the modern area of Yellowstone National Park. Photographs, paintings, and reports on the area filtered back to the government in the east, and Congress became convinced on the area's natural beauty and the need to preserve it. Hayden in particular pushed for this; he was familiar with Niagara and hoped to protect the west from the same fate. As a result, congress removed the area from the public auction block. On March 1, 1872 President Ulysses S. Grant signed into law the act of dedication, establishing Yellowstone as the world's first National Park.

American Buffalo in the Yellowstone

Concerned by reports of poaching and misuse of the land, and encouraged by the Northern Pacific Railroad who wished to see their interests in Montana preserved, the government established a military fort in the region to help protect the area. This policy was continued with the second National Park in Mackinack, Michigan (now a state park), establishing a pattern which would be followed by National Park rangers. In 1891 the United States cavalry established a garrison in the Yosemite to help protect and manage the area, and their success led to the area becoming Federally controlled in 1906.

Claire Marie Hodges, the first female US Park Ranger. In 1918, facing Manpower shortages due to World War I, she applied to be a park Ranger at Yosemite. Her job was to deliver gate receipts to the park's headquarters. This required to travel overnight on horseback solo through areas inhabited by black bears and Mountain Lions.

Meanwhile, during the 1880's and 1890's another movement formed to protect cliff dwellings, native ruins, Spanish missions, and other antiquities in North America. In 1906, famed naturalist and preservationist president Theodore Roosevelt signed into law the Antiquities Act. This gave the government authority to establish National Monuments to preserve and protect natural, cultural, and scientific resources. Soon after, in September of 1906, President Roosevelt established Devil's Tower Wyoming as the first National Monument. In the future I hope to do a full post on Teddy; he's my favorite president and for good reason. In addition to the Antiquities act, he created by Presidential order 5 National Parks, 18 National Monuments, 51 bird reserves, 4 game preserves, and 150 national forests, including Shoshone National Forest, the nation's first.

President Roosevelt with famed Naturalist John Muir on Glacier Point, Yosemite National Park

For the next ten years, this complex system of parks, monuments, and more grew under the management of various government agencies. Finally, on August 25, 1916 President Woodrow Wilson established the National Park Service to help consolidate these inefficient and complex agencies. In 1933 another presidential Roosevelt, Franklin, signed into law executive order 6166. This reorganized the NPS and gave them authority over the various types of sites they have today, including National Memorials, National Cemeteries, and National Battlefields. The order also greatly expanded the service by adding multiple natural and historic areas to the preservation lists. The next 30 years saw major expansions and additions, but also saw significant problems arise due to the sheer volume of work required to preserve and maintain these vast areas.

In the 1960's the NPS began to face legal hurdles by local governments with questions of authority and corporate interests who wished to exploit the vast natural wealth of areas under federal control. As a result in 1979 Congress passed the Redwood Amendment; this expanded Redwood National Park and, crucially, further established and clarified the National Park Service's authority to protect the areas under its control. Since then the parks have continued to grow and flourish. Under President Nixon two areas were established, one in New York and one in San Francisco, to create and expand open space for the use of people living in urban areas who found traveling to more remote parts of the country difficult. President carter greatly expanded NPS holdings in Alaska, and between the administrations of President Reagan and now, 77 units have been added to the system, including several National Parks. The newest, Castle Mountains National Monument, was created by President Obama on February 12, 2016.

Castle Mountains National Monument

The Parks haven't' been without controversy. The issue of federal control of public land continues to incite controversy; early in 2016 a militia occupied a bird sanctuary (administered by the US Fish and Wildlife service, not the NPS), and court cases are opened nearly yearly arguing against the government's right to create or administer these lands. In the early years the creation of the parks frequently saw the ejection of Native groups or homesteaders from their lands, requiring military occupations to keep the peace. There are arguments that the parks are somehow discriminatory, and are too inaccessible to various groups of Americans. Some argue that the parks are too large of an economic strain, or that they do not provide enough economic advantages to offset their costs.

Hiking Glacier National Park is this author's #1 Item on his bucket list!

Despite these criticisms, I believe the National Parks to be one of America's greatest ideas and something that all of us should be proud of. They have been hugely influential, with most other nations today having their own national park systems. The first of these was established in Australia in 1879, after having been inspired by the creation of Yellowstone. Most of America's most iconic sites were created by or are governed by the National Parks. Mount Rushmore, the Statue of Liberty, Old Faithful, the Grand Canyon, the National Mall and its various memorials and monuments (including the Lincoln and Washington monuments), Gettysburg, Independence Hall, and more area all preserved by our National Park Service. Until the end of this month admission to the parks are all free, so I heartily recommend taking the time to visit at least one of these sites this year. If you're in Kentucky or Ohio (where most of my readers are from), Mammoth Cave, Shenandoah, Cuyahoga, and Great Smoky Mountains are all within a days drive and make great trips over a long weekend.

That's it for today!

Some sources on the National Parks:

The National Parks: America's Best Idea. I'm not normally a fan of Ken Burns, but this is a great overview of the history of the Parks. If you have an amazon Prime account the entire series is free to stream on Amazon, and if not it appears fairly regularly on PBS in syndication.

Prophets and Moguls, Rangers and Rogues, Bison and Bears: 100 Years of the National Park Service, by Heather Hansen. This is a great NPS approved introductory history to the parks, and includes great photographs and a forward by the NPS's current director, Jonathan Jarvis.

National Parks: The American Experience, 4th Edition by Alfred Runte. Runte served as Ken Burns' primary adviser on his National Parks documentary, and this history is great if a little older.