The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn About Yosemite And Yellowstone For the honor of having originated the idea which led to the creation of our national park system, Yosemite and Yellowstone carry...
...He was one of the group of politician-explorers and he took part in that campfire discussion...
...One thing which he said was this: "In these days of business worry and anxiety, we need to live with the trees, the streams and the mountains...
...They decided to suggest that the Yellowstone area be taken over by the Government of the United States and preserved and developed for the benefit of all the generations of the future...
...Other members of the party wrote articles about their observations which were published in the literary magazines...
...It was first viewed by a white man (Indians, of course, didn't count) in 1807-8...
...Jim Bridger, one of the more talented and audacious of the mountain men, thought that if the stupid Easterners did not believe the truth he would give them some real tales on which to exercise their credulity...
...Gustavus C. Doane, who was in charge of the small contingent, had a good eye for facts and a good vocabulary for reporting...
...we need re-creation rather than recreation...
...After a long evening of argument back and forth, the general opinion seemed to be that a few smart men could take hold of this amazing combination of wonders and make a slick fortune out of it...
...Ted has a touch of the mystic about him which led him to express the thought that Providence had preserved this lovely and exciting spot until the American people had enough feeling for democracy to know what to do with it...
...Cornelius Hedges was eloquent enough to dissuade the men who the previous evening had been all for making money out of the wonders of nature...
...The idea was there in some public-spirited minds, but it was not put across...
...So he told them about water which came down the rocks so fast that it set them on fire and turned the whole region into a torrent of heat and steam and flame that rendered human and animal existence impossible...
...Little by little, the truth about Yellowstone began to make headway...
...His imagination kept picturing the shining streams and falls, those towering mountains, those majestic forests and, above all, those dazzling and mysterious geysers being turned into a noisy and dirty Coney Island...
...No one would believe his grotesque tales of waterfalls higher than Niagara and steam bursting from holes and seams all over the earth and rising more than two hundred feet into the air...
...The military men served more than a military purpose, for it turned out that Lt...
...And the attention paid to Yosemite did not serve as the beginning of any consecutive and logical series of steps looking toward a national park system...
...When the group of adventurers from Montana had risked their lives and spent their strength in climbing the mountains and fording the streams of Yellowstone, they met to discuss what they would do about their astonishing findings...
...While I was in Yellowstone at the end of my swing about our national parks, Warren F. Hamilton, the Assistant Superintendent, gave me an hour of wise and cheerful talk...
...Yellowstone roused deeper concern and led to more important results...
...On March 1, 1872, Congress passed the law which put this intention into effect...
...The "discoverer" was John Colter, a former member of the Lewis and Clark expedition...
...Obviously, here was the beginning of the elaborate system we have now...
...President Grant signed the bill, and the idea of the national park system was on its way...
...In 1870, a group of dignified public officials from Montana entered the much-discussed region under the protection of a military escort...
...But that was at the climax of the Civil War...
...But that night the man could not sleep...
...But 1870 was also the beginning period of a great depression, and an age when ruthless exploitation of any sort of resource was in vogue...
...This part of my story I learned from Ted Parkinson, a ranger scientist who one evening gave a campfire talk just before Old Faithful's amazing exhibition was illuminated...
...The beauties of Yosemite were set aside in accord with a law signed by Abraham Lincoln in 1864, which provided that this section of the mountain area of California was to remain "inalienable" forever...
...He just could not make peace with the idea...
...THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn About Yosemite And Yellowstone For the honor of having originated the idea which led to the creation of our national park system, Yosemite and Yellowstone carry on a cheerful competition...
...Then he told about Cornelius Hedges...
...I wish his speech could have been preserved, for here was a turning-point in American history, where a great man applied a good mind and a sensitive imagination to the solution of an important national problem...
...I wish I could reproduce important parts of it...
...So the next morning he presented his thought to his companions...
Vol. 40 • September 1957 • No. 35
