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How National Parks Tell Our Story—and Show Who We Are

By David Quammen for National Geographic Magazine

A hundred years ago, in the early months of 1916, America stood possessed of a magnificent, visionary, slightly confused and inchoate idea: national parks. These would be parks for the American citizenry, not pleasure grounds or private hunting reserves for nawabs and kings; parks to be shared, even, with visitors from around the world.

At that point 14 national parks already existed in the United States, the oldest being Yellowstone, which had been set aside by federal law, back in 1872, as the first national park anywhere in the world. The other U.S. parks, representing a diverse sample of majestic landscapes, all west of the Mississippi, included Yosemite in California (originally a state park, nationalized in 1890), Wind Cave in South Dakota (1903), Glacier in Montana (1910), and Rocky Mountain in Colorado (1915). ...There were also 21 national monuments—a form of protection more easily achieved because it could come by presidential decree under the Antiquities Act (passed in 1906), as robustly exploited by Theodore Roosevelt during his last three years as president. That early list of national monuments included Devils Tower, Chaco Canyon, Muir Woods, and the Grand Canyon.

What the country did not have in 1916, but now realized it needed, was a coherent definition of what a national park is or should be, supported by a single agency empowered to manage, defend, and oversee the expansion of its scattered patchwork of parks and parklike monuments. In August of that year—a time when European civilizations were gruesomely entangled at the first Battle of the Somme—Congress passed an act, and President Woodrow Wilson signed it, creating a National Park Service within the Interior Department. Stephen Mather, a Californian who had gotten rich selling borax but who cared deeply about conservation, became the first NPS director. His assistant and sidekick was an impecunious young lawyer named Horace Albright, son of a mining engineer, who would serve as superintendent of Yellowstone beginning in 1919 and eventually succeed Mather as NPS director. These two crucial men and their many allies mustered support for the system and for adding new units, but the project of defining a national park’s essence didn’t end with their work.

The early parks in the American West had been established primarily to protect scenic wonders, splendors of soaring rock and tumbling water and perennial ice, severe places that offered little prospect for economic exploitation—except maybe in the form of tourism as envisaged by railroad tycoons. That perceived dearth of business opportunity, plus the patriotic savor of touting America’s natural “cathedrals” in counterpoint to the cathedrals and monuments of old Europe, made creating parks easier than it would be later. Another factor was the negative example of Niagara Falls, where the best overlooks had been bought up and fenced by private operators, turning a national icon into a cheesy, for-profit peep show. Heaven forbid that should happen to Old Faithful or the Yosemite Valley. Protection of living creatures—the American bison in Yellowstone, the gigantic Sierra redwoods later known as sequoias—became part of the idea too. But it wasn’t until 1947 that any U.S. national park was approved largely for the protection of wildlife. That was Everglades National Park, a vast wetland in Florida, lacking mountains or canyons but full of birds and alligators.

So Rudyard Kipling began his 1889 account of a tour in America’s oldest national park. His disdain was aroused most by the “howling crowd” of tourists with whom he shared the visit. Attractions such as Old Faithful still draw more than three million (mostly well behaved) visitors yearly to Yellowstone; the vast majority of them never go beyond a hundred yards from a paved road. If Kipling himself had ventured deeper into the 3,472-square-mile park to witness the splendor of its river valleys and mountain meadows, his rant might well have given way to rapture.

Since then, our national parks have gradually taken on the high purpose of preserving nature’s diversity—native fauna and flora, ecological processes, free-flowing waters, geology in its raw eloquence— as exemplars of Earth’s interactive complexity, not just as scenic wonderlands. Now they teach us as well as delight us. They inspire active curiosity as well as passive awe. They help us imagine what the American landscape and its resident creatures looked like before railroads and automobiles and motels existed. Repeat: They help us imagine. They carry a glimpse of the past into the present and—if our resolve holds and our better wisdom prevails—they will carry that into the future.

The way so far has been a stumbling, incremental process, fraught with politics and economics and conflicting ideals, that has brought us to where we are now. National parks were a good idea that has gotten better, and a big idea that has gotten bigger. The system now includes not just parks proper and national monuments but also battlefields, forts, seashores, scenic rivers, grave sites, and other significant places (some still privately owned) that are recognized as national historic landmarks, as well as noteworthy paths through landscape and history, such as the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail in Alabama. Jon Jarvis, the current director of the National Park Service, says that its purpose is to tell America’s story, not simply protect parcels of landscape. “If not us, who else? It’s our job.” As we celebrate the centennial, we also should remember that, although one act of Congress and a presidential signature can put a park on the map, the work of preserving these places and their stories falls to us too, as citizens, as owners, and it’s never done.