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WSRE to Air Ken Burns’ “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea”
A New Six-Part Series About the History of the National Parks,
Beginning September 27, 2009

WSRE, PBS for the Gulf Coast will debut the new Ken Burns 12-hour, six-part documentary series, THE NATIONAL PARKS: AMERICA’S BEST IDEA, Sunday, September 27-Friday, October 2, 2009. A new episode will premiere each evening at 7 p.m. with episodes immediately repeating on the same night they premiere. The program will be available in high-definition. Marathon viewings on the weekend following the film’s debut are also scheduled.

The documentary, directed by Burns and co-produced with his longtime colleague, Dayton Duncan, who also wrote the script, is the story of an idea as uniquely American as the Declaration of Independence and just as radical: that the most special places in the nation should be preserved, not for royalty or the rich, but for everyone. As such, it follows in the tradition of Burns’ exploration of other American inventions, such as baseball and jazz.

Filmed over the course of more than six years in some of nature’s most spectacular locales — from Acadia to Yosemite, Yellowstone to the Grand Canyon, the Everglades of Florida to the Gates of the Arctic in Alaska — the documentary is nonetheless a story of people from every conceivable background: rich and poor; famous and unknown; soldiers and scientists; natives and newcomers; idealists, artists and entrepreneurs; people who were willing to devote themselves to saving some precious portion of the land they loved, and in doing so, reminded their fellow citizens of the full meaning of democracy.

“Just as many of the lands that make up today’s national parks were the spiritual homes for the indigenous tribes who lived there, they had a profound and often spiritual impact on the settlers who first saw them and on the visionaries who fought tirelessly to preserve them as the common property of the American people,” said Burns. “They saw in them a visual, tangible representation of God’s majesty. Our film celebrates the beauty of these parks and the vision and foresight of the men and women who made sure that this land would be preserved.”

The narrative traces the birth of the national park idea in the mid-1800s and follows its evolution for nearly 150 years. Using archival photographs, first-person accounts of historical characters, personal memories and analysis from more than 40 interviews, and what Burns believes is the most stunning cinematography in Florentine Films’ history and the most contemporary footage of any Ken Burns film since LEWIS AND CLARK, the series chronicles the steady addition of new parks through the stories of the people who helped create them and save them from destruction. It is simultaneously a biography of compelling characters and of the American landscape.

“Making this film was one of the greatest joys of my life,” said Dayton Duncan, who has visited all but one of America’s 58 national parks. “Each park is unique and has its own fascinating historical story. But they are all connected by the transformative idea that they belong to each of us, providing a shared place that lives in the memory of every individual and every family that has visited them over the years. And they are connected by the notion that individual Americans, in the best possible example of democracy, worked to make sure that future generations could enjoy them.”

With 391 units (58 national parks, 333 national monuments, historic sites and other units), the National Park Service has a presence in 49 of the 50 states (Delaware is the sole exception). Like the idea of freedom itself, the national park idea has been constantly tested, is constantly evolving and is inherently full of contradictory tensions: between individual rights and the community, the local and the national; between preservation and exploitation, the sacred and the profitable; between one generation’s immediate desires and the next generation’s legacy.

Wallace Stegner called the national parks “the best idea we ever had,” and no activity of the federal government engenders such universal support and public loyalty; yet the story of how these special places became preserved as parks, the role of individual citizens in creating them and the powerful stories of people’s emotional connection to them remains relatively unknown.

Among the lengthy cast of characters profiled in the series are James Mason Hutchings, a magazine publisher who was one of the first people to promote Yosemite and who sought to develop a resort hotel on the land; John Muir, a deeply religious mountain prophet who found inspiration in Yosemite and then inspired generations of parks enthusiasts; George Masa, a Japanese immigrant whose photographs of the Great Smoky Mountains in North Carolina and Tennessee served in the fight to protect the region as a national park; Chiura Obata, another Japanese immigrant, whose highly acclaimed paintings of Yosemite gave Americans a fresh perspective through which to see their beloved landmarks; Marjory Stoneman Douglas, who persuaded Congress that a swamp in southern Florida, the Everglades, should be set aside as a national park; George Melendez Wright, a park ranger from San Francisco who recognized the need to preserve the parks’ wildlife in its natural state; Adolph Murie, a young biologist and protégé of Wright who was instrumental in reforming park policy so that wildlife — even predators — would have the same protections as the land itself; and Stephen Mather, a wealthy businessman who used his personal fortune and genius for promotion to create a National Park Service.

These historical accounts are paralleled by contemporary stories of people who continue to be transformed and inspired by the parks today. They include Shelton Johnson, an African American who grew up in Detroit, where the national parks seemed distant, unreachable places until he later became a park ranger; Gerard Baker, a Native-American park superintendent whose tribe has long considered the land sacred; Tuan Luong, a Paris-born Vietnamese rock climber and photographer who fell in love with the parks and dedicated himself to photographing all 58 national parks with a large-format camera; and Juan Lujan, who grew up in west Texas during the Depression and joined the Civilian Conservation Corps, with which he would help develop Big Bend National Park in Texas. Also included in the film are interviews with best-selling author Nevada Barr, a former park ranger; writer and environmentalist Terry Tempest

Williams; historians William Cronon, Paul Schullery and Alfred Runte; and many others.

In addition to Peter Coyote’s narration, THE NATIONAL PARKS features first-person voices read by some of America’s greatest actors. Tom Hanks reads the voices of several characters in the film, including Congressman John F. Lacey, who helped push a bill through Congress to protect Yellowstone’s last wild buffalo herd. Other voices include Andy Garcia, Josh Lucas, Eli Wallach, Campbell Scott, Sam Waterston, John Lithgow, George Takei, Philip Bosco, Carolyn McCormick, Adam Arkin and Kevin Conway.

THE NATIONAL PARKS: AMERICA’S BEST IDEA is a production of Florentine Films and WETA Washington, DC. Director/producer: Ken Burns. Producer/writer: Dayton Duncan. Co-producers: Craig Mellish, Julie Dunfey and David McMahon. Supervising editor: Paul Barnes. Episode editors: Paul Barnes, Erik Ewers and Craig Mellish. Cinematography: Buddy Squires, with Allen Moore, Lincoln Else and Ken Burns. Narrator: Peter Coyote.

Funding is provided by General Motors; Evelyn & Walter Haas, Jr. Fund; Corporation for Public Broadcasting; The Arthur Vining Davis Foundations; Park Foundation, Inc.; Public Broadcasting Service; National Park Foundation; The Peter Jay Sharp Foundation; The Pew Charitable Trusts; and Bank of America.

Historical Figures Featured in the Film

THE NATIONAL PARKS: AMERICA’S BEST IDEA is a story of people from every conceivable background who were willing to devote themselves to saving some precious portion of the land they loved, and in doing so reminded their fellow citizens of the full meaning of democracy. The 12-hour, six-part documentary series, directed by Ken Burns and co-produced with his longtime colleague and the film’s writer, Dayton Duncan, premieres Sunday, September 27, 7 p.m. on WSRE, PBS for the Gulf Coast.

The following is an alphabetical listing of the historical figures featured in the film.

Ansel Adams (1902-1984)
Ansel Adams, a celebrated photographer from San Francisco, became an influential force in the designation of Kings Canyon as a national park through his breathtaking photographs and his work with the Sierra Club. Adams’ 1938 book, Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail, captivated President Franklin Roosevelt after Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes showed it to the president. Roosevelt would not only designate Kings Canyon a national park in 1940, but a roadless park, leaving it completely undeveloped. Due to his handicap, Roosevelt’s only access to the splendor of Kings Canyon would be through Adams’ photography.

Adams’ influence on the national parks was not limited to his efforts in Kings Canyon. His relationship with Ickes led to a contract with the Department of the Interior in 1941. Adams’ contract sent him on a journey to all but one of the national parks (the Everglades), capturing thousands of images of the national parks on what he considered “one of the greatest ideas ever to come out of Washington.”

Horace M. Albright (1890-1987)
Albright served as the first assistant director of the National Park Service under Stephen Mather and filled in as director while Mather was ill during the early years of the NPS. He also served as superintendent of Yellowstone National Park from 1919-1929 before taking over as the second director of the National Park Service from 1929-1933.

Albright, as much as his boss and mentor Mather, was responsible for molding the national parks into a unified system after the creation of the National Park Service in 1916. Many policies still practiced in the parks were initiated by Albright. He also was personally involved in the creation of Zion National Park and even more responsible for the creation and expansion of Grand Teton National Park. After leaving the NPS, Albright served as president of the United States Potash Company.

Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902)

The German-born Bierstadt was already a famous painter of the so-called “Rocky Mountain School” by the time he arrived in Yosemite Valley in 1863. His paintings — along with the early photographs of Carlton Watkins — helped bring Yosemite to the attention of people in the East. One of Bierstadt’s works, Domes of the Yosemite,nine-and-a-half feet by 15 feet, would command a price of $25,000, equal to the highest amount ever paid for an American work of art at the time.

Lafayette Bunnell (1821-1903)
As a member of the Mariposa Battalion in 1851, Bunnell was among the first white men to enter Yosemite Valley. Although the battalion’s mission was to expel its native residents, the Ahwahneechees, Bunnell became captivated by the valley’s scenery. He explored the valley and gave names to many of its landmarks. His descriptions, in turn, brought the valley to the public’s attention. In 1880, his experiences were published as Discovery of Yosemite, and the Indian War of 1851. The Mariposa Battalion’s misunderstanding over the name of the Indians who lived there resulted in the valley’s being called Yosemite.

Ernest Coe (1866-1951)
Coe, a landscape architect from Connecticut who moved to Miami in 1925, became one of the leaders of the efforts to make the Everglades a national park. Concerned about the development threats to the Everglades and the steady loss of rare birds and orchids it sustains, he formed the Tropical Everglades National Park Association in 1928 and began his crusade. Known for his tireless persistence — often to the aggravation of elected officials in Florida — Coe worked for six years to get a park bill passed through Congress and another 13 years before the land was acquired for the new park. Coe was disappointed that the boundaries weren’t as large as he had proposed, but in the years after his death in 1951, those sections were ultimately saved as the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, Big Cypress National Preserve and Biscayne National Park. He is often called “the father of the Everglades,” and the main visitor center in the park is named after him.

Senator John Conness (1821-1909)
On May 17, 1864, in the midst of the Civil War, California’s Senator Conness introduced the bill to set aside the Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove of sequoias — a total of more than 60 square miles — for “public use, resort and recreation.” It was the first time in history such a large tract of undeveloped land was protected from development. To help win the votes he needed, Conness assured his colleagues that the land was “worthless” in terms of its commercial and homesteading potential. His bill entrusted the new park, called the Yosemite Grant — later becoming Yosemite National Park — to the care of the state of California. After passing both the Senate and House, Conness’s bill was signed by President Abraham Lincoln on June 30, 1864.

Emma and George Cowan
In 1877, Emma and her husband, George, celebrated their second wedding anniversary in Yellowstone National Park, which had been created only five years earlier. On the morning of their anniversary, they were ambushed and attacked by a group of Nez Percé warriors — the Nez Percé were being pursued by the U.S. Army, which was trying to force the tribe onto a reservation in Idaho. During the encounter, George was shot in the head and Emma was taken captive along with others traveling with the Cowans. They were later released unharmed. George, meanwhile, was picked up by Army scouts — still alive — and field surgeons removed the bullet from his skull. In 1901, George and Emma returned to Yellowstone National Park and talked about their anniversary ordeal. By this time, George had turned the flattened bullet into a watch fob.

Senator Ralph Henry Cameron (1863-1953)
Cameron was an Arizona prospector and businessman who fought to control much of the land in what is now Grand Canyon National Park by filing thousands of often spurious mining claims at strategic locations within the canyon and on its rim. This included the entrance of the Bright Angel Trail, where he erected a toll gate and charged a fee to anyone wishing to travel the trail from the rim to the river, and Indian Garden, a rest stop on the trail where Cameron had a cluster of ramshackle buildings and charged tourists for water and for the only outhouse within miles. 

Cameron opposed President Theodore Roosevelt’s use of the Antiquities Act to create Grand Canyon National Monument; he took his opposition to the U.S. Supreme Court, where he lost. He also opposed — and lost — making the national monument a national park in 1919. Nonetheless, he used his political connections to steadfastly ignore federal rulings that he give up his fraudulent claims and in 1920 became even more brazen when the voters of Arizona sent him to Washington, DC, as their senator. In the Senate, Cameron constantly battled Stephen Mather and Horace Albright of the National Park Service over issues involving the Grand Canyon, including their fight to keep him from building some dams within the park. He lost reelection in 1926 and all control over his Grand Canyon ventures.

George Bucknam Dorr (1854-1944)
Dorr was among the wealthy “cottagers” of Mount Desert Island in Maine. Inspired by Charles W. Eliot’s campaign to preserve land on the island, Dorr became the most active member of the group working to buy or receive gifts of land that would be made accessible to the public. He negotiated many of the transactions (often using his own inheritance, later with money donated by John D. Rockefeller Jr.), mapped many of the island’s trails and lobbied tirelessly for protecting the island, first as a national monument and then, in 1919, as a national park. After Acadia National Park was created, he served as its first superintendent until his death.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas (1890-1998)
Born in Minneapolis and a graduate of Wellesley College, Douglas moved to Miami in 1915, following a brief and unhappy marriage, to work for her father at the Miami Herald. She started as a society reporter, but soon distinguished herself as a feisty and articulate crusader for women’s rights, racial justice and conservation. Ernest Coe recruited her in the fight to save the Everglades as a national park; she soon became the public voice of the effort. Her book, The Everglades: River of Grass, is still considered a classic work.

Her work did not end with the creation of Everglades National Park. She continued to fight against efforts by the Corps of Engineers to divert the natural flow of the waters and in 1970 founded Friends of the Everglades to broaden the constituency for its protection. In 1993, she was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom; following her death at age 108, she was posthumously inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.

Charles W. Eliot (1834-1926)
Eliot, the president of Harvard University, had a “cottage” on Mount Desert Island in Maine. His son, also named Charles, a landscape architect with Frederick Law Olmsted’s firm in Boston, made the first proposal that much of the island be saved from development and opened for public use. When the younger Eliot died of meningitis, the elder Eliot took on his son’s dream and organized the Hancock County Trustees of Public Reservations to make it come true. He recruited George Dorr and, later, John D. Rockefeller Jr., into the cause that ultimately resulted in Acadia National Park.

Truman C. Everts (1816-1901)
A member of the Washburn/Langford expedition of 1870, Everts, a 54-year-old nearsighted Vermonter, became separated from his companions and promptly lost his horse, guns, matches and supplies. He wandered, lost and starving, for 37 days — surviving on thistle roots, forced to warm himself next to thermal vents and suffering terribly when he scalded his legs in one accident and burned his hands in another. After being rescued, he wrote a popular magazine account of his ordeal, Thirty Seven Days of Peril, published in Scribners Monthly in 1871, and was offered the job of superintendent when Yellowstone became a park. Since the job carried no salary, he turned it down. The thistle that had kept him alive is now called Everts thistle.

Margaret and Edward Gehrke (1880-1939) and (1883-1978)
Margaret and Edward, a childless couple from Lincoln, Nebraska, began traveling together to the national parks via train in 1915, when the young couple decided to stop at the Grand Canyon on the way home from San Francisco. For the next quarter century, the couple would travel thousands of miles to visit virtually all of the existing national parks at the time, eventually switching from the railroad to traveling in the string of Buicks they owned. During each summer journey, Edward snapped photographs and Margaret recorded their adventure in her journals — the journals and photographs eventually were given to the Nebraska State Historical Society.

In the 1930s, Edward built a “house-car,” but he died in 1939 before the couple could drive it to a national park. Margaret lived almost 40 more years, but rarely traveled. However, in 1948, the then-65-year-old Margaret traveled once more by train to Rocky Mountain National Park, the couple’s favorite.

George Bird Grinnell (1849-1931)
Grinnell became one of the most important advocates of the national park idea in the late 1800s. A well-educated New Yorker trained in ornithology and paleontology, as a young man he had made a number of trips to the West — as official zoologist to George Custer’s expedition to the Black Hills in 1874 and then with a government survey to Yellowstone in 1875. As editor and publisher of Forest and Stream, an influential sportsman’s magazine in New York City, Grinnell used its pages to champion the protection of Yellowstone, which he called “the people’s park.” In 1894, his efforts were particularly crucial in getting Congress to pass laws giving legal teeth to regulations against poaching and vandalism in Yellowstone. The bill is credited with saving America’s last wild herd of buffalo from extermination.

Among his many contributions to the cause of conservation, Grinnell founded the Audubon Society, partnered with Theodore Roosevelt to found the Boone and Crockett Club and helped organize the New York Zoological Society. As a mentor to Roosevelt, his influence was even broader. In later life, Grinnell became better known as an ethnographer of Plains Indian tribes, but he never stopped supporting national parks. He was the driving force behind the creation of Glacier National Park in 1910.

Ferdinand V. Hayden (1829-1887)

As head of the U.S. Geological Survey of the Territories and a trained geologist, Hayden was in charge of many scientific expeditions into the West. Early in 1871, after hearing Nathaniel Langford give a speech about Yellowstone, Hayden decided to mount a government survey of the region that summer, taking along a team of scientists — a botanist, zoologist, mineralogist, meteorologist and topographers — as well as the artist Thomas Moran and photographer William Henry Jackson.

Following the expedition, Hayden prepared a report for Congress, recounting the information he had gathered and urging the lawmakers to pass legislation preserving Yellowstone from development, so it didn’t become another over-commercialized Niagara Falls. (The suggestion for the recommendation had come from a representative of Jay Cooke, the financier behind the Northern Pacific Railroad, who believed Yellowstone could become a tourist destination for his railroad — and thought it would be easier to deal with the government than private landowners.) Prohibiting settlement in Yellowstone, Hayden assured Congress, “takes nothing from the value of the public domain, and is no pecuniary loss to the Government, but will be regarded by the entire civilized world as a step of progress and an honor to Congress and the nation.”

Clare Marie Hodges
In 1918, Clare Marie Hodges of Santa Cruz, California, became the first woman ranger in the National Park Service. Hodges was only 18, but was offered the job as a ranger in Yosemite National Park because of her vast knowledge of the mountain trails. In addition to her duties as a ranger, Hodges taught at the Yosemite School, was president of the San Jose Normal School’s literary society and was the author of Songs of the Trail. She later married Peter J. Wolfsen, a Mariposa rancher; “The Wolfsen Nature Trail” is named after both of them.

James Mason Hutchings (1820-1902)
James Mason Hutchings, a failed prospector and budding publisher, went to Yosemite Valley in 1855 after reading Lafayette Bunnell’s descriptions of its waterfalls. His illustrated publication, Hutchings’ California Magazine, did more than anything else to bring the valley’s beauty to the attention of the world. He opened the Hutchings’ Hotel and led visitors on tours, constantly promoting the region in a quest for profits.

In 1864, Yosemite Valley was set aside from private development and given to the care of California, but Hutchings, technically a squatter on federal land, refused to acknowledge the new designation and took his challenge to the U.S. Supreme Court. The court ruled against Hutchings, setting the legal precedent that would later affirm the creation of national parks. Hutchings’ other inadvertent contribution to the national park idea occurred in 1869 when he hired an itinerant sheepherder named John Muir to build a sawmill in Yosemite Valley, giving a home to the person who would become the valley’s — and the park idea’s — greatest champion. Hutchings himself would be evicted from the valley, though he would continue publishing books about it and occasionally lead tours there. In 1902, during a return trip, his horses spooked and he was killed when his carriage overturned; he was buried a few days later near the base of Yosemite Falls.

Bessie and Glen Hyde
In 1928, newlyweds Bessie and Glen set off on a honeymoon adventure down the Colorado River, attempting to pass through the Grand Canyon in a wooden scow Glen had built. Bessie, age 22, was the first woman to attempt navigating the Grand Canyon. The Hydes hoped to capitalize on their trip by writing a book about it — using Bessie’s journal notes and photographs — and going on the lecture circuit. They made it from Green River, Utah, to the bottom of Bright Angel Trail with only a few problems. After hiking up the trail to buy supplies and spend a few nights at Grand Canyon Village, the couple hiked back to their boat and set off on November 17. A month later, when they had not emerged from the canyon, a massive search located their boat — with their supplies, Bessie’s journal and camera and rolls of film, and everything else — floating in an eddy on the river. The Hydes, presumed drowned, were never seen again.

Harold Ickes (1874-1952)

No Secretary of the Interior was a more staunch defender of the national park idea than Ickes, who served in the role from 1933 to 1946. Originally a reform Republican from Chicago, he became a fierce New Dealer under President Franklin Roosevelt. As Interior Secretary, he stopped plans for a skyline drive in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, championed the cause for Kings Canyon National Park in California to be created as a road-less park (he wanted it named for John Muir), took on the timber interests in creation of Olympic National Park, hired Ansel Adams to photograph the parks, declared 1934 the “National Park Year” with special postage stamps and posters designed to promote it, and is responsible for innumerable other achievements on behalf of the parks.

Ickes, who called himself “the old curmudgeon,” was controversial. His proposals to consolidate all natural resource agencies in the federal government under his control at Interior were rebuffed even by a Congress normally friendly to FDR. He ordered managers at Shenandoah National Park to take down signs segregating campgrounds and picnic areas. With Eleanor Roosevelt, he arranged for Marian Anderson to sing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial after the Daughters of the American Revolution had refused to allow Anderson to perform in Constitution Hall in Washington, DC, because of her race. Known for a fiery temper and brusque style, Ickes was “the meanest man who ever sat in a Cabinet office in Washington,” Horace Albright said, “and the best Secretary of the Interior we ever had.”

William Henry Jackson (1843-1942)

By 1871, Jackson had made a name for himself as a photographer, having chronicled the building of the Union Pacific Railroad. Like Thomas Moran, he was part of the Hayden Expedition to Yellowstone, going at the behest of the Northern Pacific. His photographs of Yellowstone’s wonders, in combination with Moran’s paintings, did more than anything else to sway Congress to create the world’s first national park in 1872. Jackson would continue photographing the West for years afterward.

Horace Kephart (1862-1931)

Born in Pennsylvania and raised in Iowa, the precocious Kephart was enrolled in graduate school at Cornell by the age of 17. He became an expert on early western explorations and was named head of the prestigious St. Louis Mercantile Library. He became a heavy drinker, lost his wife and family and job, and in 1904, at the age of 42, tried to start over in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina, where he lived alone in a small cabin. There, he wrote Camping and Woodcraft, which became known as the “camper’s Bible,” and Our Southern Highlanders, about the distinctive people of southern Appalachia.

Worried that the Smokies were being ravaged by clearcutting, he took up the cause for saving them as a national park, writing many influential articles about it. He and photographer George Masa became close friends and spent much time working on maps for the proposed park, as well as for the Appalachian Trail. Kephart was killed in a car accident in 1931, before Great Smoky Mountains National Park was finalized. A mountain in the park now bears his name. 

Emery and Ellsworth Kolb

In 1902, the Kolb brothers bought a photographic studio in Williams, Arizona, and had its contents moved to the south rim of the Grand Canyon, 50 miles away. At first, they opened for business in a canvas tent near one of the tourist hotels, but later built a wooden structure at the head of Bright Angel Trail. They supported themselves by taking photographs of tourists about to descend the trail on mules and having the images developed and ready for sale by the time the visitors returned from the river a mile below. They also were known for daring treks into the canyon to capture images from seemingly impossible vantage points.

In 1911, the Kolbs retraced John Wesley Powell’s historic descent of the Colorado River, bringing along a moving picture camera and getting footage they later showed in a specially built theater in their south rim studio. The brothers were active in anything that went on in the canyon — from government surveys to the search for Glen and Bessie Hyde. Ellsworth went his own way in 1924, but Emery stayed on at the south rim, photographing tourists and giving his lecture at the studio until his death in 1976 at age 95.

Lancelot Jones (1898-1997)
Born in a boat in Biscayne Bay to a former slave father and a Bahamian mother, Jones inherited from them the tiny island known as Porgy Key, near the southern end of the bay. As the only private resident of Porgy Key, Jones would become a fishing guide to millionaires and dignitaries vacationing in Miami Beach. However, when developers threatened to turn Porgy Key and the other undeveloped islands into a resort area in the 1960s, Jones refused to sell. 

In 1968, the islands were saved as Biscayne National Monument, which eventually became a national park. Jones then sold his 277 acres to the National Park Service, on the condition that he have a life tenancy on the land he loved. Jones remained there until 1992, when he was forced to evacuate due to Hurricane Andrew.

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
British author Kipling visited Yellowstone National Park in 1889 as a young writer on his first trip to the United States. Kipling played the tourist, traveling into the park on a guided tour with other visitors excited to see the park many called “The Wonderland.” Kipling would later write popular poetry and such famed works as The Jungle Book and Captains Courageous. In 1907, Kipling was the first English-speaking author to win the Nobel Peace Prize in literature. 

John F. Lacey (1841-1913)
An arch-conservative Republican congressman from Oskaloosa, Iowa, Lacey became the unlikely champion of a number of progressive laws important to conservation and national parks. One, in 1894, was the law that finally put legal muscle behind regulations against poaching and vandalism in Yellowstone National Park. (Lacey had seen how lawless the young park could be: In 1887, the stagecoach he was taking through Yellowstone was stopped and robbed by bandits.) His second major legislation was the Lacey Bird and Game Act of 1900, which helped bring an end to the heedless slaughter of plumed birds in Florida and elsewhere. Lacey also was the author of the bill creating Wind Cave National Park and in 1900 began advocating for a National Park Service.

Perhaps his most important legacy was the Act for the Preservation of American Antiquities of 1906. Originally meant to stop vandals from looting southwestern ruins, the act gave the president unilateral authority — without consulting Congress — to set aside parcels of the public domain. Theodore Roosevelt, who signed Lacey’s bill into law, then stretched it to save the Grand Canyon in 1908. Future presidents — from Franklin Roosevelt for the Tetons to Jimmy Carter for Alaska to Bill Clinton for Utah — would also employ it, often against local opposition, to preserve vast portions of the American landscape.

Fitz Hugh Ludlow (1836-1870)
Ludlow was an author, journalist and explorer most famous for his autobiographical book, The Hasheesh Eater, and whose second book, The Heart of the Continent, details his travels across America to Utah, Yosemite in California and the forests of Oregon. While in San Francisco on his travels, he was influenced by the authors of the “Golden Era,” including Mark Twain, who became a friend and influence.

Nathaniel Pitt Langford (1832-1911)
At the urging of the Great Northern Railroad, Langford, a Montana politician, helped lead an expedition to the headwaters of the Yellowstone River in 1870 with co-leader Henry D. Washburn. There they discovered that mountain men’s rumors of boiling mud springs, spouting geysers and a deep canyon with a majestic waterfall were true. Washburn gave Old Faithful its name. Upon completion of the expedition, Langford published articles about their discoveries and went on a lecture tour of the East (also underwritten by the railroad), which heightened interest in the region and prompted a government expedition in 1871. After Yellowstone became a national park in 1872, Langford became its first superintendent, serving until 1877. He liked to claim — with great exaggeration — that his group came up with the national park idea and in later years said his initials, N.P., stood for “national park.”

George Masa (1881-1933)
Born Masahar Iizuka in Osaka, Japan, Masa came to the United States in 1901 to study mining. He eventually settled in Asheville, North Carolina, where he took a job as a bellhop at the swank Grove Park Inn. He soon learned the art of photography, opened his own studio, made a name for himself for his scenic photographs, became friends with the writer Horace Kephart and spent the rest of his life working to preserve the Smoky Mountains. His photos, with Kephart’s text, were used in promotional materials supporting the effort to create a national park. After seeing Masa’s photographs, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., donated $5 million to help purchase the lands to become part of a new park. 

Masa and Kephart also worked on mapping and promoting the creation of the Appalachian Trail in the Smokies. One year after Masa’s death in 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt completed the purchase through $1.5 in government funds, finalizing the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Today, a 5,685-foot peak in the park is named Masa Knob, dedicated in Masa’s honor in 1961.

Stephen Mather (1867-1930)
Mather was the first director of the National Park Service, using his wealth and political connections to take the national park idea in important new directions. A self-made millionaire and genius of public relations — he had made borax into a national best-selling product after promoting 20 Mule Team Borax from Death Valley — Mather became disgusted with the poor condition of the parks he witnessed during visits to Sequoia and Yosemite in the summer of 1914. He quickly wrote his college friend, Secretary of the Interior Franklin Lane, who wrote back that Mather should come to Washington and do something about it himself. Mather did, taking a job as Lane’s assistant in charge of the parks and beginning a crusade to mold a haphazard collection of national parks into a cohesive system and to create a federal agency solely devoted to them: the National Park Service. 

Mather took on staff, paying for them out of his own pocket, and set out on a public relations and political lobbying campaign to build awareness of the parks and increase their size and number. Mather raised funds from his wealthy friends to purchase new park lands and often purchased land himself, only to give it to the NPS for protection. He joined forces with the budding automotive industry to “democratize” the parks by making them more accessible to a broader cross-section of Americans. He and his assistant, Horace Albright, professionalized the corps of superintendents and rangers in the parks. 

Mather’s love of the parks was highly personal: He had found that time in nature helped him ward off the bouts of depression to which he was prone. During his tenure as NPS director, he suffered several severe depressions, requiring hospitalization, during which Albright filled in without revealing the reasons for Mather’s absence. Upon Mather’s death, the NPS erected bronze plaques in every park with the words, “There will never come an end to the good that he has done.”

Iwao Matsushita and Hanaye Matsushita (1892-1979) and (1898-1965)
Iwao and his wife Hanaye were Japanese immigrants who came to the United States in 1919, settling in Seattle. They fell in love with Mount Rainier, which reminded them of their “holy mountain” in Japan, Mount Fuji. They made more than 100 trips to Mount Rainier National Park, taking photographs with the Seattle Camera Club, along with home movies and journal records. During World War II, Iwao was separated from Hanaye during their internment, but the two exchanged letters, many about the mountain and their memories of it. After being released, the couple returned to Seattle to be close to their beloved Mount Rainier. His journals and photographs were later donated to the libraries of the University of Washington.

Virginia McClurg (1850-1931)
McClurg, a reporter for the New York Daily Graphic, was sent to write about the archeological finds of Mesa Verde in the 1880s. She soon started a campaign to preserve the ancient cliff dwellings, lobbying Senator Edward Wolcott to introduce a bill declaring Mesa Verde a national park. The bill failed, as did numerous other attempts. McClurg organized women’s groups in Colorado and nationally in support of the effort, working tirelessly for the cause. She later became an opponent of federal control, in favor of Mesa Verde becoming a state park, run by her group. Many of her organization’s members, including Lucy Peabody, disagreed and kept pushing for federal control. On June 29, 1906, President Roosevelt signed a bill creating Mesa Verde National Park.

Lloyd Miller
In the 1960s, Miller, a mid-level manager for an airline based in Miami and an avid fisherman in Biscayne Bay, helped lead opposition to refineries and commercial and residential development on the last pristine Florida keys between Miami and Key West. Along with Juanita Greene and Lancelot Jones, he fought to have them declared a national park. It was an intense battle: His car was vandalized, people tried to pressure his employer to fire him and his family dog was poisoned. Miller saw his goal through to the end — and was in the White House in 1968 to watch President Lyndon B. Johnson create Biscayne National Monument. He still lives in the Miami area.

Enos Mills (1870-1922)

Born in Kansas, Mills was a sickly child, not expected to live through his teenage years. A doctor recommended he move to Colorado for its dry air, and at age 14, Mills made his way to Kansas City on his own and worked in a bakery for enough money for a train ticket west. He ended up in Estes, in the heart of the Rockies, where his health was restored. He eventually became Colorado’s official “snow observer,” traipsing alone in the mountains to measure the snow pack, and was an expert outdoorsman. By the time he was 35, Mills had camped in every state and territory of the United States.

In 1901, he bought a ranch and renamed it the Longs Peak Inn, where he offered patrons not only room and board, but guided nature hikes and gave speeches in front of the lobby’s fireplace. An admirer of and correspondent with John Muir, Mills followed his hero’s career path as a nature writer for popular magazines and eventually published more than 18 books. He was the principal leader of the effort to preserve the Longs Peak region under federal protection and is often referred to as the “father of Rocky Mountain National Park.”

Thomas Moran (1827-1926)

British-born Moran, who had been commissioned to illustrate Langford’s tales from Yellowstone in Scribner’s magazine in 1871, accompanied the Hayden Expedition later that year (at the behest of the Northern Pacific). He drew watercolor sketches of Yellowstone’s wonders, some of which he later turned into oil paintings. They were displayed in the Capitol and helped convince Congress that Yellowstone should be declared a national park; one of his paintings was purchased by the government for $10,000.

Later in life, Moran would focus on the Grand Canyon, painting a number of masterpieces and becoming famous enough that the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway used his work in their advertisements luring people to the canyon.

Adolph Murie (1899-1974)
After visiting Mount McKinley National Park in Alaska as a 22-year-old college student, Murie was inspired to pursue his doctoral degree in biology. He became an important voice in preserving wild nature in national parks. He conducted a number of wildlife studies for the NPS in a range of parks, the most significant being his landmark observations of wolves in their natural habitat at Mount McKinley. His conclusions that wolves were not a scourge on the other wildlife — and his call for wolves to be protected, not exterminated — made him unpopular, even within the park service. He persevered, and eventually, many of his proposals were adopted as policy.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Murie also raised objections to plans for building a paved highway into the center of Mount McKinley National Park and for a hotel and gas station near Wonder Lake, as well as other developments. He won a partial victory when the park service ended the paving after an initial 13 miles and abandoned the plans for the hotel and other construction.

Murie’s half-brother, Olaus, also a biologist, was an important figure in American conservation, serving as a director of the Wilderness Society and playing an instrumental role in the creation of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and passage of the Wilderness Act. Olaus’ wife, Mardy, was his full partner in the conservation efforts and carried on after his death. She played a key role in the fight for creation of the Alaska parks in the late 1970s and was eventually awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom by President William Clinton.

The Murie Center in Grand Teton National Park, created from a ranch given to the park by the families of the Murie brothers, carries on their conservation work. On August 16, 2004, the Murie Science and Learning Center in Denali National Park was officially opened and dedicated to Adolph Murie in honor of his work to enlarge and protect national parks and their wildlife populations.

John Muir (1838-1914)
Muir was one of the national park idea’s earliest advocates and perhaps its most eloquent spokesman. He was born in Dunbar, Scotland, and moved with his family to a Wisconsin farm in 1849. With a flair for inventions and a keen interest in geology and botany, in 1867 he cut short a promising career in industry to walk from Indiana to Florida, collecting botanical sketches on his way. From there he sailed to California, and upon reaching San Francisco, walked to the Sierra Nevada — the “Range of Light” that would transform his life with his “unconditional surrender” to nature.

After working as a sheepherder in the high country for a season, he took a job building a sawmill for James Mason Hutchings in 1869. In his free time, he roamed Yosemite, developing both a scientific theory, that the valley had been carved by glaciers, and a spiritual, transcendental approach in which mankind is just one part of an interconnected natural world, not its master, and God reveals himself through nature, not by the works of man.

To preach his gospel of nature, in 1873 — at the urging of friends — he moved to Oakland to write articles for leading magazines, such as Overland Monthly, Scribner’s and Harper’s Magazine,which made him nationally famous. He married Louie Wanda Strentzel and turned her family’s farm in Martinez, California, into a profitable orchard business; he grew restless to immerse himself in nature again and traveled to Alaska’s Glacier Bay and Washington State’s Mount Rainier with his writings, bringing national attention to two more places that would eventually become national parks. Likewise, he championed protection of the Petrified Forest and the Grand Canyon in Arizona. He was the public voice for setting aside the high country around Yosemite Valley as a national park in 1890, as well as for General Grant and Sequoia National Parks. His efforts to make a large park in the Kings Canyon region of southern California would not be successful, but later park supporters would take up the cause.

Muir’s three-night camping trip with President Theodore Roosevelt in 1903 could be considered the most important camping trip in park history. Not only did he persuade President Roosevelt to return Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove to federal protection as part of Yosemite National Park, his conversations about conservation with Roosevelt had a lasting impact on the president. Muir’s final cause — trying to stop the city of San Francisco from building a dam and creating a massive water reservoir in Yosemite’s Hetch Hetchy Valley — ended in heartbreak for the old man in 1913, with federal approval of the project. He died a year later, on Christmas Eve, at age 76.

Muir was a founder and first president of the Sierra Club; Muir Woods National Monument, protecting a grove of redwoods north of San Francisco, is named in his honor.

Chiura Obata (1885-1975)
Obata was a Japanese immigrant and renowned artist who spent much of his career painting landscapes of Yosemite National Park. He also taught at the University of California, Berkeley. During World War II, he and his family were relocated to an internment camp in Topaz, Utah, where he founded the Topaz Art School and encouraged his fellow prisoners to look to nature, as he did, for strength during the “intolerable sin” of internment. One of his watercolors from the camp was donated to Eleanor Roosevelt, in thanks for her speaking out against the unjust treatment of Japanese Americans. After the war, he returned to teaching and took many trips with the Sierra Club to paint landscapes.

Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903)
Olmsted is credited as the father of American landscape architecture and is most famous for his efforts to design landscaped park spaces throughout America, including Central Park in New York City. He was in California in the early 1860s and was named one of the original California state commissioners overseeing the new Yosemite Grant. 

A report Olmsted wrote for the commission in 1865, echoing the Declaration of Independence, laid out a manifesto for the necessity of parks, available to all people, as the “duty” of a democratic government. His report also called for regulations to protect the “dignity of the scenery” so that future generations could also enjoy it. The commission quietly shelved his report, which did not surface publicly until 1952. 

Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. (1870-1957)
Like his famous father, Olmsted also was a landscape architect and deeply involved in the national park idea. At age 31, he had been chosen by President Theodore Roosevelt to design a system of parks for the nation’s capital. He was among the group of people gathered by Stephen Mather to draft the legislation creating the National Park Service in 1916 and personally added what one member called “the essential thing” — a statement of purpose, meant to stand the test of time, to “conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life” of the parks and “provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner … as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”

Olmsted stayed involved with national parks. He was sent to the Everglades in the 1930s to study whether a place that most considered a worthless swamp was worthy of becoming a national park — he recommended its protection — helped efforts to protect California’s coastal redwoods and designed a number of scenic overlooks for the park service, including the tunnel and parking area that provide the most stunning first view of Yosemite Valley.

Gifford Pinchot (1865-1946)
Yale-educated Pinchot studied forestry in Europe and was the first American to declare himself a professional forester. At first a friend and ally of John Muir in his opposition to the wasteful destruction of American forests, Pinchot eventually became an adversary of Muir within the growing conservation movement. Pinchot’s favorite saying, “the greatest good for the greatest number,” attested to his view of conservation-through-use that would come to be known as “utilitarian.” Muir, on the other hand, was what came to be called a “preservationist.” To him, the great value of forests and wilderness was more spiritual than practical. 

With the creation of the National Forest Service within the Department of Agriculture and Pinchot as its first director, his view prevailed in Washington: Forests would be treated like a crop, not a temple. Pinchot later prevailed again when he persuaded President Theodore Roosevelt to allow the construction of the Hetch Hetchy dam in Yosemite, despite Muir’s vociferous objections. 

After Muir’s death, supporters of the creation of a National Park Service believed that Pinchot and his forest service tried their best to prevent a separate parks agency from being established and then to keep the number of new parks at a minimum. Pinchot remained a powerful political force and leader in conservation; he later went on to become governor of Pennsylvania from 1923-1927 and 1931-1935.

John Wesley Powell (1834-1902)
In 1869, Powell, a one-armed veteran of the Civil War, led the Powell Geographic Expedition down the Green and Colorado Rivers, the first recorded passage through the Grand Canyon. His expedition drew national attention to the Grand Canyon, and a subsequent trip in 1872 resulted in accurate maps and photographs of the area that would later become a national park.

John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (1874-1960)
Rockefeller was the son of the founder of the vast Standard Oil trust, John D. Rockefeller Sr., at the time the richest man in America. The younger Rockefeller became a prominent philanthropist and conservationist who donated millions of dollars towards the creation and expansion of national parks across the nation. No single American donated more to the parks. 

Rockefeller purchased land and donated money — $45 million by some estimates — to create or expand Acadia, Great Smoky Mountains, Grand Teton, Yosemite and Shenandoah National Parks and contributed to many other park activities, such as the creation of museums. He passed his love of the parks on to his children; his son, Laurance, was responsible for the creation of Virgin Islands National Park and helped launch the National Park Foundation to encourage more Americans to contribute to their parks.

Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919)
As a sickly young boy in New York City, Roosevelt had learned taxidermy and started his own collection of stuffed specimens. At age 12 he donated some them — a dozen mice, a bat, a turtle, four birds’ eggs and the skull of a red squirrel — to the American Museum of Natural History. Eleven years later, he presented 622 carefully preserved bird skins to the Smithsonian.

In 1883, when he was a New York City alderman, he took a train to North Dakota to hunt buffalo before the species disappeared; he shot a bull and had its head mounted on his wall in New York. The trip transformed Roosevelt’s life — he bought a ranch in the Dakota badlands and returned regularly to ride and hunt. A book he wrote about his time in the West was mildly panned by George Bird Grinnell in Forest and Stream; when Roosevelt burst into Grinnell’s office to complain, the meeting ended with the two becoming lifelong friends. With Grinnell, he formed the Boone and Crockett Club, a hunter’s group of prominent easterners, and became its first president.

After becoming U.S. president in 1901, Roosevelt became an even greater champion of conservation. In 1903, he interrupted a national speaking tour to spend two weeks camping in Yellowstone National Park; visit the Grand Canyon, calling for its protection; and go to Yosemite, where he and John Muir slept out under the stars for three nights, with Muir urging him to make Yosemite Valley part of a larger Yosemite National Park. 

As president, Roosevelt created five national parks (doubling the number of parks); signed the landmark Antiquities Act and used its special provisions to unilaterally create 18 national monuments, including the Grand Canyon; and set aside 51 federal bird sanctuaries, four national game refuges and more than 100 million acres’ worth of national forests.

There are more National Park Service units dedicated to Roosevelt’s life and memory than any other American’s, including Theodore Roosevelt National Park in the Badlands of North Dakota, where he shot his first buffalo and set up a ranch.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945)
Like his famous older cousin, Roosevelt became an energetic park supporter as president. In the midst of the Depression, national parks were dramatically improved by virtue of Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps, and despite the hard times, the number of park visitors skyrocketed, prompted in part by Roosevelt’s highly publicized trips to them and constant encouragement to his fellow citizens to follow his example.

With Harold Ickes, his Secretary of the Interior, Roosevelt also embarked on ambitious expansions of the park system. In 1933, he signed the order transferring historic sites such as Civil War battlefields and national shrines such as the Lincoln Memorial to the care of the park service, in one stroke of the pen enlarging the national park idea to include the nation’s memory of its history. He battled entrenched interests to create Olympic and Kings Canyon National Parks; made Great Smoky Mountains National Park possible by directing federal funds to land purchases for the first time in history; fought for the expansion of Grand Teton National Park and the establishment other national parks, such as Isle Royale on Lake Superior; and created a string of national monuments — Joshua Tree, Capitol Reef, the Dry Tortugas, the Channel Islands — that would ultimately become national parks.

General Philip Sheridan (1831-1888)
Sheridan was a Civil War hero who later became a top general during the Indian wars on the Great Plains. In 1882, he led an expedition that blazed the trail from Wyoming’s Jackson Hole into Yellowstone National Park, where he witnessed the indiscriminate slaughter of elk and buffalo; he vowed it should be brought to an end. He joined Missouri Senator George Vest in taking President Chester Arthur on a camping trip through the park in 1883 and urged greater protection. His proposal to double the size of Yellowstone to more closely conform to the migratory habits of its large game was soundly defeated by western political interests, but when Congress stripped away funding for the park in 1886, Sheridan (using a provision Vest had earlier slipped into law) dispatched the First U.S. Cavalry to maintain order. The military remained as protectors of Yellowstone National Park for 30 years until the National Park Service was created in 1916.

Charles Sheldon (1867-1928)
Sheldon was a self-made millionaire in the railroad business who retired at a young age to pursue his passion as an amateur naturalist and study the wild sheep of North America. That quest brought him to the region around Mount McKinley in Alaska, home of the distinctive Dall sheep. Sheldon made two extended trips to the remote region, one for an entire year. To protect the rich variety of wildlife from extermination by market hunters, Sheldon proposed that the region be made a national park. As a friend of Stephen Mather and a member of New York City’s influential Boone and Crockett Club, Sheldon threw himself into the effort. He moved to Washington to help usher the bill through Congress, and on February 26, 1917, he personally delivered the bill creating Mount McKinley National Park to President Woodrow Wilson for signing. 

Sheldon had originally suggested that the park and mountain at its core be named Denali, in honor of the Athabaskan Indian name for the peak (“the high one”), but Congress settled on Mount McKinley. In 1980, the park’s name was changed to Denali National Park and Preserve.

William Gladstone Steel (1854-1934)
In 1870, Steel was a 15 year old in Kansas when he read an article in the newspaper used to wrap his lunch. It described a mysterious clear and deep lake in Oregon, which he vowed to visit one day. Fifteen years later, he made it to the remote spot — Crater Lake — and immediately started another long quest to preserve it as a national park. That effort lasted 17 years before Crater Lake National Park was created in 1902. Steel was later named the park’s superintendent and remained involved with its protection until his death in 1934.

Mark Twain (1835-1910)
In 1866, Samuel Langhorne Clemens visited Hawaii as a young reporter writing under the pen name of “Mark Twain.” Among his stops was the new Volcano House, at the time a modest hut, on the rim of the Kilauea volcano. His descriptions — some riveting, some hilarious — helped bring the islands and their fiery volcanoes to America’s attention. In later years, Twain would use the same combination of humor and vivid writing to become one of the world’s best-known and best-loved authors.

Isabel Bassett Wasson (1897-1994)
Wasson was the first female naturalist ranger at Yellowstone National Park. Born in Brooklyn, New York, Wellesley College graduate Wasson held a master’s degree in geology from Columbia University and became one of the first women petroleum geologists in the United States. At Yellowstone in 1920, Wasson became a popular lecturer, with crowds following her from location to location as she gave her nature talks.

Richard Wetherill (1858-1910) and the Wetherill Brothers
The Wetherill brothers were five cowboys from a Quaker family that moved from Kansas to ranch in southwestern Colorado in the early 1880s. In 1888, the oldest, Richard, and his brother in-law, Charles Mason, came upon Cliff Palace, the largest cliff dwelling in North America, in what is now Mesa Verde National Park. Al, the second oldest, may have seen Cliff Palace as early as 1885, but it was Richard and Charles Mason who entered the dwelling three years later. 

Richard and his brothers excavated artifacts for sale to museums and were hired by the Swedish nobleman Gustaf Nordenskiold to do more digging at Mesa Verde; the uproar over Nordenskiold, a foreigner, extracting ancient American treasures for shipment to Europe helped fuel the movement to protect Mesa Verde as a national park. Richard then went on to make important excavations in other parts of the Southwest and, though not a professionally trained archaeologist, made important discoveries; his biggest was at Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, where he undertook extensive excavations as carefully and scientifically as possible. Once again, his activities created a furor in the professional community, which led to the passage of the Act for the Preservation of American Antiquities in 1906, perhaps the most important single law in conservation history, giving the U.S. president the unilateral authority to set aside parcels of the public domain for historic or scientific reasons.

Originally disparaged by professional archaeologists and, at times, the National Park Service, Richard is now seen as important to the protection of Mesa Verde and other southwestern ruins. He and his family had proposed that Mesa Verde become a national park early on, but their suggestions were ignored. At Chaco Canyon, he had offered to give up his homestead claim if the government would take over the ruins and protect them properly, which happened in 1907 when President Theodore Roosevelt used the Antiquities Act to create Chaco Canyon National Monument.

George Melendez Wright (1904-1936)
Wright was born into a wealthy San Francisco family, the son of a ship’s captain and daughter of one of El Salvador’s most prominent dynasties. He exhibited an early interest in the natural world — hiking from San Francisco to California’s northern border in his mid-teens — and received a degree from the University of California, Berkeley, in forestry and zoology. During a field trip to Alaska, he was credited with being the first scientist to locate and describe the nest and eggs of the rare surfbird.

Wright went to work at Yosemite National Park as an assistant park naturalist in the late 1920s; his fluency in Spanish helped with interpretation during the emotional return of Totuya, the granddaughter of Chief Tenaya and the last living survivor of the expulsion of the Ahwahneechees in 1851. In 1930, he persuaded his superiors to let him and two colleagues conduct a four-year survey of wildlife and plantlife conditions in the national parks, funding the ambitious program with his own funds. His first-of-a-kind survey resulted in two landmark reports, which urged the park service to change a number of ingrained practices (feeding bears at dumps, killing predators, etc.) and let nature take its course in the parks. 

In 1933, Horace Albright named Wright the first chief of the newly created Wildlife Division; he was only 29. In that capacity, he supervised the hiring of more biologists; investigated new places being considered as national parks, becoming a strong supporter of saving the Everglades; and continued pushing against considerable internal resistance to change the direction of park policies toward accepting the notion that parks were meant to preserve the animals and plants as much as pretty scenery. In 1936, he was part of a commission studying a potential international park along the Big Bend of the Rio Grande in Texas and Mexico. On his way home from Texas, he was killed in a car accident at age 31.

Mountains in Big Bend National Park and Denali National Park and Preserve now bear his name. In his honor, the George Wright Society was formed, a nonprofit association of researchers and managers working on behalf of scientific and heritage values in protected areas.

Robert Sterling Yard (1861-1945)
Yard already had made a name for himself as a reporter and editor with The Century Magazine and New York Herald when his friend Stephen Mather asked him to work as a publicist in the Department of the Interior in 1915; to lure him to the job, Mather paid Yard’s $5,000 salary from his own pocket. Working with Mather, Yard helped bring national attention to the parks as never before — from well-placed news articles to creation of the National Parks Portfolio — and was instrumental in the promotional campaign that led to creation of the National Park Service in 1916.

With Mather’s help, he became the first executive secretary of the new National Parks Association (now the National Parks Conservation Association) in 1919 and in that role eventually parted ways with his old boss on the direction of some park policies. In particular, he worried that some new parks (Shenandoah, Mammoth Cave) were not up to what he called “national park standards,” and he became increasingly critical of Mather and Horace Albright’s willingness to embrace the automobile as a way of getting more people into the parks. In 1936, reacting to proposals by the park service to build a skyline drive through Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Yard became a founder and president of the new Wilderness Society.

Captain Charles Young (1864-1922)
Young was born into slavery in Kentucky on March 12, 1864. His father escaped bondage to join the Union Army during the Civil War, and Young later followed in his father’s military footsteps, attending the United States Military Academy. Young was only the third African American to graduate from West Point when he earned his degree in 1889. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Ninth Cavalry, the famed Buffalo Soldiers, in Nebraska. In 1901, he was promoted to the rank of captain — the first black officer in the regular army to receive that rank — and led his troops with distinction in the Philippines.

In 1903, Captain Young and his men were stationed at the Presidio in San Francisco, where they were part of President Theodore Roosevelt’s escort through the city. They were sent to Sequoia and General Grant National Parks as part of the army’s role of protecting national parks at the time, and Young was named acting superintendent, making him the first African American to be put in charge of a national park.

Later, he was dispatched to Haiti as the United States’ military attaché and sent again to the Philippines and then to Republic of Liberia. During the “punitive expedition” in pursuit of Pancho Villa, Young was put in command of troops from the Tenth Cavalry and promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel. Though he would eventually become a colonel, to his bitter disappointment, he was not permitted to serve in the field during World War I. He died in 1922 during a visit to Nigeria; ultimately, his remains were buried in Arlington Cemetery.

THE NATIONAL PARKS: AMERICA’S BEST IDEA
Timeline of U.S. National Parks Designations

Filmed over the course of more than six years in some of nature’s most spectacular locales, THE NATIONAL PARKS: AMERICA’S BEST IDEA is a story of people from every conceivable background who were willing to devote themselves to saving some precious portion of the land they loved, and in doing so reminded their fellow citizens of the full meaning of democracy. The 12-hour, six-part documentary series, directed by Ken Burns and co-produced with his longtime colleague and the film’s writer, Dayton Duncan, premieres Sunday, September 27, 7 p.m. on WSRE, PBS for the Gulf Coast.

The following is a chronological listing of the U.S. national parks sorted by the date of their authorization. As some parks held other designations prior to their authorization, additional historical information may be listed next to each park. In total, there currently are 58 U.S. national parks.

1872    March 1st – Yellowstone National Park (Wyoming/Montana/Idaho)
1890    September 9th – Sequoia National Park (California)
October 1st – Yosemite National Park (California); originally formed as the Yosemite Grant in 1864, which was under state control
October 1st – General Grant National Park (California); was enlarged in 1940 and renamed Kings Canyon National Park
1899    Mount Rainier National Park (Washington)
1902    Crater Lake National Park (Oregon)
1903    Wind Cave National Park (South Dakota)
1904    Sullys Hill National Park (North Dakota); was transferred in 1931 from a national park to a national game preserve
1906    Mesa Verde National Park (Colorado)
Platt National Park (Oklahoma); merged with Arbuckle National Recreation Area in 1976 to become Chickasaw National Recreation Area
1910    Glacier National Park (Montana)
1915    Rocky Mountain National Park (Colorado)
1916    August 1st – Hawai‘i National Park; dissolved when Haleakala National Park and Hawai‘i Volcanoes National Park were formed in 1960 and 1961, respectively
August 9th – Lassen Volcanic National Park (California); was originally designated a national monument in 1907

1917    Mount McKinley National Park (Alaska); was combined with Denali National Monument in 1980 and was renamed Denali National Park and Preserve
1919    February 26th – Grand Canyon National Park (Arizona); was originally designated a national monument in 1908
February 26th – Lafayette National Park (Maine); part of the park was originally designated Sieur de Monts national monument in 1916; was renamed Acadia National Park in 1929
November 19th – Zion National Park (Utah); was originally designated Mukuntuweap National Monument in 1909
1921    Hot Springs National Park (Arkansas); was originally designated Hot Springs Reservation in 1832
1924    Utah National Park; was originally designated a national monument in 1923 and was renamed Bryce Canyon National Park in 1928
1926    Great Smokey Mountains National Park (Tennessee); was authorized in 1926, but not chartered until 1934 and officially dedicated in 1940
Shenandoah National Park (Virginia); was authorized in 1926 and established in 1935
Mammoth Cave National Park (Kentucky); was authorized in 1926 and established in 1941
1929    Grand Teton National Park (Wyoming); was expanded in 1950 when Jackson Hole National Monument became part of the park
1930    Carlsbad Caverns National Park (New Mexico); was originally designated a national monument
in 1923
1931    Isle Royale National Park (Michigan); was authorized in 1931, expanded in 1934 and officially established in 1940
1934    Everglades National Park (Florida); was authorized in 1934 and officially established in 1947
1935    Big Bend National Park (Texas); was authorized in 1935 and officially established in 1944
1938    Olympic National Park (Washington); was originally designated a national monument in 1909
1956    Virgin Islands National Park (St. John/St. Thomas)
1962    Petrified Forest National Park (Arizona); originally designated a national monument in 1906
1964    Canyonlands National Park (Utah)
1966    Guadalupe Mountains National Park (Texas); was authorized in 1966 and was officially established in 1972
1968    North Cascades National Park (Washington)
Redwood National and State Park (California)
1971    Capitol Reef National Park (Utah); was originally designated a national monument in 1937
Arches National Park (Utah); was originally designated a national monument in 1929
Voyageurs National Park (Minnesota/Ontario); was authorized in 1971 and officially established in 1975
1978    Theodore Roosevelt National Park (North Dakota); was originally designated the Theodore Roosevelt National Memorial Park in 1947
Badlands National Park (South Dakota); was originally designated a national monument in 1939
1980    Channel Islands National Park (California); was originally designated a national monument in 1938
Biscayne National Park (Florida); was originally designated a national monument in 1968
Katmai National Park and Preserve (Alaska); was originally designated a national monument
in 1918
Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve (Alaska); was originally designated a national monument in 1925
Gates of Arctic National Park and Preserve (Alaska); was originally designated a national monument in 1978
Kenai Fjords National Park (Alaska); was originally designated a national monument in 1978
Kobuk Valley National Park (Alaska); was originally designated a national monument in 1978
Lake Clark National Park and Preserve (Alaska); was originally designated a national monument in 1978
Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve (Alaska); was originally designated a national monument in 1978
1986    Great Basin National Park (Nevada); was originally designated a national monument in 1922
1988    National Park of American Samoa (American Samoa)
1992    Dry Tortugas National Park (Florida); was originally designated a national monument in 1935
1994    Death Valley National Park (California/Nevada); was originally designated a national monument
in 1933
Saguaro National Park (Arizona); was originally designated a national monument in 1933
Joshua Tree National Park (California); was originally designated a national monument in 1936
1999    Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park (Colorado); was originally designated a national monument in 1933
2000    Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve (Colorado); was originally designated a national monument in 1932
Cuyahoga Valley National Park (Ohio); was originally designated the Cuyahoga Valley National Recreation Area in 1974
2003    Congaree National Park (South Carolina); was originally designated a national monument in 1976

THE NATIONAL PARKS: AMERICA’S BEST IDEA

Episode Descriptions

Series logline:
Filmmaker Ken Burns explores the history and splendor of, and the public passion for, America’s national parks.

Series long listing:
This 12-hour, six-part documentary series by Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan tells the story of an idea as uniquely American as the Declaration of Independence and just as radical: that the most special places in the nation should be preserved, not for royalty or the rich, but for everyone. From Acadia to Yosemite, Yellowstone to the Grand Canyon, the Everglades of Florida to the Gates of the Arctic in Alaska, the series explores the stories of people, from every conceivable background, who were willing to devote themselves to saving some precious portion of the land they loved, and in doing so, reminded their fellow citizens of the full meaning of democracy.

“The Scripture of Nature” (Episode One)
(1851-1890)
Logline:
The astonishing beauty of Yosemite Valley and the geyser wonderland of Yellowstone give birth to the radical idea of creating national parks for the enjoyment of everyone; John Muir becomes their eloquent defender.

Long listing:
In 1851, word spreads across the country of a beautiful area of California’s Yosemite Valley, attracting visitors who wish to exploit the land’s scenery for commercial gain and those who wish to keep it pristine. Among the latter is a Scottish-born wanderer named John Muir, for whom protecting the land becomes a spiritual calling. In 1864, Congress passes an act that protects Yosemite from commercial development for “public use, resort and recreation” — the first time in world history that any government has put forth this idea — and hands control of the land to California. Meanwhile, a “wonderland” in the northwest corner of the Wyoming territory attracts visitors to its bizarre landscape of geysers, mud pots and sulfur pits. In 1872, Congress passes an act to protect this land as well. Since it is located in a territory, rather than a state, it becomes America’s first national park: Yellowstone.

“The Last Refuge” (Episode Two)
(1890-1915)
Logline:
A young president, Theodore Roosevelt, becomes one of the national parks’ greatest champions; in Yellowstone, a magnificent species is rescued from extinction; and in Yosemite, John Muir fights the battle of his life to save a beautiful valley.

Long listing:
By the end of the 19th century, widespread industrialization has left many Americans worried about whether the country — once a vast wilderness — will have any pristine land left. At the same time, poachers in the parks are rampant, and visitors think nothing of littering or carving their names near iconic sites like Old Faithful. Congress has yet to establish clear judicial authority or appropriations for the protection of the parks. This sparks a conservation movement by organizations such as the Sierra Club, led by John Muir; the Audubon Society, led by George Bird Grinnell; and the Boone and Crockett Club, led by Theodore Roosevelt. The movement fails, however, to stop San Francisco from building the Hetch Hetchy dam at Yosemite, flooding Muir’s “mountain temple” and leaving him broken-hearted before he dies.

“The Empire of Grandeur” (Episode Three)
(1915-1919)
Logline:
In John Muir’s absence, a new leader steps forward on behalf of America’s remaining pristine places; a new federal agency is created to protect the parks; and in Arizona, a fight breaks out over the fate of the grandest canyon on earth.

Long listing:
In the early 20th century, America has a dozen national parks, but they are a haphazard patchwork of special places under the supervision of different federal agencies. The conservation movement, after failing to stop the Hetch Hetchy dam, pushes the government to establish one unified agency to oversee all the parks, leading to the establishment of the National Park Service in 1916. Its first director, Stephen Mather, a wealthy businessman and passionate park advocate who fought vigorously to establish the NPS, launches an energetic campaign to expand the national park system and bring more visitors to the parks. Among his efforts is to protect the Grand Canyon from encroaching commercial interests and establish it as a national park, rather than a national monument.

“Going Home” (Episode Four)
(1920-1933)
Logline:
As America embraces the automobile, a Nebraska housewife searches for peace and inspiration in park after park, while a honeymoon couple seeks fame and adventure in the Grand Canyon; and the future of the Great Smoky Mountains becomes caught in a race with the lumbermen’s saws.

Long listing:
While visiting the parks was once predominantly the domain of Americans wealthy enough to afford the high-priced train tours, the advent of the automobile allows more people than ever before to visit the parks. Mather embraces this opportunity and works to build more roads in the parks. Some park enthusiasts, such as Margaret and Edward Gehrke of Nebraska, begin “collecting” parks, making a point to visit as many as they can. In North Carolina, Horace Kephart, a reclusive writer, and George Masa, a Japanese immigrant, launch a campaign to protect the last strands of virgin forest in the Smoky Mountains by establishing it as a park. In Wyoming, John D. Rockefeller Jr. begins quietly buying up land in the Teton Mountain Range and valley in a secret plan to donate it to the government as a park.

“Great Nature” (Episode Five)
(1933-1945)
Logline:
In the midst of an economic catastrophe and then a world war, the national parks provide a source of much-needed jobs and then much-needed peace; the park idea changes to include new places and new ways of thinking; and in Wyoming, battle lines are drawn along the front of the Teton Range.

Long listing:
To battle unemployment in the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt creates the Civilian Conservation Corps, which spawns a “golden age” for the parks through major renovation projects. In a groundbreaking study, a young NPS biologist named George Melendez Wright discovers widespread abuses of animal habitats and pushes the service to reform its wildlife policies. Congress narrowly passes a bill to protect the Everglades in Florida as a national park — the first time a park has been created solely to preserve an ecosystem, as opposed to scenic beauty. As America becomes entrenched in World War II, Roosevelt is pressured to open the parks to mining, grazing and lumbering. The president also is subjected to a storm of criticism for expanding the Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming by accepting a gift of land secretly purchased by John D. Rockefeller Jr.          

“The Morning of Creation” (Episode Six)
(1946-1980)
Logline:
A stubborn iconoclast fights a lonely battle on behalf of a species nearly everyone hates; America’s “Last Frontier” becomes a testing ground for the future of the park idea; and in unprecedented numbers, American families create unforgettable memories, passing on a love of the parks to the next generation.

Long listing:
Following World War II, the parks are overwhelmed as visitation reaches 62 million people a year. A new billion-dollar campaign — Mission 66 — is created to build facilities and infrastructure that can accommodate the flood of visitors. A biologist named Alfred Murie introduces the revolutionary notion that predatory animals, which are still hunted, deserve the same protection as other wildlife. In Florida, Lancelot Jones, the grandson of a slave, refuses to sell to developers his family’s property on a string of unspoiled islands in Biscayne Bay and instead sells it to the federal government to be protected as a national monument. In the late 1970s, President Jimmy Carter creates an uproar in Alaska when he sets aside 56 million acres of land for preservation — the largest expansion of protected land in history. In 1995, wolves are re-established in Yellowstone, making the world’s first national park a little more like what it once was.

WSRE Hosts Special Screening of
“The National Parks Celebration Live From Central Park”

– Free Public Event Comes to WSRE’s Amos Performance Studio on September 23 –

WSRE invites the public to join us for The National Parks Celebration From Central Park on Wednesday, September 23 from 6:30-8:30 p.m. in the Jean & Paul Amos Performance Studio. Come enjoy a special, live event via satellite from New York City’s Central Park as part of a nationwide celebration of America’s national parks and the upcoming PBS film by Ken Burns, “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea.” Admission the event is free and tickets are not required, however seating is limited to the first 550 attendees. For more information visit wsre.org/NationalParks or call 850.484-1211.

The festivities will include special musical performances by Eric Benet, Gavin DeGraw, Jose Feliciano, Carole King, Alison Krauss and Union Station featuring Jerry Douglas, and Peter Yarrow. You’ll see exclusive clips from the film, which premieres nationally on PBS stations September 27, 7 p.m., and hear remarks from Ken Burns.

Attendees will also get an exclusive sneak peek at WSRE’s companion documentary about a jewel located right in our own backyard — “Gulf Islands National Seashore: The Treasure of the Gulf Coast,” which premieres Sunday, October 4, 7 p.m. Earle Bowden, known as the “Father of Gulf Islands,” due to his tireless efforts to preserve the area as a national seashore, will also speak. Local park rangers from Gulf Islands will share their passion for the history, culture and natural beauty of America’s largest national park that contains a seashore. Light refreshments will be served and door prizes will be given away.

“WSRE is very proud to partner with PBS on this special celebration of Ken Burns’ newest television event that explores the history, splendor and public passion for America’s national parks,” said Sandy Cesaretti Ray, WSRE General Manager. “WSRE is committed to continuing its grassroots investment in the community and connect people with the parks and nature that are important to the Gulf Coast.”