Episode Descriptions 10/9/08 Page 2
THE NATIONAL PARKS: AMERICA’S BEST IDEA
Episode descriptions 10/9/08
The National Parks: America’s Best Idea – a six-episode Ken Burns film – tells an epic story spanning a century and a half of our nation’s history and ranging from one corner of the country to the other: from the southernmost tip of Florida to the frozen tundra of Alaska, from the rocky coast of Maine to the volcanic Hawaiian islands. It is the story of an idea as uniquely American as the Declaration of Independence and just as radical: that the most magnificent places we possess belong not to royalty or the rich, but to everyone – and for all time. Set against the most spectacular landscapes on earth, it chronicles that idea from its first expression in the mid-1800s through the late 1990s.
Like the idea of America itself -- full of competing demands between local rights and those of the nation; between the impulses of idealism and exploitation, the sacred and the profitable; between the immediate desires of one generation and its obligation and promise to the next – the national park idea has been constantly debated, constantly tested and is constantly evolving, ultimately embracing places that also preserve the nation's first principles, its highest aspirations, its greatest sacrifices – even reminders of its most shameful mistakes.
Most of all, the story of the national parks is the story of people: people from every conceivable background – rich and poor; famous and unknown; soldiers and scientists; natives and newcomers; idealists, artists and entrepeneurs. 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.
EPISODE ONE
The Scripture of Nature
(1851 – 1890)
Beginning with a montage of breathtaking scenery that sets the stage for the human drama of the entire series, this first episode establishes the national parks as both a “treasure house of Nature’s superlatives” and a quintessentially democratic idea, that “magnificence is a common treasure.”
The narrative begins in 1851, when a band of Indian fighters enters Yosemite Valley in California to dispossess the natives who call it home. They encounter a place of astonishing beauty – setting in motion events that bring other newcomers to the valley. One of the first, James Mason Hutchings, a failed prospector, hopes to make a fortune publicizing Yosemite’s scenery and running a tourist hotel in the valley.
In 1864, in the midst of the Civil War, Congress sets the valley and a grove of giant sequoias aside from private development, but entrusts them to the care of the state of California – the first time such a huge tract of land (more than 60 square miles) had been preserved for future generations. Frederick Law Olmsted, creator of a man-made park in New York City, becomes one of the first state commissioners of the Yosemite Grant and lays out a manifesto declaring public parks a “duty” of healthy democracies, warning against any impairment of the valley’s scenic beauty, and calling on the state to not only develop roads into Yosemite but to enforce regulations for its protection. His report is quietly suppressed.
Among those ignoring Olmsted’s call for careful preservation of the valley is Hutchings, technically a squatter on what is now public land, who continues expanding his tourists operations. Then, in the fall of 1869, he hires a Scottish-born wanderer named John Muir, who will become the park idea’s most eloquent spokesman. Muir – part scientist, part mystic – develops theories (derided at the time, now accepted) about the work of glaciers in creating Yosemite Valley; and yet he also calls it a “sanctum sanctorum” where God reveals himself through nature. Through his writings, he begins urging Americans to see that “wildness is a necessity” and to appreciate places like Yosemite for reasons other than their economic value.
Meanwhile, in the northwest corner of Wyoming Territory, reports emerge of a fantastical place at the headwaters of the Yellowstone River, where mud boils and steam spouts from the ground. An exploration, prompted in part by a railroad hoping to lure passengers to such an attraction, confirms the rumors – though one member, the near-sighted Truman Everts, becomes hopelessly lost and nearly perishes. When a government survey brings back the first paintings and photographs of this “wonderland,” and in 1872, after politicians are persuaded that it is unsuited for farming and mining, Congress creates the first national park in world history, Yellowstone, but does nothing to provide for its protection.
In 1877, George and Emma Cowan, a young couple celebrating their second anniversary, find out just how wild and lawless the new park can be, when they are caught in the midst of an Indian war within Yellowstone’s boundaries. Later, the railroad moves in to monopolize the choicest locations, but a crusading sportsman named George Bird Grinnell fights to keep the “people’s park” out of commercial hands. And in 1886, with Yellowstone increasingly vulnerable to poachers, vandals, and profiteers, General Phil Sheridan intervenes: the U.S. Cavalry rides to the park’s rescue.
By now John Muir, the mountain prophet, has become a famous voice for nature, but after marrying and settling down as a fruit farmer, he becomes restless. He visits Alaska and its glaciers, climbs Mount Rainier, then returns to his beloved Yosemite, where he realizes California has not been adequately protecting his “sacred temple.” And the mountain ramparts in the Sierras above it are being destroyed by sheep and lumbermen. He begins a struggle to have it all preserved as a national park. His campaign is partially successful: the high country portion becomes Yosemite National Park in 1890, but the valley and big trees are kept under the lackluster supervision of the state.
EPISODE TWO:
The Last Refuge
(1890 – 1915)
As the 19th century concludes, some Americans begin to question the nation’s headlong rush across the continent that has devastated forests, ravaged entire species of animals, and left fewer and fewer pristine places intact. Theodore Roosevelt, a young New York politician, hurries west to shoot a buffalo before they disappear. Rudyard Kipling, a cynical travel writer, visits Yellowstone in the company of wealthy tourists who think nothing of etching their names into Old Faithful. And the Army (including the African-American “Buffalo Soldiers”) tries to protect the parks, but is hobbled by the lack of clear legal authority to punish wrongdoers.
In 1889, the Wetherill brothers, cowboys in southwestern Colorado, stumble across the ruins of an ancient civilization in the cliffs of Mesa Verde. When they and a Swedish nobleman named Gustaf Nordenskiold excavate the ruins and prepare to ship the artifacts to Scandinavia, an uproar ensues, but there is no law to prevent it. A headstrong lecturer named Virginia McClurg galvanizes Colorado women’s clubs to preserve Mesa Verde’s ruins as a national park, while Richard Wetherill’s excavations at New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon prompt Congress to pass the Antiquities Act, giving Presidents the unique power to unilaterally set aside parcels of federal land as National Monuments – a tool that will prove one of the most important levers in the national parks story.
In response to the widespread destruction of America’s natural bounty, new organizations are being formed. John Muir founds the Sierra Club. George Bird Grinnell starts the Audubon Society and, with Theodore Roosevelt, creates the Boone and Crockett Club, a group of wealthy easterners with an interest in big game hunting, whose political clout Grinnell and Roosevelt use on behalf of conservation. They turn the case of a poacher in Yellowstone, who was killing some of the last remaining bison on the continent, into a cause celebré that at last results in legislation more fully protecting the wildlife and scenic attractions there.
John Muir and the nation’s first professional forester, Gifford Pinchot, split over how best to stop the wasteful destruction of forests. Muir wants them made into parks; Pinchot believes in more scientific methods of logging – and Pinchot prevails, with the creation of the National Forest Service. But Muir is able to turn at least one national forest preserve into a park: Mount Rainier in Washington State. A Kansas boy named William Gladstone Steel, drawn to Oregon by a story in the newspaper wrapped around his lunch, comes to Crater Lake and launches a 17-year crusade to save it as a national park. And an arch-conservative Republican Congressman from Iowa, John F. Lacey, becomes the unlikely champion of a series of progressive conservation laws.
But conservation’s greatest champion is the new president, Theodore Roosevelt. In 1903 he embarks on an ambitious tour of the West, which includes two weeks camping in Yellowstone. He delights in the park’s wildlife, now flourishing because of the new protections (though he has to be persuaded against hunting cougars), and upon his departure he declares the “essential democracy” of the park idea. During a brief stop at the Grand Canyon, he admonishes the people of Arizona to “leave it as it is.” Next he spends three days in Yosemite camping alone with John Muir, who inspires Roosevelt to reclaim Yosemite Valley from the state of California and provide it with better protection as a national park. Several years later, a letter from Muir prompts the president to use the Antiquities Act to save Arizona’s Petrified Forest as a national monument. And then – over the protests of Congress and local politicians -- Roosevelt stretches the Act to its limit, with a stroke of his pen setting aside 800,000 acres of the Grand Canyon as a national monument.
The episode ends with the dramatic story of the fight over whether San Francisco, eager for a better water supply, can build a dam in the Hetch Hetchy Valley of Yosemite National Park. To Muir, flooding the valley would be a sacrilege; to Pinchot, now a close adviser of President Roosevelt’s, it would be the “greatest good for the greatest number.” A lengthy and heated controversy results, but in the end Pinchot prevails again: Roosevelt does nothing to stop him, and plans move forward to bury Muir’s “mountain temple” under a water reservoir. Broken-hearted and exhausted from the battle, the 76-year-old Muir dies.
EPISODE THREE:
The Empire of Grandeur
(1915 – 1919)
As the park idea turns 50 years old, America boasts a dozen national parks, usually set aside at the urging of individuals willing to turn their passion for a particular landscape into a crusade. But the parks are really just a haphazard collection of special places under the supervision of three different federal departments. The defeat at Hetch Hetchy has persuaded conservationists that a new agency is needed, one with the sole responsibility of protecting the national parks. With the death of John Muir, a new generation of park proponents will step forward: an unlikely alliance that includes railroad barons, adventurers, and some of the nation’s wealthiest men.
In central Colorado, an innkeeper and Muir acolyte named Enos Mills works to have the Long’s Peak region preserved as Rocky Mountain National Park. In northern Montana, the Great Northern Railway is firmly in charge of the newly created Glacier National Park, encouraging upper class Easterners to “See America First” instead of visiting Europe. And in the territory of Hawaii, a coalition of scientists and boosters finally convinces Congress to set aside some dormant and active volcanoes as a national park – though no money is appropriated to run it on the belief, one Senator explains, that “it should not cost anything to run a volcano.”
On the coast of Maine, where the choicest sites along the Atlantic are steadily being purchased by “cottagers” building elaborate estates, the idealistic Charles Eliot draws up a plan to make more of Mount Desert Island accessible to the public – but dies at age 38. His father takes up the cause and recruits George Dorr, who quickly turns over his life to it, as well as much of his inheritance, buying parcels of land which their organization offers as a gift to the federal government. When President Wilson accepts the gift and uses the Antiquities Act to declare it a national monument, Dorr vows to keep working on enlarging it – and to having it become a national park.
Meanwhile, a millionaire businessman named Stephen Mather impulsively accepts the offer to oversee the national parks for one year. Mather, a promotional genius responsible for Twenty Mule Team Borax, launches a crusade to publicize the parks as a system and to persuade Congress to create a single agency to oversee it. As his right-hand man he hires young Horace Albright, a lawyer as steady and methodical as Mather is mercurial. Mather goes on a tour of the parks, opens his wallet at every stop to buy parcels of land which he donates as park expansions, and takes his well-connected friends on a camping trip to Sequoia National Park, where he enlists them in his cause with his infectious enthusiasm.
Back in Washington, Mather’s publicity blitz reaches a crescendo in 1916 with the passage of a bill establishing the National Park Service, whose dual mission Albright admits is a “paradox” – to make the parks accessible to all Americans for their use and enjoyment, yet also preserve them “unimpaired” for future generations. At the moment of triumph, Mather is incapacitated by depression and requires hospitalization, a secret Albright has to keep while he fills in as acting director of the new agency.
Up in Alaska, a friend of Mather’s, Charles Sheldon, has become convinced that the area surrounding the continent’s highest peak, Mount McKinley, needs to become a national park – not just because of the majestic mountain that has lured and challenged climbers for years, but because of the diverse array of wildlife teeming around it, especially the rare Dall sheep, under siege by market hunters. Sheldon joins forces with the Boone and Crockett Club and Mount McKinley National Park (now Denali National Park) is set aside.