This brief excerpt from my draft book describes an incident I experienced at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. It introduces the chapter titled, “National Parks and Black Americans: Legacy of Exclusion.”
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Many of America’s national parks are located in urban areas. Among those “town jewels” is the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Although its name can be confusing (some out-of-towners ask where the department stores are), the National Mall not only is a separate unit in the National Park System, it’s home to several well-known monuments that comprise its memorial core. The Lincoln Memorial is one of those monuments.
I visited the Lincoln Memorial often when I worked for the National Park Service in Washington. People reach it by climbing a broad stairway that affords a panoramic view of the Mall. But although millions visit each year, only a few notice an inscription carved into a step about halfway up:
I HAVE A DREAM
MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
THE MARCH ON WASHINGTON
FOR JOBS AND FREEDOM
AUGUST 28, 1963
Before the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial was dedicated in 2011, this modest marker was the only recognition on the National Mall of Dr. King’s momentous speech delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Yet despite its significance, most visitors walk right by or over the words, unaware that they are treading on the site of a singular event in the march toward American civil rights. I once conducted an informal experiment, standing by the inscription and pointing my camera down at it to see if this would attract curiosity seekers; but even that failed to draw any visitors.
One Saturday morning as I stood at the top of the memorial’s stairway, I noticed two women approaching the MLK engraving. One was White and the other Black. The Black woman appeared to be blind, but with the aid of her companion she knelt down and traced her fingers over the engraved words. As with my informal experiment, no other visitors seemed to notice what appeared to me to be a very meaningful connection. After a moment, the two ladies rose, exchanged a few words, then walked away.
In the years since, I’ve wondered about those two women and their stories. Where were they from? Why did they visit? Had either of them been part of the massive crowd on the National Mall on that historic day in 1963? Was I imagining a connection that wasn’t there, or was it deeper than I could possibly understand?
The Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial, dedicated in Washington, D.C. in 2011.
I’ll never know the answers to those questions, but they raise fundamental issues about the relationship between national parks and peoples of color. The centuries-long trauma of American slavery eventually led to the “I have a dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial and the blind woman’s encounter with the King inscription. By physically touching those words was she connecting with an experience that few White persons can fully comprehend? If so, what does that say about how African Americans and White Americans identify with national parks?
More importantly, does it provide clues about how to reverse a long legacy of exclusion of Black Americans from the national park idea?
Metaphor in Nature Poetry
James Gramann
1 Jun, 2022
Writers of all types, but especially poets, love metaphor and use it often. In nature poetry, metaphor takes two forms. A poem’s internal metaphors uncover hidden similarities or differences between two objects. Such comparisons amplify an everyday object by presenting it from a different, sometimes startling, perspective. In addition, metaphors often elevate a poem’s language and create vivid imagery. Consider the metaphorical way William Butler Yeats describes a starry sky in this poem and then contrasts the metaphor with itself.
He Wishes for the Cloths of HeavenHad I the heavens' embroidered cloths,Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half light, I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
The distinction between the unreachable “cloth” of the night sky and the fragile and too reachable cloth of a lover’s dreams magnifies the gulf between what is wished for and what is real. In so doing, it gives the poem its emotional impact. Such is the power of metaphor.
But sometimes an entire poem is a metaphor. In this case, the condition or concept represented isn’t always apparent; instead, the reader must discover it. No doubt some people read a metaphorical poem without ever uncovering its deeper meaning or, as one poet put it, without penetrating to the second or third thought. But making that deep dive into discovery is one of the pleasures that comes from engaging with metaphorical poetry. Here is a nature poem by A. A. Milne from his children’s book, When We Were Very Young. It’s a simple but charming example of the poem as metaphor.
DaffodowndillyShe wore her yellow sun-bonnet, She wore her greenest gown; She turned to the south wind And curtsied up and down. She turned to the sunlight And shook her yellow head, And whispered to her neighbor: "Winter is dead."
In Milne’s creative hand, this poem delights by transforming a familiar garden flower into a woman dressed gaily in bonnet and gown as she welcomes the warm wind and sunshine of spring. Will the child who reads it ever view a daffodil the same way again?
My sonnet, First Snow, is chock-full of internal metaphors, but it, too, is one big metaphor. What does it mean to you?
First SnowYou drift in shredded remnants of a cloud, brush away the cloak of shattered eggshell, stinging pillowfulls of feathers, death knell of a swan, melt against your tongue. A shroudof ashen petals, wasted from the once-proud summer, swirls about you in a carousel of afterlife, a shimmering farewell to youthful flowers of red and gold. Unbowed by winter's storm, you meet the simple severance of its touch and, turning quietly inside yourself, accept the blizzard's promise, knowing all the flakes to come will fall in reverence for your season--Bound for earth, they guide you home. You rise and follow where it's snowing. James Gramann, Fugue, Fall 2000
Harbors of Darkness
James Gramann
25 Apr, 2022
International Dark Sky Week is observed each year in April. As a professor of park and conservation policy at Texas A&M University, I gave presentations on “natural lightscapes” in my undergraduate course. The National Park Service defines a natural lightscape as the resources and values that exist in the absence of human-caused light at night, such as starlight and moonlight, lunar eclipses, meteor showers, displays of the northern and southern lights, and bioluminescence. But night skies are not the only harbors of darkness. Caves also provide natural lightscapes. Countless visitors have experienced total darkness during cave tours when a guide switches off the artificial lighting.
Led by the International Dark Sky Association, actions to protect natural lightscapes are expanding worldwide. A growing number of parks and communities stage night-sky events to promote public awareness and protection of natural lightscapes, and astronomy programs are among the most popular interpretive offerings at many national parks. As harbors of darkness, those parks offer superlative views of pristine lightscapes that possess both scientific and cultural value. But perhaps their greatest impact comes from revealing what we have lost when light pollution turns the urban night sky into a featureless yellow. This brief excerpt from my draft book describes my personal encounter with a harbor of darkness. It comes from the chapter titled, “Keeping the Gates.”
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In the summer of 1972, I was a twenty-two year old seasonal concession employee at the Old Faithful Campers Cabins in Yellowstone National Park. It was my turn to “open up,” which meant leaving my cabin well before dawn to prepare the dining room for the frantic breakfast rush. Yellowstone had little night lighting, even in developed areas, so I carefully made my way through the predawn darkness toward the dim shape of the lodge.
I worried about grizzly bears.
One night a few weeks earlier, a young man camping illegally had been killed and another seriously mauled by a grizzly just across the Firehole River, not a mile from where I walked. In the immediate aftermath, trails in the Old Faithful area were closed, rangers armed with rifles hunted the bear, helicopters hovered overhead.
But on this night, as I glanced up at the dark sky, my concern about earth-bound grizzlies vanished. Just above the horizon, otherworldly in its brilliance and pinned at a weirdly skewed angle, blazed the constellation Ursa Major—the Big Dipper, the Great Bear. I was transfixed. Having grown up in the incandescent glow of a Seattle suburb, I recognized a few familiar constellations; but the night sky a few miles north of a city is a pale shade of the darkness that cloaks Yellowstone.
The brilliance of that constellation and its unfamiliar position in the predawn hours disoriented me. I felt out of balance and, at the risk of seeming melodramatic, uncertain of my place in the firmament.
Ursa Major, the Great Bear, over Old Faithful Geyser (Astrophotography blog)
On returning home that fall, I tried to compose a short story about my experience but gave up. My immature skills as a writer were no match for the power of that encounter with the Great Bear in Yellowstone’s starry night sky.
A Conservation Trifecta: Promise & Problems
James Gramann
22 Apr, 2022
April is an especially significant month for America’s national parks. This is because it marks a trifecta of observances, each designed to educate the public about environmental issues. Two of the events focus specifically on national parks. One of those promotes awareness and support for their conservation mission. Another seeks to inspire the next generation of national park stewards and supporters. In this post, I’ll review the promise and history of April’s conservation trifecta, as well as some of its problems.
Earth Day
April 22 is Earth Day, a call for collective action on behalf of the environment. Planned as a grass-roots movement in 1970 by Senator Gaylord Nelson and Denis Hayes, a Harvard University student, Earth Day initially was conceived as a series of campus teach-ins about pressing environmental problems. But it had to compete with other campus causes of the period, including the Vietnam War and civil rights. So the vision shifted from teach-ins on college campuses to organizing grass-roots community events that encouraged people to take action to solve environmental problems.
Earth Day’s name was proposed by a Madison Avenue marketer named Julien Koenig who had created Volkswagen’s successful “Think Small” advertising campaign. Early on, organizers had realized that the teach-in model popular in the 1960s was not striking a sympathetic chord with the larger public. So Koenig volunteered to develop several mock-up ads for the event that included names like Ecology Day and Environment Day. But his favorite was Earth Day. Hayes, the Harvard student, agreed, and the rest is history.
This January 18, 1970 ad in the New York Times announced the first Earth Day. It represents the first public use of the name chosen for the new movement.
An early idea was to hold Earth Day every ten years. But fueled by a full-page ad in the New York Times, the movement proved so popular in its first year it quickly became an annual observance. In 1990 it went global with Earth Day events in 141 countries. The attention-grabbing issues that inspired the first Earth Day included water and air pollution, the widespread use of harmful pesticides such as DDT, an expanding ozone hole in the upper atmosphere, unconstrained population growth, nuclear power safety, and urban decay.
Another issue attracting attention was the need to protect untrammeled nature in national parks and similar preserves. Even then, national parks were seen as being “loved to death” by crowds, a situation that persists as visitation rates to the most popular parks have increased.
But despite the national issues, Earth Day has always been about the grass roots. Each community is encouraged to identify environmental problems in its area that can be improved through local action. In my town, a regional land trust suggests planting milkweed for monarch butterflies, volunteering for clean-ups and environmental restoration activities at its preserves, bringing a friend to visit a preserve, or contributing money to support land trust activities.
Measuring a movement’s influence on national policy is tricky, but it’s fair to state that Earth Day gave a grass-roots voice to a growing concern that the planet needed help, and this provided political cover to Congress and presidents to do something about it.
The years after the first Earth Day witnessed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the Environmental Protection Agency. Concerted international action repaired the ozone hole, saving the planet from slow death by ultraviolet radiation. Air and water in the U.S. became demonstrably cleaner than a few decades earlier. Species on the brink of extinction, including bald eagles, American alligators, and humpback whales, were brought back. Solar power, an energy source which emits no greenhouse gases, is now on track to become one of the country’s dominant sources of electricity. Popular national parks are turning increasingly to rationed-use systems, such as reservations, to reduce overcrowding and improve visitor experiences.
In 2022, President Joe Biden signed an executive order on Earth Day to protect the old growth forests that play a disproportionately large role in carbon capture, crucial for reducing the impacts of climate change. So the political influence of Earth Day continues to percolate up to higher levels of policy-setting. In fact, the observance often serves as an annual benchmark for governments and citizens to mark progress, assess actions, and commit to a better world for all living things.
National Park Week
Despite occasional political pressures to downplay environmental issues in its programming, the National Park Service boasts a strong record of environmental education dating back to the earliest days of the national parks. One of its more recent programs is National Park Week. In 2022, the “week” ran from April 16th to 24th, making it nine days long. The first National Park Week was observed in 1991, the year the National Park Service celebrated its 75th anniversary. As part of that observance, on August 21st President George H. W. Bush proclaimed the week to recognize the “inestimable value of our national parks.”
Since August 25th is Founders Day–the date in 1916 when President Woodrow Wilson signed the legislation creating the National Park Service–the original scheduling of National Park Week to include Founders Day made sense. Even so, for the next two years, there were no observances. But in 1994, President William Clinton resurrected the week as an annual event, shifting the celebration from August to the third week in April. This meant National Park Week would incorporate Earth Day on April 22, thus reinforcing the importance of the agency’s environmental conservation and education missions.
sPark Connections is the theme for the 2022 National Park Week.
Each National Park Week has a theme. In 2022, it was “sPark Connections.” In addition, every day within the week has its own sub-theme around which activities and programs can be organized. Daily themes in 2022 included programs on the National Park Service’s national and international work in environmental conservation and historic preservation, the innovative application of technology to those activities, and the relationship between human and environmental health.
However, except for the symbolic value of including Earth Day in National Park Week, the current scheduling is less than ideal. Some of the best known and popular national parks can’t offer in-person activities during the week. Because it’s in April, high-elevation parks such as Yellowstone, Glacier, Mount Rainier, Rocky Mountain, and the Alaskan parks are still covered in snow or just beginning to clear road access. Also, much of the front-line staff at those parks is seasonal and isn’t yet onboard. To make up for those difficulties, podcasts keyed to each day’s theme are available on the Internet. Although the podcasts are well-done, the essence of a national park experience has always been first-hand exposure in situ to the topics and resources being interpreted.
A National Park Week scheduled around Founders Day in August would more fully achieve its potential to introduce visitors to the national parks and to their value as laboratories for environmental research, education, and conservation.
Even in April, there is one National Park Week activity that many parks offer. A widely advertised feature of the first day of National Park Week is a waiver of park entrance fees. Because the week begins on Saturday, the fee waiver has the potential to attract many visitors to parks who otherwise might not go. Some might even choose to visit a new park. But most of the 424 units in the national park system don’t charge an entrance fee, and an additional number only charge during peak season when it makes financial sense to do so. So entrance to those parks is free anyway. Even so, free entry remains an established part of each year’s kickoff to National Park Week.
Having National Park Week designated by presidential proclamation certainly highlights the parks’ importance. But the observance remains a work in progress. If one purpose of the week is to use onsite programs to demonstrate the value of parks as environmental laboratories, then the current dates are not optimal and should be shifted to a time when more parks are accessible. If the purpose also includes attracting visitors to educate them about their potential as environmental stewards and good citizens of the Earth, that’s something most national parks do every day. But a third purpose could be to offer opportunities to actively engage in environmentally helpful activities, such as clean-ups, perhaps in partnership with nearby communities or national forests. It will be interesting to see how National Park Week evolves in future years. As it now stands, the week essentially consists of three activities: the entry fee waiver on the first Saturday, Earth Day, and this third observance. . . .
National Junior Ranger Day
National park interpretive programs for youngsters have existed since the 1930s, but National Junior Ranger Day is a relatively new creation, announced by First Lady Laura Bush during an event in Zion National Park in 2007. Although national parks had offered junior ranger activities for a number of years, the effort was uneven. But on the heels of the adoption of national standards in 2005, Laura Bush announced a revitalized program. She also agreed to serve as national chair. This was fitting because the First Lady had been a huge fan of the national parks for years and was one of their strong supporters during her husband’s presidential administration.
Junior Ranger Program at Gateway Arch National Park.
A typical Junior Ranger Program consists of a workbook that’s usually free and contains park-specific learning activities that kids can complete during their visit. Those may involve playing a game about fossil formation, drawing a picture to describe a birdsong, or completing a wildlife scavenger hunt. Most booklets rate activities by difficulty, so children can participate in those appropriate for their age.
A completed booklet is presented to an adult ranger, who checks it and makes the child an official junior ranger during a ceremonial oath-taking. The child also receives a coveted wooden badge (replacing the earlier plastic badges which were discontinued as not being Earth-friendly). It’s not unusual in a park to see kids wearing vests covered with the badges they’ve collected. Some parks make the swearing-in ceremony a low-key event, but others announce it on their visitor center’s public address system. If asked, many rangers will tell you that one of the favorite parts of their job is administering the junior ranger oath to children.
Today, almost all units in the national park system offer a Junior Ranger Program. The program can also be completed by mail. Targeted age groups range from around four to about 13. But many parks now have a Senior Ranger Program as well. One adult I’m aware of has completed over 100 of those. He says he likes them because they make him slow down and learn more about the park than he would during a quick windshield tour.
Because it’s so strongly associated with the national parks, people might be surprised to learn that the National Park Service modeled the current version of its junior rangers on a U.S. Forest Service program. Several state parks offer similar programs. So junior rangers as a way to educate and inspire the next generation of stewards and supporters continues to grow in popularity and promise for the future.
Concluding Thoughts about the Conservation Trifecta
Earth Day, National Park Week, and National Junior Ranger Day have immense potential to inspire dialogue and action about our environment and ways to exist harmoniously with it. Even without the complications of climate change, some argue that this is too big an issue, that human nature is too entrenched, to find a workable solution to the conflict between short-term economic efficiency and long-term environmental sustainability. So the value of the Conservation Trifecta is that it shows that others believe differently. Moreover, it gives those people an opportunity to express their beliefs and their solidarity. Presidents announce new actions. Seasoned naturalists, ordinary citizens, and young stewards of the future come together to learn more about their environment and how to make their spot on the planet healthier.
It’s true that many of today’s environmental issues are huge and can’t be addressed by a single group or community alone. But participation in a grass-roots event provides one way to join a community of people, each doing their part to achieve small successes. Those small victories can lead to bigger successes, and those may lead to a more healthy partnership with the wild.
Harbors of Natural Quiet
James Gramann
11 Apr, 2022
One of the values that national parks seek to protect is the natural soundscape, also called natural quiet. Despite its name, natural quiet doesn’t mean the absence of sound, but of human-caused sound, such as mechanical noise. Natural soundscapes can be filled with the calls of birds and wildlife, insects chirping, rippling rivers and streams, wind whooshing through trees, roaring waterfalls, and crashing surf. At other times, soundscapes can be so still that their silence is engulfing. Those who have experienced the stunning absence of even natural ambient sound never forget it.
Protecting natural quiet is important in wilderness and in places imbued with strong commemorative values, such as cemeteries and memorials to the fallen. These are the types of areas where the National Park Service works to conserve natural soundscapes.
Much of the Chisos Mountains in Big Bend National Park is a harbor of natural quiet.
The Chisos Mountains are the southernmost mountain range in the United States and the only one fully contained in a national park. Sculpted by volcanism and erosion, their peaks formed over millions of years into fantastic contours. The best known of these is The Window, a notched cleft at the edge of the range opening to an expansive view of the Chihuahuan Desert hundreds of feet below.
Although the Chisos Basin is a bustling center of visitor activity and services, in the evening or early morning hours it too can become a harbor of natural quiet. Below are two of my soundscape poems inspired by natural quiet in the Chisos Mountains. Silence is a sonnet. The second poem, Chisos Mountains: The Big Bend, is composed in a verseform called a villanelle. I’ve written several villanelles, but this is the only one that describes a specific national park.
Sonnets are metered fourteen-line poems that include a “volta,” or turn of thought. In an Italian sonnet, such as the one here, the volta usually appears in the ninth line: May it shield us . . .
A villanelle is more complicated. Its nineteen lines are based on two repeated refrains and two rhyming sounds. The refrains are stated in the opening stanza as the poem’s first and third lines. They then alternate as the closing line in each of the following three-line stanzas (tercets). In the poem’s concluding four-line stanza, they combine as the final two lines. Dylan Thomas’s Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night is a villanelle.
Villanelles are hard to write. They take me weeks or months to compose. It’s helpful to start with the final two refrains in the last stanza and then work up through the preceding tercets to the poem’s beginning.
In fact, the effort that it takes to compose a villanelle, a sonnet, or any other metered verseform, is why Robert Frost once famously stated that writing free (or unmetered) verse is like playing tennis without a net.
Silence was inspired by my experience of the total absence of detectable sound in Big Bend and in a few other areas as well. It’s odd that something that is nothing can create such an overwhelming impression.
The inspiration for Chisos Mountains came early one morning while I walked from my Civilian Conservation Corps-built duplex to Big Bend’s lodge building. I was struck not only by the quiet of the basin in that dawn hour but by how the rays of the rising sun gradually bathed a prominent rock formation called Casa Grande with splinterings of light.
Silence
Beyond The Window feel the silence soar,
entreating us to quit
the din within these four
reverberating walls, to join in respite
from the dissonant disharmony. It implores
us. From the vast, insistent
landscape, silence pours.
May it shield us from the toll of violent
clamor, dissolve us in the liquid-quiet
dawn, enrapture us before
a stunning dearth of noise. Touch the silent
revel of the earth, this riot
of tranquility, this perfect roar.
James Gramann, RE:AL, The Journal of the Liberal Arts, Spring 1999
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Chisos Mountains: The Big Bend
To the peaks of savage land, the voice of quiet
rises. Soft and lingering as aftertaste, it
calls us from the mountaintops. We hear the riot
lightly, unfolding with the soundless sunrise, high yet
near to us. Ascending from where night embraced it
to the peaks of savage land, the voice of quiet
wakens on splinterings of light, bit by bit
elevating day. Innocent and chaste, it
calls us from the mountaintops. We hear the riot
in the calm, the virgin swirl, the slurry sigh. It
dares us to aspire, to go where dawn has laced it
to the peaks of savage land. The voice of quiet
nourishes with morning-song, returns exquisite
harmony to ears that dissonance disgraced. It
calls us from the mountaintops, we hear the riot
deeply. Listen, and you'll understand it--why it
penetrates us, why it pulls us, why we raced it
to the peaks of savage land. The voice of quiet
calls us. From the mountaintops, we hear the riot.
James Gramann, The Road Not Taken: a Journal of Formal Poetry, Spring 2009
Yellowstone's 150th Birthday
James Gramann
1 Mar, 2022
Yellowstone National Park turned 150 years old on March 1, 2022. It is the oldest national park in the U.S., born in 1872 when President Ulysses Grant signed the bill creating it. But how did this legislation come to be, and who played key roles in its success?
In the 19th century, during the great government surveys of the West, artist-explorers were regular participants. So, in 1871, when geologist Ferdinand Hayden led the first scientific expedition into the largely unknown Yellowstone region, his party included artist Thomas Moran and photographer William Henry Jackson. No nineteenth century painters or photographers are more associated with America’s first national park than Moran and Jackson.
Thomas Moran and Liberty Cap, Mammoth Hot Springs (William Henry Jackson photo)
During the five weeks that Hayden’s party spent in the future park, the two men worked together to verify the wonders of Yellowstone to a skeptical nation. Moran advised Jackson on viewpoints and posed in some of Jackson’s photos to create a sense of scale. In turn, Jackson lent Moran some of his images for use as he painted. Moran was the consummate “colorist,” one who has never been matched in portraying Yellowstone’s vibrancy. Jackson’s photographs linked art with science through a medium assumed to provide an objective record of Yellowstone’s landscape.
Moran and Jackson were not the only artists on the 1871 survey. Photographer Joshua Crissman of Bozeman, Montana, was a guest, but he lost his camera when it blew over a cliff at the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. Jackson lent him a spare stereo camera. Crissman’s stereo images received only limited distribution in northwest Montana but were the first photographs of Yellowstone seen by the public, a largely forgotten fact.
A third photographer, talented Chicagoan J. T. Hind, was part of a small Army detachment, the Barlow-Heap survey, that coordinated closely with Hayden. But before he could make prints, Hind’s negatives were destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.
Finally, Henry W. Elliott, a topographical draftsman who had been part of one of Hayden’s earlier surveys and who contributed drawings to Hayden’s technical reports to Congress, rounded out the Yellowstone expedition’s artists.
A bill to preserve Yellowstone as a public tourist attraction was being pushed by Jay Cook, the financier of the Northern Pacific Railroad. The railroad planned a line that would run just north of the park. Cook urged geologist Hayden to recommend that “Congress pass a bill reserving the Great Geyser Basin as a public park forever.” Cook also was responsible for Thomas Moran’s participation in the Hayden survey. He realized how important visual imagery would be in promoting Yellowstone’s “wonderland” to potential visitors (and Northern Pacific customers), and he greatly admired Moran’s work.
In 1872, a few months after returning to Washington, Hayden began lobbying for a national park. He knew that no congressman had ever seen an American geyser. Because of this, he needed images to document their existence.
Castle Geyser by Thomas Moran, 1872 (watercolor, Gilcrease Museum)
Moran had painted several exquisite watercolors of Yellowstone scenery, including one of Castle Geyser, which he presented to Hayden. A newspaper clipping in the artist’s scrapbook reports that Hayden showed those works to several “leading men” in Washington, including congressmen and the president, and that “all were extremely interested.” According to another news article, key members of Congress “found Moran’s color schemes . . . of great help in clarifying some of the learning in which the scientific members had clothed their findings.”
Hayden also displayed Jackson’s photos at the U.S. Capitol (in some accounts, at the Smithsonian Institution) along with other Yellowstone specimens. Jackson’s son later wrote that an attractively bound portfolio of his father’s photographs was placed on the desk of every member of Congress before the vote. While consistent with Hayden’s lobbying approach, this claim, coming 75 years after the fact, has not been verified. Jackson himself later wrote that he felt Moran’s evocative watercolors did more to persuade Congress than his own black and white photographs.
As time passed and Yellowstone gained in popularity, several other people claimed credit for its creation, including Nathaniel Langford, who had explored Yellowstone a year before Hayden and lectured about it in Washington, D. C., some members of Congress, and General Philip Sheridan, who authorized the Barlow-Heap military survey that coordinated with Hayden’s 1871 expedition.
But in 1872, in no small part due to Hayden’s lobbying and the works of Moran and Jackson, the Yellowstone legislation passed. It was noncontroversial in the Senate, and in the House it carried on a party-line vote, 115 to 65 with 60 abstentions. President Grant signed the bill on March 1.
So, if you photograph or paint a national park and post your work on social media, realize that you are following a track through time that dates back to the very birth of America’s national parks.
