National Parks

OUR WONDERFUL NATIONAL PARKS. WHILE it may not seem possible today, there was a period in the early 1800s when many thinking people believed that much of the mighty stretch west of the Mississippi River was nothing but a vast "American desert." Jefferson, at the time he made the Louisiana Purchase, felt certain we would draw upon that huge territory very slowly, and it might be a full two hundred years before some parts of it admitted the first settlers.

Even before Arkansas was named, it had been decided that a part of this region would become the permanent home of the Indians. Fort Smith erected in 1817, marked what was then thought would long be our western frontier. In those days it may well have seemed that as a nation we were land-poor, and had more natural wonders and dazzling scenery than we would ever know what to do with.

Yet it was in this very same Arkansas area that our national park system had its beginning, and only fifteen years after Fort Smith was founded. Then in 1832, a group of warm springs with seemingly magical healing powers that gushed from the foot of a wooded hill in the Ouachita Mountains, together with four square miles of surrounding land, wen* set aside as the Hot Springs Reservation. It would be many years before the preserve was raised to park status, but here was the pattern for a program that became active almost a half century later.

USA National Parks

By then the United States extended to the Pacific Ocean and beyond. Great sections of what had once been judged worthless land were now being opened to settlement and other uses. Some of them, such as the great forest areas, were being stripped of their ageless beauty. Certain farsightcd men, however, began to realize that there were natural wonders, such as the Hot Springs, which could be misused under private ownership, or defaced, and their loveliness or other appeal lost forever, AH such should be set apart as reservations so that their unique qualities might be conserved, and kept for the benefit of all the people throughout all time.

When the Department of the Interior was organized in 1849, its purpose was to manage, conserve, and develop our natural resources. One of its chief interests was "to prevent waste." And so it was that when some of America's wonderlands seemed to be threatened, and might very well be laid waste, it was decided that especially deserving areas were to be set aside. But all such were to be unique. In some manner they must be singular, peculiar, and without like or equal.

National Parks Photos

Beautiful, excelent, terrific. Landscapes: mountains, waterfalls, lakes, ocean, rivers. Animals, plants etc. etc.

Starting in the early 1870, possible candidates began to come up for consideration, Yellowstone, with its unsurpassed geyser display, was one, Yosemite, with its glacier-carved valley and plumelike waterfalls, another. And, as the years crept by, there were other tracts, many with the most noble and inspiring scenery, such as the breath-taking group of mountains in northwestern Montana, or the immense, yawning, vivid canyon bulldozed through the high mesa country of Arizona by the restless Colorado River, These points of scenic splendor, together with others having some outstanding or unusual quality, deserved to be properly guarded and administered, since they are supreme examples of the splendor and grandeur of our country.

Nature Park. There was a tendency at first to lock them away. But even though museum pieces require safekeeping, they still merit being seen by the greatest possible number. And our excellent National Park Service, established in 1916, is doing its best today to encourage all Americans to visit, enjoy, and profit by the marvels which it administers in the public interest. Its duty and purpose is to "conserve the scenery, and the natural and historic objects, and the wildlife" in the areas within the system, "and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations." One other of its tasks is to determine that all new areas brought to park status are worthy, and are indeed supreme examples of their kind.

They must be of a quality with Mount ftanwr, which has the finest single-peak glacier system in the world. Or with Crater Lake, one of the deepest, bluest, and most handsome of all bodies of water. All candidates must be of a kind with Mount McKinlcy, loftiest peak above its base the world around, or Hawaii, with its largest living volcano, or Sequoia, in which grow the big trees, earth's oldest growing things. Thus they are superb specimens even the very newest among them, that rare and remarkable tropical jewel in the Virgin Islands, just made .the twenty-ninth member of this select company.

And because they are such carefully chosen wonderlands, they now draw close to 50,000,000 visitors each year. So may the brief visits to each of them made in following pages encourage countless others to join this mighty throng. They are presented in this book in the order in which they were established as parks.