Isabel Bassett Wasson

Isabel Deming Bassett was born on January 11, 1897, in Brooklyn, New York to Representative Edward Murray Bassett and Annie Rebecca Bassett. As a child she visited quarries throughout New England with her father, collecting rocks and fossils. She earned a BA in History from Wellesley College in 1918. She studied geology at the University of Chicago that summer, in preparation of a return to Wellesley as a geology teaching assistant for the 1918-1919 academic year. While there she took a geology class at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Bassett returned to the University of Chicago in the summer of 1919, and decided to get a master's degree. She completed an MA in Geology at Columbia University in 1920.

Bassett’s connection to the National Park Service (NPS) began in the summer of 1919, when she and her parents travelled with the Brooklyn Daily Eagle party to Yellowstone and Glacier national parks. Yellowstone superintendent Horace M. Albright heard Bassett give a lecture on the park’s geologic features and returned the next night to hear her speak again. He later heard her lecture at Glacier National Park when her group travelled there. Bassett made a significant impression. Her lectures were cited in the 1919 NPS annual report, and Albright offered her a job for the 1920 summer season.

Although others have reported that Albright hired her on the spot, Wasson herself recalled in an oral history that it was several months later that he wrote to her to see if she would consider going back to Yellowstone in the summer of 1920 to help train the bellboys who were then acting as guides to the formations. Her personnel file shows that she got an appointment as a temporary park ranger—not a ranger-naturalist—on March 8, 1920, although she didn’t start until July 1st. Interestingly Albright doesn’t mention his bellboy plan. In recommending her appointment, he wrote:

Last summer she was in Yellowstone park as a tourist and lectured to the Brooklyn Eagle party on the physiographic features of the park, particularly the geysers and hot springs. I was amazed by her knowledge and surprised to find that she has a most remarkable faculty of explaining geologic phenomena in popular language. She is a splendid public speaker and has the ability to hold a large audience while discussing scientific problems. My idea is to have Miss Bassett act as a ranger in guiding people about the geyser formations while performing duties relating to the protection of these formations. In the evenings it is expected that she will lecture to the traveling public. She will also perform service in getting specimens for the museum of the park and in getting data for our information bulletins.

Albright made a real effort to recruit her. In addition to the $100/month salary (the same as male park rangers), he paid her travel in both directions between New York and the park. This was unusual as rangers had to pay their own way. He justified that expense because he expected her to lecture in the evenings and perform other duties such as writing and planning museum exhibits that “other members of the ranger force would not be required to do.”

She married Theron Wasson on June 11, 1920, and returned to Yellowstone as Isabel Bassett Wasson. Often referred to in later writings as a naturalist, her official title was park ranger. She was the first confirmed woman ranger hired at Yellowstone (but see Rangers, Not Rangerettes for possibility of a woman ranger at the park in 1918).

Isabel Bassett Wasson, ca. 1920s. (Courtesy of John Wasson)

Wasson explained her three-month job at Yellowstone to her old classmates, saying she “talked” instead of “range[d].” Her general duties included staffing the information desk in the mornings and giving lectures to visitors at different locations around the park in the afternoons. She developed a following of visitors and tried to make each lecture different. She also worked with park naturalist Milton Skinner to collect information on park animals, birds, and geological features.

After her first season, Albright offered her “more important work than last year” to return in 1921. He proposed that she would “take full charge of the guide station at Mammoth Hot Springs, as well as the information bureau.” Wasson was pregnant, however, and declined the offer. She asked to return for the summer of 1922, but Albright didn’t have money to hire her.

Wasson has been well known in NPS history because she is mentioned by name in the 1920 NPS annual report, noting that her lectures were “a valuable feature of the information service in Yellowstone” and that she gave three free half-hour talks each day. Because of this, many writers have referred to her as a naturalist instead of a park ranger, as if 1) all she did was give three 30-minute lectures a day, and 2) as if no male rangers ever guided visitors or gave talks. Wasson’s appointment, like those of other women in the early 1920s, was as a park ranger, not a ranger-naturalist.

After her time at Yellowstone, the Wassons moved to Oklahoma where both worked for the Pure Oil Company. Isabel Bassett Wasson became one of the world’s first woman petroleum engineers. The Wassons travelled to Venezuela and Puerto Rico for their work. In 1926 they moved to Forest River, Illinois. She quit her petroleum engineer job in 1928. While raising her three children, she taught science classes in Forest River public schools for 10 years.

Wasson guest lectured on geology, botany, and ornithology at Chicago area schools, and taught adult education classes at the Morton Arboretum, the Field Museum, and the Chicago Academy of Sciences. She wrote numerous scholarly articles on the geology, ecology, and archaeology of the Chicagoland region. She also became a well-respected amateur archaeologist, discovering a previously unknown effigy mound.

Isabel Bassett Wasson died at the age of 97 on February 21, 1994, in La Grange Park, Illinois. She is buried in Plain Cemetery in Ashfield, Massachusetts.

Sources:

Department of the Interior. 1919. Report of the Director of the National Park Service Report to the Secretary of the Interior for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1919. Government Printing Office.

Department of the Interior. 1920. Report of the Director of the National Park Service Report to the Secretary of the Interior for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1919. Government Printing Office.

Heise, K. (1994, February 24). Isabel Bassett Wasson, A Teacher and Geologist. Chicago Tribune. Retrieved from http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1994-02-24-9402240044-story.html

Kaufman, P. W. (January 1990). Challenging Tradition: Pioneer Women Naturalists in the National Park Service. Forest & Conservation History, Vol. 32, No. 1, 4-16.

Oak Park River Forest Museum and the Historical Society of Oak Park and River Forest. (2018). Hometown Legends: Isabel Bassett Wasson. Oak Park, Illinois. Retrieved from http://oprfmuseum.org/people/isabel-bassett-wasson.

Wasson, I. B. (1978). (P. Bergstrom, Interviewer) Yellowstone National Park Library.

Whittlesey, L. (2002, March - April). Yellowstone's First Female Rangers. The Buffalo Chip: Resource Management Newsletter, Yellowstone National Park.

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To learn more about the history of women and the NPS uniform, visit Dressing the Part: A Portfolio of Women's History in the NPS.


This research was made possible in part by a grant from the National Park Foundation.