PIPE SPRING Cultures at a Crossroads: An Administrative History

The National Park Service, Historical Background

National Context, 1916-1923

Before focusing on National Park Service (NPS or Park Service) activities in Utah and Arizona, it is helpful to consider the larger national context, both prior to and after the 1916 creation of the Park Service. As the Church's fort at Pipe Spring was under construction in the Arizona Territory, a number of expeditions between 1869 and 1871 traversed the region of Yellowstone in the Montana and Wyoming territories. Members of these parties suggested reserving Yellowstone for public use, rather than let it fall into private hands. Agents of the Northern Pacific Railroad Company threw their weight behind the idea of setting aside Yellowstone and its geological wonders, standing to benefit financially from such a tourist attraction. [323] The Yellowstone bill was passed in Congress and signed into law by Ulysses S. Grant on March 1, 1872. Like Yellowstone, parks set aside in the following years were most noted for their natural or scenic values: Sequoia, General Grant, and Yosemite in California were the next national parks to be established during the 1890s. All had Army superintendents. The Forest Reserve Act of 1891 authorized U.S. presidents to set aside forest reserves on the public domain; 176 million acres were so designated by 1916. [324] Meanwhile, 10 more national parks were established by 1916.

During the 1880s and 1890s, efforts were made to secure protective legislation for prehistoric and historic sites, contributing to congressional passage and Theodore Roosevelt's signing on June 8, 1906, of the Antiquities Act. The Antiquities Act gave U.S. presidents authority to proclaim and reserve "historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest" on lands owned or controlled by the United states as "national monuments," while prohibiting excavation or appropriation of antiquities on federal lands without government permission. Mesa Verde National Park was created three weeks later. Roosevelt proclaimed 18 national monuments during his tenure, 12 of which were designed to protect natural features, such as Wyoming's Devils Tower. Nearly one-fourth of the units in the current National Park System today originated in whole or part from the Antiquities Act. [325]

Lack of central control in the pre-Park Service years led to serious problems, as Paul Herman Buck writes in The Evolution of the National Park System of the United States: "Without responsible direction, the establishment of parks and the efforts to secure appropriations for them in several instances deteriorated into a scramble for federal appropriations.... There was no over-all administrative authority to check on the quality of national park proposals." [326] Consequently a number of "inferior parks" were added to the system, some of which were later abolished. Such parks drained scarce resources from the more worthy parks while creating an impression that Congressional appropriations smacked too much of pork barrel. [327]

On January 21, 1915, Stephen Tyng Mather was appointed Assistant to the Secretary of the Interior, as director in charge of parks. Both Secretary Franklin K. Lane and Mather were alumni of the University of California at Berkeley. Horace M. Albright, another Berkeley graduate, became Mather's top aide. Mather and Albright garnered support from influential journalists, railroads likely to profit from increased tourism, and members of Congress as they lobbied for passage of the bill creating the National Park Service. [328] Notably, Senator Reed Smoot was an ardent champion of the bill. By the time the National Parks Act (Organic Act) was passed and signed by President Woodrow Wilson on August 25, 1916, the Department of the Interior oversaw 14 national parks and 21 national monuments, the vast majority being in the western United States. Mather was appointed the Park Service's first director (serving from 1917 to 1928) with Albright appointed assistant director, a position he held until 1919. [329] Both men firmly believed that the parks needed to attract and accommodate more visitors.

In 1916, to stimulate public awareness of the available transportation to national parks and to publicize their extraordinary scenery, Mather's infant agency published the National Parks Portfolio, a stunning publicity volume containing pictures and descriptions of all the major preserves. Seventeen western railroads contributed $43,000 toward the publication of the first edition. Mather mailed 275,000 copies to carefully selected scholars, politicians, chambers of commerce officials, newspaper editors, and other influential people who were likely to boost the national park idea. [330]

In a letter to Mather from Secretary Lane on May 13, 1918, the policies that were to guide future expansion of the park system were outlined:

In studying new park projects, you should seek to find scenery of supreme and distinctive quality or some natural feature so extraordinary or unique as to be of national interest and importance. You should seek distinguished examples of typical forms of world architecture.... The national park system as now constituted should not be lowered in standard, dignity, and prestige by the inclusion of areas which express in less than the highest terms the particular class or kind of exhibit which they represent. [331]

In the East, the War Department since the 1890s had administered historic sites of national significance (battlefields, forts, and war memorials). Having a personal interest in history, Assistant Director Horace Albright sought to have these areas transferred to the Park Service soon after its creation, but met with little success until he succeeded Mather as director in 1929. [332] President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued two executive orders, effective August 10, 1933, that transferred these historical areas along with national monuments administered by the U.S. Forest Service to the National Park Service. The reorganization of 1933 added 44 historical areas to the Park Service's holdings.

While the West had an abundance of candidate places possessing historical significance, nearly all of the parks and monuments established under the new Park Service from 1916 to 1930 featured spectacular scenery or prehistoric sites. Pipe Spring National Monument was only the second historical monument created during this period. [333] Given Secretary Lane's guidelines for designating national parks and monuments, why did the remote and little-known Pipe Spring site come to be one of the earliest historical monuments established under the newly created Park Service? That question can be partly answered through an understanding of the economic and political context that fostered development in southern Utah and northern Arizona during the 1920s.