The Full History
of America's Best Idea

The idea of a national park is American. The first person to write down the idea was George Catlin — a Pennsylvania-born painter who had gone west to document the Plains tribes before they vanished. He saw what was coming. He wrote about it in a letter from the Great Plains in 1832. The proposal, published in his book in 1841:

Catlin's idea was considered impractical. It went nowhere for thirty years. But it was the first time anyone in America — or arguably anywhere — had written the words "national park" together as a coherent concept. He was 32 years old.

President Abraham Lincoln signed the Yosemite Valley Grant Act on June 30, 1864 — in the middle of the Civil War. The act transferred Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Big Tree Grove to the State of California to be "used and preserved for the benefit of mankind." It was the first time the federal government had set aside land for preservation rather than exploitation. The Senate sponsor was John Conness of California; the bill was drafted with influence from Frederick Law Olmsted, who would go on to become Yosemite's first manager and design Central Park.

Yosemite was given to California, not the federal government — so it was not technically the first national park. But it was the first principle. The country had decided that some places were too valuable to be sold off, even in the middle of a war over the future of the country.

The Hayden Geological Survey of 1871, led by Ferdinand Hayden, brought back the first official photographs and paintings of Yellowstone. William Henry Jackson's photographs and Thomas Moran's paintings stunned Congress. The Northern Pacific Railroad — usually a force for development — lobbied for protection because they saw the tourism opportunity. Hayden, photography, painting, and railroad lobbying together created a coalition no one had anticipated.

The Yellowstone National Park Protection Act passed both chambers and was signed by President Ulysses S. Grant on March 1, 1872. It set aside 1,221,773 acres in territories that had not yet become Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho. The legislation broke with the entire prior history of Western land policy. Instead of transferring land to private settlers as quickly as possible, the federal government had decided to keep it. Forever.

The act had a fatal weakness: it provided no funding, no staff, no enforcement. The first superintendent, Nathaniel Langford, was given the job with no salary, no funding, and no rangers. For 14 years, Yellowstone was unprotected — poachers nearly wiped out the bison, vandals broke up geological formations and sold the pieces, and squatters built within the park boundaries. The U.S. Cavalry took over Yellowstone's protection in 1886 and held it for thirty years until the National Park Service was created.

Theodore Roosevelt entered the White House in 1901 already a committed conservationist. He had visited Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the Grand Canyon. He had hiked, hunted, and ranched across the West. He was politically a Republican; he was philosophically a conservationist who saw himself as stewarding America's natural inheritance for "the unborn generations" — his words.

Roosevelt signed the Antiquities Act on June 8, 1906. The law gave presidents the unilateral authority to declare federal lands as protected national monuments. It was a workaround: Congress was slow, and many Roosevelt-allied conservationists worried that fast-moving development would consume sites before legislation could pass. The Antiquities Act allowed presidents to act fast.

Roosevelt used it. In his last three years as president he declared 18 national monuments, four national game refuges, and 51 bird sanctuaries, including Devil's Tower (the first), the Petrified Forest, El Morro, the Grand Canyon (later upgraded to a national park), Mount Olympus (later upgraded), and Pinnacles. He added approximately 230 million acres of federal protection — an area roughly the size of California, Texas, and Pennsylvania combined.

His ally John Muir — co-founder of the Sierra Club, the most influential conservation writer in American history — visited him at Yosemite in 1903. They camped under the stars. Muir is widely credited with persuading Roosevelt to push the Yosemite Recession Act of 1906, which transferred Yosemite from California back to the federal government and into the national park system.

By 1915, the federal government had 35 national parks and monuments managed by the Department of the Interior, dozens more managed by the War Department, and others under the Department of Agriculture's Forest Service. There was no consistent management, no consistent rules, no consistent funding. Each unit was managed by whichever federal employee was nearest.

The man who solved this was Stephen Tyng Mather — born 1867, son of an old New England family, made wealthy in the borax mining industry. Mather had visited Sequoia and Yosemite as a young man and never recovered from the experience. In 1914, he wrote an angry letter to Secretary of the Interior Franklin K. Lane complaining about how poorly managed the parks were. Lane wrote back: "If you don't like the way the national parks are run, why don't you come down to Washington and run them yourself?"

Mather did. He took the position of Assistant Secretary of the Interior in 1915 — at $2,750 a year, a pay cut from his industrial salary that meant almost nothing because he supplemented every aspect of the parks from his personal fortune. He paid the salaries of the first park rangers from his own bank account. He bought land out of his own pocket and donated it to the parks system. He hired Horace Albright — a 25-year-old Berkeley law graduate — as his deputy.

Together, Mather and Albright lobbied Congress for two years. They organized industrialists, the National Geographic Society, the American Civic Association, and the Sierra Club. They got Robert Sterling Yard hired as a publicist. They wrote articles, gave speeches, and made the case in every major magazine and newspaper.

The Organic Act passed both chambers in August 1916. President Woodrow Wilson signed it on August 25, 1916. The act created the National Park Service in the Department of the Interior, brought 35 existing parks and monuments under its authority, and gave the agency its founding mission — language drafted in part by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., son of the man who had managed Yosemite half a century earlier:

This sentence — fewer than 70 words — has been quoted in every NPS guidance document, every legal interpretation, every court ruling about parks for the next 109 years. It established what is sometimes called "the park service paradox": the parks must be enjoyed and they must be unimpaired. The two missions can pull against each other. The Park Service has been balancing them for over a century.

Stephen Mather was named the first Director. He served until 1929, when ill health forced him to retire. He died in 1930. The bronze plaque installed at every national park in his honor reads, "There will never come an end to the good that he has done."

By 1933, the Great Depression had collapsed the economy. Unemployment was 25%. President Franklin D. Roosevelt — Theodore's distant cousin and politically a Democrat — proposed an idea that became the Civilian Conservation Corps: hire young men, pay them $30 a month (most sent home to their families), house them in camps, and put them to work on America's public lands.

Congress passed the Emergency Conservation Work Act on March 31, 1933. The first CCC enrollee, Henry Rich, signed up on April 7. Within months, 250,000 young men were in CCC camps. By the time the program ended in 1942 — when the United States entered World War II and the men were drafted — 3 million Americans had served in the CCC.

What they built is still standing. The CCC built the modern infrastructure of the National Park System. Every visitor who has driven into a national park has driven on roads built or improved by the CCC. Every overlook with stone walls — built by the CCC. Every trail, lodge, cabin, picnic area, ranger station, fire road, dam, bridge, and visitor center across the entire NPS in the early 1940s — built or rebuilt by the CCC.

Park rangers in the 1930s reported that the CCC built 800 state parks and helped develop 94 national parks and monuments. They planted approximately 3 billion trees. They built 13,000 miles of foot trails. They constructed 125,000 miles of road. They built fire towers and fought wildfires that destroyed millions of acres in the 1930s.

By the 1960s, postwar America had built freeways, suburbs, and dam projects that consumed vast tracts of public land. Conservationists feared the parks themselves were vulnerable. Howard Zahniser, executive director of The Wilderness Society, drafted the Wilderness Act in 1956. He spent eight years lobbying for it. He died in May 1964 — four months before the act passed Congress.

President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Wilderness Act on September 3, 1964. The act created the National Wilderness Preservation System and designated the first 9.1 million acres as protected wilderness — meaning no roads, no logging, no commercial development, no permanent structures. The Act's definition of wilderness, written by Zahniser:

By 2024, the National Wilderness Preservation System included 109 million acres — about the size of California. Many wilderness areas are inside national parks; others are in National Forest, Bureau of Land Management land, or Fish & Wildlife Refuges. The act gave permanent protection that even a presidential administration cannot easily strip away. Removing wilderness designation requires an act of Congress. No designation has ever been removed.

The General Authorities Act of 1970, signed by President Richard Nixon (Republican), supplemented the Organic Act and confirmed the unified mission across all NPS units — by then, well over 200. The Endangered Species Act of 1973, also signed by Nixon, gave the parks new legal tools to protect wildlife.

The Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980, signed by President Jimmy Carter (Democrat), expanded the park system by 47 million acres in a single law — including Wrangell-St. Elias (now the largest National Park at 13.2 million acres), Denali, Gates of the Arctic, Glacier Bay, Katmai, Kenai Fjords, Kobuk Valley, and Lake Clark. The single largest single expansion in NPS history.

The 1980s saw the Reagan administration attempt budget cuts to the parks system, but they were largely rebuffed by Congress. James Watt, Reagan's first Interior Secretary, faced bipartisan congressional opposition to many of his proposals and eventually resigned in 1983. The parks survived.

The 1990s and 2000s saw growth. President George H.W. Bush (Republican) signed the Civil War Battlefield Protection Act of 1992. President Bill Clinton (Democrat) used the Antiquities Act to protect Grand Staircase-Escalante and 18 other monuments. President George W. Bush (Republican) used the Antiquities Act to create the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument — at the time the largest protected area on Earth (later expanded by Obama and again by Biden).

President Barack Obama (Democrat) added 29 monuments. President Joe Biden (Democrat) restored two monuments Trump had reduced (Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante) and signed the Great American Outdoors Act in 2020 — bipartisan legislation that delivered the largest investment in national park infrastructure since the CCC era. The bill passed the Senate 73-25.

By 2024, the National Park Service had grown to manage 433 sites covering 84 million acres, with a record 331,863,358 visitors. The American public's support for the parks system was essentially universal: 95% support in 2018 polling, with majority support exceeding 80% in every demographic, region, and political party.

For the rest of the story — the 24% staff cuts in seven months, the largest budget cut in NPS history (rejected by Congress), the FY2027 attempt at another 37% cut, what's happening in individual parks right now — return to the main NPS investigation page.