Conservation and the National Parks

After a century of settlers clearing forests, plowing prairie, and hunting bison toward extinction, Americans around 1900 started worrying that the frontier was actually running out. Progressive reformers who trusted expert planning in other areas of life applied the same instinct to land: if left alone, private companies would strip forests and drain rivers for short-term profit. So the federal government stepped in. Yellowstone had become the first national park back in 1872, but the real wave came under Theodore Roosevelt, who used his authority to set aside national forests and create new parks and monuments across the West between 1901 and 1909, with more parks following through the 1910s. This put huge amounts of western land under federal control rather than private or even state control, a real expansion of federal power into territory it had mostly left alone.

That expansion did not mean everyone agreed on what the land was for. Gifford Pinchot, head of the Forest Service, believed in conservation: resources should be surveyed, managed, and used wisely, cutting timber and damming rivers in ways that would last for generations. John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, believed in preservation: certain wild places had value simply by existing and should stay untouched by development. Those two visions collided directly over Hetch Hetchy, a valley inside Yosemite National Park.

San Francisco wanted to dam Hetch Hetchy for drinking water and hydroelectric power after its 1906 earthquake and fire. Pinchot supported the dam as sensible resource use; Muir fought it as a desecration of protected wilderness. Congress approved the dam in 1913, a conservationist win that left preservationists bitter. The same federal apparatus that built dams for western cities also funded irrigation projects under the 1902 Newlands Reclamation Act, tying federal money ever more tightly to who controlled western water.