Our national parks, his proud legacy
We are now celebrating the 100th anniversary of America’s National Park Service. Many people were instrumental in the creation of the 59 glorious national parks and many other places managed by the Park Service today. But one person stands out.
Stephen Mather took an unlikely path to founding and then running a government agency entrusted with safeguarding millions of acres of public land. He became a fabulously wealthy businessman by the time he was in his thirties. His fortune, ironically, came from mining borax in what is now Death Valley National Park.
Then he joined the government on a dare.
Soon after Mather’s old friend Franklin Lane was appointed as Secretary of the Interior by President Woodrow Wilson, Mather wrote him bemoaning the disorganized management of the nation’s growing number of national parks (Yellowstone, created in 1872, was the first).
Lane responded with a tart letter advising, “Dear Steve, If you don’t like the way the national parks are being run, come on down to Washington and run them yourself.”
Mather did. He served as a special assistant to the secretary of the interior until Congress enacted the law establishing the Park Service in August 1916, and then as the new agency’s director until his retirement in 1929.
His experiences have much to teach as we begin the Park Service’s second century.
Mather lived out the tension built into the law which created the Park Service and gave the new organization its marching orders. The law directs the agency “to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein 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.”
These goals — conservation and enjoyment — challenged Mather as much as they continue to challenge us today.
He was the consummate salesman, promoting the cause of the national parks by soliciting press coverage, encouraging the building of roads and railroads, and making America the Beautiful a more desirable travel destination than the fading grandeur of Europe.
But Mather also emphasized the need to conserve the very natural qualities that make our parks so special. He battled with poachers and overzealous promoters alike. Mather preserved the special status of these rare American jewels by resisting the pleas of hundreds of local boosters around the country who insisted that their communities were worthy of becoming national parks, too.
Mather was motivated by many things, but there were two deeply personal reasons for his commitment. For Stephen Mather was a descendant of Cotton and Increase Mather, the Puritan leaders who played an instrumental role in New England during the 17th and 18th centuries. Stephen Mather opened the January 1917 National Parks Conference by emphasizing “the hundred ways the national parks will touch vitally the intellectual and spiritual life of the people.” For Mather, as for his friend John Muir, the parks were a place to encounter God.
They were also a place of renewal, something Mather sorely needed. His periods of whirlwind activity were punctuated by three disabling nervous breakdowns. The first happened in 1903, and after it Mather began to explore the outdoors to regain his health. The next happened during the January 1917 conference, when Mather was so spent by his efforts to create the Park Service that he suffered another breakdown that sidelined him from the parks for over a year. Finally, a stroke felled Mather in 1929, and he died a year later.
Today each national park contains a plaque dedicated to Mather. The inscription on each reads, “There will never come an end to the good he has done.” Amen.
The work of Stephen Mather