This is the first of four Public Lands Blog posts that examine the topic of national parks in Oregon. Part 1 explores Oregon’s one success in establishing a national park. Part 2 discusses multiple failures to establish additional national parks in the state. Part 3 examines both successful and failed attempts to expand Crater Lake National Park. Part 4 looks at the potential supply and demand for additional national parks in Oregon and the political challenges and chances.
Figure 1. Crater Lake and Wizard Island. Source: Gary Halvorson, Oregon State Archives.
National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.
—Wallace Stegner (1983)
Let’s get one thing straight up front. There are national parks and then there are other units of the National Park System—all administered by the National Park Service. The United States has 62 national parks. It has another 357 units that are also part of the National Park System but go by another name (national monument, national preserve, national historic park, national historic site, national recreation area, and many other national whatevers). Herein we focus on the one national park in Oregon.
One of the First and One of the Best
Crater Lake National Park (Map 1) was the nation’s sixth national park (since you asked: Yellowstone, Sequoia, Yosemite, General Grant [subsumed into Kings Canyon in 1940], and Mount Rainier). Established in 1902 (and expanded slightly in 1932 and 1980), Oregon’s only national park today encompasses ~183,224 acres.
Map 1. 1906 map of Crater Lake National Park. Source: National Park Service.
While Oregon has only one national park, it also has all or part of nine additional units of the National Park System:
• California National Historic Trail (CA, CO, ID, KS, MO, NE, NV, OR, UT, WY)
• Fort Vancouver National Historic Site (OR, WA)
• Ice Age Floods National Geologic Trail (WA, OR, ID, MT)
• John Day Fossil Beds National Monument (OR)
• Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail (IA, ID, IL, IN, KS, KY, MO, MT, NE, ND, OH, OR, PA, SD, WA, WV)
• Lewis and Clark National Historical Park (OR, WA)
• Nez Perce National Historical Park (ID, MT, OR, WA)
• Oregon National Historic Trail (ID, KS, MO, NE, OR, WA, WY)
• Oregon Caves National Monument and Preserve (OR)
William Gladstone Steel’s Vision
The campaign to establish Crater Lake National Park took decades. The “father of Crater Lake National Park” was William Gladstone Steel (Figure 2), a Portland journalist and developer. Steel was not Oregon’s John Muir (that would be Judge John B. Waldo). While Steel, Muir, and Waldo were all great promoters of nature, Steel was no preservationist.
Figure 2. William Gladstone Steel (1854–1934). Source: Wikipedia.
In an article published in The West Shore, a Portland literary magazine, Steel described his first visit in 1885 to Crater Lake and his resolve to save it.
Not a foot of the land about the lake had been touched or claimed. An overmastering conviction came to me that this wonderful spot must be saved, wild and beautiful, just as it was, for all future generations, and that it was up to me to do something. I then and there had the impression that in some way, I didn’t know how, the lake ought to become a National Park. I was so burdened with the idea that I was distressed. Many hours in Captain Dutton’s tent, we talked of plans to save the lake from private exploitation. We discussed its wonders, mystery and inspiring beauty, its forests and strange lava structure. The captain agreed with the idea that something ought to be done—and done at once if the lake was to be saved, and that it should be made a National Park.
Map 2. Steel’s proposal included Diamond Lake, Mount Bailey, and Mount Thielsen, but Congress didn’t go there. Source: National Park Service.
Steel wanted Diamond Lake, Mount Bailey, and Mount Thielsen (Map 2) included in Crater Lake National Park. Bailey is unique among the snow-covered peaks of the Oregon Cascades that are not on the Cascade Crest. All sides of Mount Bailey drain into the North Umpqua River.
Figure 3. Diamond Lake and Mount Bailey, which Steel wanted included in Crater Lake National Park. Source: Gary Halvorson, Oregon State Archives.
John Wesley Powell’s Vision
Even more visionary and expansive than Steel’s vision were the 1888 recommendations of John Wesley Powell, then the head of the United States Geological Survey. Powell (Figure 4) was a soldier, a geologist, an explorer of the American West, and the director of major scientific and cultural institutions. Powell’s greatest claim to fame was leading a three-month trip down the Green and Colorado Rivers, including the first known descent through the Grand Canyon.
Figure 4. John Wesley Powell (1834–1902). Source: Wikipedia.
In a statement to Congress regarding a bill introduced in 1887 to provide for establishment of a park that would include Crater Lake and Diamond Lake, Powell first placed the two lakes and their vicinity in national context:
I would submit that the proposed measure is one which I believe to be eminently wise and proper. Crater Lake and Diamond Lake and their surroundings constitute a group of natural objects which will, in my belief, acquire increasing celebrity with the lapse of time. In respect to beauty and impressiveness this scenery is of the same order as that of the Yosemite Valley or the finest parts of the Yellowstone park. The lake itself is a unique object, as much so as Niagara, and the effect which it produces upon the mind of the beholder is at once powerful and enduring. There are probably not many natural objects in the world which impress the average spectator with so deep a sense of the beauty and majesty of nature.
Second, Powell made specific recommendations about boundaries (he was a surveyor, after all). Third, Powell brought up the matter of forests:
The region embraced in the limits designated by the bill does not include any of the really grand forest of the Cascades. It is too high. The species within it are firs and pines which never attain great dimensions, nor any marked beauty of form, though they grow in forests whose beauty and impressiveness is derived from the density and masses of foliage. The great trees, such as the Douglass spruce, the sugar pine (here larger than in California), the white pine and the tall, beautiful species of fir flourish at a lower altitude. But if the boundary were carried to the westward some eight or ten miles, it would take in a section of the finest part of the great forest of the Cascades, and a grander and nobler forest cannot be found in the world. There are many thousands of trees of which would yield more than 40,000 feet of lumber. The beautiful open parks in this timber are the breeding grounds and summer pasturage of the deer and the streams still preserve numerous beaver dams. It seems desirable on many accounts that the western boundary should include a large section of this forest belt. The scenery which it contains is of the most beautiful and impressive order. I believe that the addition of a considerable tract west of the limit proposed in the bill would greatly improve the park and avoid the danger of burdensome private control over the natural line of approach to the park. This would all be accomplished by drawing the boundary seven or eight miles farther west than the bill proposed. No settlement has been made and no possessory rights have been established so far as I can ascertain in the addition here suggested and up to the last autumn the entire tract was wholly unoccupied. [emphasis added]
Just another example of JWP being ahead of his time. (Among many other sensible ideas, Powell recommended that states and counties in the American West be organized along watersheds rather than on non-hydrological lines.)
Establishment and Early Maladministration
Steel advocated for a 12-by-30-mile rectangle (230,400 acres) that centered on Crater Lake but also included Diamond Lake and Mount Thielsen. The latter two did not survive the legislative gauntlet that resulted in the 1902 establishment of Crater Lake National Park. From that year until the establishment of the National Park Service in 1916, Crater Lake NP was administered by the United States Army.
Mad and hurt that he wasn’t made the first superintendent of the park he had dedicated much of his life to establishing, Steel engineered the ousting and replacement by himself of William F. Arrant, who was superintendent from 1902 to 1913. Fortunately, Steel was himself ousted in 1916.
It was all about recreation to Steel, and not just the passive and ambulatory nature-enjoying kind. Steel wanted development, and lots of it. Today, the lodge and the rim road are his major marks upon the land. Fortunately, a lack of congressional funding (and winter conditions) prevented him from building an elevator from the rim down to the lakefront at Cleetwood Cove. While vacationing at the park in 1915, the recent former secretary of state and often Democratic presidential aspirant William Jennings Bryan suggested a tunnel to the lakeshore from a comparable elevation elsewhere in the park, a suggestion that Steel heartily embraced. Steel also wanted a bridge to Wizard Island to facilitate visitation by automobile.
Part 2 looks at failed efforts to have Crater Lake no longer be Oregon’s only national park.
Over the decades, the National Park Service sought an expanded Crater Lake National Park but was willing to give away parts of the original park to get it. Part 3 examines these efforts.
For More Information
• Unrau, Harlan D. 1987. Administrative History: Crater Lake National Park, Oregon (Volumes I and II). National Park Service. (Chapter 17 by Stephen R. Mark, Park Historian in 1991)