[Longform] Seeding the National Parks through Art and Ideas
Seeding the National Parks through Art and Ideas
by Timothy LeBlanc
“Now is the birth-time of leaves; the pines are retassled, and the oaks are sprayed with young purple. Spring is fully committed.”
John Muir, a naturalist and author, said this in one of his earliest articles, a piece for the New York Tribune in May 1872. Although Muir was talking about the season of spring coming to Yosemite Valley, he could have been following in the footsteps of his chief influence, Ralph Waldo Emerson, by utilizing metaphor to say the whole of the national parks system was beginning to sprout. Just a few months earlier, in March of the same year, President Ulysses S. Grant signed a bill allowing Yellowstone to become the first national park in the United States of America and the world. It had only been 8 years since the government had given any thought to preservation of land when in 1864 is preserved Yosemite at the state level. The National Parks System now covers over 52 million acres of land and is visited by 84 million visitors annually. The land of all of the National Parks is preserved in as natural a state as possible so that individuals can journey and learn from nature itself. To a modern citizen, it may be difficult to understand just how radical an idea this was. This monumental step in American history and culture came about as a result of a desire for this wild idea of a national park system being kindled in the American people by the works of early American philosophers and artists, such as Emerson, Muir, Carleton Watkins, Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran, and William Henry Jackson, who made distant landscapes visible and real to the masses of the United States.
Emerson was the leader of the Transcendentalists, a thought movement which advocated for the power of the individual and that the natural world was the best place to connect with one’s self and with God. From them grew a focus on self-reliance, a trait that enabled the expansionist America of the 1800s, and skepticism, mostly from David Hume who greatly influenced Emerson. English Romantic writers, like the poet William Wordsworth, gave a new view on the power of nature and gave many a sense of the sublime that was present in Transcendentalist writings and the works of painters in America at the time. Emerson and those around him influenced John Muir, who would help push their ideas and his own observations out to the masses. Since this set of ideas had such an effect, many consider it to be the first prominent American philosophy and the one which had the most effect on American history as it influenced not just a few intellectuals but the whole of the nation.
American art of the time found itself concerned with preserving in paint and in photo, once invented, the magnificent land found here and the people which enacted their will upon it, the majority of the time causing harm to the rapidly vanishing land and its native peoples. Although there were some that worked in other genres, the greatest artists of the time were focused on landscape and portraiture. The painters, Moran and Bierstadt, for example, would commonly “improve” the land by altering where a landmark was to show more of an area’s features within one painting. Even many of their “history” paintings, that reached back to events they would not been able to see, are rooted in landscapes that the artists saw first-hand. Many of their works acted in tandem with the writers, using many of the same metaphors and acting to freeze lands before many of the spaces could get developed. Artists would go on expeditions to lands unexplored by non-Native Americans at a time when this was a difficult trek, and join early conservation groups. Their works showed the public for the first time the grandeur of America’s finest resource, undisturbed nature.
Emerson and Connecting Through Nature
In 1836, Emerson wrote a pivotal book for the park system, Nature. An early work of the Transcendentalism movement, it establishes the tone for both individualism and man’s connection to the outdoors:
“When we speak of nature in this manner, we have a distinct but most poetical sense in the mind. We mean the integrity of impression made by manifold natural objects. It is this which distinguishes the stick of timber of the wood-cutter, from the tree of the poet… Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape.”
It is easy to see how sentiments like this influenced a multitude of important people. One of whom, the Unitarian preacher Thomas Starr King, was stationed for ten years in Boston where he engaged with Emerson directly. Later, he took the ideas west with him to San Francisco where his sermons spoke directly to the importance of nature as an example of God in this world, and therefore something which should be preserved and loved. The historian, Tyler Green, highlights that their relationship was so close that, when Emerson’s son came to San Francisco in 1862, he stayed in King’s home. Also known, is that King would, most likely later that same year, send Emerson photos of Yosemite by the artist Carleton Watkins, a friend of King and a man whose artwork was influenced by Emersonian ideas.
The connection and influence of Emerson on King is so important because of King’s large audience, filled with both members of the general public and many politicians. Jessie and John C. Fremont, the first governor of California and first republican nominee for president, were some of his closest friends once King moved to San Francisco. Jessie, whom King is known to have given a copy of Emerson’s Nature, was particularly fond of King and brought him around for dinners with politicians such as her husband and newly elected Republican senator Edward Baker. King, as well as Baker, would spend much of 1860 campaigning for Abraham Lincoln and, after his win, King would champion the Union and its ideas. This contingent of west coast republicans were governed at least in part by the Transcendentalist mindset, and reflected it back to their eastern counterparts. It is known that Watkins’ photos, like those given to Emerson, were shown to Congress and even President Lincoln, by Anti-Slavery Pro-Union Democrat California Senator John Conness. The senator was most certainly a known individual to the circle of influential Californians already discussed and he was sent a set of Watkins’ 1861 photos of the Yosemite Valley and surrounding areas with the first draft of the act which would go on to secure protections for those lands. Conness then introduced the bill that established Yosemite Land Grant into the Senate. On May 17, 1864, in his formal defense of it he, stated that:
“… [Yosemite and the Mariposa Big Tree Grove] shall be inalienable forever, and preserved and improved as a place of public resort … that they may be exposed to public view, and that they may be used and preserved for the benefit of mankind… The Mariposa Big Tree Grove is really the wonder of the world, containing those magnificent monarchs of the forest …”
Conness’ statements could have been quoted from many of Emerson’s or his contemporary Henry David Thoreau’s works instead of the proceedings of the United States Senate. While some historians give much of the credit to Watkins’ photographs or single out some other individual, it is clear to see the multitude of Transcendentalist-based influences that were present in Lincoln’s decision to sign the unprecedented Yosemite Land Grant. This bill only gave protection at the state level but provided the framework that would form the national system only eight years later.
Picturing the West
It is important to remember that those pushing for preservation weren’t only doing so in this singular space but in variety of spaces at all levels. Thoreau, even wrote,
“Each town should have a park, or rather a primitive forest, of five hundred or a thousand acres, where a stick should never be cut for fuel, a common possession forever, for instruction and recreation,”
clearly wishing that unaltered nature was be available for all. The dissemination of art images of the places that would come under protections was already starting to happen. 1863 saw an exhibit of Carleton Watkins prints, most likely including many of the same images Conness had, in New York City. The painter Bierstadt, who with his two brothers ran a photography studio in New York that sold some of the earliest photos of what would become Grand Teton National Park, would make his first trip to Yosemite that year. Bierstadt’s paintings exposed people to the majesty of the land and his monumental 10’ x 15’ painting Domes of the Yosemite, 1867 (pictured above) would go on a tour of America’s east. People in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston would pay a small fee to witness the sublime nature of the painting. While he produced these grandiose paintings, many would get turned into prints that were much more attainable for the average citizen to purchase and live with.
Although Watkins and Bierstadt would be the two most important artists for the protection of Yosemite, it would be another set of artists that helped secure the rights for Yellowstone, the first official National Park. Painter Thomas Moran and the photographer William Henry Jackson went on the geological survey of the Yellowstone area in 1871. They produced a variety of works that made it clear just how amazing the land was. The impact over the next year of Moran’s watercolors (pictured at the start of this essay) and Jackson’s photos cannot be understated. The historian Hiram Chittenden, writing an early history of Yellowstone, went so far as to say:
“These [Moran’s and Jackson’s artworks] were placed on exhibition, and were probably seen by all members of Congress. They did a work no other agency could do, and doubtless convinced everyone who saw them that the region where such wonders existed should be carefully preserved to the people forever”
By March of 1872, Yellowstone was officially the world’s first official national park. The artists’ influence was not done though. Just three months later, a magnificent large-scale painting of Moran’s, The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, (pictured below) would be purchased by congress for display in the Capital building, after spending a month on display for the public in the Smithsonian. It would quickly be joined by another one of his paintings and, a couple of years later, paintings from Bierstadt. Living their it is sure that they would have an influence as the members of Congress saw them every day.
Muir and Nationalizing the National Parks System
Even with all the dissemination of writing and artworks, it was John Muir who would go on to champion the national system. Muir, a generation younger than the Transcendental writers and artists, was one of the most important naturalists in history. Muir made his influences clear when he recounted meeting Emerson in 1871. Muir highlighted the thinker Emerson, along with two important botanists (who we know used Watkins prints to gain a better understanding of the natural world at this time), when he wrote:
“Emerson, [Louis] Agassiz, [Asa] Grey – These men influenced me more than any others… First of all, and greatest of all, came Emerson… so great was my awe and reverence.”
Muir’s writings not only shared but expanded on the ideas he learned from Emerson. His article, “Yosemite in Spring”, is important to understanding his push at the beginning of the national park movement. It was first published May 7, 1872, in the New York Tribune, and focused on the fact that congress had yet to pass national park legislation for Yosemite:
“The salons of our State Capitol have disbanded — disintegrated from the awful majesty of Senate and House to common men, who have betaken themselves to their taverns and ranches without giving us one Yosemite law.”
Yellowstone had become the first national park only two months before, although many had pushed for the protection of Yosemite as Muir did in his article. Unfortunately, he and the rest of those concerned with conservation would have to wait 18 years until 1890 to see Sequoia, September 25, and Yosemite, October 1, to become the second and third official national parks.
Muir saw the importance of including visual element in his works. Starting in 1888, Muir would act as the editor and writer of series of books, Picturesque California, which include 600 etchings, the first of which was by Moran, (pictured above) and over 700 additional images of various mediums. It was one of Muir’s other books, Our National Parks, that proved to have the heaviest impact on the history of the National Parks System. Published in 1901, it quickly landed in the hands of President Theodore Roosevelt. The president had already been interested in the ideas of land conservation, even going so far as to found the conservationist Boone & Crockett club, which also counted Bierdstadt among its early members. A mere two years later, in March of 1903, Muir would find himself with Roosevelt as his company on a three-day camping trip in the faithful Yosemite Valley. Muir would be playing the role as influencer to the president as he did to the people through his writings and founding of the Sierra Club, which would grow to be the world’s largest conservation group, in 1902. In Roosevelt’s 1913 autobiography, he makes clear how influential Muir’s perspective and introduction were:
“It was my good fortune to see the ‘big trees’, the Sequoias, and then to travel down into the Yosemite, with John Muir. Of course, of all people in the world he was the one with whom it was best worth while thus to see the Yosemite.”
According to the National Parks Service themselves, Muir talked of conservation with Roosevelt in such a way that it had a lasting effect. One of Roosevelt’s lasting legacies is that, after that meeting, he would go on to preserve 230 million acres in a variety of ways including outright creation of five national parks as well as areas that would go on to form another five parks under later administrations.
Throughout the 1800s and the early 1900s, Ralph Rudolph Emerson, John Muir, and a multitude of artists published articles, wrote books, and created accessible views of the land. These actions greatly helped form the impetus of the National Park System and would go on to not only change American life but also seed the thought of government level preservation worldwide. Trees that have stood for twenty-five generations have been saved and hopefully they will continue to stand for many more. If not for their influence, we may have found ourselves with only the artworks that first exposed the masses to these vistas left to enjoy. One must return to John Conness that day in 1864 when he defended the measure to give the first protections to Yosemite, “There is no parallel, and can be no parallel for this measure, for there is not, as I stated before, on earth just such a condition of things.” There is no parallel for how important that measure was, just as there is no parallel for the grandeur that 84 million people get to experience in the National Parks each year.