Railroads help
establish national parks. The nascent
Northern Pacific Railroad
openly worked hard to establish Yellowstone National
Park, accomplished on
March 1, 1872 by an Act of Congress. The Northern Pacific constructed a spur line
into Yellowstone in 1883, then built and operated many of the great park lodges.
Upset at possible commercial development
within Yellowstone, the Northern Pacific
endlessly promoted conservation and
preservation. Further west in Oregon, the
Northern Pacific donated the top square mile of Mount Rainier to the U.S.
government in 1889 to help establish Mt. Rainier National Park.
as a National Park, a status achieved in 1890 along with General
Grant and Sequoia
National Parks. In
1898, the Southern Pacific RR founded Sunset magazine to
promote the casual western lifestyle and encourage immigration and settlement.
The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe
Railway in 1905 completed the El Tovar
Hotel
on the south rim of the Grand Canyon to provide luxury accommodations
to rail
passengers visiting the giant gorge.
The Santa Fe helped establish the Grand Canyon
as a National Monument in
1908 and as a National Park in 1919.
hundred miles north of Yellowstone. GN President, Louis V. Hill, tirelessly
promoted the establishment of a national park along his rail line in
Montana.
Congress responded by establishing Glacier National Park in 1910.
The Great
Northern then built and operated two great lodges -- Glacier Park Hotel
and
Many Glacier Hotel -- and numerous chalets at Glacier National Park to
accommodate rail passengers. All these western
railroads brought a strong
sense of stewardship to this task, and the result is
a legacy of treasured natural
parks across the western United States.
The remote national parks were accessible primarily by
railroad for the first fifteen
years of the 20th Century. Visitors stayed in hotels and chalets and
toured the parks
in horse drawn stage coaches.
Automobiles were not allowed into the national parks
until July 31, 1915,
when Yellowstone opened what soon became a floodgate. Other
national parks quickly followed
suit. The horse drawn stagecoaches that transported
visitors around Yellowstone lasted for only another two years and were gone by
1917,
replaced by a fleet of White motor busses.
U.S. Department of the Interior, the War
Department and the Forrest Service in the
1900s jointly operated the national
parks on a small budget and with differing policies.
So in 1910 they began lobbying Congress to
establish a national park bureau. Meanwhile,
many private and some governmental interests continued to gnaw on the tender
young
national parks. In 1913, Congress
authorized the damming of the beautiful Hetch Hetchy
valley in Yosemite National
Park to create a reservoir for the City of San Francisco. This Congressional defilement of a national
treasure shocked the preservationists and railroads
alike into redoubling their
lobbying efforts. As a result, Congress created the National Park
Service effective
August 25, 1916. This nascent agency
needed a budgetary boost, so the
1916 first edition of 275,000 copies of the
National Parks Portfolio, which contained nine
loose booklets describing western
National Parks, was paid for by a coalition of 15 railroads.
exploitative practices of the railroads were responsible
for the second thread of our story,
the founding of Pendleton Woolen Mills. Pendleton, Oregon, on the Union Pacific
transcontinental
rail line, was a convenient point from which to ship raw wool east for
processing. But raw wool contained much useless foreign matter, so two entrepreneurs
established a wool scouring plant in Pendleton to ship only clean wool east at
a 60%
reduction in volume. The railroads
responded to this entrepreneurship by raising the
shipping rate for clean wool to
eliminate all savings. The plant owners countered
by
bringing in textile machines and establishing the Pendleton Woolen Mills in
1895.