Original subtitles

[Bell clanging]

PETER COYOTE: In July of 1929, a 90-year-old woman returned

to the Yosemite Valley in California.

She was called Maria Lebrado, but 78 years earlier as

a young girl, she had been known by her real name To-Tu-ya,

the granddaughter of Chief Tenaya, leader

of the Ahwahneechees, an Indian tribe who

for centuries had called the valley their home until

in 1851 a battalion of white men had driven them out

at bayonet point.

To-Tu-ya was the sole remaining survivor

of that sad moment.

This was her first time back.

Half a generation after the Ahwahneechees' expulsion,

the federal government had preserved the beautiful valley

permanently as a national park.

Still, everywhere she looked, To-Tu-ya was reminded of how

much things had changed.

In a broken mixture of English, Spanish, and her own

ancient language, she told her escorts the valley floor was

now more wooded and brushy than in her day.

Her people had regularly set grass fires to keep

the meadows open and the trees and shrubs at bay.

Then she looked up at the rock walls of the valley.

The great monoliths and majestic waterfalls

stood unchanged.

Turning toward Half Dome, the cleft rock she knew as

Tis-sa-ack, she stretched out her arms and raised her voice

in a strong, clear, high-pitched call that echoed

off the granite walls.

It was, she explained, the call her

grandfather Tenaya had once used to summon his

people together.

Until that moment, she had been the last one to hear it.

[Woman calling]

WOMAN: They're islands of hope.

The parks are always where I can go home again.

I go back to my hometown, there is a Safeway where I

used to play with Sylvia Gonzalez, they have taken

and turned my old school into a junk shop,

but the parks don't do that.

So these are places we can always go home

and paradoxically that we can always see into the future

and hope for the better things.

MAN: When we look at parks and we look at the United States

and we examine the whole idea of democracy, I think that

the park experience is an exploration

of the idea of freedom.

Where do I come from, where am I going,

how did I get here, how did we as a people get here?

I think that when people go to a national park, they

get a sense, a compass to history.

COYOTE: As the 1920s ended, the United States was about to

enter two of the darkest and most frightening decades

of the 20th Century, ones that included an economic

catastrophe that threatened the foundation of American

society, followed by a war that threatened the existence

of freedom throughout the world.

For a time during those dark years, the national parks

would thrive as never before.

In the 1930s and 1940s, hundreds of thousands

of American boys would go to the parks in pursuit

of a paycheck and discover a new sense of dignity.

Then hundreds of thousands more under different

circumstances would enjoy in the parks a moment of peace.

And what happens in the United States is that the American

land comes to embody the American nation,

and the national parks become the icons of our nationalism,

the place where we come to celebrate what it means

to be an American.

COYOTE: The national park idea was changing, too.

Though the park service had lost its charismatic first

director Stephen Mather, a new president and his

progressive administration would vastly expand the number

of parks and then even more dramatically expand the very

notion of what a national park could be.

A young biologist would insist that the survival of wildlife

is as important as the preservation of scenery

and that places without mountains or waterfalls should

be seen as natural wonders, as well, and in a time when

the future of the country was most in doubt, the symbols

of her complicated past would be set aside and cherished

while Americans from every walk of life and every

possible background would find in the parks a deeper

connection to their land, their nation, and themselves.

MAN: My sense is that our special connection with

the national parks comes from the fact that we're a nation

of immigrants, we're a nation of people for whom this is not

home, and the national parks are what anchor and root us

on this continent.

They are the meaning of home for many of us.

They're what it means to be an American and to inhabit

this continent.

It's the end of the immigrant experience, and they're what

takes you and says, "Now I am in America."

COYOTE: In April of 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt,

newly sworn in as president, asked Horace Albright,

the second director of the National Park Service to come

along with him during a day trip from Washington to

Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains.

MAN AS HORACE ALBRIGHT: The president got in the front

seat, where there was more room, and they took

the braces off his legs.

He put a cigarette in his long cigarette holder,

sat back, and relaxed.

I sat behind him on the jump seat just a few inches

from his ear.

I had a dream I wanted to make real.

For years, I had wanted to get the many national military

parks, battlefields, and monuments transferred out

of the War Department and Department of Agriculture into

the National Park Service.

As we approached the Rappahannock River, I began

thinking, "If I'm going to talk to the president"

"about getting the military parks,"

"I had better get to it."

Now was the time.

COYOTE: Albright began pointing out sites important

to the Second Battle of Bull Run in the Civil War,

then broadened the discussion to myriad other battlefields

and historic sites in the area.

WOMAN: So my father had a golden opportunity.

He told him exactly what he wanted.

He wanted the monuments, and he wanted

the battlefields. "All right."

When they got back to the White House,

"Hey, Albright," he said.

"Tomorrow morning, I want a plan in my office."

"I want to know what you want to do."

FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT: And to the formal duties of the

Park Service by transferring from other departments many

other parks, battlefields, memorials,

and national monuments.

COYOTE: Within days, Roosevelt would sign two executive

orders initiating a sweeping reorganization that overnight

transformed the Park Service.

From the War Department, the agency was given

responsibility for more than 20 military parks and historic

battlefields and monuments: from Castillo de San Marcos,

an ancient Spanish fort in St. Augustine, Florida,

to Yorktown, Virginia, where the decisive victory

of the American Revolution had been won; From Antietam,

where the bloodiest battle of the Civil War was fought,

to Appomattox Courthouse, where it ended.

Under the new plan, the Park Service was now expected to

protect and interpret more than a dozen nonmilitary

historic sites, as well: The Statue of Liberty in

New York's Harbor; Mount Rushmore in South Dakota;

and many of the District of Columbia's

most hallowed places,

including the Lincoln Memorial, the shrine to

the president who in 1864 had given the national park

idea its first tentative expression.

National parks now embraced the idea of America itself.

MAN: Our national heritage is richer than just

scenic features.

The realization is coming that perhaps our greatest national

heritage is nature itself with all its complexity and its

abundance of life.

George Melendez Wright.

COYOTE: During To-Tu-ya's emotional return to Yosemite,

one of her escorts, chosen because he was fluent

in Spanish, was a young Park Service employee named

George Melendez Wright.

He had been born into a wealthy San Francisco family.

His mother came from one of El Salvador's most

prominent dynasties.

His father was a ship captain.

When they both died prematurely, he was raised by

an aunt, who encouraged his fascination with the natural

world, which led to a degree in zoology.

Working in Yosemite as an assistant park naturalist,

Wright became convinced that the parks were fulfilling only

part of their purpose.

By focusing so much on attracting visitors,

park managers had overlooked another responsibility,

which Wright called "the very heart of the National Park"

"System," preserving wildlife in its natural state.

MAN AS GEORGE MELENDEZ WRIGHT: When a tourist enters the

park, he is looking for the same concentration of animals

he saw in the paddocks of the zoological garden.

A galaxy of bears at our garbage platform approximates

this concept, and he is satisfied.

Then comes a day when his heart skips a beat.

Walking along a deep forest trail, he comes upon a single

bear eagerly peeling the bark from a log in search

of fat white grubs.

This is a fresh thrill, and it brings the realization that

the unique charm of the animals in a national park

lies in their wildness, not their tameness, in their

primitive struggle to survive, rather than their fat

certainty of an easy living.

COYOTE: Though only in his mid-20s and near the bottom

of the Park Service career ladder, Wright proposed to his

superiors that he undertake something that had never been

done before, a scientific survey of wildlife conditions

in the parks.

It took a year of persuasion, but he finally won approval

for his plan, partly because of his persistence

and friendly personality and also because the financially

independent Wright offered to pay for the whole

thing himself.

In the summer of 1930 in a Buick Roadster he had

purchased and customized to carry camping gear, cameras,

and scientific instruments, Wright set off with two

colleagues on an 11,000-mile tour of the western parks.

They would keep at it for 4 consecutive years.

At each park, Wright kept a daily log

of the animals he saw.

He also gathered information from his conversations

with people in the field, park rangers

and superintendents, local rangers and hunters,

old-timers who remembered what it was like back

in the 19th Century, anyone with information

about the state of wildlife in the parks, to augment what he

and his fellow researchers were observing

with their own eyes.

Everywhere he went, Wright discovered disturbing evidence

that the equilibrium of nature was out of kilter.

Coyotes, wolves, and mountain lions, even badgers and hawks

and owls were routinely shot as unwelcome predators.

Buffalo were kept in corrals like domestic cows.

Elk, deer, and antelope were being fed hay

in the wintertime.

At Yellowstone, he learned that rangers had been ordered

to go to the nesting grounds of white pelicans and stomp

their eggs because it was feared that grown pelicans

deprived anglers of too many fish.

The bears meanwhile were treated like pets, fed scraps

of food at staged events each evening near the parks'

garbage dumps or along the roadsides, where they were

encouraged to beg for handouts from tourists.

MAN AS GEORGE MELENDEZ WRIGHT: The average citizen expects

more intelligence from a bear than he has any

right to expect.

He goes on the assumption that if he feeds a bear two sticks

of candy and does not want to give it a third he is

the one to say, "No, no," and he believes that

the bear is to be accused of an unforgivable breach

of etiquette if it takes all the candy out of his hand

and perhaps takes the hand with it.

COYOTE: Wright eventually published two reports

proposing a radically new policy.

Unless threatened with extinction within in a park,

each native species, including the hated predators, he wrote,

"should be left to carry on its struggle"

"for existence unaided."

MAN: When he said that "the rare predators shall be"

"protected in the national parks"

"in proportion that they are persecuted everywhere else,"

that was... that was revolutionary.

COYOTE: Wright also called for the end of winter feedings,

closing the bear dumps, no more stocking streams

with nonnative fish, expansion of some park boundaries to

accommodate grazing habits and changes in a multitude

of practices that had become ingrained.

Most park managers were unconvinced,

but Horace Albright, intrigued by the surveys, established

a new Wildlife Division in 1933

and named George Melendez Wright,

only 29 years old, as its chief.

MAN AS GEORGE MELENDEZ WRIGHT: If we destroy nature blindly,

it is a boomerang which will be our undoing.

Consecration to the task of adjusting ourselves to the

natural environment so that we secure the best values from

nature without destroying it is not useless idealism.

It is good hygiene for civilization.

MAN: Part of the changing relationship with national

parks as we evolved as a nation went

from scenery to science.

The scenery was obvious.

It was overwhelming, it was stunning.

The science is not so obvious.

Science embraces mystery, and it begins to look into

the future in ways that most people can't preserve.

It asks questions that most people don't ask, and it says,

"We need to hold on to these places, and I can't give you"

"precise reason why, but the reason will come along later,"

"and if we don't have them, we'll never be able to explore"

"the answers to the questions we'll be asking."

So they hold the answers to questions we have not even

yet learned to ask.

[Frogs croaking]

WOMAN: I think it's the people that pressure the government

to do the things that benefit them.

I don't think most politicians sit there and say, "Now what's"

"the best thing I can do for the people today?"

But they hear from their constituents, and that's what

makes up their minds,

and the people really love their parks.

They mean a lot.

There's an emotional bond there, and they'll

fight for them.

WOMAN: There are no other Everglades in the world.

Nothing anywhere else is like them.

Their vast, glittering openness wider than

the enormous visible round of the horizon, the sweetness

of their massive winds under the dazzling blue

heights of space.

The miracle of the light pours over the green and brown

expanse of saw grass and water, shining and slow-moving

below, the grass and water that is the meaning central

face of the Everglades of Florida.

It is a river of grass.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas.

COYOTE: For centuries, the fresh waters of Lake

Okeechobee had flowed slowly and yet unimpeded across

a vast swath of southern Florida toward the Gulf

of Mexico, a seemingly endless saw grass marsh punctuated by

cypress swamps and mangrove forests, creating

an environment unlike anything else on earth.

Its highest elevation is never more than a few feet above sea

level, yet its rich landscape supports more than a thousand

different species of plants from royal palms

and smooth-barked gumbo limbo trees

to delicate orchids and bromeliads.

It is the only place where alligators and crocodiles can

be found living side by side, and it is a critical breeding

ground for wading birds beyond counting: egrets and ibises

and herons of all sizes, roseate spoonbills,

and the wood stork, the only stork native to America.

GREENE: It's magnificent when you stand there and look out

on the vastness of it all.

Well, they call it a swamp, but it's really not a swamp

because the water moves ever so slowly, but it moves.

COYOTE: Because of its trackless impenetrability,

the Everglades became something of a sanctuary

for people, too.

In the 1800s when the Seminole Indians were driven out

of Florida, small groups escaped and found refuge deep

in the cypress trees and saw grass along

with the Miccosukee Tribe and hundreds of runaway slaves.

Later when the fashion in women's hats made the white

feathers of egrets more valuable per ounce than gold,

plume hunters and poachers hid out in the Everglades

and slaughtered the birds there with impunity.

A few game wardens who dared try to stop them were killed,

too, but a greater threat soon imperiled not just the birds

but the Everglades itself.

Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, elected governor on a slogan

of "Drain the Everglades" was merely one in a long series

of Florida politicians and promoters who built their

careers on the idea of turning the vast wetland into

a developer's promised land.

They had divided up the Everglades into lots that they

were selling to the suckers from up north.

They were selling land by the gallon.

COYOTE: As mechanized dredges began digging drainage canals,

real estate speculators began offering land

at $1.00 an acre, then $20, then $50,

even though some of it was still underwater.

A succession of real estate booms swept south Florida.

Much of the northern Everglades was turned into

sugar cane plantations, vegetable fields,

and cattle ranches.

The towns sprouting up along the coastline began taking

more and more land in the interior as their

populations swelled.

Then in the late 1920s in the Miami area, a small movement

began, hoping to save as much of the remaining

Everglades as possible.

The Florida Federation of Women's Clubs had already

preserved a 120-acre parcel called Royal Palms and given

it to the state.

That wasn't enough for Ernest Coe, a landscape

architect who had recently moved from Connecticut to Miami

and was shocked to learn that rare orchids, exotic birds,

and so much else in the Everglades were being

systematically destroyed.

He decided to make it his life's work to create a much

larger national park.

Coe threw himself into the cause, convening meetings,

firing off petitions, relentlessly pestering

politicians, and persuading others to join his crusade.

WOMAN AS DOUGLAS: I can't say I've spent many years and months

communing with the Everglades.

To be a friend of the Everglades is not necessarily

to spend time wandering around out there.

It's too buggy, too wet, too generally inhospitable.

I suppose you could say the Everglades and I have the kind

of friendship what doesn't depend on constant

physical contact.

I know it's out there, and I know its importance.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas.

COYOTE: Marjory Stoneman Douglas soon became

the movement's most powerful public voice, even though,

as she was the first to admit, she seemed an unlikely

champion of the cause.

She wouldn't voluntarily say, "Well, let's go have a picnic

in the Everglades," or, "Let's go boating in the Everglades."

She just wasn't that much of an outdoor person really,

but she taught people about the Everglades.

She would go anywhere anytime to make a speech

about the Everglades.

COYOTE: A graduate of Wellesley College, Douglas had

come to Florida in 1915 to get a divorce after a brief

and unhappy marriage, then enlisted in the Navy

in World War I and sewed with the Red Cross in Europe.

"I wanted my own life in my own way," she said.

She became the "Miami Herald" society reporter but found

herself more interested in the struggles for women's rights

and racial justice, earning a reputation for her feistiness

and colorful writing.

When Ernest Coe turned her attention to the Everglades,

Douglas quickly agreed with him that its unique

combination of water, wildlife, and plants needed

federal protection, but at the national level, many park

supporters were unsure whether the Everglades, lacking

dramatic mountains, waterfalls, or geysers,

was worthy of being a national park.

"A swamp is a swamp," one leading

conservationist said.

The National Park Service has spent the first 15, 20 years

of its own existence promoting the West, and suddenly,

the Everglades comes along, and the National Park Service

says, "But wait a minute. Where's the scenery?"

"Where's the Canyons? Where's the mountains?"

"Why are people going to come here?"

COYOTE: Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., who like his father had

helped define the national park idea, was dispatched to

Florida to study the request.

"The quality of the scenery," he conceded, "is to"

"the casual observer somewhat confused and monotonous,"

"perhaps rather subtle for the average person in search"

"of the spectacular."

Then at the end of a long day, Olmsted found himself near the

nighttime roost of thousands of ibises and herons.

MAN AS OLMSTED: After dusk, flock after

flock came in from their feeding grounds and settled

in the thickets close at hand.

It was an unforgettable sight that ranks high among the

natural spectacles of America.

MAN: Somebody can tell you about a place, and you can nod

your head and say, "Yeah, boy, that's interesting."

Someone can show you a photograph or a painting of it

and say, "Man, that's something," but until you're

actually there, until you're in the midst of the place,

where all your senses are involved, that's

the transformative moment, that's when you say,

"This is a place, and I am part of it."

COYOTE: Skeptical Park Service leaders, including

Horace Albright, made a series of official trips to decide

whether to support the idea.

So did George Melendez Wright, director of the new

Wildlife Division.

Both found it easier to conduct at least part of their

investigations from the air, floating above the Everglades

in the Good Year Blimp.

Both were astonished by what they saw.

"Unless this area is quickly established as a national park,"

Wright warned, "the wildlife there will"

"become extinct."

RUNTE: And then Horace Albright got in a blimp,

went over the Everglades, looked down, saw the wildlife,

saw the alligators and all the ibises and all the wonderful

bird life, and said, "You know, this is a beautiful

"place, and I think this could be a park," and began to

change his mind.

And in the process of changing his mind,

it changed the Park Service's mind.

COYOTE: Finally, Ernest Coe and Marjory Stoneman Douglas'

efforts paid off.

A bill to create Everglades National Park passed Congress

by the narrowest of margins.

For the first time in history, a park had been created solely

for the preservation of animals and plants

and the environment that sustains them.

GREENE: It was an enchanted spot, and to me, that was the

closest thing to heaven on earth, and I spent almost

every weekend down in the a little bitty boat cruising

Florida Bay and looking at the birds.

We didn't fish, we didn't speed around in a boat.

We just floated around and felt like we were

all part of it.

Us and the birds.

And the fish that we could see on the bottom the water

was so clear.

We were just being there part of it all.

I think that's what a national park is all about.

It gives people breathing room, it gives people

a tranquil atmosphere.

It gives them an opportunity to be a part of nature.

You're just part of it all, just part of the rest of it.

[Frogs croaking]

ROOSEVELT: Today for the first time, I have seen Glacier Park.

Perhaps I can best express to you my thrill and delight by

saying that I wish that every American, old and young,

could have been with me.

The great mountains, the glaciers, the lakes,

and the trees make me long to stay here for all

the rest of the summer.

To say from standpoint of scenery alone that...

MEN, SINGING: Where seldom is heard a discouraging word

And the skies are not cloudy all day

COYOTE: In Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the national parks

had found their greatest friend in the White House

since the presidency of his cousin Theodore Roosevelt

a generation earlier.

F.D.R. had developed his own deep love of the outdoors

during his boyhood on his wealthy family's

country estate.

Adding historic sites and battlefields to the national

parks had been simply a first step in the larger

reorganization F.D.R. and his administration contemplated,

but a much bigger issue demanded his attention.

The Great Depression had thrown 1 out of every 4

American wage earners out of work.

Factories shut down, farms were foreclosed, unemployed

young men, concerned that they had become a burden to their

families, roamed the countryside

by the hundreds of thousands.

Many Americans wondered where their next meal

would come from.

In some cities, animals in the zoo were shot and the meat

distributed to the poor.

Everyone in the United States was affected.

MAN: The welfare at that time was called relief.

It was sad when I found out the source of that money.

It was from the paupers' fund, so that was hard to take,

but, hey, it kept us going.

COYOTE: Juan Lujan had grown up in west Texas near the tiny

town of Redford on the Rio Grande.

LUJAN: By the time I graduated from high school, that was

the depth of the Depression, so that prompted me and my

mother to seek something, and one of the social workers

advised her about the CCCs.

COYOTE: The TVA, the PWA, the WPA, the CWA.

Among the alphabet soup of programs Roosevelt's New Deal

created to stimulate the economy and combat

unemployment was one especially dear to

the president's heart because it incorporated his concern

for conservation.

He had pushed it through Congress in less than a week

after being inaugurated.

The Civilian Conservation Corps put young men to work

in national forests, state parks, and national parks,

clearing brush and replanting forests, fighting fires,

building visitor shelters and ranger cabins, improving

campsites and trails.

Horace Albright was part of the early planning,

and because the Park Service already had a long list

of projects ready to go, it was given a lead

role in the new program.

Within 3 months, 1,000 CCC camps were up and running

with nearly 300,000 young men at work in them, sending money

back home, helping millions of Americans.

LUJAN: Prior to the CCC, I didn't know anything

about national parks except what I read in my history

books, that they existed somewhere.

I had never been to a national park before.

COYOTE: Juan Lujan was dispatched to help develop

what would become Big Bend National Park in Texas.

LUJAN: We were housed in barracks,

we ate in a mess hall just like the military,

and we had a certain discipline.

We'd get up early in the morning, do calisthenics.

That was before breakfast, and you'd better be

at the calisthenics.

Otherwise, KP, kitchen patrol.

COYOTE: For many, it was their first time away from home

and their first real encounter with the natural world.

Burton Appleton from Brooklyn was sent to Glacier National

Park in northwest Montana.

I once visited my brother in Hackettstown, New Jersey,

which was maybe 50 miles west of the Hudson River.

I had an aunt who lived out on Long Island,

Eastport, Long Island.

Maybe that was 50 miles.

I can't remember visiting anyplace else.

Those are the only two times that I think I had left

Brooklyn, New York.

We'd been on the train for about 4 days, and we were

awakened at a stop, and I looked out the window of my

upper berth, and there was this mountain with snow

in April, and of course, in Brooklyn, we had a bluff

maybe in Prospect Park we could walk up, but nothing

like that in my past.

Another thing I remember is that I was out there by myself

one day with my Kodak box camera, and I... to this day,

I don't believe it.

A deer walked up to me within 10 feet maybe.

I stood stock still.

I couldn't believe that, and I took a picture, and as

soon as I clicked the camera, the deer turned tail an ran,

and I have that photo.

COYOTE: Claude Tyler, at age 16 the eldest of 6 boys and

2 girls in a desperately poor farm family from Blossom,

Texas, was dispatched to the barren wastes of Death Valley

National Monument.

TYLER: We loaded on a truck somewheres in that area

and went to Death Valley, and it was pretty warm then,

but in June, it really did get hot.

Fifth day of June, it was 120 in the shade.

270 foot below sea level.

Well, it was hot, and us boys kind of got toughened

to it, I think.

We all got a good suntan.

COYOTE: Tyler was then sent to Lassen Volcanic National Park

in northern California, a peak more than

10,000 feet above sea level.

TYLER: I'd never been to the mountains before.

It was all new to me.

Kind of short-winded the first time I went up there.

Ha ha ha!

Get up above the tree line, why, you get short of breath,

and I would make pictures and send them home and tell them I

was doing all right and this is where I'm at, and Mother

would write and say, "Well, you be careful

on those mountains."

We got paid $30 a month of which a whole $5.00 was ours.

The rest of it went home, and $25 a month seems like

nothing, but it made a big difference.

Money and dignity was important because whenever you

need a shirt and you buy it, if you bought it with your own

money, that's a good feeling.

ROOSEVELT: It's very good to be here at these

Virginia CCC camps.

I wish I could see them all over the country.

I hope that all over the country they're in as fine

condition as the camps that I have seen today.

I wish that I could take a couple of months off from the

White House and come down here and live with them because I

know I'd get full of health the way I have.

LUJAN: We almost thought he was God.

We really liked him.

Because at the same time, there were many other programs

having nothing to do with the CCC, but there was progress,

there was work, there was money in

the community circulating.

COYOTE: Besides the conservation work they did,

the men also participated in organized sports, hobby clubs,

discussion groups, and classes meant to prepare them

for getting jobs once they left the camps.

At Big Bend, Juan Lujan helped lay the foundations for new

park buildings and then, because he spoke both Spanish

and English fluently, became a museum guide.

He was also put to work teaching his

less-educated comrades.

LUJAN: Most of the enrollees in that particular camp had

not graduated from high school.

Many of them had little or no education, and those of us

that had some, we volunteered to teach classes, and some

of them wanted to learn how to read and write Spanish.

I taught some of those, too.

COYOTE: Juan Lujan would go on to college, something his

mother always wanted him to do, eventually earn a master's

and then a doctoral degree and continue teaching others

for the rest of his life.

After his time at Lassen, Claude Tyler returned

to Blossom, Texas.

TYLER: I went back to school for a year.

I went over to the school house, and the teacher wanted

me to go from a... I had only finished about the fifth

grade, and he looked over some of the things that I took

in CC camps and correspondence courses, and he put me

in the first year in high school, and so I went one year

in high school, and that's the last

of the education that I had.

It's because my parents hadn't really got up

on their feet real good.

I went back to CC camps and stayed two terms in there.

APPLETON: I was not a very good high-school student.

My grades were not all that good, and I am convinced to

this day that the only reason I was able to matriculate

at the New York State College of Forestry was that I

convinced the registrar or the dean of admissions of my

experience in the CCC.

That's what the CCC did for me.

COYOTE: Over the course of the Depression, more than

3 million men would find work at one time or another with the

Civilian Conservation Corps.

They would build more than 97,000 miles of fire roads

in national forests, combat soil erosion on 84 million

acres of farmland, and plant 3 billion trees, more than one

half the total reforestation accomplished

in the nation's history.

During that time, some $218 million would be pumped

into projects solely within the national parks,

including trails and buildings that remain to this day.

RUNTE: The Depression is a golden age

because the National Park Service is a federal agency,

and it's going to get all of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's

"let's rebuild the nation" dollars.

And the budgets of the National Park Service soar,

and as the National Park Service looks at projects that

could put people to work, Congress agrees,

and Franklin Delano Roosevelt agrees,

and the National Park Service

suddenly finds itself swimming in money relative to what it

had in the 1920s.

ROOSEVELT: We are definitely in an era of building today,

the best kind of building,

the building of great public projects

for the benefit of the public and with the definite

objective of building human happiness at the same time.

TYLER: Looking back on it now, I believe that it helped a lot

of families have a better life.

I realize now that it was for the benefit of the economy,

too, but I believe that a lot of families might not have

been able to survive if it hadn't have been

for that program.

And I got to see a lot of the world that I wouldn't have

seen before that if I hadn't have done to the CC camps.

Mount Lassen was outstanding all right.

Death Valley was just hot.

I don't know whether I'd call that a favorite memory,

but I can remember it.

[Clattering]

SCHULLERY: The national parks have always been managed

pretty much by the values of their time.

It was still spectacle.

Wild beauty was defined on superficial levels that had

very little to do with wildness and how wildness

actually works.

Oddly enough, it's the scientists who had the most to

do with redefining beauty.

MAN AS GEORGE MELENDEZ WRIGHT: In the end, the National Park

Service either will be praised for intelligently conserving

the last fragments of primitive America or condemned

for failure to hold to the real purpose.

George Melendez Wright.

WOMAN: I think his passion really shows through

in his writing.

He was very persuasive.

He could convince people who really were against his ideas,

he could bring them along.

He was a joyous person.

He was very comfortable in his own skin, not egotistical

but very confident in himself.

He was a small person even by Hispanic standards

but with a big heart, mind, and presence.

COYOTE: By 1936, George Melendez Wright was married

with a growing family, but he was busier

with is work than ever.

The Wildlife Division he had started within in the Park

Service now had 27 biologists promoting Wright's vision that

park policies had to take the animals and plants into

account, not just the tourists.

His personal interest in Yellowstone's trumpeter swans,

the largest and most rare of American water fowl, which had

been reduced by hunting to a mere handful of breeding

pairs, had turned into a personal crusade to save them

from extinction.

Wright solicited the help of local rod and gun clubs,

lobbied state fish and game commissions and other federal

agencies, even donated some of his own money again to create

a special wildlife refuge that ultimately brought the swans

back from the brink.

MAN AS GEORGE MELENDEZ WRIGHT: Sometimes while I'm watching

these birds, the illusion of the untouchability of this

wilderness becomes so strong that it is stronger than

the reality, and the polished roadway becomes the illusion,

the mirage that has no substance.

COYOTE: In February, the traveled to the newly

authorized Big Bend National Park in southwest Texas,

where the Chisos Mountains rise out of the Chihuhuan

Desert and the Rio Grande cuts through a series of dramatic

canyons separating the United States from Mexico.

With Roger Toll, another rising star within the Park

Service, Wright was part of a two-nation commission studying

the possibility of an international park straddling

both sides of the border.

His fluency in Spanish and his outgoing disposition helped

him make friends with his Mexican counterparts.

After the meeting, he and Toll headed for home.

Near Deming, New Mexico, an oncoming car blew a tire

and crashed head-on into their vehicle.

Both men were killed.

George Melendez Wright was 31.

Without him, the Park Service's interest

in wildlife waned.

By the end of the decade, of the 27 biologists who had

once been under his supervision, only 9 were left.

MAN: Scenery without wildlife is scenery.

Wildlife is a component of the grander scene.

Without that wildlife, you don't have

a national park.

George Melendez Wright was a savior of wildlife

in America's national parks, but more importantly,

George Melendez Wright is a savior

of the national park ideal.

ROOSEVELT: I'm very keen about travel, not only personally...

You know that... but also travel for as many Americans as can

possibly afford it because those Americans will be fulfilling

a very desirable objective of our citizenship, getting to

know their own country better, and the more they see of it,

the more they will realize the privileges which God

and nature have given to the American people.

COYOTE: Throughout the Depression,

President Roosevelt made a number of well-publicized visits

to the national parks, glorying in the chance to be outdoors

in the midst of such stunning landscapes, even if the polio

that had destroyed his legs confined him to the backseat

of his touring car, and he cheerfully encouraged his

fellow citizens to follow his example.

ROOSEVELT: I decided today that every year ought

to be National Parks Year.

There is nothing so American as our national parks.

The scenery and wildlife are native, and the fundamental

idea behind the parks is native.

It is in brief that the country belongs to the people.

They are not for the rich alone.

COYOTE: Despite hard times, the number of park visitors

continued to rise during the 1930s from roughly 3 million

a year at the start of the decade to 15.5 million

in 1939, and Roosevelt was intent on setting aside more

places for them to visit.

He turned his attention to the northwestern corner of

Lake Superior off the coast of Minnesota and Michigan

and the largest freshwater island in the world, creating

Isle Royale National Park.

The president also used his authority under

the Antiquities Act to bypass Congress altogether and create

a string of national monuments.

Some of them would eventually be elevated to park status,

including Joshua Tree in southern California, named

for the distinctive plants Mormon pioneers believed

looked in silhouette liked the Prophet Joshua raising his

arms to beckon them forward.

The Dry Tortugas, a remote cluster of 7 tiny islands

70 miles off the southernmost tip of Florida.

On one island sits the largest brick fortification

in the world, Fort Jefferson,

used during the Civil War as a prison.

Capitol Reef in Utah, where a hundred-mile fold

in the earth's crust exposes a panoply of differently colored

rock formations the Navajo Indians called

The Land of the Sleeping Rainbow.

And off the coast of Santa Barbara,

the Channel Islands,

a crucial breeding ground for hundreds of animal species,

including the California brown pelican, whose nesting place

had virtually disappeared everywhere else in the western

United States, an oasis of undeveloped land just a few

miles from the explosive urban growth of greater Los Angeles.

All clear!

ROOSEVELT: We should remember that the development of our

national park system over a period of many years has not

been a simple bed of roses.

It has been a long and fierce fight against many private

interests, which were entrenched in political

and economic power.

MAN: This is an allocation out of the total sum...

COYOTE: No one was more willing to take on entrenched

interests than the president's

irascible Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes,

a self-described old curmudgeon.

A Chicago lawyer and former Republican stalwart known

equally for his explosive temper and his fierce devotion

to New Deal policies, he had become one of Roosevelt's

closest and most controversial advisers.

"The meanest man who ever sat in a cabinet office

"in Washington," Horace Albright said,

"and the best Secretary of the Interior we ever had."

Ickes fought battles on every front.

One of his first acts was to abolish the department's

segregated lunchrooms.

Then he told the national parks in the South to simply

ignore local Jim Crow laws

requiring separate facilities for blacks.

At Virginia's Shenandoah National Park, signs

segregating campgrounds or picnic areas were

quietly taken down.

Ickes make more enemies by repeatedly proposing the

creation of a Department of Conservation that would put

national parks, national forests, and all other natural

resources under the same administrative control... his.

Congress repeatedly refused, but he continued to have

Roosevelt's ear and trust and was tirelessly effective

in advocating new parks regardless of the opposition.

In 1937, Roosevelt and Ickes entered

into a park controversy that had been raging for 30 years.

On the Olympic Peninsula west of Seattle, majestic mountains

trapped the moist Pacific winds, which dropped

160 inches of rain a year, nurturing verdant rain forests

that contained the largest specimens in the world

of Douglas fir, red cedar, western hemlock,

and Sitka spruce.

For centuries, it was the homeland of native tribes like

the Makah and Quinault, the Hoh and Skokomish.

Over the years, more than 10 different bills had been

introduced in Congress to make Mount Olympus National

Monument into a National Park.

Each one was defeated, caught in a seemingly endless battle

between the Forest Service and the Park Service.

Meanwhile, loggers were approaching the last virgin

stands of rain forest.

"Left to the care of the Forest Service," Harold Ickes

contended, "such places suffered the same fate as"

"a pig in the stockyards."

"All that is left," he said, "is the squeal."

POPE: Harold Ickes was one of the few Interior Secretaries

of the 20th Century who was as big as the parks because Ickes

was the first Secretary of the Interior who really engaged

the fact that you could save a place once somebody had

aspirations on it.

The early parks were created before anybody big

and powerful had aspirations, and when San Francisco,

which was big and powerful, drew its bead on Hetch Hetchy,

San Francisco won, Hetch Hetchy lost.

Ickes said, "Wait a minute."

"Big, powerful people may have their aspirations"

"on the Olympics, but they don't have to win."

COYOTE: The president decided to have a look for himself,

but his visit was arranged by the Forest Service and its

allies in the lumber and pulp mill industries, all of them

intent on convincing Roosevelt that a national park would

ruin an already suffering local economy.

No detail was overlooked.

They excluded all Park Service officials from

the invitation list, scheduled a massive logging train to

rumble past the president's lodge during his breakfast,

a not-so-subtle reminder of the jobs at stake, and they

moved the sign marking the National Forest boundary to

give the impression that a heavily logged area,

now several square miles of burned stumps, was not

on federal land.

"I hope the son of a bitch who's responsible for this is"

"roasting in hell," Roosevelt said, not realizing that he

was actually looking at a national forest and his guide

was the forest supervisor.

When Roosevelt learned about the deception, it only

increased his commitment to protect the forest.

On June 29, 1938, with the president's passionate

support, Congress converted the National Monument to

Olympic National Park and gave Roosevelt the authority to

expand its boundaries, which he soon did, saving two

of the most threatened valleys by stripping an additional

187,000 acres away from the Forest Service.

MAN: When the weekend comes around, I get restless.

At night, I bring maps of Mount Rainier into bed with me

and fall asleep looking at them.

When it's time to depart for a trip, I cannot stay in bed

any longer and get up before anyone else.

I can't wait to go hiking again.

Iwao Matsushita.

COYOTE: Among the millions of people who

took President Roosevelt's advice to visit national parks

were Iwao Matsushita and his wife Hanaye, Japanese citizens

who had moved to Seattle in 1919.

Each Sunday, the Seattle Camera Club, which he had

helped start, organized outings to nearby

Mount Rainier National Park, where Matsushita not only took

still photographs but also created home movies and kept

a small journal to record their adventures.

[Projector running]

MAN AS IWAO MATSUSHITA: Beyond these high valleys, you can

see the craggily white mountains, whose peaks are

showing through a thick fog.

It is a view worthy of a sumi-e painting.

Looking to the north, you can see Mount Rainier appearing

majestically like our king of mountains Mount Fuji.

I sit on a patch of heather.

I marvel at the speed with which clouds are

changing their shape.

I crouch by a stream fed by the remaining snow to enjoy

a cold drink of water and open up my sushi.

COYOTE: By the mid-1930s, Iwao and Hanaye had visited

the park more than 100 times, drawn to the place they called

Holy Mountain.

MAN AS IWAO MATSUSHITA: Everyone here is having a good

old time, and no one had a reason to frown.

Like a paradise of our own world and time.

Looking up, I feel as though the great snowy mountain were

an affectionate mother to all the people playing

on her slopes.

COYOTE: Farther to the south, another Japanese immigrant was

finding similar joy and inspiration

in another national park.

MAN: Success or failure is not my aim in life.

Whether I be a flake of snow or only a drop of dew,

I do not care.

I wish only to paint with gratitude to nature in my

heart and with sincerity in my brush.

This is my future, this is my biography.

Chiura Obata.

COYOTE: Chiura Obata had arrived in the United States

in 1903 at age 17, a promising young painter whose original

intention was to stay only briefly in America before

going on to Paris to continue his career, but he soon set

down roots in San Francisco, creating some of the only

on-site sketches of the destruction wrought by the

Great 1906 Earthquake, making a name for himself in the bay

area's international art community, even co-founding

the first Japanese-American baseball team on the mainland.

Then in 1927, he visited the high Sierra

and John Muir's Yosemite.

MAN AS CHIURA OBATA: In the evening, it gets very cold.

The coyotes howl in the distance.

In the mid-sky, the moon is arcing.

All the trees are standing here and there...

[Coyote howls]

And it is very quiet.

[Water running]

You can learn from the teachings within

this quietness.

Some people teach by speeches, some by talking, but I think

it is important that you are taught by silence.

WOMAN: I think for my grandfather it was not only

that he was able to paint this landscape, but for him,

it became a spiritual inspiration, as well, and he

would describe it that this was "the greatest harvest"

"for my whole life and future in painting," and not only did

he paint for art that he would bring home but also even just

little postcards.

He sent several postcards back to his children back home.

One of them reads, "Gyo-Chan, the lovely moon is gone."

"It went to bed early to sleep."

"Grow big and shine more."

COYOTE: For two months, he and two other artist friends

tramped the high country, taking in all the park had to

offer, exposing Obata to what he called "not just shizen,"

or nature, "but dai-shizen, great nature."

Obata's Yosemite images drew huge crowds when they were put

on exhibit and rave reviews from the critics.

"To see our native beauty spots through the eyes

"of a foreign artist of high rank," one of them wrote,

"is to find new charm in our own land."

By the 1930s, Obata had been asked to join the art faculty

at the University of California, and every summer,

he and his family would return to Yosemite, where he gave

lectures, taught outdoor sketching classes to the

tourists, and made his annual pilgrimage to a special mountain

spring, whose clear water he collected for use in making

his paints throughout the rest of the year.

MAN AS CHIURA OBATA: I dedicate my paintings first to

the great nature of California, which has always

given me great lessons, comfort, and nourishment,

second to the people who share the same thoughts as though

drawing water from one river under one tree.

My paintings, created by the humble brush of a mediocre man,

are nothing but expressions of my

whole-hearted praise and gratitude.

COYOTE: By 1940, thanks in great part to the national

parks they had come to cherish as their own,

both Chiura Obata and Iwao Matsushita

had decided the United States was home,

even if its laws at the time prohibited them from

becoming citizens because they had been born in Japan.

When the company he worked for ordered him back to Tokyo,

Matsushita resigned.

The Depression would make finding a new job difficult,

but he and Hanaye wanted to stay close to their

Holy Mountain.

MAN AS IWAO MATSUSHITA: I enjoy my life in Seattle.

I have so many happy memories with nice people, both

Japanese and Americans.

I have visited Mount Rainier, my lover, more than 190 times.

I cannot leave Seattle when I think of the beautiful views

of Mount Rainier.

Iwao Matsushita.

MAN: Fortunate he is who may see Mount McKinley against

the summer midnight sky, the lush fern forests of Kilauea,

the white jubilance of Yosemite's waters,

and the somber rock and surf of Acadia National Park.

To record and interpret these qualities for others,

to brighten the drab moods of cities, and build high

horizons of the spirit on the edge of plain and desert,

these are some of the many obligations of art.

Ansel Adams.

COYOTE: In 1938, a book arrived at Harold Ickes'

office, entitled "Sierra Nevada: the John Muir Trail."

It was filled with stunning images of the mountainous

Kings River Canyon region of the southern Sierra, captured

by an aspiring photographer named Ansel Adams.

This was his first book of landscapes, and since he knew

that Ickes was interested in making the area a national

park, Adams had sent it along with his personal compliments.

Ickes took it to the White House to show

President Roosevelt, who liked it so much he quickly

appropriated it for his own.

Ansel Adams was on his way to becoming the most influential

photographer for the cause of national parks since

William Henry Jackson's images of Yellowstone had helped

persuade Congress to create the world's

first park in 1872.

There is this unending argument about whether art can

affect human affairs, and I think Ansel is one great

example of how it did.

Muir is another example.

Muir's writings absolutely had effect, and it wasn't just

propaganda writings.

It was his evocative descriptive writings

of the Sierras.

Same with Ansel.

Ansel used his photographs in this movement and used them

very effectively.

COYOTE: The sensitive only child of a patrician

San Francisco family, Adams had first encountered nature

during a family trip to Yosemite.

There, seeing the waterfalls and the rock faces,

El Capitan, The Three Brothers, Half Dome,

he was transfixed.

"We should not casually pass them," Adams wrote later,

"for they are the very heart of the earth speaking to us."

"I knew my destiny," he added,

"when I first experienced Yosemite."

In the 1920s when he made two pack trips into the

Kings Canyon Country, it ignited in him the conviction that

the place was just as inspirationally spectacular as

Yosemite and equally deserving of federal protection.

It was an old dream.

John Muir had fought for it and failed in the 1890s.

Then Stephen Mather had taken up the cause

with the same result.

Now Adams and the Sierra Club believed they had an ally who

shared the dream and had the power to make it come true...

Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes.

"If I had my way about national parks," Ickes said,

"I would create one without a road in it, a place where man"

"would not try to improve upon God."

Ickes saw in Kings Canyon his chance to create a new

kind of park, a wilderness park in which

roads, hotels, and other large developments would be banned.

He thought it should be called the John Muir Kings Canyon

Wilderness Park, and he threw himself into the fight against

the forces that instead wanted dams, irrigation projects,

grazing, timber harvesting, and elaborate tourist resorts.

Through a series of shrewd maneuvers, he turned one

private interest group against the other, waged ceaseless

battle against the Forest Service's efforts to retain

control over the land, and persuaded most

of the major conservation groups not to abandon their

support because of the compromises he felt

he had to make.

"Ickes was," one opponent of the park said,

"overambitious, egocentric, ruthless, unethical,"

"and highly effective."

In the final moments before the vote in Congress, the name

was simplified, dropping any reference

to John Muir and wilderness.

On March 4, 1940, President Roosevelt signed the law

creating Kings Canyon National park.

Because it was a road-less park and because of his disability,

Roosevelt would never be able to see Kings Canyon in person.

Instead, he contented himself with following John Muir's

trail through the photographs and words of Ansel Adams.

MAN AS ANSEL ADAMS: The dawn wind in the high Sierra is not

just a passage of cool air through forest conifers,

but within the labyrinth of human consciousness becomes

a stirring of some world magic of most delicate persuasion.

Here are forces familiar with the eons of creation,

contemplating the flow of life and of change through living

things, each of them tied to cloud, stone, and sunlight.

We may make new discoveries about ourselves.

COYOTE: In the fall of 1941, Ickes decided Adams could be

of even greater assistance.

He put him on the Interior Department's payroll at $22.22

a day and told him to bring back photographs of all the

parks for prominent display in the capital city.

Adams said it was one of the best ideas ever to come out

of Washington and happily packed up his station wagon to

set out on his assignment.

Off and on for the next 8 years, he would compile

thousands of images of the national parks and visit every

one of them except, to his great regret, the Everglades.

[Radio static]

ANNOUNCER: This bulletin from the NBC Newsroom

here in New York.

SECOND ANNOUNCER: We've just had a flash...

ANNOUNCER: Action against Pearl Harbor defenses.

SECOND ANNOUNCER: saying that a state of war exists

with the United States.

THIRD ANNOUNCER: That the Japanese have attacked

the United States Naval Base.

SECOND ANNOUNCER: Now we begin to see through things,

it's obvious that the... the, uh, Imperial General's staff

has precipitated an attack and now announces

that that attack is war.

COYOTE: But just a few months after Adams began his travels,

the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and the United States

was thrust into another World War.

Now Adams pursued his project with even greater passion.

To those who questioned whether his artistry could be

put to a better purpose in wartime, he had

a simple reply.

"I believe my work," he wrote, "relates most efficiently to"

"what we are fighting for."

Like everything else in American life, the national

parks now found themselves subordinated to the all-out

effort to defeat Japan and its ally Germany.

The CCC camps closed down as the men who had been working

on trails and park buildings became soldiers and shipped

out overseas.

Park budgets were cut to a quarter of their

pre-war levels.

Just as in the First World War, pressures mounted to open

them up to timber cutting, mining, and grazing.

Harold Ickes did his best do minimize the damage.

MAN AS ANSEL ADAMS: When World War ll began, there were

strong pressures in many circles to close the national

parks for the duration with the thought that no one needs

a vacation in wartime.

Ickes disagreed with this, stating that in times

of national stress and sorrow the people needed precisely

what the national parks could offer.

Ansel Adams.

COYOTE: When Ickes informed Roosevelt that a proposed

bombing range would endanger the breeding grounds

of the rare trumpeter swan that George Melendez Wright

had worked so hard to preserve, the president dashed

off a quick note to his Secretary of War

countermanding the decision.

"The verdict is for the trumpeter swan and against

"the Army," Roosevelt wrote.

"The Army must find a different nesting place."

In 1941, the year leading up to

America's entry into the war, a record 21 million people had

visited the national parks.

The next year, the figure dropped to 9 million, then to

6.8 million in 1943.

All across the system, many park rangers changed

uniforms and went off to war.

"Poor, old National Park Service is in a bad way,"

a now retired Horace Albright wrote to his

successor after being informed of all the cutbacks,

but the parks still had a role to play.

At Mount Rainier, units of what would become

the 10th Mountain Division were taught how to survive in high

altitudes and cold weather.

War planners also realized that national parks could

provide much needed rest and recuperation

for battle-weary soldiers.

The Navy took over the swank Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite

for a convalescence center.

Rest camps went up in Sequoia, Carlsbad Caverns,

the Grand Canyon,

and Mount McKinley National Park in Alaska was

transformed into an army recreation camp.

Soldiers stationed in the Aleutian Islands could fish,

hike, ski, skate, and relax.

In 1943, 1.6 million soldiers found

momentary solace and enjoyment in a national park,

1/4 of the total visitation.

That same year, Ansel Adams interrupted his photographic

survey and went to the Owens Valley of California

in the eastern shadow of Mount Whitney to document

something entirely different.

After the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, President

Roosevelt signed an executive order requiring all people

of Japanese descent living on the West Coast, even those who

were United States citizens, to be uprooted from their

homes and sent to internment camps

for the duration of the war.

"We must prosecute this war with all ruthless efficiency,"

Adams wrote after he had photographed the Manzanar

internment Camp, "but we must be certain that, as the rights"

"of the individual are the most sacred elements of our"

"society, we will not allow passion, vengeance, hatred,"

"and racial antagonism to cloud the principles of universal"

"justice and mercy."

WOMAN: Dear Husband, I'm a little too much tired,

but I'm sure I can live here all right.

Just imagine a mountain camp.

When the sky's clear, we will see our holy

Mount Rainier, I suppose.

I will write you again very soon.

Lovingly yours, Hanaye.

COYOTE: Because he had worked for a Japanese company,

Iwao Matsushita was arrested and taken away from his wife

in the first hours after Pearl Harbor.

Hanaye was put in a temporary detention center near Seattle,

where she tried her best to boost the spirits of her

husband far away in an internment camp

in western Montana.

WOMAN AS HANAYE MATSUSHITA: Dear Husband, after severe

rain, the sky became clear, and we saw Mount Rainier over

the hill yesterday for the first time.

There will actually be a day when you'll be released

and we'll be able to rest peacefully.

Once in a while, I dream about running around the base

of Mount Rainier.

Remember the times we hiked through the mountain together?

It all seems like a dream.

MAN AS CHIURA OBATA: The sudden burst of Pearl Harbor

was as if the Mother Earth on which we stood was swept by

the terrific force of a big wave of resentment

of the American people.

Our dignity and our hopes were crushed.

COYOTE: Friends of Chiura Obata had pleaded with the

federal government that the artist posed no security

threat and even suggested that he be taken instead to his

beloved Yosemite.

The request was denied.

Obata and his family were forced to go to a camp

in Topaz, Utah.

To help keep his and his fellow prisoners' minds off

what he called "the intolerable sin" of their

incarceration, Obata opened an art school at the camp

and continued his own sketching and painting.

HILL: So here he was basically with a community

of fellow Japanese.

"Yes, we are in this desert, but don't just look"

"at the dust and the ground, don't just be depressed"

"about what's happening."

"You can somehow lift your spirits by looking"

"at the mountains that are surrounding us."

They were not the same mountains that he had

experienced in the Sierras of course, and yet,

he felt comforted.

He would use that word.

"I still feel comforted and nurtured by great nature."

And he wanted other people to understand this, as well.

COYOTE: One of his paintings, "Moonlight Over Topaz,"

was given to the president's wife, Eleanor Roosevelt,

in thanks for her speaking out for fair treatment

of Japanese Americans.

Years later in remembrance of his personal ordeal, Obata

would paint "Glorious Struggle," the image of a tree

in Yosemite's high Sierra, whose own struggle to survive

seemed to give him strength and hope in his darkest hour.

One subject he loved to paint again and again

was the sequoia.

For him, they were this great vertical

line that connected heaven and earth, and for him, he saw

the life of a person in these trees and that no matter the

storms and trials of life that these trees survive with great

dignity and great strength.

MAN AS CHIURA OBATA: In such times, I heard the gentle

but strong whisper of the Sequoia gigantean.

"Hear me, you poor man."

"I've stood here more than 3,700 years in rain, snow,"

"storm, and even mountain fire, still keeping my thankful"

"attitude strongly with nature."

"Do not cry, do not spend your time and energy worrying."

"You have children following."

"Keep up your unity. Come with me."

Chiura Obata.

COYOTE: In the midst of the war, a letter arrived

at the White House for President Roosevelt.

MAN: My dear Mr. President, many years ago,

I purchased some 30,000 acres of land

in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, confidently expecting

that the federal government would gladly accept

the land as a gift to be added to its national park system.

15 years have passed.

The government has not accepted the property.

I have now determined to dispose of the property,

selling it if necessary in the market to any

satisfactory buyer.

Very sincerely, John D. Rockefeller Jr.

COYOTE: The longest festering fight in the history

of the parks was about to erupt into

a full-scale battle.

Back in the 1920s, Horace Albright had shown

Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller Jr.

The flat, sage-brush-covered plain called Jackson Hole

and explained to them his dream that all of it,

the valley floor as well as

the mountains, would one day be preserved, but when

Congress had created Grand Teton National Park in 1929,

it left the valley alone and set aside only the mountains.

Meanwhile, Rockefeller continued anonymously buying

up ranches and homesteads in the valley with the intention

of donating it all for the park's expansion, but Wyoming

politicians, who had learned of Rockefeller's scheme,

did everything they could to thwart his plan, not wanting

Washington to tell them what they could and could not do

with their land.

The state's sole congressman even introduced a bill calling

for the complete abolition of Grand Teton National Park

despite the fact that the mountains were not part

of the dispute.

MAN AS HORACE ALBRIGHT: I must confess I get pretty

discouraged at times in trying to understand some

of the people out there.

It almost makes one weep, not for one's self

because after all what difference does it make to

an individual what happens to Wyoming, but one weeps

for Wyoming itself.

Horace Albright.

COYOTE: Albright was a private citizen but more determined

than ever to see his dream fulfilled.

In 1943 with Congress still unwilling to enlarge the park,

he and Rockefeller and Harold Ickes decided that their

only hope lay in the president's unique authority under

the Antiquities Act to create a national monument.

Rockefeller's letter to Roosevelt was meant to prod

the president into action.

It worked.

On March 15, 1943, Roosevelt signed an executive order

establishing Jackson Hole National Monument, placing

221,610 acres of federal land on the eastern border of

Grand Teton National Park under Park Service control.

In Wyoming, the response was a declaration of political war.

The president, one senator said, had committed

"a foul, sneaking, Pearl Harbor blow."

A journalist wrote that Roosevelt's action followed

the general lines of Adolf Hitler's

seizure of Austria.

MAN: When this happened, it was a big uproar,

lots of talk, lots of talk, and the ranchers

were totally opposed, and they thought their grazing

rights were being destroyed.

COYOTE: Wyoming's governor threatened to use state police

against any National Park official attempting to assume

authority in the new monument.

Some Forest Service employees gutted their ranger stations

before turning them over to the Park Service, and hoping

to provoke a confrontation and draw attention to their cause,

a group of armed local ranchers, led by the aging

movie star Wallace Beery, defiantly herded 500 head

of cattle across the monument without a permit.

MAN: I was born here in Jackson Hole in 1912.

There was pretty strong resentment about the manner

in which the monument had been created, and we had rifles,

and we drove cattle across the Gros Ventre River and across

the monument land, and Wallace Beery was right

at the... right at the head.

Ostensibly to shoot anybody who might try to stop us.

No one tried to stop us, but we did get

a lot of attention.

COYOTE: In Washington, Wyoming's delegation pushed

through a bill abolishing the national monument and turning

the land back to the Forest Service.

Roosevelt vetoed it.

The state of Wyoming then went to court, claiming that

Jackson Hole lacked the objects of scientific or

historic interest necessary for national monument status.

Postcards showing a ramshackle outhouse were circulated

with a message saying, "These are some"

"of the historic structures here."

"This is one known to have been occupied several times"

"by Horace M. Albright."

A federal court dismissed the case, saying it was a dispute

between the executive and legislative branches which

the judiciary would do well to steer clear of.

In 1945, Roosevelt died and World War ll ended,

but the battle of Jackson Hole roared on.

MAN AS HORACE ALBRIGHT: Dealing with Wyoming is like

dealing with the Russians.

You never get anywhere by trying to cooperate.

Horace Albright.

COYOTE: "This was a battle," the retired Albright said,

"I had to get into."

He lobbied his Republican friends like former president

Herbert Hoover and marshaled a campaign by major conservation

groups to rally their members to tell Congress that

the American people also had a stake in what

happened in Wyoming.

A study was published showing that retail sales taxes

in Jackson Hole had doubled and the region's overall

economy had been strengthened by the boost in tourism,

but the local political climate remained decidedly,

stubbornly anti-park.

Finally in 1950 after it became clear that the bitter

battle would never end in unconditional surrender by

either side, a compromise was worked out.

Teton County would be reimbursed for lost property

taxes, existing grazing rights were grandfathered in,

and the migratory elk herd would be managed by both the

Park Service and the state, which would be permitted to

oversee supervised hunts.

In return, the bulk of Jackson Hole National Monument became

part of an enlarged Grand Teton National Park,

now 3 times its original size.

Included in it was the 30,000 acres of private land

John D. Rockefeller Jr. had been trying so hard to give away.

MURIE: So it's not just the spectacular.

It's the foreground.

You have to have foregrounds to wilderness, you have to

have the highlands and middle lands and the lowlands,

and a huge piece of northern Jackson Hole is saved from

strip malls, saved from what happened to... to... down

in the town of Jackson.

COYOTE: Tucked away in the compromise that finally ended

the battle of Jackson Hole was another concession:

"According to this provision, future United States presidents"

"are barred from ever again using executive action to"

"establish new national monuments"

"in the state of Wyoming except"

"by the express permission of Congress."

Wyoming, the state with the distinction of having the

world's first national park, Yellowstone, and the first

national monument, Devil's Tower, now had another

distinction... the only state where the Antiquities Act

is null and void.

HANSEN: I was one who was very critical of the Rockefellers

and did all I was able to do to try to thwart their plans,

and I'm grateful now that I wasn't successful because I

have to appreciate as everyone else does the uniqueness

and the beauty of this area.

Thank God for the Rockefellers.

I've told them on more than one occasion that I'm glad

I lost that fight.

WOMAN: For all the bureaucracy, for all the red

tape, for all the arguments about public policy,

our national parks are first and foremost places of love,

and I think each American can look into their own hearts

and tell you, "This is my national park," and it might

be the Great Smokies, it might be Yosemite.

For our family, it's Grand Teton.

This is the range of our memory.

My great-grandfather brought my grandfather, who brought

my father, who brought us as children.

It's the last place my mother came before she died.

It's also the last place my brother took his family before

he succumbed to lymphoma.

I'll never forget. We were at the Murie Ranch,

and Steve and Ann and the girls were walking

toward the Snake River.

It was pink light, alpenglow, and Steve stopped,

and you could see the reflections of the Tetons

in one of the pools, and he turned to Ann and the girls,

and he said, "Mark this moment."

And then 5 elks went across the Snake River, and I watched

this family of 5 return.

These are the stories that allow us to go home and face

not only our lives but even our deaths.

That's the power of these remembered landscapes.

DUNCAN: The Declaration of Independence began with this

incredible statement that all men, all human beings

are created equal.

We've been chasing that ideal, those words for the rest

of our history, often too slowly, never quite reaching

it even yet, but that's the statement that we're chasing.

The national park idea, which is the best idea we had

after we became a nation, didn't start that way

with a bold statement, grand ideals that we're

trying to chase.

It began sort of experimentally,

improvisationally, and it's only as we've moved through

time that we have added this notion of what a park is

and what's allowed in it and what's not allowed in it,

what we should be drawing from it, but like the notion

of freedom, we've always been arguing over it, we've always

been trying to grapple with its meaning, and always trying

to on the one hand remain true to the ideal but leaving it up

to each succeeding generation to either push it a little bit

farther or broaden it a little bit more.

COYOTE: In the midst of Franklin Roosevelt's

presidency, the world renowned contralto Marian Anderson had

been denied the opportunity to perform in

Constitution Hall, the 4,000-seat auditorium

controlled by the Daughters of the American Revolution,

because of the color of her skin.

At the urging of Eleanor Roosevelt, Harold Ickes,

who had once been the head of the NAACP in Chicago, quickly

issued Anderson permission to sing at a different venue,

the Lincoln Memorial, a recent addition

to the national park system.

The concert was free and drew a crowd of 75,000

of all races and creeds.

HAROLD ICKES: Genius, genius draws no color line, and so it

is fitting that Marian Anderson should raise her

voice in tribute to the noble Lincoln,

whom mankind will ever honor.

Miss Marian Anderson.

COYOTE: After being introduced by Ickes, Anderson stepped to

the microphone and began her program.

My country, 'tis of thee

Sweet land of liberty

Of thee we sing

Land where my fathers died

Land of our pilgrims' pride

From every mountainside

Let freedom ring

Ave Maria

ICKES: In this great auditorium under the sky,

all of us are free.

When God gave us this wonderful outdoors and the sun

and the moon and the stars, he made no distinction of race

or creed or color.

[Anderson continues singing "Ave Maria"]

POPE: You start out with places that were created

in the late 19th Century because nobody wanted them,

like Yellowstone.

You go through places like Hetch Hetchy, which were

sacrificed because somebody did want them.

You go to the Olympic Peninsula, and the guys who

wanted to cut the logs lose.

You go to Jackson Hole, and the state of Wyoming

desperately fights the creation of Grand Tetons

and then puts it on its license plates, and finally,

you end up with history.

So what... what, a European would ask, does all this have

in common, and I think what it all has in common is these are

the places where Americans encounter who they

are and are home.

These are the places that make this continent our home.

This is what enables Americans to inhabit this whole place,

where after all very few of us originally came from.

ANDERSON: Ave Maria

[Cheering and applause]