Seed of the Future:Yosemite and the Evolution of the National Park Idea
Seed of the Future: Yosemite and the Evolution of the National Park Idea is a beautiful book, with gorgeous pictures and heavy paper that made me hesitate to underline and write in the margins.*
It is also an excellent work of history. Written by award-winning filmmaker and writer Dayton Duncan in conjunction with the Yosemite Conservancy, Seed of the Future tells the story of the National Parks System through the lens of the Yosemite Land Grant, which pre-dated the creation of Yellowstone as the first national park by eight years. (Who knew?)
The Yosemite story as Duncan tells it is one of natural marvels, national pride, successful PR, political infighting, attempted land grabs, and determined individuals. Teddy Roosevelt and naturalist John Muir make their expected appearances. Ralph Waldo Emerson and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted play unexpected roles. (Unexpected to me at any rate.) The park's first guardian, Galen Clark, is heroic in his dedication.
The heart of the story is not the action or the characters--gripping though they are--but the development of a new idea about public space. Today the idea of preserving wild areas for public use is so common that we take it for granted.** When Congress passed the Yosemite Grant Act in 1864, the idea of saving wilderness for public use was unheard of. Distributing public land for private use was more common, at least in the United States. The Homestead Act that allowed the head of a household to claim 160 acres with little more than sweat equity was passed only two years before. The Yosemite Grant Act occurred in a narrow space where ideas about democracy, wilderness, the Sublime, tourism and health came together.
If you're interested in national parks, American history, or how big ideas are created from many small ones, you'll enjoy Seed of the Future. Even if all you do is look at the pictures.
* How do you have a conversation with a book if you don't mark it up? And more important from your perspective, how do I remember what I want to say in a blog post?
**Taking preservation for granted is dangerous. Like many of our liberties, the idea of preservation must itself be protected.
Image courtesy of the Library of Congress
Plane Spotting
Like anyone who has spent time hanging around the British or American homefronts of World War II, I am familiar with the concept of plane spotting.* Plane spotters were trained to look at planes on the horizon and ask "How many?" "Where are they headed?" "Are they ours or the enemy's?" It never dawned on me to ask how they learned to identify planes--or where they reported spotted planes. Which meant I didn't know anything that mattered.
Last weekend My Own True Love and I took a road trip to the Grissom Air Museum,** where I learned enough about plane spotting in the United States to make me want to learn more.
Soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the army aided by the American Legion, set up the Army Air Forces Ground Observer Corps (aka GOC): a force of 1,500,000 volunteers who manned observation posts along the coasts. Their purpose was to identify enemy aircraft in time to prevent future attacks.
Observation posts were staffed around the clock. They ranged from specially built structures to a host family's front room. Observers needed a telephone, binoculars, a pad of flash message forms, and an official identification book with photographs and silhouette drawings of warplanes from Allied and Axis air forces. (My guess is they also needed a way to keep themselves awake in the long stretches of no action.) When planes were seen (or heard), the observer recorded as much information as possible and then called it in to an Army Filter Center,*** where sightings were plotted on a large map and checked against other reports and known flights. The system as a whole was known as the Aircraft Warning Service.
Volunteers ranged from Boy Scouts to little old ladies who brought their knitting along, but the corps didn't take just anyone who showed up. Spotters had to pass a training course. One of the training devices--the one that set me off on my plane spotting quest--was model airplanes. Built to 1/72 scale and painted black, the models approximated the appearance of an airplane as seen on the horizon when seen from a distance of thirty feet. Official spotters had to be able to identify each type of plane from the back of their classroom. So many models were needed that the government put out a call for children and hobbyists to build 500,000 models for official use. That's a lot of model airplanes.
Official spotters weren't the only people to check the skies then they heard the sound of a plane. Young boys in particular served as an unofficial GOC auxiliary. Unofficial spotters learned to identify planes with decks of plane spotter cards or the charts that were printed in comic books, newspapers and magazines. Companies produced plane spotter premiums. Coca-Cola offered a popular manual called Know Your Planes for only ten cents. Wonder Bread offered an Aircraft Spotter Dial.
Few enemy planes reached the United States. In October, 1943, the Aircraft Warning Service was put in reserve as advances in radar technology made it obsolete. It was deactivated on the mainland in 1944. Posts remained active in Hawaii through the end of the war--for reasons that I'm sure I don't need to elaborate with the anniversary of Pearl Harbor only a few days away.
* Though now that I think about it, most of what I previously knew came from the 1964 film Father Goose with Cary Grant and Leslie Caron.
**The Grissom Air Museum is not for the general history buff. It is a small museum devoted to military aviation as seen through the filter of Bunker Hill Air Base (later Grissom Air Base). Like many small specialized museums it is chronically underfunded and run by fanatics for fanatics. Inside, the museum is both grimy and grim, but there are jewels of information buried in the exhibits for the patient visitor. Outside, the collection of vintage military airplanes is excellent.
***Often staffed by members of the Women's Army Auxillary Corps (WAAC)--another subject that I keep stumbling across these days.
Holiday Rerun: The Other First Thanksgiving
Unless you live in the American Southwest, the grade school version of American history* typically leaps from Columbus and 1492 straight to 1620, when the Pilgrims landed in Massachusetts. There is a vague awareness that the Spanish and the French were "out there" doing something, but the story focuses on the development of the thirteen British colonies.
In fact, El Paso, Texas, makes a good claim to being the site of the first American thanksgiving feast. **
In March, 1598, an expedition under the leadership of Juan de Oñate set out from Santa Barbara in the modern Mexican state of Chihuahua toward the northern Rio Grande Valley, where Oñate had been granted land by the viceroy of New Spain. Instead of taking the normal route along first the Rio Conchos and then the Rio Grande, the group of 500 people and 7000 head of livestock set out across the Chihuahua desert.
The trip took fifty days. For the first seven days, the expedition traveled through heavy rain. For the rest of the trip, they suffered from heat and dryness. Five days before they reached what is now El Paso, they ran out of both food and water. They scavenged what they could in the desert, but it was the Rio Grande that saved them. After resting for ten days on the banks of the river, Oñate declared a day of thanksgiving, including a feast of game and fish. One member of the expedition described the event in his diary:
We built a great bonfire and roasted the meat and fish, and then all sat down to a repast the like of which we had never enjoyed before. . .We were happy that our trials were over; as happy as were the passengers in the Ark when they saw the dove returning with the olive branch in his beak, bringing tidings that the deluge had subsided.
In fact, the feast wasn't the main event of the day. Festivities also included claiming the land of the Rio Grande Valley in the name of Philip II of Spain***--an event known as La Toma, literally The Taking. Many historians consider this event the beginning of Spanish colonization of the American Southwest. (Oñate's party continued up the Rio Grande and settled in what is now Santa Fe.)
Since 1989, the El Paso Mission Trail Association has celebrated a day of thanksgiving on April 30 in commemoration of Oñate's feast. I don’t know about you, but that's a holiday I could buy into. Thanksgiving tamales, anyone?
* Which tends to be the default version in our heads.
**Or more accurately, the first European-American Thanksgiving.
*** Just to help you connect the dots: Philip II was married to Queen Mary of England, the older sister of Queen Elizabeth. In 1588, he ordered the ill-fated attempt on England known as the Spanish Armada.