Nature Noir by Jordan Smith (best summer reads of all time txt) 📕

To most Americans a ranger is a nostalgic figure, living a simple outdoor life reminiscent of that in the nineteenth-century American frontier. Surrounded by herds of elk and the world's tallest trees at California's Redwood National and State Parks, she's a jack-of-all-trades who can splint a broken bone and replace a busted fan belt on her truck with equal facility. At Sequoia and Kings Canyon in the high Sierra, he might ride up to you on horseback, wearing the flat-brimmed campaign hat that is the ranger's most recognized symbol. At Glacier Bay in Alaska, she might paddle up in a sea kayak to explain the habits of grizzly bears, in whose proximity she beds down each summer night unprotected but for a tent and a can of pepper spray. In Glacier National Park in Montana, he might appear out of an early June sleet storm to orient you on an indistinct trail across a high pass. Answering visitors' questions in a cliff dwelling at Mesa Verde in Colorado, her knowledge of Indian culture might be deeper than that gleaned from book-learning, for your ranger could well be Navajo or Hopi herself.

All of that feels very Old West-y, but in fact the ranger is a distinctly modern figure, who didn't appear until the historical moment—between 1850 and 1900—when it became possible to imagine nature as no longer an adversary but a conquered and cornered thing in need of preservation. That the first rangers were contemporaneous with the emergence of the Arts and Crafts Movement in the field of design is no accident. By the second half of the nineteenth century, the great cities and their steam-powered factories had become smoky, clamoring horrors and mass-produced factory goods were on their way to eradicating the mark of human hands on the things people used, wore, and lived in. Some urban people—the upper classes, anyway—were suddenly filled with a yearning for rusticism: fabrics, furniture, and architecture with the marks of a craftsperson's hand, and the clear air, uncrowded vistas, and birdsong that were increasingly obscured by coal smoke, miles of brick, and the deafening cacophony of the streets.

The Arts and Crafts Movement is said to have begun in England, but national and state parks were an American invention. Parks were meant to evoke the presettlement landscape, and their advent was driven by an immediate nostalgia for the western frontier at the time of its closing. However, where the frontier was characterized by expansiveness and progressive subjugation, parks were created by a new and diametrically opposite force: the intentional refusal of progress and the encouragement of picturesque primitiveness.

Today at a park or wilderness boundary, all sorts of things are said no to: roads, off-road vehicles, loud music, fireworks, and firearms. The U.S. Forest Service has at times interpreted the Wilderness Act as prohibiting the agency's own use of chainsaws for trail maintenance, bulldozers for firefighting, and generators to light ranger cabins within designated wildernesses. An American company that produces washboards, hand washers, and mangles for the Amish (whose religion forbids the use of some modern contrivances) has among its other customers the National Park Service, which supplies these antique laundry implements to some of its rangers in remote backcountry cabins.

The creation myth of the national park idea is a scene oft related by historians: In September 1870, seated around a campfire, members of an expedition to survey the natural wonders of the Yellowstone Plateau talked about the area's future. Some of them felt Yellowstone's geysers, hot springs, and other curiosities ought to be leased to entrepreneurs for development. But one, an eastern lawyer by the name of Cornelius Hedges, is said to have maintained that, rather than fragment Yellowstone's marvels into private hands, they ought to be protected in a public park.

Returning to the East that winter, Hedges's fellow expedition member Nathaniel P. Langford was sufficiently taken with Yellowstone and Hedges's vision for it that he spent the winter lecturing and publishing on the subject. He was sponsored by Jay Cooke of the Northern Pacific Railroad, who saw a Yellowstone park's potential to boost passenger receipts as a tourist destination. The railroads would later be influential in pushing legislation for Yellowstone and other parks through Congress.

In the course of his speaking tour, Langford is said to have caught the attention of Ferdinand V. Hayden, director of the federal government's Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories. The following summer Hayden organized another expedition to Yellowstone, taking with him the photographer William Henry Jackson and the landscape painter Thomas Moran. With their powerful images assisting the cause, Congress began deliberations on a park bill in December 1871. The act creating the park was signed into law the following March by President Ulysses'S. Grant.

It was a paradoxical moment. While the pace of settlement and the indignities of modern life in cities already made it clear to people like Hedges and Hayden that the remaining slices of the unfenced West were endangered by and would soon be needed by their countrymen, the park's creation predated by four years the 1876 slaughter of Custer's Seventh Cavalry by twenty-five hundred Cheyenne and Sioux warriors in Montana Territory—a very frontierlike event. Still, by then the United States was linked coast to coast by steel rails and copper telegraph wire, and the thirty to seventy million bison that only recently had thundered across once endless seas of grass on the Great Plains were well on their way to extinction. Of the handful that survived in the United States by an 1889 census, the largest herd, of about two hundred, had taken refuge in Yellowstone, where they would ultimately be saved.

That, then, is the official version of the beginning of national parks.

But in fact the first national park wasn't one at all. It was a state park called Yosemite, and the first California state park ranger there predated Yellowstone by fifteen years. And I wouldn't have known this if it hadn't been for