|
|
|
Reviews
NATIONAL PARK, CITY PLAYGROUND: MOUNT RAINIER IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
|
by Theodore Catton
|
| University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2006. Photographs, maps, notes, bibliography, index. 236 pages. $18.95 paper. |
| Everyone remembers their first sighting of Mount Rainier — The Mountain. Floating above the horizon, it stands watch over Seattle and Tacoma, "an arctic island in a temperate sea." In this fine, compact book, Theodore Catton argues that, while the state's defining landmark continues to exert a powerful influence on those who live within its view, those people have also shaped The Mountain. Catton's fundamental argument is that development of Mount Rainier National Park was driven by the competing desires of the populations of the greater Seattle-Tacoma area — who historically comprise the bulk of the park's users — and the evolving approach of the National Park Service to the "national park idea" — that is, the balance of accessibility and stewardship. |
1
|
|
Promoters of tourism in Seattle and Tacoma viewed the park as an engine for economic development, while federal administrators worked to preserve its landscape in accordance with the 1899 legislation that created the park. Catton describes well how the two forces ebbed and flowed with the times. The key point of divergence was park access. Locals called for immediate road-building into the park. The Interior Department, mindful of its charge to carefully manage the public space, instead instituted a long process to determine appropriate routes. As a result, it was not until 1908 that cars could reach the Nisqually Glacier (now an overlook point on the way to the park's main lodge). |
2
|
|
Prompted by photographer Asahel Curtis, businessmen in Seattle and Tacoma joined together to promote faster development of the park. Although the group had mixed success, they did strengthen the national case for a single agency to manage all the parks. With the creation of the National Park Service in 1916, Rainier was poised to enter a new phase. |
3
|
|
The agency's inaugural director, Steve Mather, believed that parks could be best developed when the federal government partnered with private enterprise. The creation of the Rainier National Park Company (RNPC), capitalized by a consortium of businessmen from Seattle and Tacoma, epitomized such a relationship. The RNPC provided park concessions — including lodging, dining, and guide services — but had to comply with Park Service oversight. Over the next half-century, the RNPC and the National Park Service shaped the development of Mount Rainier in ways that reflected the ongoing tension between the federal mandate for park preservation and access and the profit objective of the private sector. |
4
|
|
The balance shifted during the Depression, as government work programs brought thousands of men to the park to build trails, bridges, and other facilities, and the RNPC, affected by the economic downturn, had fewer resources to spend on park development. It shifted again after World War II, when the economy boomed. At that time, the RNPC, which wanted to construct better winter facilities, also sought increased public funding. This "uneasy compromise ... of government ownership coupled with private operation" was not unique to Mount Rainier, but the park's problems became emblematic of the challenges facing the entire national park system. Park Service policy dictated that public need trump considerations of profitability. Beholden to stockholders, the RNPC literally could not afford to build or maintain money-losing facilities. Because of its profit mandate, furthermore, the RNPC wanted to develop facilities, such as permanent ski lifts, that were in clear opposition to the national park idea. |
5
|
|
As park use increased, the Park Service struggled to distribute visitors around the park and preserve the environment at the most popular spots. Land-use issues in the mid-1960s marked another phase in park administration. Instead of developing new facilities to encourage visitors away from Paradise visitors' area, the park imposed quotas for backcountry use. Those quotas were less problematic than attempts to control automobile use; for many visitors, a scenic drive constitutes the total national park experience. |
6
|
|
Catton shows how conflicts — among user groups, between the Park Service and private enterprise, and between the Park Service and park visitors — evolved according to changes in demand. The author does an excellent job of contextualizing Mount Rainier within the larger history of the national park system and the political economic history of the United States, and he carefully follows the thread of local influence on park development. Perhaps most usefully, Catton provides a means by which readers can understand the park in its current form. The jarring juxtaposition of the elegant Paradise Inn and the modernist Jackson Visitor Center, the jumble of buildings at Longmire, and the sea of cars on a winter weekend are all better understood with this book in hand. |
7
|
| Lauren Danner
|
| Washington State Historical Society, Olympia |
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|