On July 14, 1915, Stephen Mather hosted a party in Visalia, California, for
influential conservationists and businessmen. Mather
promoted the idea of creating a single
federal agency to manage America’s far-flung
national parks—including Yellowstone in Montana, Yosemite in California, Crater Lake in Oregon, and Mesa Verde in Colorado. Mather and his supporters thought a unified agency could better organize and protect the parkland.
Mather himself was a powerful businessman, having made his fortune in California’s
borax industry. (Borax was
mined for use as a key ingredient in detergent.) He was a passionate conservationist, and, having resigned from his business, worked for the U.S. Department of the Interior. He immediately began
lobbying for the creation of an agency to manage the national parks.
The group of men who gathered at Visalia’s Palace Hotel on July 14 included Gilbert Grosvenor, president of the
National Geographic Society; Ernest O. McCormick, vice-president of the Southern Pacific Railroad; Mark Daniels, a
landscape architect who was consulted in the design of hotels around Glacier National Park in Montana and Mount Rainier National Park in Washington; Robert Marshall, chief
geographer of the
USGS; Henry Osborn, president of the American Museum of Natural History; and Rep. Frederick H. Gillett (R-Massachusetts), a powerful leader on the House
Appropriations Committee.
The morning after enjoying a Mexican meal in the warm California weather—“the coolest condition was the Tabasco sauce,” Mather’s assistant Horace Albright said—the 30-man Mather party set off on a ten-day
trek through nearby Sequoia National Park. The trek was
luxurious, with meals prepared and
catered by the USGS’
exemplary Chinese chefs and served on white
linen tablecloths. Horses and pack mules carried the party’s
cargo. The party hiked through redwood forests, swam in the Kern River, and even
ascended Mount Whitney.
The trek through the national park convinced the party a national park agency was a goal worth pursuing. Grosvenor and other
journalists featured stories and photos of national parks in their newspapers and magazines. McCormick organized railroads to provide reliable
transportation to national parks. Osborn encouraged the scientific community to support national parks. Gillett worked to create a new federal agency: “It was entirely due to [Mather’s] generous
hospitality that I was introduced to [Sequoia National Park’s] wonders and imbued with some of the
enthusiasm for the development of all our national parks.”
The Mather Mountain Party was incredibly successful. Less than a year later, the National Park Service was created, with Stephen Mather as its first director.
