The origin story of America’s national parks goes like this: during the Lincoln administration, fearing that the recently “discovered” wonders of Yosemite Valley would be defiled as Niagara Falls had been, and the “Mariposa Big Tree Grove” logged, federal legislation created what would eventually become Yosemite National Park, though as author Dennis Drabelle notes, the word “park” never appeared in the law.  

The reserve was conveyed to the state of California.  

A mysterious and spectacular landscape, mostly in Wyoming Territory, similarly threatened by entrepreneurs who sought to profit from access to it and possibly make it into a carnival like Niagara Falls, resulted in the first national park because Yellowstone was federal land and there was no state to which to grant it.  

John Muir and others campaigned to make the land around Yosemite Valley and the nearby giant sequoias a national park, which they achieved, and Yosemite Valley was ceded back to the federal government and became the Yosemite National Park we know and love today. So, there you have it, a simple and straightforward progression.

The actual origin story is, however, neither simple nor straightforward, stretching over half a century and involving many players, some well known to the park-loving public today, and most not.

In The Power of Scenery, Dennis Drabelle traces the early evolution of the national park idea and its realization. His account moves from British statesman and political philosopher Edmund Burke, who wrote of the aesthetic that stirred the national park movement, to early American artist George Catlin, who envisioned a “nation’s park,” and then to Henry David Thoreau, who also floated the idea.

Drabelle describes how U.S. Senator John Conness of California shepherded the initial Yosemite legislation to passage by Congress and the signature of Abraham Lincoln, and then to a lengthy discussion of how Frederick Law Olmsted influenced the national park movement. Others in the story include journalist Samuel Bowles; America’s first landscape architect, Andrew Jackson Downing; scientist and survey leader Ferdinand Hayden; photographer William Henry Jackson; entrepreneur Nathaniel Langford; Congressman John Lacey; and financier Jay Cooke. While these and other philosophers, legislators, writers, journalists, photographers, early scientists, and explorers all play their parts, Drabelle makes Olmsted the focal point in his account of the evolutionary process that resulted in the National Park System we know today.

Why Olmsted? Because, as Drabelle explains, the power of Olmsted’s ideas about parks influenced the course of national park history more than any other single person, and that might be a surprising claim to those who give the accolade to John Muir.

After reviewing the contributions of Olmsted’s predecessors who contributed ideas that influenced the park movement, Drabelle summarizes Olmsted’s early life and his many ventures as an apprentice seaman, farmer, journalist and, most importantly, superintendent and landscape designer of New York’s Central Park, the historic role for which he is especially remembered. With architect Calvert Vaux he designed and oversaw early construction of this historic park. Then he served as a United States Sanitary Commission member and leader during the Civil War, and as manager of the Mariposa Estate in California, which placed him where he could make his primary contribution to national park history.

Drabelle opens The Power of Scenery in 1865 with Olmsted in a “smoke- and beard-filled room” presenting a lengthy report to his colleagues on the Yosemite Commission on how the new Yosemite “park” should be managed. The Commission and its charge were required by the conveyance of Yosemite Valley from federal to state ownership and Olmsted, with his Central Park management and design experience, had become its de facto leader.

Drabelle writes, “Olmsted applied to Yosemite the first principle behind his great New York project: a park should belong to and be useable by everyone.” At the time, this was a radical proposal, as Drabelle goes to some length to explain using the example of Niagara Falls where “everyone” could only enjoy it at considerable financial expense.

“And then came a recommendation tailored specifically to this, the first public park in the wilds: leave it in its natural state, permitting only such minor additions as a road or two for better access and a handful of rustic structures to accommodate visitors,” continues Drabelle. This, too, was a radical idea as, driven by the idea of manifest destiny and other motives for “taming” and “conquering” nature, Americans at the time were bent on extracting every cent possible from the land, modifying it to fit their ambitions.

Several of his fellow commissioners decided for various reasons that Olmsted’s visionary blueprint for the park was too radical and expensive and managed to have his report quashed, but for decades it percolated in the background as the national park “movement” got underway.

Olmsted became nationally prominent as a landscape architect and found many ways to put his ideas before the public and decision-makers.  Drabelle notes that “In 1903, the year of Olmsted’s death, President Theodore Roosevelt gazed out over the Grand Canyon and implored his audience to ‘leave it as it is. You cannot improve upon it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it.’ Almost 40 years earlier, Olmsted has reached the same conclusion about Yosemite and, by extension, every American national park to follow.”

Olmsted’s thinking had reached the pinnacle of political power with lasting consequences for the American landscape and its national parks, the Grand Canyon of course destined to be one of them. Olmsted’s 1865 report may have been quashed for a time, but Drabelle writes that it was “Buried but influential all the same.”

According to Drabelle, Olmsted’s genius “lay in peering into the heart of each landscape he came across and finding ways to bring out its best. Yosemite Valley struck him as an entirely different case than Manhattan Island, in that Yosemite’s best had already been brought out, as agents such as the glacier grinding away at its granite, and he fashioned his report accordingly.”

Olmsted left California after four years of trying unsuccessfully to right the sinking Mariposa Estate and commenced his career as the most influential landscape architect in American history. He designed parks all over the United States and established the profession to which he had been introduced by Andrew Jackson Downing, a profession that would be most influential in the future National Park System.

Following in his father’s footsteps, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. was the principal draftsman of the National Park Service Organic Act of 1916 in which, as Drabelle writes, “he might have simply cut and pasted the principle laid down by his father in the 1865 Yosemite report.”

His father “had reaffirmed the [Yosemite] report’s central recommendation – that managers of a wilderness park should keep ‘improvements’ to the bare minimum – periodically throughout his career, including in the report for Niagara Falls he coauthored with Vaux.” But “cutting and pasting” was of course impossible. Olmsted Jr. had to state the principle differently because in 1916 there were national parks, and Congress was finally getting around to creating an agency to manage them, authorizing it to enforce rules in them, police powers that even the U.S. Army had lacked in its decades-long efforts to protect early parks.

The Organic Act famously stated, in part, “The service thus established shall promote and regulate the use of the Federal areas known as national parks, monuments, and reservations, which purpose is to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” 

Father and son set the National Park Service up for a big challenge – provide for enjoyment but leave unimpaired – which the agency has struggled to manage since its inception.

The Power of Scenery covers historical ground extensively explored by many other writers in both popular and scholarly ways. Drabelle puts Frederick Law Olmsted’s role in national park history into context, explaining how and why he was able to be so important to that history in the late 19th century and even to the present.

Drabelle’s style and approach make for a compelling read for anyone with a shred of interest in America’s national park history. For instance, he explains how Olmsted seemed unimpressed by the “sublime” qualities of Yosemite Valley that so captured John Muir and many others yet saw the great value of Yosemite Valley. Olmsted subscribed to a different aesthetic even though Drabelle goes to considerable length to describe the nature and influence of the “sublime” aesthetic that was so important to the rise of the national park idea. Describing the new California reservation soon after its passage in a letter to his father, Olmsted portrayed the valley as “awfully grand, but . . . not frightful or fearful . . . . The valley is as sweet & peaceful as the meadows of Avon, and the sides are in many parts lovely with foliage and color.”

Drabelle writes,

While saying nothing specifically about Half Dome or El Capitan or Yosemite Falls, he compared the Merced River to the bucolic Avon and preferred ferns and rushes to chasms. When it came to nature’s extravagances, Olmsted had a blind spot. Toward the end of his career, in 1893, he admitted as much, mentioning his susceptibility to natural beauty but adding a qualification. “Not so much grand or sensational scenery as scenery of a more domestic order. Scenery to be looked upon contemplatively and which is provocative of musing moods.” It all went back, he thought, to “the enjoyment which my father and mother (step-mother) took in loitering journeys; in afternoon drives on the Connecticut meadows.” As for all things craggy, they struck him as anything but tranquilizing. “Mountains,” he said, “suggest effort.” 

This passage illustrates Drabelle’s readable style and approach and his occasional touch of humor. Asides, such as his account of Truman Everts getting lost in Yellowstone when traveling that wild landscape as part of the famous Washburn-Langford-Doane expedition of 1870, provide entertaining tales that enliven the story of how the national parks got their start.

Scholars of national park history, who are not the audience for this book, might be put off by some obvious errors that will jump out at them. Perusing the small collection of photos in the book they will note that in photo #9 the caption reads, “Yellowstone superintendent Horace Albright (left) with explorer Charlie Cook in 1922, at the fiftieth-anniversary celebration of the park’s establishment. Courtesy of Wikimedia.”

Unfortunately, NPS Director Stephen Mather is listening to Charlie in the photo, not Albright, who was present but not in this image.

In another error, Drabelle has the Yosemite National Park superintendent “responding to a letter from George Grinnell that the superintendent’s boss, Stephen Mather had passed along for comment. He has the wrong Grinnell here. George Bird Grinnell indeed played a role in national park history, but the Grinnell writing to the Yosemite Superintendent was Joseph Grinnell, the director of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology of the University of California at Berkeley, whom Yosemite Park historian Al Runte (cited by Drabelle as his source here) describes as “an indefatigable champion of park protection and research.”

And finally, Drabelle places “the first official American wilderness area, within the Gila National Forest in Arizona.” That wilderness is in New Mexico. Errors like this will not detract from the value of this book for the average reader, who can learn much from Drabelle’s study of Frederick Law Olmsted’s role in national park history, but it will annoy some who hold authors writing history, even for popular audiences, to a high standard of accuracy.

In this book, Dennis Drabelle makes a compelling case that Frederick Law Olmsted deserves the prominent place he holds in the pantheon of shapers of the National Park System we enjoy in the 21st century. Visitors may be awed by the monumental scenery, experiencing the “sublime” qualities of Yosemite, Yellowstone, and other parks. Or they may enjoy the “sweet and peaceful” meadows and wildflowers as Olmsted did. They will enjoy, without knowing of it, the work of landscape architects as they have sought to fashion park development that does not intrude upon the scenery, part of Olmsted’s legacy.

While today we recognize that national parks have many more values than scenery, the “power of scenery” in the history of national parks is an important and entertaining story.