UC Riverside UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations

UC Riverside UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Playing in the Park: Winter Sports and Sports Spectacles in Yosemite, 1900–1950 Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7bw0b031 Author Wrenn, Rebecca Louise Publication Date 2017 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Playing in the Park: Winter Sports and Sports Spectacles in Yosemite, 1900–1950 A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History by Rebecca Louise Wrenn June 2017 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Catherine Gudis, Chairperson Dr. Molly McGarry Dr. Brian Lloyd Copyright by Rebecca Louise Wrenn 2017 The Dissertation of Rebecca Louise Wrenn is approved: Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside Acknowledgments I am exceedingly grateful for the support I’ve received from so many people while working on this project. My committee members—Dr. Catherine Gudis, Dr. Molly McGarry, and Dr. Brian Lloyd—have been unfailingly supportive, gracious, and patient, and I hope they realize how much I value the encouragement and advice they have cheerfully offered ever since I first took classes with each of them. As Chair, Dr. Gudis had the extra hurdle of dealing with a long-distance student for three years, and her emails and phone calls were incredibly helpful. Dr. Juliette Levy took me under her wing as a student and a T.A., and I greatly appreciate the many words of wisdom and the bottle of whiskey. Iselda Salgado heroically steered me through the last few years of forms and policies, and I am very thankful for her good humor and aid. Jamie Green and Emily McEwen were absolutely the best cohort buddies imaginable and made grad school—and life—far better, as did Vanessa Stout, an almost-cohort buddy, who wound up just down the road from me in Virginia. I was fortunate to receive grants from the UC California Studies Consortium and the UC Riverside history department which allowed me to spend several very memorable weeks in Yosemite in 2013, scrambling through archives just before they were closed to the public due to the federal government sequester. (They have since reopened.) I am very grateful for the funds and the time. The archivists, librarians, and rangers who offered assistance, ideas, and juicy park gossip made my work easier and much more enjoyable. Gwen Barrow and Brenna Issoway at the Park Service archives in El Portal, just outside the park, welcomed me into their remarkable Cold-War-bunker-style building and offered helpful suggestions. Linda Eade, who spent decades living and working in Yosemite as head of the Yosemite Research Library, was always generous with her time and stories—even in the last few days before her iv retirement—which made each trip to the cozy attic room in the park’s museum building a true treat. Deputy Chief of Interpretation and Education Paul Ollig, Rangers Sheldon Johnson and Erik Westerlund, and historian and musician Tom Bopp graciously let me pick their brains about the park and the Park Service. Staff at the Huntington Library, the National Archives in College Park, the Library of Congress, the Department of the Interior, Harpers Ferry Center, Stanford University, and the Palo Alto Historical Society have also offered invaluable assistance and suggestions, if not quite as spectacular scenery. I will miss the research trips. More recently, Wade Myers and Nancy Russell (Harpers Ferry Center for Media Services), Paul Rogers (Yosemite), Fabrizio D’Aloisio (St. Moritz Tourism), Brooke Childrey (Mount Rainier), and Virginia Sanchez (Yosemite Research Library) have generously helped me find photographs. After moving to Virginia unexpectedly three years ago, I needed to find a new place to write, and the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden in Richmond proved the perfect spot to reflect on the natural world. More importantly, Ginter staff, especially Laura, Mabel, Annie, and Shane, welcomed me and my family with open arms, good cheer, and a library with a fireplace. And in Williamsburg, my former bosses Sally Mason and Ron Hoffman took me back in as an editor, and their sound advice, wry humor, and nearly-unbelievable stories are very much appreciated. My family inspired me to write about Yosemite. My dad, Jim, took my mom, Joan, on her first trip to the park soon after they got engaged in 1968, and clearly it must have gone very well. They took my brother Gregg and sister Colleen and I to the park at least yearly and taught us how to both appreciate it and play (gently) in it. Gregg, Colleen, and I ran through Camp Curry, played in the river, “climbed” rockfalls, and tried to learn how to take pictures half as well as our dad. My mom devoted a large chunk of her summer in v 2013, just months after my dad died, to corralling my one-year-old in the park while I did research. She more than earned the “large beer” she would occasionally upgrade to after a long day of chasing Helena through a national park. More recently, she and Colleen patiently dealt with a whole lot of editing, because they “have the best words” (and eagle eyes), for which I am very grateful. Jason Sampson, who wisely agreed to marry me on Glacier Point, has been roped into editing, advice-giving, and road-tripping. He lucked out by getting to come along on research trips; I lucked out by getting a partner in crime whose wit and brains match his writing abilities. Our kids, Helena and Mallory, are not quite ready for editing pens, but their pictures of Half Dome and smiley faces have been surprisingly helpful. Helena’s first snow, first time ice skating, and first car accident—all before age two—were in Yosemite, and while Mallory has already experienced the first two elsewhere, I hope someday she’ll get to see what all this typing was about. Curiosity and enthusiasm— which they both inherited in droves from their grandpa—are two traits the world needs much more of if places like Yosemite are to survive and thrive. I can’t thank them all enough. vi ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Playing in the Park: Winter Sports and Sports Spectacles in Yosemite, 1900–1950 by Rebecca Louise Wrenn Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in History University of California, Riverside, June 2017 Dr. Catherine Gudis, Chairperson Since its founding, the National Park Service has struggled with a dual mandate to both protect sites within its charge and provide for the enjoyment of these spaces by current and future generations. This conflict was especially consequential in Yosemite, the world’s first park set aside for preservation and public use. The park was best known for its natural wonders—thunderous waterfalls, massive granite domes, towering Sequoias—and yet over the course of the early twentieth century, tourists increasingly played in the park, instead of merely gazing at it. This marks a remarkable conceptual shift from “sacred space” to public playground. Visitors still admired the scenery, but became more physically engaged with the natural surroundings, thereby changing the very meaning of a national park vacation. Winter sports had a particularly significant impact on Yosemite’s early history. They boosted park visitation during the slow season, introduced tourists to relatively unknown forms of recreation (especially skiing), and helped redefine both the park and the state of California as year-round vacation destinations. The program was so successful that Yosemite even bid on the 1932 Winter Olympic Games, a stunning move considering the infrastructure, crowds, vii and congestion that generally accompanied even early Olympics. The bid failed, but the park’s snow and ice sports grew exceedingly popular by the 1930s and 1940s. Winter carnivals and other sports spectacles transformed Yosemite into a stage for human achievement, with people—often collegiate or professional athletes—as the star attractions. However, concerns over spectatorship, park atmosphere, artificiality, and more, eventually doomed many of Yosemite’s most popular sports facilities and events. By exploring this often-overlooked slice of park history, this study helps reframe early debates over preservation and public use. The two were not mutually exclusive in the minds of early visitors, who believed using the land for play was an appropriate function of public landscapes. viii Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter One: Playing in “A Fairyland of White” 62 Chapter Two: The St. Moritz of the Sierra Nevada? Yosemite Bids on the 1932 Winter Olympics 108 Chapter Three: Making “a hurly-burly of the park”? Debating Public Use 164 Chapter Four: Ski Lifts and Snow Queens: Sports Centers and Spectacles 207 Epilogue 262 References 282 ix List of Images Image I-1: Costume Skating Carnival, 1931 4 Image I-2: Stephen Mather and his staff 12 Image I-3: Officials visit the site of the Ahwahnee 26 Image I-4: Patriotic vaudeville on ice 31 Image I-5: A stagecoach leaving the Valley, 1903 33 Image I-6: Tourists at Camp Curry tent cabin, 1920s 39 Image I-7: Camping in Yosemite Valley 41 Image I-8: St. Moritz 50 Image 1-1: Group on horseback near Nevada Falls 69 Image 1-2: Half Dome cables 80 Image 1-3: Snowshoeing, 1917 87 Image 2-1: Yosemite Valley in Winter 109 Image 2-2: Waiters on ice in St. Moritz, Switzerland 115 Image 2-3: Ski jump at the 1928 St. Moritz Olympics 119 Image 2-4: Lake Placid bobsled poster 125 Image 2-5: Four-man bobsleigh at the 1932 Olympics 145 Image 2-6: Opening ceremonies of the 1932 Olympics

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