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Frederick Law Olmsted's Failed Encounter with Yosemite and The Frederick Law Olmsted’s Failed Encounter with Yosemite and the Invention of a Proto-Environmentalist Wendy Harding To cite this version: Wendy Harding. Frederick Law Olmsted’s Failed Encounter with Yosemite and the Invention of a Proto-Environmentalist. Ecozon@, Alcalá de Henares Madrid: Universidad de Alcalá de Henares, 2014, 5 (1), pp.123-135. hal-01023008 HAL Id: hal-01023008 https://hal-univ-tlse2.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01023008 Submitted on 11 Jul 2014 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Author: Harding, Wendy Title: Frederick Law Olmsted’s Failed Encounter with Yosemite and the Invention of a Proto-Environmentalist Frederick Law Olmsted’s Failed Encounter with Yosemite and the Invention of a Proto-Environmentalist Wendy Harding Université de Toulouse Abstract In 1865 Frederick Law Olmsted read to the Yosemite Commissioners a report detailing his ideas about California’s newly reserved natural space and his recommendations for its development as a “public park or pleasure ground.” His text, “The Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Big Trees: A Preliminary Report,” was lost for almost a century until his biographer Laura Wood Roper unearthed it, pieced it together, and published it. In spite of the lack of response it obtained at the time of it was written, Olmsted’s text is now held up as a foundational document for both the National Parks system and environmentalism. This paper investigates how the stillborn proposal came to achieve canonical status in the late twentieth century and how legends concerning it have accrued. The report has become the road not taken; it allows people to imagine what the Yosemite National Park might have remained if it had not been subject to intense development. Taken up by contemporary environmentalists, Olmsted’s text is made to authorize a myth of origins that is simpler and more inspiring than the tangled reality of events. This article analyses the report to show how the contradictions in Olmsted’s vision for the park would not have permitted its preservation in the condition in which nineteenth century visitors found it. Keywords: Ecocriticism, environmentalism, Olmsted, Yosemite, National Parks, landscape. Resumen En 1865 Frederick Law Olmsted leyó a los comisionados de Yosemite un informe detallando sus ideas sobre el recientemente reservado espacio natural y sus recomendaciones para el desarrollo de éste Vol 5, No 1 como “un parque público o un suelo de recreo”. Su texto “The Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Big Trees: A Preliminary Report” estuvo perdido casi un siglo hasta que su biógrafa Laura Wood Roper lo sacó a la luz, le dio sentido y lo publicó. A pesar de la falta de respuesta que obtuvo cuando fue escrito, el texto de Olmsted hoy se considera un texto fundacional para el sistema de Parques Nacionales así como para la ecología. Este ensayo explora cómo la propuesta sin éxito inicial llegó a formar parte del canon a finales del siglo veinte y cómo se han acumulado leyendas entorno a ésta. El informe se ha convertido en “el camino no elegido”: permite imaginar cómo podría haber permanecido el Parque Nacional de Yosemite si no hubiera sido sujeto a un intenso desarrollo. Recuperado por ecologistas contemporáneos, el texto de Olmsted se hizo para autorizar un mito fundacional más sencillo y más inspirador que la enredada realidad de acontecimientos. Este artículo analiza el informe para mostrar cómo las contradicciones de la visión de Olmsted sobre el parque no habrían permitido su conservación en las condiciones en que los visitantes del siglo diecinueve lo encontraron. Palabras clave: ecocrítica, ecología, Olmsted, Yosemite, Parques Nacionales, paisaje. ©Ecozon@ 2014 ISSN 2171-9594 123 Author: Harding, Wendy Title: Frederick Law Olmsted’s Failed Encounter with Yosemite and the Invention of a Proto-Environmentalist In 1865, at a culminating moment in his short-lived tenure as one of the Commissioners appointed to manage the territory in Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove that had been newly granted to the State of California, Frederick Law Olmsted read a preliminary report to the Commissioners gathered at the site. He was probably chosen for this honor because of his success in designing New York’s Central Park along with his less famous partner, Calvert Vaux. He also happened to be in California at the time, having been hired to manage the faltering Mariposa mining concerns of General Freemont. Olmsted’s report was never submitted to the State of California or the Congress, and its author never set foot in Yosemite again. His ideas for managing the newly created “park or pleasure ground”1—the terms with which to designate it were still in flux—were never adopted. Realistically speaking, Olmsted’s engagement with Yosemite was a failure and his report initially met the usual fate of failed grant proposals. It was abandoned in favor of other projects and filed away somewhere in his office. Curiously, though, it was to have a second life. After having been buried for many decades, an incomplete copy of the report was resurrected by Olmsted’s son’s secretary. Subsequently, biographer Laura Wood Roper found the missing ten pages that Olmsted had apparently extracted and included in an 1868 letter to the editor of the New York Evening Post. Thanks to the newly reconstituted text, Olmsted was to be reborn as an early environmentalist prophet. Despite the failure of his proposal and the very short duration of his engagement with the site, Olmsted’s name now figures prominently in histories of Yosemite. The meager facts of his engagement have been elaborated to produce what can only be called an origin myth. The legends surrounding Olmsted’s report Although the Report went missing for almost a century, it is held up as a foundational text for environmentalism. In his 1965 book, John Muir and the Sierra Club: Vol 5, No 1 The Battle for Yosemite, Holway R. Jones claims that Olmsted’s report “is important in understanding the motivations behind the idealism of the new conservation and in explaining the actions of Muir and the Sierra Club in opposing the Yosemite Commissioners” in the 1890’s (30). In his recent biography of Olmsted Justin Martin declares: “With his August 1865 address, Olmsted played a key role in the conservation of America’s wild spaces” (268). The official statement on the Library of Congress American Memory website proclaims: “Only in the twentieth century has his Preliminary Report come to be widely recognized as one of the most profound and original philosophical statements to emerge from the American conservation movement” (“Evolution” n.p.). Submitted to modern exegesis after being brought to light by Roper in 1952, Olmsted’s report has revealed meanings that permit its interpretation as an early ecological scripture. In addition, Olmsted’s failed encounter with Yosemite has been worked into one of the foundational stories for America’s National Parks. Roper advanced this surprising 1 In a letter dated July 5 1865, addressed to his father Olmsted uses both terms: “I am preparing a scheme of management for Yosemite, which is by far the noblest public park, or pleasure ground in the world” (Olmsted, Papers 36). ©Ecozon@ 2014 ISSN 2171-9594 124 Author: Harding, Wendy Title: Frederick Law Olmsted’s Failed Encounter with Yosemite and the Invention of a Proto-Environmentalist thesis in her introductory note when she published the report in Landscape Architecture in 1952. In italics, for added emphasis, she declares: “With this single report, in short, Olmsted formulated a philosophic base for the creation of state and national parks” (14). Subsequently, this claim has been strengthened by selective quotations from the report and by creative reconstructions of events. Ken Burns’s 2009 documentary, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, contributes to the Olmsted legend by selecting passages that seem to champion “the rights of posterity” (Olmsted, Yosemite 24) by urging the “restriction” of anything that would “obscure, distort or detract from the dignity of the scenery” (Olmsted, Yosemite 21). The documentary omits the ensuing qualification that constructions undertaken in Yosemite should be, “within the narrowest limits consistent with the necessary accommodation of visitors” (Olmsted, Yosemite 21). Nor is there any mention of the fact that the major part of the $37,000 appropriation that Olmsted’s report asks for is reserved for the construction of a road leading “toward the district” and taking in all the “finer points of view” (Olmsted, Yosemite 26-27). Instead of elaborating on the details of the report, the film moves on to identify a cast of ecological villains who serve as foils to the spurned Commissioner. An accusing voice explains how “once Olmsted returned to New York, a small group of Yosemite Commissioners secretly convened, decided his recommendations were too controversial to bring to the state legislature and quietly shelved his report” (The National Parks n.p.). Then Alfred Runte appears to explain how James Mason Hutchings, one of Yosemite’s early champions, did all he could “to exploit the hell out it” after the Valley was set aside for public enjoyment (The National Parks n.p.). It is understandable that popular productions like the PBS series should favor broad outlines over the tangled complexity of events. Surprisingly, though, more scholarly works are sometimes even less rigorous with the facts.
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