Huntington Library exhibit commemorates National Park Service

“Today I am in Yellowstone Park, and I wish I were dead.” So wrote Rudyard Kipling in 1889, regarding the “howling crowd” of tourists he found there.

That pungent observation is among scores of historic, and often unexpected written and visual material on display in “Geographies of Wonder: Origin Stories of America’s National Parks 1872–1933,” running through Sept. 3 in the West Hall of the Library building at the Huntington. Catch it if you can. It is the first of two consecutive exhibitions commemorating the centennial of the National Park Service, signed into law in August 1916 by President Woodrow Wilson. “Geographies of Wonder” part two, “Evolution of the National Park Idea 1933–2016,” opens Oct. 22 and runs through Feb. 13.

Both exhibitions feature a treasure trove of rare books, photographs, diaries, letters, travel posters, prints and other materials from the Huntington’s collections. These illustrate the magnitude and consequences of the National Parks concept, a catalyst for artistic inspiration, national pride, the pursuit of outdoor recreation, scientific research, conservation and preservation efforts, and business opportunities thwarted and realized.

The centennial “was the hook,” said curator Peter Blodgett, the Huntington’s H. Russell Smith Foundation Curator of Western Historical Manuscripts. “But the focus of the two exhibitions is considerably broader.” It is a reflection, he said, on the meaning of the national parks — the country’s “best idea,” as writer Wallace Stegner put it — exploring the impact that the concept has had “socially, politically and economically, and how that concept in turn has been influenced by those same forces coming in from the larger society.”

“I was very fortunate,” Blodgett said, “to draw upon a collection that’s so rich with materials that speak to individual experiences, to collective engagement in parks, to policy-making, and visual materials that reflect the allure of scenic magnificence, and textual materials that help tease out the details that underlie the complexities that are involved with the National Park idea.”

The exhibition begins not with Yellowstone, named the first official National Park in 1872, but with Yosemite, the subject of legislation, signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1864, that designated Yosemite Valley as California’s protected scenic area, barring it from developers and private ownership. It was the first such U.S. legislative protection in the country’s history.

Opening these expanses of wilderness to visitors had a profound effect on the American psyche. An example of the rhapsodic rhetoric that Yosemite, and the national parks that followed, evoked is a 1904 South Pacific Railroad Co. poster that reproduces a poem written by Elwyn Irving Hoffman as a tribute to geologist Joseph Le Conte. It is entitled “In Yosemite, God’s Wonder Palace.”

“So many people — poets, philosophers — find in the parks some version of their heart’s desire,” said Blodgett. Early preservationists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau “set the table with their sense of nature,” he said, followed by naturalist John Muir, whose 1901 articles calling for the preservation and conservation of the national parks were instrumental in the passage of the National Park Service legislation.

But claiming national stewardship of these places of “sublime beauty” and “the forest primeval” was not without human cost. The exhibition addresses the fact that the parks that so quickly became an iconic part of the nation’s cultural identity did so at the expense of other cultures: indigenous populations that were pushed out of their homelands beyond park boundaries, even as their images were exploited as advertising to draw visitors to the parks by evoking a sense of a romanticized Old West.

“I wanted to make sure that viewers understood the complexity that the concept of national parks inevitably involves,” Blodgett said, “and what one of the most significant costs in creating them entailed.” The issue of making national resources unavailable for development has always been “subject to robust debate,” he noted. “The cost to indigenous people is much clearer and much starker.”

Kipling’s lament over the crowds in Yellowstone in 1889 is a recurring theme, one that is explored, too, in the second part of the exhibition. “On one side is the benefit that tourism will bring in ensuring robust federal revenues and the continued expansion of the system,” Blodgett said. But almost from the beginning, “you have this trickle of visitors, which becomes a stream that will become something of a flood tide of people who want a more intensive experience: campers, backpackers and other users of the outdoors.”

The eventual result is “industrial tourism, mechanized, and heavily dependent upon all of the technological elements and amenities that we’re so used to today.”

Moving through the exhibition, stagecoach transport gives way to railroad companies, and then to the need for parks to become automobile-friendly, to the dismay of James Bryce, Ambassador of Great Britain to the U.S. “Do not let the serpent enter Eden at all,” he wrote in 1912, in a letter on display.

“At the moment he is making that remark,” Blodgett said, “the ‘serpent’ had in essence just about entered Eden.” It was, he said, “what some historians have referred to as the devil’s bargain: the trade-off between accessibility on the one hand and increased numbers [of visitors], and inaccessibility and lack of political support for the parks on the other.”

Another key theme on display is “Defending the National Parks” — from threats that include the exploitation of natural resources, pollution from coal-fired power plants, uranium and gold mining, the pursuit of geothermal power, and, said Blodgett, the “ongoing danger of ‘loving the parks to death,’ as I think a National Park director one time put it.

“I would just say, for the broadest perspective,” he added, “that I hope people will engage with the complexities the parks represent.” Comment books for visitors will be available, “and I hope they will share some of their thoughts with us.”

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What: “Geographies of Wonder: Origin Stories of America’s National Parks 1872–1933” and “Geographies of Wonder: Evolution of the National Park Idea 1933–2016”

When: “Origin Stories” runs through Sept. 3; “Evolution” opens Oct. 22.

Where: The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, 1151 Oxford Rd., San Marino.

When: Summer hours: 10:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday, Wednesday through Sunday; closed Tuesday.

Admission: Adults, $23 to $25; seniors and students (12 to 18, or with full-time student ID), $19 to $21; youth (4 to 11), $10; children under 4, free.

More info: (626) 405-2100. www.huntington.org

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LYNNE HEFFLEY writes about theater and culture for Marquee.