Love National Parks? You Have This Man to Thank

The millionaire who understood that before you can save a beautiful place, you have to make people fall in love with it.

Stand at Mather Point on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon and it is easy to understand why millions of people come here.

What most visitors don’t know is who Mather was — or why one of the Grand Canyon’s most magnificent overlooks bears his name.

Stephen Tyng Mather was a wealthy businessman, a passionate outdoorsman and one of the great champions of America’s wild places. He made a fortune in the borax business and then did something remarkable with his money, his connections and his considerable powers of persuasion:

He helped America understand that its most extraordinary landscapes were worth protecting. 

Long before there was a National Park Service, there were national parks. But they lacked a single agency devoted to protecting and managing them. Mather believed America’s great landscapes deserved something better. So he went to work. And his methods were anything but ordinary.

In the summer of 1915, Mather assembled an extraordinary group of influential Americans — businessmen, government officials, scientists, journalists and other decision-makers — and took them into California’s Sierra Nevada. It became known as the Mather Mountain Party.

This was no ordinary camping trip. Mather paid for the expedition. Horses and mules carried supplies into the wilderness. The party slept on the latest air mattresses. And despite being miles from civilization, dinner could arrive on tables dressed in snowy white linen, with china and silverware. Their cooks somehow produced fresh bread, steak, fried chicken, trout, pies and even plum pudding with brandy sauce in the backcountry.

Mather wasn’t simply entertaining his friends. He was building a constituency for America’s wilderness. He understood something remarkably modern about persuasion: people protect what they have experienced.

Rather than sitting in Washington explaining why America’s great landscapes mattered, he took influential people into those landscapes and let the mountains make the argument for him.

It worked.

Mather helped assemble a broad coalition of politicians, business leaders, railroads, journalists and conservation organizations behind the idea of a federal agency devoted to America’s parks. In 1916, Congress created the National Park Service. The following year, Stephen Mather became its first director.

And then there was the Grand Canyon. The story had begun years earlier. President Theodore Roosevelt first visited the Grand Canyon in 1903 and was overwhelmed by what he saw. His message to the country was wonderfully simple: leave it alone. Roosevelt understood that there are some places human beings cannot improve.

In 1908, using the Antiquities Act, he proclaimed more than 800,000 acres of the Grand Canyon a national monument, giving this extraordinary Arizona landscape a powerful new level of federal protection. But the Grand Canyon was not yet a national park.

That happened in 1919, three years after the creation of the National Park Service and during Mather’s tenure as its first director. Roosevelt and Mather played very different roles in this American story.

Roosevelt used the power of the presidency to protect extraordinary land. Mather helped build the institution — and the public enthusiasm — that could protect extraordinary places for generations. Mather also believed that preservation and visitation belonged together. He wanted Americans to actually experience their parks. He advocated better roads, trails, accommodations and visitor services because he believed that people who knew the parks would become the people who defended them.

He even spent substantial amounts of his own fortune supporting them. He helped purchase Yosemite’s privately owned Tioga Road and personally contributed to park improvements when government funding wasn’t enough.His philosophy was wonderfully straightforward:

Show people something magnificent, and they will want to save it.

More than a century later, we are still living with the results. Today, when you arrive at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, one of the first great overlooks you encounter is Mather Point.

It is named for Stephen Tyng Mather.

Stand there at sunrise and watch the canyon slowly emerge from darkness. Watch the cliffs change from violet to rose to gold. Look across a landscape so immense that for a moment it becomes difficult to comprehend. Then remember the man whose name is on the sign. Stephen Mather wasn’t a president. He wasn’t an explorer who discovered the Grand Canyon. He didn’t create the idea of conservation. What he did was perhaps less dramatic — and enormously consequential.

He figured out how to turn admiration into action.

He brought people together. He persuaded them. He spent his own money. He made powerful people experience wild places firsthand. And he helped build the National Park Service that would protect those places long after he was gone. Bronze memorials to Mather were eventually placed in national parks across America. Their inscription ends with a sentence that feels particularly appropriate when standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon:

“There will never come an end to the good that he has done.”

The next time you’re at the Grand Canyon, go to Mather Point. Look out. And remember Stephen Mather. Some names deserve not to be forgotten.

There’s so much to love…

XO from AZ