When the New York City minister Joel Headley collapsed in 1849 from a nervous breakdown, he was ordered by his doctor to try what was, for a mid-nineteenth-century American, a most unusual undertaking: a vacation. As a destination for this peculiar endeavor, Headley selected the little-known Adirondack Mountains, a series of heavily forested peaks that crowned New York’s northernmost counties. The Adirondacks’ clean air, tranquil scenery, and remoteness from urban centers, Headley reasoned, would provide a tonic for his shattered nerves. Although at the time upstate New York was better known for its hardscrabble farms and lumber camps than for...

“The people, as a rule, know nothing of the existence of a Forest Commission.” So reported one of the commission’s agents following a special investigative tour of the Adirondacks in the summer of 1885 , in a comment that portended the enormous challenges facing the region’s newly appointed managers. It had been a relatively easy matter for officials in Albany to draw a “blue line” around some three million acres of state and private land in northern New York and to proclaim this space a park and forest preserve governed by a new series of environmental regulations. But landscapes do...

In planning the Adirondack Park, conservationists had envisioned nature as stable and predictable, an entity that followed fixed laws easily comprehensible to trained experts. If park supporters had initially focused little attention on the people inhabiting their new conservation experiment, they soon concluded that the region’s human populace possessed few of the qualities that characterized its natural systems. In place of nature’s order and harmony, Adirondackers seemed to be governed by a “peculiar moral attitude” that manifested itself in unpredictable, lawless behavior. “I have not found a single instance in which the State forestry laws are obeyed or even respected...

On the morning of August 24 , 1877 , Frank Carpenter awoke to a sight unlike any other he had encountered in Yellowstone National Park: five mounted Indians riding into his camp in Yellowstone’s Lower Geyser Basin. For the past two weeks, Carpenter, along with several friends and family members, had been sightseeing in the nation’s first park, created some five years earlier to protect Yellowstone’s unique natural features. Dramatically situated on a high plateau, the new park boasted thousands of geysers, boiling springs, mud pots, fumaroles, and other geothermal oddities—all testimony to the region’s location over a rare...

To most nineteenth-century conservationists, the military’s arrival at Yellowstone marked a clear turning point in the park’s fortunes. John Muir, for instance, rejoiced at seeing Yellowstone “efficiently managed and guarded by small troops of United States cavalry.” “Uncle Sam’s soldiers,” the Sierra Club president enthused, are “the most effective forest police.”¹ “I will not say that this Rocky Mountain region is the only part of the country where this lesson of obedience to law is badly needed,” agreed Charles Dudley Warner inHarper’smagazine, “but it is one of them.” Like Muir, Warner saw Yellowstone’s military administration as a notable...

As the fall of 1892 drew to a close, Yellowstone’s acting superintendent, Captain George S. Anderson, paused to reflect on recent events at the park. The past year had witnessed a number of developments: the erection of a new army barracks at Mammoth Hot Springs; heavy rains that had washed out many of the park’s roads and discouraged tourist travel to Yellowstone; an early September snowstorm. Still, one issue above all preoccupied the captain. “Trouble with poachers,” railed Anderson, “continues to be one of the greatest annoyances the superintendent has to contend with. There is gradually settling about the park...

In the fall of 1915, Captain Jim, a member of the Havasupai tribe of northern Arizona, dispatched an urgent letter to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs. Captain Jim opened his missive by detailing the close relationship that had once existed between his people and the wildlife of the region, particularly mule deer, the area’s most plentiful game animal: “A long time ago the Gods gave the deer to the Indian for himself. The women and children all like deer meat very much. The Indian men like buckskins to trade for grub, saddles, horses, saddles, blankets, and money. A long time...

History does not record how or when the Havasupai became aware of the existence of a forest reserve at the Grand Canyon. Perhaps they first learned of the reserve’s creation in April of 1894 , when federal administrators, upset by the numerous attempts that had been made “to secure right of entrance, occupancy and use of tracts of public land embraced in forest reservations,” posted signs printed on linen cloth at reserves throughout the West, detailing the new reserves’ prohibitions against the setting of fires, the cutting of trees, and the grazing of livestock. Any violators of these rules, the...