The Fight to Make Rainier Uncle Sam’s Park

Secretary Whitworth, of the Chamber of Commerce, has received from Senator W. C. Squire a copy of a memorial from the Geological Society of America for the establishment of a national park in this state around Mount Rainier. The memorial was introduced in the Senate by Senator Squire, referred to the Committee on Public Lands, and ordered to be printed. It will come up at the next session of Congress as a bill.

The memorial is presented to Congress in behalf of the following organizations representing the Geological Society of America: the American Association for the Advancement of Science, at its meeting held at Madison, Wis.; the National Geographic Society, held in Washington City; the Sierra Club, held in San Francisco; and the Appalachian Mountain Club, held in Boston. Accompanying the memorial is a map showing the original Pacific forest reserve and its western boundary cutting directly through the snow fields and glaciers of Mount Rainier.

The proposition is to create a national park out of that part of the reserve around Mount Rainier, add to it one line of townships on the west, make the eastern boundary the crest of the Cascade Mountains, and restrict the northern and southern boundaries so as not to include the Wilkeson and Carbonado coal fields on the north and the undeveloped coal fields of the Cowlitz on the south. The park thus asked for will contain about twenty-four miles square.

The committee claims that the western part of the Pacific reserve, including the portion desired as a national park, contains many features of unique interest and wonderful grandeur. The region is one of such exceptional rainfall and snowfall that the preservation of its forests is of unusual importance as a protection against floods in the lower valleys; but the scenic features which mark it out for a national park attract tourists, who set fire to the timber. This destruction goes on notwithstanding it is a forest reserve, and will continue until protection is afforded by adequate supervision of the area.

In describing Mount Rainier the memorial committee grows enthusiastic and says: "This grand mountain is not, like Mont Blanc, merely the dominant peak of a chain of snow mountains; it is the only snow peak in view. Mount St. Helens and Mount Adams being, like it, isolated and many miles distant. Rainier is majestic in its isolation. It is superb in its boldness, rising from one canyon 11,000 feet in seven miles. Not only is it the grandest mountain in this country, it is one of the grand mountains of the world, to be named with St. Elias, Fujiyama and Ararat, and the most superb summits of the Alps."

The memorial explains that the boundaries were selected to include the glacial area and adjacent forest while excluding coal fields and leaving the Naches Pass on the north and the Cowlitz Pass on the south open for railroad construction. It recommends that the park be defined by a boundary beginning at the northwest corner of section 19, township 18 north, range 7 east of the Willamette meridian, thence south twenty-four miles, east twenty-seven miles to the summit of the Cascade range, north to a point east of the place of beginning, and west twenty-six miles to the start.

"Railroad lines have been surveyed and after the establishment of a national park would soon be built to its boundaries," the memorial says. "The concessions for a hotel, stopping places and stage routes could be leased and the proceeds devoted to the maintenance of the park. The policing of the park could be performed from the barracks at Vancouver by details of soldiers, who would thus be given useful and healthful employment from May to October."