Yosemite embodies the long war over US national park privatization

Michael Childers does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

The Trump administration’s cuts to the National Park Service’s budget and staffing have raised concerns among park advocates and the public that the administration is aiming to further privatize the national parks.

The nation has a long history of similar efforts, including a wildly unpopular 1980 attempt by Reagan administration Interior Secretary James Watt to promote development and expand private concessions in the parks. But debate over using public national park land for private profit dates back more than a century before that.

In early 1864, Central American Steamship Transit Company representative Israel Ward Raymond wrote a letter to John Conness, a U.S. senator from California, urging the government to move swiftly to preserve the Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoia trees to prevent them from falling into private hands. Five months later, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Yosemite Grant Act, ceding the valley and the grove to the state of California, “upon the express conditions that the premises shall be held for public use, resort, and recreation.” This was years before Yellowstone became the first federal land designated a national park in 1872.

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