Tiring of taking picture after picture of the same mountains from the same spot, we packed up and moved on, driving around Jackson Lake, enlarged considerably by a dam built in 1916.
When my younger self passed through Jackson Hole those many years ago, it struck me as somehow odd that a National Park would have a big, man-made, terrain-altering structure like a dam in it. In my youthful naivete, I had this fuzzy idea that the government had simply decreed the existence of the park, and all such parks, and that somehow they had been delivered down though time preserved in their primordial state. The idea that humans had lived there and altered the land seemed nonsensical. People lived and farmed here? But it's a National Park!
Even as the Hayden Surveys of the 1870's were mapping and popularizing the mountains near the headwaters of the Snake River, the population of settlers and farmers was steadily increasing on the Snake River plains. Farming needs water, and in the West that means irrigation. By 1900, the Federal Government had instituted a project to build sufficient irrigation capacity to supply the upper Snake River plain (basically, eastern Idaho). Dams and irrigation canals began appearing at lower elevations, and eventually worked their way up to Jackson Hole. Each of the lakes in Jackson Hole was evaluated for suitability, and Jackson Lake was the most promising.
Jackson Hole was by no means pristine and untouched. Though the seasonal bands of Shoshone – never numerous to begin with – had been killed or moved away, settlers had moved into Jackson Hole and been busy digging irrigation ditches and diversion canals. The Jackson Lake dam was bigger in scope but not different in kind from the activity that was already occurring.
In 1929 the National Park was formed, but at that time it was much smaller, encompassing just the high peaks and the lakes immediately adjacent. Jackson Hole was still farming territory, but John Rockefeller's Snake River Land Company was stealthily buying up homesteads throughout the valley, with the intent of eventually giving the land to the federal government to add to the park. Rockefeller's activity became public, setting off a vigorous local controversy. Opponents of an expanded park managed to stall action until 1943, when Roosevelt created the Jackson Hole National Monument by fiat. In 1950, congress merged the park and the national monument.
Leaving the lake and the Tetons behind, we drove into lodgepole pine forests along the Rockefeller Parkway, slowly gaining altitude as we climbed onto the Yellowstone plateau.
Posted by David Fleck at 10 March 2007 06:59 AM