National Parks ***** 141 



they lie within national forests or military reservations. It is more economi 

 cal to protect these monuments with forces of these other departments, but 

 it is believed that the policies governing them will ultimately be those of the 

 National Park Service. As a matter of fact, the War Department has taken 

 the position that the National Park Service should take over not only its 

 national monuments but also the national military parks, which include 

 Gettysburg in Pennsylvania, Shiloh in Tennessee, Vicksburg in Mississippi, 

 Chickamauga and Chattanooga in Georgia and Tennessee, and Antietam in 

 Maryland, all battlefields of the Civil War, but most of them also very 

 scenic and otherwise possessed of park characteristics. 



There are also two other national military parks, Guilford Courthouse in 

 North Carolina, a Revolutionary War battleground, and Lincoln's birthplace 

 in Kentucky, containing the log cabin and part of the farm where Abraham 

 Lincoln was born. This latter park, it seems, should have been under the 

 National Park Service from its establishment, as there never has been any 

 military significance to its creation and maintenance. So it appears that there 

 will be ultimately a consolidation of national parks, national monuments, and 

 national military parks under the National Park Service, which is equipped by 

 experience, personnel, legal authority, and general policies to administer and 

 protect them all in the interest of the nation. 



Of the national monuments now under the National Park Service, two 

 are in California, eight are in Arizona, six in New Mexico, one in Nebraska, 

 three in Colorado, four in Utah, two in Wyoming, one in South Dakota, one 

 in North Dakota, one in Montana, one in Idaho, and three in Alaska. 



All of the monuments in Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah, with the excep 

 tion of the Carlsbad Cave and the Dinosaur monuments, are under the admin 

 istration of one superintendent with headquarters at Casa Grande, Arizona. 



Following is a brief description of each of the national parks and monu 

 ments, together with suggestions for seeing them. 



YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK 



Yellowstone National Park lies principally in Wyoming, but extends over 

 the borders of Idaho and Montana. It is probably the most celebrated of all 

 the national parks because it contains more and greater geysers than all the 

 rest of the world together, the only other great geyser fields in the world 

 being those in Iceland and New Zealand. 



Geysers are, roughly speaking, water volcanoes. They occur only at 

 places where the internal heat of the earth approaches close to the surface. 

 Their action, for so many years unexplained and even now regarded with 

 wonder by so many, is simple. Water from the surface trickling through 

 cracks in the rocks, or water from subterranean springs, collecting in the 

 bottom of the geyser's crater down among the strata of intense heat, be 

 comes itself intensely heated and gives off steam, which expands and forces 

 upward the cooler water that lies above it. It is then that the water at the 

 surface of the geyser begins to bubble and give off clouds of steam, the sign 

 to the watchers above that the geyser is about to play. When the water in 



