THE NATIONAL PARKS SYSTEM 269 



the City of Los Angeles (representing the power 

 interests) to make them subject to power in Na- 

 tional Parks, until 1926, when compromise resulted 

 in passage of a Greater Sequoia bill which omitted 

 the Kings country. The battle was drawn. The 

 Valleys of the Kings remain where they were in 

 the Sierra National Forest, still safe from power 

 use; but not tied up forever as they would be in a 

 National Park. Year by year they will establish 

 more surely in the public mind their manifest des- 

 tiny. Whether administered by the Forest Service 

 or transferred to the National Park Service, these 

 valleys are as certainly lost to water power as 

 though a National Park. 



In all the other contests of these strenuous 

 years involving power or irrigation inclusion within 

 National Parks, whether fought in Congress or in the 

 several western states where not infrequently the 

 tide of battle passed, the cause of national policy tri- 

 umphed consistently over reactionary localism. No 

 Bechler Basin dam was authorized within Yellow- 

 stone National Park. Four years of campaigning 

 failed to get one of Senator Thomas B. Walsh's 

 bills to dam Yellowstone Lake even out of Senate 

 committee. A National Park spotted around in a 

 desert and an Indian Reservation, including every 

 possible violation of national standards, was not 

 created at Secretary Fall's demand in New Mexico. 

 An absurd little National Park was not perched 

 like a jockey cap on the peak of a Virginia moun- 



