Notes and Correspondence 



349 



During my last three weeks in the country, with a half-breed girl as 

 companion, I traveled with three Indians and a Hudson's Bay Company 

 packtrain over the old miner's trail to Dease Lake, seventy-five miles 

 northeastward from Telegraph. We crossed the Arctic-Pacific Divide 

 into Mackenzie River headwaters, journeyed by scow thirty miles down 

 the lake, and then afoot took a ''knapsack" trip some twenty-five miles 

 further, packing our outfits on the backs of three dogs. To carry a pack 

 upon one's own back would be to lose caste utterly in the eyes of the 

 Indians. We visited the one mine now in operation on Thibert Creek 

 and continued on with our novel packtrain to the base of Defot Moun- 

 tain. I had planned to climb it for the view to northward of which Mr. 

 Muir speaks, but a snowstorm prevented and we had to hasten back to 

 Dease Lake the next day to meet the last outgoing packtrain of the sea- 

 son. I was the first white woman, so they told me at the mine, who had 

 ever traveled in that region "for fun." y^^^^^ r^^^,^^^ ^^^^^ 



Economic Destiny of the National Parks 



[Passage from an address by J. Horace McFarland delivered at the National Park 

 Conference, Washington, D. C, January, 1917] 



I insist the time must soon come when instead of having national parks 

 created by accident or through the devotion of some interested man, we 

 must have a system of national parks all over the land in order to ac- 

 complish the upbuilding of patriotism. . . . Congress now has spent a 

 gigantic sum on the national parks — nearly a quarter of a cent per per- 

 son a year. If it would spend a half cent per year per person for parks, 

 I think Mr. Mather would think the millennium had arrived. And if i 

 cent per person per year was provided, he would be unable to compre- 

 hend all that could be done for our national parks. Yet Philadelphia 

 spends $1.40 per person for park purposes ; Milwaukee, 93 cents ; Pitts- 

 burgh, S3 cents. Why should not the United States spend a whole penny 

 for each of us annually in our national parks ? 



Let me put it in another way. The United States spends the gigantic 

 sum of $700 a day on its vast areas of marvelous natural wonders; 

 Philadelphia $655 on her little bit of most inadequate park area; Mil- 

 waukee gets away with $1,076; and even smoky Pittsburgh spends $862 

 per day on her parks, which Pittsburgh knows is better than extending 

 cemeteries and providing more policemen. 



We need extension of the sort of national park promotion we have 

 recently had. Indeed the kind of management that has been going on 

 the last eighteen months in the National Parks Service is so near busi- 

 ness management that I do not see how it can have happened in Wash- 

 ington. Here are Mr. Mather and Mr. Yard, business men, actually 

 managing national parks as if they were a business enterprise. It is ex- 

 traordinary; but I wish it might be extended, and that we might have a 

 whole lot more of it, and that they might be given money, much real 



