The Present Peril of the National Parks 
J. Horace McFarland, President American Civic Association 
It has been the general impression that the national parks were 
as secure against commercial intrusion as a cemetery by the very fact 
and method of their creation. The successful assault on the Yosemite 
for a city water supply ought to have warned us all that no such 
security existed. Under present legal relations, since the passage of 
the Federal Water Power Act approved June lo, 1920, no single 
square foot of national park, monument, reservation or even cemetery, 
is safe from the claims of the power promoter if it has on it a drop of 
water. 
Further, irrigation interests, including scores of corporations 
organized for the purpose, are casting covetous eyes on the water in 
national parks, and on locations suitable for irrigation dams, res- 
ervoirs, flumes, pole-lines, tunnels and conduits. 
A project originating in Idaho got through the Federal Senate early 
in 1920, and nearly passed the House prior to the summer recess. It is 
a plan impounding the water of the southwestern corner of the Yellow- 
stone National Park in a reservoir to flood eight thousand acres. This 
" FaUs River Basin " was described as a worthless and unvisited swamp 
and the project offered to establish instead ''a beautiful lake." In- 
vestigation during July has shown that this basin is perhaps the most 
beautiful valley in the park, with broad, grassy, well watered mead- 
ows, described as "a camper's paradise," and surrounded in part by 
high lands from which spring several lovely waterfalls, from 130 to 380 
feet in height. Following up a completed similar reservoir outside the 
park shows that as the water is drawn down in summer, dead trees and 
slimy beaches are uncovered, so that the beautiful Jackson Lake is 
now bordered by an inaccessible morass. 
Yellowstone Lake, a major attraction of this greatest of our 
national parks, and Shoshone, Lewis and Heart Lakes, the only other 
considerable bodies of water in the park, are also desired by the 
irrigationists as reservoirs to be drawn down during the summer. It 
is proposed by a Montana corporation, according to a letter written 
by the Secretary of the Interior Payne, *'to dam the Yellowstone 
River near the mouth of the Yellowstone Lake," thus flooding and 
making inaccessible the present beautiful shores of the lake, covering 
some islands, and in general, destropng much of the rare beauty of 
this marvelous region. Flumes, tunnels and pole-hnes are a part of 
this project. 
Secretar}'^ Payne says "the certain encroachment upon the parks 
by the power and other interests tending toward commercialization 
should be resisted to the utmost." 
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