326 
PARK AND CEMETERY. 
Progress In National Park IN o r k 
By Stephen T. Mather, Assistant Secre- 
tary of the Interior, Washington, D. C. ' 
Realizing that success depends ultimately 
upon public support, and knowing that the 
people were surprisingly ignorant of the 
extent, variety, magnificence, and economic 
value of their national parks, I early in- 
augurated an earnest campaign of public 
was distributed over specially compiled 
lists and reached appreciative hands. Forty- 
three thousand dollars were contributed 
by the railroads toward the cost of issu- 
ing these portfolios, and this sum repre- 
sented only a small part of the contrib- 
pected to equal that of the year before, 
which, with the lure of the Western expo- 
sitions, had been phenomenal. Reports 
from the parks, however, clearly indicate 
that the 1916 travel not only did not fall 
below that of last year, but actually ex- 
education under the management of Robert 
Sterling Yard. 
To this end the information circulars 
were immediately rewritten, reorganized, 
and distributed under a new and effective 
plan. Last winter, a descriptive booklet 
entitled "Glimpses of Our National Parks" 
was written by iNIr. Yard to meet special 
educational needs. The astonishing de- 
mand that immediately developed for this 
book assured me that the public was eager 
for the facts. 
I followed this in the early summer by 
the publication, with the financial co-oper- 
ation of seventeen Western railroads, of 
ITr. Yard's "National Parks Portfolio,” an 
elaborately illustrated volume written and 
designed for the purpose of differentiating 
the principal national parks and presenting 
an adequate pictorial representation of 
each. .An edition of about 275,000 of these 
uting railroad’s total expense in advertis- 
ing the national parks reached by their 
respecti\e lines. 
In addition to these important publica- 
tions many hundreds of photographs were 
collected from many sources and distrib- 
uted to magazines and newspapers desiring 
to publish them, and facts and figures re- 
garding national parks were furnished 
freely to newspaper and magazine writers 
who sought them as a result of the rap- 
idly growing public interest inspired by the 
department. All of this material was freely 
offered to all writers and periodicals wath- 
out discrimination, and was followed by 
an e.xtraodinary increase in the inform- 
ative periodical literature on the subject. 
L’nder the stimulus of this public inter- 
est it was expected, in the early days of 
the season just closed, that travel to the 
parks would be heavy, but it was not ex- 
ceeded it. Of course, the travel did not 
increase in every park, but in several parks. 
In Rocky Mountain National Park, for ex- 
ample, the increases were so large that 
they more than offset the decreases in 
other reservations. 
However, travel to all of the parks was 
far above the normal of the years before 
their development was undertaken. And 
we cannot refrain from conjecturing how 
much heavier it would have been had not 
unforseen conditions intervened to dis- 
courage and retard travel in all sections 
of the country. These conditions were the 
very late spring and the threatened rail- 
road strike. There is no doubt that they 
adversely influenced railroad travel to the 
parks. 
The travel that was less seriously af- 
fected by these unfavorable weather and 
industrial conditions was the motor travel. 
