GIVING AWAY THE NATION’S PROPERTY
THE NEEDLESS INVASION OF THE YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK
ON the twenty-fifth of November there is to be a hearing before the Secretary of the Interior to receive and consider the report of a board of army engineers to determine whether or not there is any other adequate source of water-supply for San Francisco than the beautiful Hetch-Hetchy Valley, which the city desires to submerge for a reservoir. This valley, as our readers know, is a part of the great Yosemite National Park, and lies eighteen miles north of the Yosemite Valley, just over the divide, so to speak. The representatives of the city have already acknowledged before the Public Lands Committee of the Senate that they could find an adequate supply of pure water “anywhere along the Sierra,” to the north of the valley—“if,” as they said, “we would pay for it!” The mainspring of the assault upon the people’s National Park—and, if it shall succeed, it will be but the first of many similar assaults on other parks—is the desire to get something for nothing. The public interest in resisting the attempt is to save from destruction one of the most wonderful of the Sierra gorges, which a good wagon road would make an integral part of the Yosemite trip. It remains to be seen whether any amount of speciousness, any elaborate and misleading volume of argument will be able to obscure the main issue—the wanton invasion of the people’s greatest park.
We believe that the Roosevelt administration had no more legal or moral right to divert a part of this National Park from the purposes for which it was created, as was done by the Garfield grant, than it would have had to give away the nation’s coal-fields in Alaska. The Sierra Club, contending with the unlimited financial resources of San Francisco, has yet presented a “brief” which riddles the arguments of the city’s case.
That fable teaches that the time to save the rest of our great scenery is before it is largely visited, for then it will become to the advantage of some “interest” to divert it from the use of posterity.