By J. N. LeConte Hetch Hetchy Valley before Inundation
By J. N. LeConte Devils Postpile, Excluded from Yosemite in 1905
The genial Secretary of the Interior showed him into a little office and said, “There’s your desk, Steve; now go to work.” With that Lane went out and closed the door, but presently opened it and said, “By the way, Steve, I forgot to ask what your politics are.”
With such brief preliminaries did Stephen T. Mather assume directorship of the national parks. He served through the presidential administrations of Wilson, Harding, and Coolidge, but the matter of his politics was never inquired into by any party.
Stephen Mather was born on the Fourth of July, 1867, in San Francisco. His ancestry traces back to Richard Mather, a Massachusetts clergyman of the days of the Pilgrim Fathers. Stephen T. Mather was not a scion of wealth. As a young man, he made his way through college by selling books. He graduated from the University of California in 1887 and for several years was a newspaper reporter. Thereafter, he entered the employ of the Pacific Coast Borax Company and was identified with the trade name, “Twenty-Mule Team Borax,” that became well known around the world. For ten years he engaged in the production of profits for his employers and then organized his own company. It was in borax that he built up his business success and accumulated the fortune which “he later shared so generously with the nation through his investments in scenic beauty on which the people receive the dividends.”
For more than twenty-five years Stephen Mather resided in Chicago, Illinois, but his loyalty to his native state, California, never waned. He was the leading spirit in the organization of the California Society of Illinois and, as its secretary, always secured donations of a carload of choice California fruits to be served at the Society’s annual banquets. Mather then saw to it that these affairs were well written up by the press and telegraphed throughout the country on the Associated Press wires. In this publicity the spirit and motives of the present Californians, Inc., had their birth.
As might well be expected, Mather was a member of the Sierra Club and participated in many of its summer outings. (See Farquhar, 1925, pp. 52-53.) He became acquainted with national park areas on these trips, and it is said that his ideal of a unified administration of the parks resulted from the intimacies so acquired. It was his ambition to weld the parks into a great system and to make them easily accessible to rich and poor alike.
At the time Mather undertook his big task, there were thirteen parks. Some of them were difficult of access and provided few or no facilities for the accommodation of visitors. Government red tape stood in the way of action in the business of park development, but Mather cut the red tape. When government appropriations could not meet the situation, he usually produced “appropriations of his own.” It was such generosity on his part which gave the Tioga Road to the government and saved large groves of Big Trees in the Sequoia National Park. In his own office it was necessary for him personally to employ assistants. Because of the lack of government funds, he expended twice his own salary in securing the personnel needed to set his parks machine in operation. The national benefits derived from the early Mather activity in the parks were recognized by Congress, and that body took new cognizance of national park matters. Larger appropriations were made available, and Mather’s plans were put into effect.
For fourteen years he gave of his initiative and strength, as well as his money. His ideas took material form, and the park system came into being as he had planned. His work was recognized and appreciated. In 1921 George Washington University bestowed upon him the honorary degree of Doctor of Law. His alma mater, the University of California, conferred the same degree in 1924. President W. W. Campbell on that occasion characterized him as follows: