How a Car Ban in Yosemite Park Ushered the Car-Friendly National Parks of Today
This story is part of a series about the Automobile Club of Southern California's role in road development and the club's relationship with environmental and historic preservation. Read the second article in the series which recounts how the automobile club pushed for road development in the name of historic preservation.
On a hot afternoon in July 1900, Oliver Lippincott braved the few trails that existed between his downtown Los Angeles photography studio and the Sierra Nevada mountains some 400 miles away, eventually making his steam-powered Locomobile the first automobile to ever enter Yosemite National Park, a protected area designated just a decade ago thanks to the work of John Muir and his colleagues. The ruggedness of the journey seemed to delight Lippincott, who entered the valley via Wawona Road and posed for photographs of himself inside the Locomobile amid the dramatic Alpine surroundings.
Lippincott's photographs inspired fellow automobilists to make the journey to Yosemite despite the lack of developed roads. At the time, the valley was only accessible to those who could afford passage on the two nearest operating railways — the Southern Pacific Railroad and the Transcontinental Railroad — as well as the few stagecoaches hired to travel from the railways' termini several dozens of miles beyond Yosemite's boundary to its center.
Scores of automobiles ventured into the valley for several years to follow, sharing the loosely compacted dirt trails with the stagecoaches, much to the dismay of the latter crowd. The intermittent noise of the automobiles' combustible engines, in addition to the clouds of dust emitted from their rubber tires, had routinely disturbed the horses operating the stagecoaches and necessitated ever more frequent maintenance of the dirt trails.
Rather than establish rules or separate trails for these two modes of transportation, the acting superintendent Major Harry C. Benson of the Department of Interior banned all automobiles from Yosemite in 1907. The park had received 7,102 visitors in 1907, and in the seven years that automobiles were banned, the park's annual visitorship would not exceed 14,000.
That same year, George Allen Hancock (a prominent businessman who would develop the majority of the wealthy neighborhood known today as Hancock Park) was elected as the director of the Automobile Club of Southern California, a Los Angeles-based motor club whose primary goal was to improve and expand the automobile road infrastructure in the region. As their influence spiraled outward from Southern California, the automobile ordinance in Yosemite posed an obvious threat to their endeavor to make the automobile a welcome mode of transportation across the entirety of the state.
In 1912, with a political influence among their staff and board of directors far greater than their still-meager membership would otherwise suggest, the club's top representatives requested a meeting with the Department of the Interior to present their arguments regarding the overturning of a law in a national park nearly half a thousand miles from their headquarters.
On October 14, representatives of both the Auto Club and those of military and conservationist organizations, including John Muir of the Sierra Club, came to Yosemite National Valley on the invitation of Interior Secretary Warren L. Fisher to participate in a three-day conference for all those "interested in the development and administration of national parks." While Fisher clarified in his introduction to the proceedings that the question of the admission of automobiles to national parks "is by no means the most important question we have to discuss," it had by far eclipsed all other concerns expressed by its participants.
Walter Fry, the head ranger of the nearby Sequoia National Park, brought up the automobile question by reasoning that, whether conservationists liked it or not, the automobile was becoming increasingly prominent on the American landscape and would inevitably have to be accommodated within the valley. "The American people, in my opinion, have outgrown the stagecoach habit," said Fry, "and the automobile is a factor that will have to be recognized, and in that park particularly I should strongly advise that its admission be encouraged."
To make their case that the automobile was better than merely a 'factor,' as Fry had explained, the Auto Club representatives appealed to the concerns of the two other major groups at the proceedings: the conservationists, who had feared the American impulse to infringe upon nature with unregulated and wasteful industry, and the militarists, who had banned the automobile from Yosemite so they could tend to other matters of the park's maintenance — a responsibility that fell to them when the park was first designated on October 1, 1890.
Agreeing to speak on behalf of the Auto Club, the former California Senator Frank P. Flint attempted to appeal to both groups by arguing that the interest in automobile access from Southern California was in large part due to its disproportionate military veteran population that had wished to visit Yosemite. To resolve the perilous journey between the city and the park, Flint explained that the club had begun taking the matter into its own hands. "I desire to say that the Automobile Club of Southern California has taken every step possible to bring together the data to convince the Secretary of the Interior that the automobile should be admitted to the park," Flint explained. "We have selected an engineer of great ability who has visited the park and the roads on six different occasions, and has made surveys and has made a report." C.H. McStay, representing the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce (and soon the Field Secretary of the Auto Club), went as far as to argue that the Interior should not only invest in the automobile's presence in the state's national parks but should also invest in the roadways between them because it "is the fact that California, not alone the park, but California, is the playground of the United States."
Following three days of hearings, the Secretary conceded that "the parks belong to the people," and should be made accessible by these new means of transportation alongside stagecoaches. In regard to a critically undeveloped six-mile mountain pass near the Southern entrance of Yosemite, however, he cautioned that "if Los Angeles is interested in this question, it is up to them to help us get the $40,000 necessary to build the road." In response, McStay pledged the Auto Club's support in raising that and funds for additional automobile roads surrounding the park. He argued, "The automobile should be not only admitted, but encouraged to come in, because it brings with it the money that we want and the people we want, and in that way tends to develop the park."
Though Muir was essentially silent during the conference, he wrote a letter to the Secretary of the American Alpine Club two months later expressing his approval of the revised ordinance in bittersweet tones. "All signs indicate automobile victory," Muir resigned, "and doubtless, under certain precautionary restrictions, these useful, progressive, blunt-nosed mechanical beetles will hereafter be allowed to puff their way into all the parks and mingle their gas-breath with the breath of the pines and waterfalls, and, from the mountaineer's standpoint, with but little harm or good." The following year, the Department of the Interior relieved the Cavalry of its duties in Yosemite; in June 1914, the Interior announced that Yosemite was once again open to automobiles, via the single Coulterville Road west of the park, with a document titled "Regulations Governing the Admission of Automobiles Into the Yosemite National Park." After paying a permit of $5 (equivalent to $138.97 today), automobiles had to follow all 65 points of the document, which forbade everything from horn honking to smoking and exceeding a speed of ten miles per hour, all while abiding by strict schedules so as not to interfere with horse travel.
The overturning of the 1907 ordinance proved to be a profitable decision for the Interior. The park's annual visitorship more than doubled to 33,452 in 1915, much of which had entered Yosemite by paying the $5 automobile permit. In 1916, the funding provided by the sudden influx of automobile drivers into Yosemite and other National Parks gave the Interior cause to establish the National Park Service (NPS), an agency dedicated to preserving both the ecological and historical character of all national parks while also ensuring they are accessible to the public. Weeks after the establishment of the new agency, the Auto Club distributed a "Panoramic Map of the Yosemite Valley" that was designed to fit in the average glove compartment. From the Southwestern approach of El Portal Road, the map depicts the features of the park as a dense assortment of wonders within arm's reach of the automobilist thanks to the newly redeveloped road carved into its center.
