It's always been about visitor stats
From the start, NPS founders knew it was their biggest bargaining chip.
On March 5, the National Park Service released their 2024 visitor statistics. Usually, this would come with a great deal of fanfare and applause — but not this year.
As Wes Siler reported on his own Substack (which is excellent, please read it), the NPS is under orders to intentionally suppress their visitation data from 2024. In any normal year, the release of this data would prompt great celebration. The NPS broke its 2016 record with 331.9 million visitors (up 2%) and 28 parks set new visitation records.
These statistics are publicly available on the NPS website — for now. The Trump Administration has shown that it has no qualms about tearing down information from public-facing websites that doesn’t serve their agenda. Already, NPS content related to the history of LGBTQ advocates — particularly transgender individuals — has been removed from webpages related to Stonewall National Monument in New York City.
The stifling of this release of information is not meaningless. Historically, visitation data has been a powerful tool that the NPS has used to bargain for money and resources from Congress. While many people want to see national parks protected for more philosophical reasons, the NPS has always had to prove itself to the “return on investment” people. NPS founder Stephen Mather knew this well — and he took big, personal steps to make the case for national parks through visitation.
Publicizing the Parks
In 1915, Stephen T. Mather and his assistant Horace Albright had just finished a dedication ceremony for Rocky Mountain National Park. While the creation of this new park was momentous, Mather had bigger fish to fry. He had been brought on as an employee of the Department of the Interior to campaign for the creation of a centralized office to run the national parks. This was a huge task, and it required a daring strategy.
Luckily, Stephen Mather was a bold, eccentric man. After making his fortune as the owner of the Thorkildsen-Mather Borax Company, Mather discovered a passion for conservation that would define the later part of his life. Shortly after being brought to Interior, he was assigned a young California lawyer as his assistant, Horace Albright. The two men quickly bonded. Together, they are most deserving of being called the “founders” of the National Park Service, forming the nucleus around which dozens of other influential conservation leaders would rotate.
“As soon as Mr. Mather was back in Washington, he directed all his attention to ways and means of getting national parks more widely known,” wrote Albright in his autobiography, Creating the National Park Service: The Missing Years.
In his account, Albright writes relates that Mather had a clear strategy for how to campaign for the creation of the National Park Service — and that he was willing to pay for it personally. “He felt that he had to get people to use the parks before he could get legislation and appropriations. Too few people knew about them. He believed that Congress had the cart before the horse, that it wouldn’t appropriate money until proof was furnished that the parks were being used.”
To meet this end, Mather stitched together a Frankenstein publicity office within the Department of the Interior. There was no central bureau for managing national parks at the time (in fact, the jurisdiction of the parks was spread across Interior, Agriculture, and the War department), so Mather had to “borrow” staff and space from other agencies. He hired an influential newspaperman and friend, Robert Sterling Yard, to run the office. Mather personally paid Yard’s $5000 salary, but had him placed on the payroll of the U.S. Geological Survey for $1 so that Yard could receive certain privileges as a federal employee. He managed to secure an office in the Bureau of Mines and a starting secretary from the Biological Survey (now the Fish and Wildlife Service).
While Mather and Yard engaged a number of influential writers to publish pieces in support of the National Park Service idea, their greatest accomplishment was the National Parks Portfolio. It came in two forms: a collection of pamphlets and a green, hardbound edition. Inside were descriptions of the national parks and monuments, written by Yard and accompanied by impressive photographs. Again, Mather coerced others in the Interior Department to aid his efforts. A photographer from the Bureau of Reclamation was convinced to tour the parks and send back photos.
Mather himself donated $5000 dollars to pay for the photographs and plates. He persuaded 21 western railroads — who also benefitted from increased visitation to national parks and monuments — to pay $40,000 for the publication of the National Parks Portfolio. Mather and Yard mailed the publication to a list of libraries, travel agencies, editors, and politicians compiled by the General Federation of Women’s Clubs.
As Albright puts it, “the publicity radiated by Yard almost immediately produced results. Along with the public’s heightened awareness of their “pleasuring grounds” came real progress for the parks in a general sense.”
One such point of “real progress” was a provision in a Civil Sundry Bill that allowed the Secretary of the Interior to accept land donated on behalf of the parks. This was significant victory for Stephen Mather. He had raised funds through his business connections to purchase the Tioga Road, which he donated to the federal government. This opened up a free new portal to Yosemite National Park for the American people.
Through all this, Mather’s strategy was simple: If you promote the parks, visitors will come. If visitors come, then appropriations will follow. Mather put his personal fortune behind this, paying salaries and purchasing land to make the parks more accessible. History has proven it a winning strategy.
Let the record show
In an op-ed for the National Parks Traveler, former NPS director Jonathan Jarvis said that “the NPS is the perfect example of an agency providing direct services to the public through its operation of 433 park units, its conservation of natural and cultural resources, its programs, and the delivery of high quality visitor experiences.”
In a sense, he is reaching back to the same logic as Stephen Mather. Money spent on the National Park Service is money well spent for the American people, and the visitation numbers are evidence for that reality. For serving 339 million Americans on a $3.2 billion budget, some might even call the NPS efficient — that’s less than $10 spent per visit.
Cuts to the NPS are antithetical to this reality, which is why the Trump Administration wants to bury the statistics. Luckily, you and I already have the Stephen Mather playbook. The statistics are freely available and ready to be disseminated. The further they go, the further they can undermine the attempts being made to dismantle the National Park Service in the name of “efficiency.”
It was a record year for the national parks — let’s make sure everyone knows about it.
This was a great read! I definitely want to lean more into the history surrounding the creation of the NPS, so I'll be looking into the resources mentioned here.