In 1832 he traveled the northern Great Plains of the United States, where he became concerned about the destruction of the Indian civilization, wildlife, and wilderness as eastern settlements spread westward.

In the east, romantic portrayals of nature by James Fenimore Cooper and Henry David Thoreau and painters Thomas Cole and Frederick Edwin Church began to compete with prevailing view of wilderness as a challenge to overcome.

In 1864, Sen. John Conness of California sponsored an act to transfer the valley and nearby Mariposa Big Tree Grove to the state so they might "be used and preserved for the benefit of mankind".

A myth evolved that near the end of the Washburn expedition, discussion around the campfire led several of the members to suggest that the area be set aside for public use and not allow it to be sold to private individuals.

El Morro, New Mexico, is a wayside in the rugged desert lands used by Indians settlers and travelers for centuries as a watering hole and a place to leave their marks.

Mukuntuweap became Zion, Sieur de Monts grew into Acadia, and Petrified Forest which was expanded by Congress to become a National Park of the same name.

For years J. Horace McFarland, President of the American Civic Association; Secretaries of the Interior Walter Fisher and Franklin K. Lane; Presidents William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson; Frederick Law Olmsted Jr.; Representatives William Kent and John E. Raker of California; Senator Reed Smoot of Utah; Stephen T. Mather and Horace M. Albright had been seeking the creation of separate agency to manage the National Parks and Monuments.

[5] The first memorial was authorized by the Continental Congress on January 25, 1776, to honor General Richard Montgomery, killed during an assault on the heights of Quebec in the midst of a snowstorm on the night of December 31, 1775.

It resolved: "That the United States in Congress assembled, will cause to be erected at York, in Virginia, a marble column, adorned with emblems of the alliance between the United States and His Most Christian Majesty; and inscribed with a succinct narrative of the surrender...." In 1823 in Boston; Daniel Webster, Edward Everett, and other prominent citizens formed the Bunker Hill Battle Monument Association to save part of the historic field and erect on it a great commemorative monument.

April 30, 1864, in the midst of the Civil War, Pennsylvania chartered the Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Association to commemorate "the great deeds of valor... and the signal events which render these battlegrounds illustrious."

By 1890 it had acquired several hundred acres of land on the battlefield including areas in the vicinity of Spangler's Spring, the Wheatfield, Little Round Top, and the Peach Orchard as well as the small white frame house General Meade had used as headquarters.

With interest and support from both North and South Congress decided to go beyond the former battlefield monument concept to authorize the first four National Military Parks — Chickamauga & Chattanooga in 1890, Shiloh in 1894, Gettysburg in 1895, and Vicksburg in 1899.

These areas were not selected at random but constituted, almost from the beginning, a rational system, designed to preserve major battlefields for historical and professional study and as lasting memorials to the great armies of both sides.

The battle of Gettysburg was scarcely over when Governor Andrew Y. Curtin (Pennsylvania) hastened to the field to assist local residents in caring for the dead or dying.

It was established to protect the Olympic elk and important stands of Sitka spruce, western hemlock, Douglas-fir, and Alaska cedar and redcedar.

By mid-century, a great and growing backlog of deferred park maintenance and development projects, posed vast new problems for the Service and System.

Jackson Hole, had been talked of as a possible addition to Yellowstone as early as 1892, and from 1916 onward the Service and Department of the Interior actively sought its preservation in the National Park System.

On November 10, 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt invited his friend and neighbor, Major Gist Blair, to give consideration "to some kind of plan which would coordinate the broad relationship of the Federal Government to State and local interest in the maintenance of historic sources and places throughout the country.

Some architectural monuments, including the Old St. Louis Post Office and the Cathedral, have been carefully preserved, but the main feature of the area is the only major national memorial of modern design in the United States, and one of a small number in the world — Eero Saarinen's stainless steel Arch.

A commission was established for New York City, where a complex of urban monuments were added, including Federal Hall National Memorial, Castle Clinton, Grant Memorial, Hamilton Grange, Theodore Roosevelt's Birthplace, and Sagamore Hill, to the previously authorized Statue of Liberty National Monument, whose boundaries were extended to include Ellis Island.

Beginning in 1960, the responsibilities of this Survey staff were extended to include recommendation of an important series of National Historic Landmarks, officially designated by the Secretary of the Interior.

The origin of Recreation Areas as a category in the National Park System stemmed in important part from widened responsibilities assigned to the Service beginning in the 1930s.

It was a large and dynamic undertaking, at its peak involving administration of 482 CCC camps allotted to state parks employing almost 100,000 enrollees on work projects guided by a technical and professional staff numbering several thousand.

These were not fairly short county or metropolitan parkways serving a variety of local and national traffic but protected recreational roadways traversing hundreds of miles of scenic and historic rural landscape.

Senator Harry F. Byrd of Virginia, aided by others, seized the opportunity to propose the construction of a scenic roadway linking Shenandoah and Great Smoky Mountains National Park as a public works project.

Among many other features, the National Industrial Recovery Act authorized federal purchases of land considered submarginal for farming but valuable for recreation purposes.

The next year, under provisions of an agreement with the Bureau of Reclamation, the National Park Service assumed responsibility for all recreational activities at Lake Mead.

By 1964, application of the National Recreation Area concept to major impoundments behind Federal dams, whether constructed by the Bureau of Reclamation or the Corps of Engineers, appeared to be well accepted by Congress.

The first seashore recreation survey in the mid-1930s resulted in a recommendation that 12 major stretches of unspoiled Atlantic and Gulf Coast shoreline, with 437 miles (703 km) of beach, be preserved.

The authorization of activities shall be construed and the protection, management, and administration of these areas shall be conducted in light of the high public value and integrity of the National Park System and shall not be exercised in derogation of the values and purposes for which these various areas have been established, except as may have been or shall be directly and specifically provided by Congress.The first national lakeshores were created in 1966 from some of the remaining unspoiled or unique coastlines of the Great Lakes.