How to manipulate emotions in a national park

Yellowstone, art, and the ways we experience nature

The Gibbon valley in Yellowstone: nature or art? (Jacob W. Frank NPS photo courtesy Wikimedia)

On July 19, 1918, Charles P. Punchard, jr., arrived at Yellowstone’s headquarters. A dark-haired, cleanshaven 33-year-old from a venerable New England family, Punchard was described by a colleague as having “professional skill and keen judgment and likable manly qualities.” He carried a letter from director Stephen Mather showing that he had been appointed as National Park Service Landscape Engineer.

It was a time of great transition in Yellowstone. Cars had been allowed in just three years previously. Then, as visitation exploded, stagecoaches were banned to minimize conflicts. Political maneuverings had delayed the transfer of Yellowstone from military to civilian operation. Meanwhile, although legislation authorizing the National Park Service was almost two years old, the agency had gotten a slow start. Mather was just now returning from an 18-month medical leave. The initial legislation had not included a budget, and subsequent budgets had been limited in wartime.

Punchard’s arrival represented the transformation that the nationwide agency would bring to its first national park. Punchard embodied the Park Service: a young professional who knew the system, rather than an untrained soldier or cowboy.

Punchard’s profession, landscape architecture, meant that he was here to manipulate Yellowstone’s environment. The term manipulate may surprise those who think of Yellowstone and other national parks as pristine wilderness. But four and a half decades after this stunning landscape was set aside from human society, pressures had built for human society to manage it. How to maintain and enhance natural resources in the face of all the new cars and visitors?

The Park Service’s answer had always been landscape architecture. A chief author of the 1916 legislation creating the agency was Frederick Law Olmsted, jr., known as Rick to distinguish him from his famous father. His father had arguably invented the discipline of landscape architecture with designs for New York City’s Central Park, Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, Boston’s Emerald Necklace, the U.S. Capitol grounds, and hundreds of other well-loved city parks.

In a brief stint as a Yosemite advisor in 1865, Fred Olmsted brought his philosophies to large rural parks. In 1916, Rick Olmsted reinvigorated them for this new agency. Parks, he argued, should benefit all sorts of people, not just the wealthy—and should do so by offering opportunities for people to have emotional reactions to scenery.

Central Park succeeded because it spurred emotional reactions. It was art, except that it was forged from trees and meadows and the placement of pathways instead of paint or marble and a museum setting.

Punchard’s role was to make sure the same thing happened in Yellowstone. In other words, Yellowstone wasn’t just about a spouting geyser, a mountain vista, or a colorful canyon. It was about how experiencing those views made a person feel. Those feelings could be enhanced by the design of a trail or road, by the planting or cutting of trees—by the manipulation of nature.

Yellowstone’s traditional road/path system, with its figure-8 shape, even roughly followed the principles Olmsted had used at Central Park. This was a “carriage road” that took you to all the major sites while constantly providing you with new and changing vistas and natural experiences. Punchard wanted to make drivers on these roads feel the emotions of getting closer to nature.

Punchard spent the entire summer at Yellowstone. Mather was pleased with his work on the placement of buildings: “employees’ cottages, ranger stations, gasoline and oil stations, automobile checking stations, comfort stations, etc.” But Punchard’s work encompassed far more.

For example, he advised that borrow pits used to gather fill for road construction be located out of sight instead of alongside the road. He suggested removing dead wood and debris at the Mammoth Hot Springs terraces. He recommended the planting of lawns around hotels, and the construction of ornamental fences around service areas. In subsequent years, he would improve the layout of campgrounds and advise clearing roadside timber to expose views of places such as Wraith Falls and Duck Lake.

In short, “Punchard established a standard for the visual appearance of developed areas of the park,” wrote historian Linda Flint McClelland. “This standard was based upon the naturalistic principles of nineteenth-century landscape gardening, whereby vistas were carefully framed, plantings were used to screen unsightly views, and roadways were laid out for the most scenic effect.”

Punchard is little known today, largely because he died of tuberculosis in 1920. Compared to, say, the Olmsteds, he had fewer opportunities to create lasting art. But he deserves a higher profile when it comes to Yellowstone, wilderness, and the human relationship to nature. He both made Yellowstone art and articulated the paradox at its heart: “It is a work of control, preserving the naturalness.”

End notes:

• I quote Punchard’s colleague Frederick Noble Evans from “Charles Pierpont Punchard, Jr.: A Minute on His Life and Service,” Transactions of the American Society of Landscape Architects, 1909-1921. 1921, p. 100. I quote Mather as cited in William Tweed, et. al., National Park Service, Rustic Architecture: 1916-1942, Washington, DC: National Park Service, 1977, part 2. I quote McClelland from Presenting Nature: The Historic Landscape Design of the National Park Service 1916 to 1942, Washington, DC: National Park Service, 1993, part 3e. I quote Punchard from “Landscape Design in the National Park Service,” Landscape Architecture 10, no. 3 (1920), p. 145.

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