On March 2, 1899, President William McKinley signed legislation creating Mount Rainier National Park in central Washington. The nearly 400 square mile area of pristine forests and spectacular alpine scenery was the fifth national park designated by Congress. Called Tacoma (or Tahoma) by generations of Northwest Native Americans, Mount Rainier was named after Admiral Peter Rainier in 1792 by English explorer George Vancouver, who sighted the enormous 14,410 foot volcanic peak while mapping Puget Sound.
Just over a century later, famed naturalist John Muir visited the Rainier region and recommended that it be designated as a national park. Muir was particularly impressed with the magnificent wildflowers that blanket the mountain during the warm months of the year. In his 1898 essay "The Wild Parks and Forest Reservations of the West," reprinted in his 1901 book Our National Parks, Muir wrote:
Above the forests there is a zone of the loveliest flowers, fifty miles in circuit and nearly two miles wide, so closely planted and luxuriant that it seems as if Nature, glad to make an open space between woods so dense and ice so deep, were economizing the precious ground, and trying to see how many of her darlings she can get together in one mountain wreath,-daisies, anemones, geraniums, columbines, erythroniums, larkspurs, etc., among which we wade knee-deep and waist-deep, the bright corollas in myriads touching petal to petal.
While the legislation to establish Mount Rainier National Park was praised by many, it was not without its critics. Some charged the act was merely a congressional ruse to aid the railroad industry. To find out what prompted this sharp criticism, search on Rainier AND railroad in Evolution of the Conservation Movement, 1850-1920.
- To learn about other important events in the movement to conserve and protect America's natural heritage, see the chronology in Evolution of the Conservation Movement, 1850-1920. For additional resources, view the introduction to that collection included in the Collection Connections section of the Learning Page.
- For more materials on naturalist John Muir, search on Muir in California As I Saw It: First Person Narratives, 1849-1900 and Evolution of the Conservation Movement, 1850-1920. This search will retrieve six of Muir's books, as well as his portrait and the 1908 legislation which established a national monument in his honor.
- Also, be sure to see the Today in History features on Yosemite and Acadia parks, and the establishment of the National Park Service in 1916.
- For more panoramic photographs of scenic Washington, search on Washington state in Taking the Long View, 1851-1991.
