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PrintThe Meddlers
Rockefeller family’s legacy in the valley continues growing to this day.
John D. and Abby Rockefeller on a boat ride across Jenny Lake in Grand Teton National Park on their 30th wedding anniversary in 1931.
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Owed to the magnetism of its setting—or what some call “the power of place”—21st century Jackson Hole is home to one of the most passionate, green-minded, and wealthiest citizenries in the American West. This is largely a result of the magnificent, protected presence of Grand Teton National Park.
In a year fraught with economic tumult, modern generations forget that the park was born in a tumultuous year not so different from this one. In 1929, just months before “Black Tuesday” struck like an earthquake on Wall Street, President Calvin Coolidge gave Jackson Hole its own sister park to Yellowstone. The fledgling Grand Teton National Park, at just 96,000 acres, encompassed the Teton Range and the six lakes at the foot of the mountains. Historian John Ise
referred to it as “a stingy, skimpy, niggardly little park” barely big enough to be of consequence.
Silently rivaling the signature Tetons’ breathtaking peaks is a topography of profound human irony. The same serenity that serves as the valley’s spiritual focal point—and has become, over many decades, a multi-billion-dollar bedrock for Wyoming’s economy—was won only after a bitter, protracted war of words that tore apart the social fabric of the community.
For Robert Righter, the eminent historian and author of Crucible For Conservation: The Struggle for Grand Teton National Park, the eighty-year commemoration provides an important opportunity to look back. Grand Teton, he notes, would not exist had the majority of local citizens prevailed in beating back the efforts of a wealthy New York industrialist and a small group of committed allies locally called “the meddlers.”
The name of the angel outsider who changed the course of Jackson Hole history was John D. Rockefeller Jr. “Junior” and his family invested part of their inherited fortune in the conviction that the power of the Tetons resides not only in the summits, but in the unblemished character of the lands beneath them. As the namesake son of the founder of Standard Oil, a company built in part on ruthless exploitation of natural resources, Junior and his eldest son, Laurance, would prove to defy the modern environmental mantra that Big Oil and conservation do not mix.
Rockefeller knew from his experience in the Adirondacks and other parts of the East what happens to natural landscapes where there are few or no regulations to guide development and commerce. His idea was simple: He would work with a small circle of bankers, conservationists, and ranchers to buy up properties, from willing sellers, east and north of the park boundaries and then donate the land to the federal government for park expansion. Rockefeller established the Snake River Land Company as a Salt Lake City-based front to conceal his identity, because he didn’t want the knowledge of his involvement to inflame opposition or inspire property owners to opportunistically inflate asking prices.
In the 1980s I asked Margaret E. Murie, the now-deceased “grandmother of the conservation movement,” what it was like to live in Jackson Hole as a vanguard tree hugger during the 1930s and ’40s. “Those were awful times in the valley,” she said on the stoop of her modest cabin in Moose, not far from where her husband, Olaus, had plotted with Rockefeller allies who included Yellowstone Park Superintendent Horace Albright, dude rancher and author Struthers Burt, and Harold Fabian, a Utah-born, Harvard-educated lawyer.
“People in town shunned people who fought for conservation,” Murie said. “Friendships were lost. I remember Olaus feeling hurt by the harsh words that were spoken and printed in the newspaper. Most of them were lies.”
Righter agrees, saying one cannot overstate the level of hostility and mean-spiritedness that was rained upon individuals working to expand the park boundaries.
