 Well, good evening everyone, and thank you for coming out on a, it was a beautiful day, but it looked like a kind of threatening a little rain this evening, but it's nice to see everyone. Thank you for coming here to the Kellogg Hubbard Library, and thank you to the library, and in particular to Michelle Singer for arranging this talk. I'm pleased to be here in Montpelier to discuss our new book, Olmsted and Yosemite, The Civil War, Abolition, and the National Park Idea. It's written with my co-author, Ethan Carr, and it's a timely reinterpretation of the origins of the National Park Idea. So where did this idea for creating a system of national parks in the United States come from? Did it spontaneously arise from a campfire conversation on the Yellowstone Plateau in 1870? There's a reenactment of that event on the left. That was the official story for, I don't know how many years, 30, 40, 50 years since proven largely erroneous, false. Or did it have something to do with Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir, and they're standing together on Glacier Point in Yosemite Valley in 1903. They met for one day in 1903 when camping that night. If you watch the Ken Burns series episode on this camp story, they obviously did a lot of talking. But national parks have been around for 30 years prior to that encounter. So that's not where the idea of national parks came from, despite once this other story had been disproven of the Yellowstone, this one became very popular. And why are we talking this evening about Frederick Lowe Olmstedt at all? He was a city park designer, right? What does he have to do with national parks? Here's an image of Olmstedt on the lower left. And maybe the question we need to ask most of all is how did this institution of public parks gain such a prominent place in our national imagination and public memory? To start, I think the term national park idea in our title might be in fact a bit misleading, to be honest. Because it's really, what we're really trying to talk about in our book is the idea of public parks, the public park idea. As it took shape in the mid-19th century, before and during the American Civil War, indeed it was the broader idea of public parks that was the source of the national park idea. Even if we choose to consider it a separate idea at all. And it was during this tumultuous period that the idea of public park, both in the nation's largest city, New York City, and in the remote Sierra Nevada of California, in fact, were established as a new institution in a remade American republic. So Ethan and I wrote Olmstedt in Yosemite to look specifically at Olmstedt's park and conservation work in the context of the Civil War. And his steadfast allegiance to the 19th century republican ideology of union, social improvement, and the abolition of slavery. The book offers a fresh perspective on the creation of national parks in the United States by connecting this park's movement to the dramatic transformation of the country brought about by the Civil War. It places Yosemite Valley, California's Yosemite Valley, the first federally authorized park inspired by New York Central Park in the larger framework of war-related legislative and constitutional reforms that reshaped America. We were particularly intrigued by Olmstedt's 1865 Yosemite report, which sought to explain the wider meaning of Yosemite's creation, its establishment as a park, and the future of public parks in a reunited and reconstructed nation. As a journalist extensively traveling through the antebellum South, American South, Olmstedt wrote it was the duty of every man, quote, the duty of every man to oppose slavery, to weaken it, and to destroy it. In his opinion, in fact, there was no greater impediment to the nation's progress than slavery. South Carolina Senator James Hammond had infamously declared on the floor of the United States Senate that cotton was king, and that the absolute economic power of cotton would quote bring the whole world to our feet. And if economic power was not enough, violence would be used even on the floor of the Senate, where in 1856, Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner was nearly beaten to death by South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks. Before the Civil War, pro-slavery politicians in Washington were content with a relatively weak central government. Its limited responsibilities included delivering the US mail, protecting settlers on the frontier, and pursuing future of slaves. They preferred financing that small government through the sale of public land in lieu of taxation. Thus avoiding taxation on enormous wealth that had been accumulated through slave labor. In our book, we believe it is useful to look at the passage of the Assemity Act. I will say this, though, that had the bill or a proposal for Yosemite Park, God forbid, a larger, much more ambitious proposal for a two-million-acre Yellowstone Park been proposed in a pre-war Congress. It would have never made it. It would have ended up like other Republican proposals such as the college, the land grant college bill, the agricultural colleges, and the homestead bill would have ended up being vetoed. And they were vetoed by this man on the left, that's James Buchanan, the predecessor Abraham Lincoln. If, in fact, Park bills had made it to the floor of the Congress, Southern Democrats committed to unrestricted expansion of slavery would have viewed setting aside public land for conservation or recreation with as an anathema and would have fought it tooth and nail. And it's quite likely that both any proposal for Yosemite and any proposal later on for Yellowstone would have, in fact, never occurred or never would have been passed. I think it's useful, if I may, to make a comparison to illustrate this opposition or likely opposition to Park bills by taking up a piece of legislation introduced by our own senator at that time, Congressman Justin Morrill. And that was the College Land Grant Act. We know College Land Grant Act from his 1862 bill that became law, but that was the second, that was the reincarnation, that was the second effort. The first effort, the first land grant bill for colleges was introduced in 1858 into Congress. And we think the reaction to a Park's bill would have been very similar to the reaction to the land grant colleges. In fact, let me stay with this. When Morrill introduced legislation in 1858, Senator Clement Clay of Alabama who was leading the Democratic opposition to the legislation announced the bill and I quote, as one of the most monstrous, iniquitous and dangerous measures ever introduced into Congress. He said, in fact, if the people demand the patronage of the federal government for agriculture and education, it is because they have become debouched and let us stray. He went on to describe the bill as a magnificent bribe to encourage Alabama to quote, surrender to the federal power, her original and reserved right to manage her own domestic and internal affairs. And you can read slavery. Alabama Congressman Williamson Cobb declared, in fact, that this would be a dangerous precedent being set and said that using public lands to generate revenue in Louis, excuse me, that the use of public lands to do anything but generate revenue in lieu of taxes, to use them for any other public purpose, would be a huge mistake. And another Southern Congressman declared that such grants would quote, only be the beginning of giving away public lands till none are left to give. Now, the same year that Morrill introduced his first version of his College Land Grant Act, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux completed their design for Central Park in New York City. Both the proposal for agriculture colleges in every state and the creation of a great public park in the largest city of the nation were defiant acts challenging a weak national government constrained by the demands of slavery. When Central Park was first opened in 1858, that year it was described in the Atlantic Monthly Magazine as quote, the most striking evidence of the sovereignty of the people in the history of free institutions. The best answer yet given to the doubts and fears which have frowned upon the theory of self-government. Olmsted himself described Central Park as a democratic development of the highest importance. Our book was inspired by Sarah Blake Shaw, a social reformer and abolitionist whose words serve as an epigram for our story in 1861 soon after the Civil War began. She wrote a letter to Frederick Law Olmsted and in that letter she said, if we can quote, if we can remake the government, abolish slavery and get Central Park well underway for our descendants, we shall have done a work worthy of the 19th century and ought to be willing to suffer. Now those words were not rhetorical. Her suffering certainly was not rhetorical. Two years later her 25-year-old son Robert Gould Shaw, commander of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, died alongside more than 100 black soldiers attacking Fort Wagner outside of Charleston Harbor. But Shaw was already looking beyond victory on the battlefield to a future that would justify the terrible war that was unfolding before her eyes. In her letter she framed the conflict as an opportunity to reinvent the nation and replace a political system that had long-sanctioned slavery. Her vision was also remarkably associated with a great public park, an achievement that was representative of the kind of civic progress that she hoped for the whole nation. The title of Olmsted's best-known book on the slave states called The Cotton Kingdom was in fact an ironic reference to those words of James Hammond, Cotton is King. The book included an unusual map which is shown on the right which displayed the population of enslaved people by county in the South. A derivation of that map was later used during the Civil War by none other than Abraham Lincoln to guide the recruitment of formerly enslaved freedmen into the ranks of the United States Army. And you can see from the portrait on the lower left, that's a Francis Bicknell carpenter painting of Lincoln meeting with his cabinet where the arrow has been inserted. You can see actually he included a copy of that very map that's above in effect documentary proof of how useful it was. Olmsted clearly understood and he wrote in the New York Times essentially an op-ed that black resistance and self-emancipation in large numbers would hollow out the Confederacy and accelerate its collapse. This great movement of freed people illustrated on the upper right, that's a wayside exhibit at Fort Pulaski on the coast of Georgia, anyone has ever been there. This great movement of freed people and their new alliance with federal armies would place enormous pressure on the Lincoln administration to accelerate plans for emancipation. Once you had thousands and then tens of thousands and ultimately hundreds of thousands of people who would not be moving back into slavery, that was clear. Time was, the time had come to move on emancipation. Self-emancipation was already occurring on large numbers and it became clear also in Congress that there would be no negotiated settlement to this war. There would be no putting the genie back in the bottle, no return to a pre-war status quo. And of course all the Southern Democrats had left Congress so the Republicans now had a majority in both houses and they were prepared to use that majority. Congress engineered an extraordinary expansion of the national government both to win the war but also to change the Republic. Congress and the Lincoln administration sought to build a more activist Republic focused on improvements that served large numbers of people. Legislation was passed in the spring of 1862. In fact, there was a period in 1862 from probably about March of 1862 to about August, about five months more or less. That was a remarkable transformation of the United States. Legislation was passed for a national banking and revenue system, first ever in the United States, the creation of a department of agriculture and land grants for railroads, homesteading and education including the reintroduction and finally the passage of the College Land Grant Act. The capstone what has been called our second American revolution was congressional authorization for the recruitment of black soldiers into the United States Army followed by Lincoln's release of his preliminary emancipation proclamation. Taken as a whole, these measures reaffirmed the efficacy and value of Republican government and the necessity of defending it. Now in 1864, Congress granted Yosemite Valley to the state of California to create a public park. It did so as Homestead declared quote, in trust for the entire nation. The act was yet another land grant. Like the College Land Grant Act, it was a modest but eventually consequential part of the same wave of wartime legislation. Now for many years, historians have been at a loss to explain the Yosemite Act because they just can't figure out the timing of its passage. It seems like such an anomaly in the middle of the war. Why ever would you take time out of dealing with this national emergency to pass a bill like this to create this small 850 acre reservation in the mountains of California? On the contrary, we believe that in fact this was in just like the College Land Grant Act and many other pieces of legislation. This was another component of wartime legislation that fundamentally remade the United States into a nation without enslaved people that preserve the republic and in fact allowed it to assume a better form. Lincoln at the time said, you know, looking at all the things being done in the midst of the war, said that if the rebellion in fact, the insurrection in fact, could interfere with the continuity and functioning of constitutional government, quote, it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us. Now the republic was still deeply flawed. The subjugation of Native Americans never abated during the war, but at least the country was moving to still unattained ideals that the nation had been founded on. Now working in California, Olmsted was asked to draft a report on the future of Yosemite as a public park and he used this opportunity, he seized this opportunity to explain the wider meaning and significance of this act. Now the Yosemite Act drew its inspiration from Central Park and the purpose of the new park and the justifications for the government to act in making it in fact were just as Olmsted explained, entirely consistent with what he described for Central Park just a few years earlier. Both parks demonstrated the republic's ability to meet the needs of large numbers of its citizens, even as it was being denounced by monarchists in Europe and violently attacked by secessionists at home. But it must be said that without a final union victory, and I might add the reelection of Abraham Lincoln in 1864, a victory that was aided ultimately by the service of almost 180,000 black soldiers, legislation for Yellowstone, and the early national parks that followed it, based on that template of Yosemite might never have been enacted. And this is a recruitment poster for African-American soldiers on the upper left and that's the grand victory parade down Pennsylvania Avenue at the conclusion of the war and of course images of both Yosemite Valley and the Yellowstone Falls. Now what happened to this story? And what happened to the story is almost as interesting as the story itself. In fact, this narrative of Yosemite and the Civil War and the changes to America then were largely erased in the early 20th century. That story was largely disappeared. And there was an effort to distance national parks from any association with the trauma and controversy of the Civil War and it's aftermath, reconstruction. Much of the country had in fact embraced white reconciliation and there you have two gentlemen at the 1913 Gettysburg Reunion, East Jubilee they called it. And a lost cause narrative that nostalgically glamorized the old South and rehabilitated leaders of the Confederacy had largely become public memory, the new public memory. Jim Crow legislation and practices in fact reversed many of the hard fought civil rights gains made during reconstruction. This happened as political momentum was just building for the creation of a professional bureau and national park service to manage a growing portfolio of national parks in the early 20th century. This is, there's a picture of a movie poster, Rick from Birth of a Nation that was premiered or shown in the White House at the time and of course we're all familiar with Gone with the Wind which was hugely, had a huge impact on propagating the lost cause. As David Blight said in his book Race and Reunion, the segregated society required a segregated historical memory. And even the park service when they were establishing new parks in the South adhered to local custom. So if the state parks were segregated the national parks were segregated too. And that's a sign from Shenandoah National Park, the bottom left, Lewis Mountain Campground, the Negro Campground and of course everything else was segregated as well, restroom facilities. And Shenandoah wasn't the only park, there were a handful of parks that in fact were segregated at least until the early 1940s. And even the Lincoln Memorial, when it was dedicated in 1922, the event had segregated seating for all the attendees. So it was not really surprising that early National Park Service supporters and leaders steered clear of any reference to Olmstead or the Assemity Report. Olmstead in fact himself he was too closely identified with Central Park when the new parks were being marketed as a concept born in the rugged east, not the urban east. Excuse me, the rugged west, not the urban east. And he was too well known for writing books that forcibly condemned the Old South. And he was too closely identified with anti-slavery and union sediment when the Civil War was being reinterpreted through the lens of the lost cause. Campfire tales attributing the National Park idea to the rugged explorers or heroic conservationists on the other hand carried no such baggage. Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir in fact, you know they discussed many things that night. And most likely they were discussing the future of Yosemite which would unite, there was a national part of the park and there was still the state reservation. So bringing it all together didn't occur in 1906. And no doubt that that was for most conversation item that night. But Olmsted, excuse me, Roosevelt was in fact, a little boy when Yosemite was created. And the National Parks, even though John Muir is often accredited as being the father of the National Parks Service, he in fact had died several years before the legislation was in fact, to create a National Parks Service in 1916 was passed. But these stories served as a comfortable and affirming park creative narrative that was unencumbered by any reference to an activist government working on behalf of freedom, equity, and the remaking of the republic. But if the new parks represented a commitment to public well-being, the public did not include everyone. The establishment of a park in Yosemite Valley would follow the dispossession a decade earlier of the Miwok people and others from their valley homes. Early writers who described Yosemite Valley as untrammeled wild nature, willfully overlooked countless generations of human occupation. Indigenous people were never included, were never the beneficiaries of Lincoln's new birth of freedom. As they were forced out of their ancestral homes by in fact making room to expedite republican policies, this injustice in fact must be acknowledged in any conversation about conservation legacy. So looking back at the Yosemite report and Olmsted's long career in park making, what can we infer about his involvement then and his continuing influence today? First, the civil war and the social revolution it fueled enabled the public park to emerge as part of our national identity and an essential institution of American democracy. In the Yosemite report, Olmsted warned against the monopolization, and I quote, of the choices natural scenes in the country and the means of recreation connected with them by a very, very few rich people, end quote. Olmsted affirmed every person's entitlement to enjoy the nation's most spectacular places and he created an intellectual framework for a system of national parks and more generally a framework for the American parks movement that would be established at every level of government. In the report, Olmsted asserted that the establishment by government of great public grounds for the free enjoyment of its people was in fact justified as a political duty. He believed that a government had a compelling obligation to support these great public parks on an equal footing with all its other major duties. And he hoped for a government acting on behalf quote of equity and benevolence. A bloody civil war had been fought, reaffirming the legitimacy of national sovereignty. With the adoption of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the US Constitution, the federal government positioned itself to be the guarantor of civil rights, including the right to vote. That had previously been the responsibility of state governments to interpret and restrict as they saw fit. This expanded national authority would be further extended by the creation of a two million acre Yellowstone National Park in 1872. The government felt confident enough to not only create a large reservation, but in fact to manage it. Olmsted had pressed for a guarantee of broad public access to these great parks and public reservations for public health, for recreation, and general well-being. And this in fact was realized in part when and finally in 1916, the National Park Service Organic Act was codified creating the national parks. This access he believed was a right of citizenship rather than a prerogative of wealth or influence. And finally Olmsted believed, as Abraham Lincoln did, that it was appropriate for a republic to level the playing field. He appealed for the pursuit of happiness against all obstacles. Just as Lincoln spoke with the Civil War, quote, as a struggle for maintaining in the world that form and substance of government whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men. So why is this important today? Well, Ethan and I make the case in our book for linking early national park and conservation history to the broader struggle for freedom, equity, and democracy in the United States. Having a more contextual and inclusive founding narrative that also acknowledges the enduring connection of indigenous people to these lands will enable more communities to see themselves as part of this legacy. And it will continue to create a more diverse system of national parks and public lands that are representative of the collective experience of all Americans. Thanks. So we have, I think we have lots of time for questions. Great. Yes. Oh man. That's, Olmsted had served for the first three years of the war as executive director of something called the US Sanitary Commission which was, it was a quasi-private effort to deal with the inadequacies of the US Army Medical Bureau and just really take care of wounded US soldiers. And he was, he ran this and he ran himself into the ground doing so. There's a book called The Republic of Suffering by Drew Gilpin Faust. That's Olmsted's line. He talked about the Republic of Suffering because he saw suffering up close and personal for many years. But it was a very highly contentious job. And there were various branches of the Sanitary Commission that wanted to break off and wanted to hold on to the money that was raised. There were all sorts of issues plus Olmsted really had very low patience for dealing with the Army Medical people. And eventually he just had it. He had applied for a job, I'm sorry to give you so much background, but he applied for a job to work, to run the first effort, Experiment and Reconstruction which occurred at Port Royal in South Carolina. And he didn't get that job. He really, he was pining for most of the year, early years of the war. He wanted to be superintendent of what was called contraband which was the superintendent in charge of dealing with all the African American freedmen who had come through union lines. And he felt he was because of his travels to the South and his administrative skills that he was the perfect person to do this. But he never got that job. And finally he felt he had burned too many bridges with the Lincoln administration. And in late in 1863 after the battle of Gettysburg he went to California. And he took a job running a mining operation in the Sierra foothills. He was a reasonably good administrator and he'd proven himself. So he was in California. It was a foregone, a foregone, it was a forlorn enterprise from start to finish. It was basically going bankrupt and slowly. And Olmsted was looking for other work. And in fact did some small part jobs out in greater Bay Area of California. And when Yosemite was created when the legislation went through in Washington they had written into the bill that there would be a commission that would plan for its future. And Olmsted's name of course went right to the top because he was well known at that point. Central Park was behind him. I mean he thought that maybe that was a one-off and he was gonna go on to other things in life. And he certainly did through the Sanitary Commission through running a mine. But in fact he was one of the, it was co-creator of Central Park and people knew about this. And so he was tapped to run essentially chair of this commission and to write this report. But he didn't write a report about the few, he didn't do a plan for Yosemite really. I mean the plan for Yosemite out of 26 pages, the plan for Yosemite is about four pages. The rest of it he just seized the opportunity to really talk about the future of the country when the war was over. He wrote most of this on the cusp of the surrender of Appomattox in the end of the war. He was thinking about what was next for the United States. And wanted to position public parks as a key institution for a reconstructed nation. So he was there. He was, in fact, he was only half a day ride from Yosemite Valley where he was. So he was perfectly positioned. He didn't stay out there very long after the report was completed. He went, he was enticed back east by his partner, his former partner, Calvert Vox, because they had gotten the commission, Vox had landed the commission to do Prospect Park, the great park in Brooklyn. And he desperately wanted Olmstead to come back east and help him with that. And he really was getting pretty angry with Olmstead towards the end. He wrote Olmstead that. Olmstead at that time was even contemplating becoming the editor-in-chief of the new nation magazine. And Vox writes him a letter and says, you could find somebody else to write for the nation. And you can dig up all the gold in the world and you still won't be doing what you really should be doing. Stanford was later in his career, when he came back east, he re-launched his landscape design career and never really got back involved too deeply, involved in either reconstruction or what followed in terms of the civil rights for African-Americans. And he was just going parks like gangbusters. And so Stanford was one of many campuses he worked on, but it was the successor firm, his sons, who did the, Olmstead did a prodigious amount of works, but it pales in comparison to the successor firm. That's another story. Yes. Thanks to the architect, I've read quite a bit about him. This has been interesting. I mean, I didn't know about his use on slavery and his travels and his reporter in the south and his reports back and of course about the assembly. This was interesting in connecting it to the civil war. I mean, I was aware of the timing generally, but to think about what had opened up the possibilities at that particular time to do that, that's... Well, the war opened a lot of possibilities. In fact, the basic thesis of the book is that it changed the United States forever. You know, it didn't change it enough, but it changed the trajectory. Not exactly. With Mount Auburn Cemetery, because at that time people, the common person, had no perfect place to be outdoors. And the outdoors means being considered healthy in cities in particular. And so there were just, there was this cemetery that instead of just being rows of gravestones was curving cows and... And recreational. And people would come on Sundays to stroll. And it sort of opened up the idea of a place for the ordinary person who couldn't afford property to have a place where they could... You're right on every point. And to some degree, because this is a limited talk, I condensed, I really didn't get into the early history and the rural cemeteries movement, and cemeteries movement is very important to the idea, the concept, the parks. But what Olmstead does in Vox, what they do is really take it to scale. So that you're talking about large municipal parks. I mean, the country had never seen anything like Central Park. I mean, it was just stunned by it. Still is. Still is. It's being discussed for World Heritage because it's not only of national significance, but in fact, the argument is that it's of universal humankind significance. So that's what they did. They were able to institutionalize it, if you will. And then of course they moved on from big parks to park systems. And Olmstead sort of pioneered that to a degree with the Emerald Necklace in Boston and the Buffalo Parks, if you're familiar with them. And his sons then, that became their calling card, was not to do individual parks, but do whole network or park systems. Yeah, the Emerald Necklace was amazing because it was not just a park, it was a whole system under our weight. Jeff. Well, I remember you talking years ago in the early history of, I think it was, you know, Semity. No. Yeah, Semity, the Seer and Parks. Say a little bit more about their presence and their importance in those early years. Well, we do mention in the book a little bit. It's the federal governments or Congress's appetite for parks, national parks, exceeded its capacity, the capacity of the government to manage them. And the argument we make is that the Civil War really pushed the government to expand and to do a lot of things that it had never done before, but it lacked capacity in many cases. And particularly after the war ended and the money sort of diminished and the emergency certainly was not as acute. So, but they had ambitions, for example, Southern Reconstruction. Congress took over reconstruction in the late 1860s and early years of the 1870s and attempted to make it work and enforce it. And they created something called the Freedmen's Bureau, which was set up to do things the government had never done before. It was to set up schools. It was to help with some limited land redistribution. It was to help with court systems. It was essentially to build civic infrastructure for a Southern society which had never seen very much of it and was prostate after the end of the war and was also, there were three or four million new, to be new citizens. So the government was trying to help that transition from enslavement to freedom and they created the Freedmen's Bureau to help with that process. They couldn't figure out how to staff it. So they turned to the United States Army and they turned to the Army in a peacetime because the Army at least was number one, it was organized. It was paid for and it was trained and people could follow orders. So in fact, I've never written this up but the first superintendent of schools in the city of New Orleans was a Vermont from the 7th Vermont Regiment who had actually worked, who had been in the 7th Vermont and which served, which was stationed in Louisiana and he later volunteered to be an officer in the US colored infantry. An interesting fact, just parenthetically, since you bring this up, is that a surprising number of privates or non-commissioned officers, not non-commissioned officers, not even officers, not even sergeants, these were privates in the Vermont unit in Louisiana were offered commissions if they would work with colored units, the US colored troops, they were called in that point in time. And a surprising number of like 60 or 70 of them chose, took the promotion. And a few of them stayed behind to work for the Freedmen's Bureau. And so it changed the trajectory of their lives and a few of them in fact were killed by the Klan working for the Freedmen's Bureau. Anyway, so the government used the army for all sorts of things but they used it to staff the national parks. There was no professional bureau of national parks there were a few people in the interior department of Washington, they weren't gonna help you very much. So the solution, because the parks were under assault, like Yellowstone for example, people were just going in and destroying the thermal hydrothermal features, they were poaching wildlife, it was sort of free-for-all because there was a nominal superintendent but no staff. So they ordered the army in to basically protect the parks. And the army, the parks in California, the Sierra Parks which includes Yosemite, Sequoia and Kings Canyon, those parks were pretty close to the Presidio in San Francisco. And the Presidio had the US Cavalry, black units of the US Cavalry station there and they sent them into the national parks. And those were called the time Buffalo soldiers. And they were in fact the first custodians, park rangers if you will, of those national parks. And the Park Service does a very good job of interpreting their story. My only beef with the national parks is that they could do a better job of making the connection of these Buffalo soldiers to the US colored soldiers who were created during the Civil War. And they would never have been Buffalo soldiers if the United States had not enlisted black soldiers to win the war. And those units, there was even one of those units stationed right here at Fort Ethan Allen. But that's another story. Yes. It almost sounded like it had been Olmstead's idea, but not how he told us that Congress asked him to do the commission. So who introduced it? You know, a number of historians have claimed it to be Olmstead's. We found no evidence whatsoever and we say it's likely it was not. He didn't even visit Yosemite Valley until months after the legislation was passed and signed. So I don't think he may have inspired it to some degree and Central Park certainly wasn't a huge inspiration, but Olmstead didn't draft the legislation. You know, it's still not entirely clear and we look pretty closely at it, but it was introduced by a representative of a steamship company, a guy named Raymond who was, who probably wanted to promote Yosemite as a destination because it was getting better known, particularly after a Bierstadt visited Yosemite. If you've been up to St. John'sbury Athenaeum, you're certainly familiar with his stunning, but he painted Yosemite many, many times. He made a lot of money off of Yosemite Valley, Bierstadt, it's very popular. In fact, during the Civil War, big cities held something called sanitary fairs, which were fundraisers for the Sanitary Commission, this Red Cross type organization. And they would be enormous kind of world fair type events that would go on for a week and the revenue would go to the wounded soldiers in the Sanitary Commission. Well, the big ones in Boston and Philadelphia and New York City had big art galleries where people could buy art and raising money. So the art would be discounted or would be donated. The most expensive painting, the painting that got the most revenue sold for the highest amount in New York City was a Bierstadt of Yosemite Valley. So it was becoming popularized. It was also popularized by a gentleman named Carlton Watkins, who was a photographer. And Watkins had gotten into the valley very early in 1861 and had created a portfolio of what they call mammoth photographs, they were huge. And that portfolio had gotten east. There were people who, you asked me about who really pushed Yosemite. There were people who wanted to see this protected. And so they arranged for this, at that time, you couldn't FedEx a portfolio of photographs. I mean, they had to go through the Isthmus of Panama, Overland, and they had to be shipped. I got only knows how they got these photographs, but they got east into people's hands. They influential people got copies and congressmen. There was a set of photographs in this Senate Sergeant and Arms had. So these photographs were hugely influential, even more so than Bierstadt's painting. And so who was responsible? Well, Raymond certainly wrote a letter to the Senator from California, a guy named Connus. And Connus agreed immediately to introduce legislation. And Raymond made sure that Connus included the words in perpetuity, set aside in perpetuity. So that was the spark for national parks, that this was not a one-off just for one point in time. Connus at some point says, oh, I was trying to help out influential people in California. Olmsted has the last word, even though he wasn't on the front end of the discussion. The Assemity Report essentially was a chronicle of the whole thing. And he says, no, this was not just serving a few influential people. He said this was in place and trust for the entire nation. And he seizes upon that opportunity to talk about what its broader meaning was above the political fray.