The valley floor of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, is one of the most photographed landscapes in America: sagebrush flats running to the Snake River, the Teton range erupting behind them with no foothills to soften the view. Nearly all of it belongs to Grand Teton National Park, and the reason it does is a story involving a fake company, a furious state, a presidential end-run around Congress, an armed cattle drive led by a movie star, and, at the hinge of it all, one of the most effective threatening letters in the history of philanthropy.
The billionaire goes shopping in disguise
John D. Rockefeller Jr. first toured Jackson Hole properly in 1926, guided by Horace Albright, the superintendent of Yellowstone, who made sure the country’s richest heir saw both the Tetons and what was accumulating at their feet: billboards, hot dog stands, a dance hall, a rodeo ground, the beginnings of roadside blight on struggling ranchland. Albright had long dreamed of protecting the valley floor, not just the peaks, and in Rockefeller he found a man with the same instinct and the means to act on it.
The means, however, required deceit. If word spread that a Rockefeller was buying Jackson Hole, prices would triple overnight and holdouts would multiply. So in 1927 the purchases began through the Snake River Land Company, a corporation quietly chartered in Utah with no visible connection to the family, presenting itself as a cattle and recreation venture. Over the following years the company assembled more than 35,000 acres of the valley, over 100 parcels from ranchers who, in the pit of the agricultural depression, were often glad of a fair-priced buyer, never knowing who the buyer was.
When the truth surfaced around 1930, Jackson Hole ignited. Ranchers who had sold felt duped; those who hadn’t felt besieged; Wyoming’s politicians denounced the secret land grab, and a congressional subcommittee rode into the valley in 1933 to investigate. The hearings established that the company had paid fair prices and broken no laws, but the sense of grievance never left, because the plan behind the purchases was now public: Rockefeller intended to give the whole valley floor to the federal government, to be added to the national park.
The gift nobody would take
What followed was one of the stranger stalemates in conservation history: a billionaire spent a decade and a half trying to give away a valley, and the United States government refused to accept it. Grand Teton National Park had been created in 1929, but covering only the mountains and the lakes at their base; Wyoming’s delegation, backed by cattlemen who grazed the flats, hunters, the Forest Service and local officials who feared losing the tax base, blocked every attempt to extend it across Rockefeller’s land. Bills died. Compromises collapsed. The Snake River Land Company paid taxes and ran cattle on ground bought for a park that Congress would not enlarge, through the Depression and into the Second World War.
By late 1942, Rockefeller had had enough, and he ended the stalemate with a letter to Interior Secretary Harold Ickes that was polite, brief and unmistakable. He had carried the land for fifteen years, he wrote; if the federal government did not want it or could not arrange to take it within a reasonable time, he would feel compelled to make some other disposition of it, including selling it on the open market to any satisfactory buyer. The prospect required no elaboration: the most spectacular private landholding in the Rockies, subdivided to whoever showed up with money.
Ickes, who wanted the land badly, treated the letter as the lever it was designed to be. Congress would not act, but the president could: the Antiquities Act of 1906 allows a president to proclaim national monuments on federal land by signature alone. On March 15, 1943, Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed the Jackson Hole National Monument, 221,000 acres of federal land abutting the park, arranged so that Rockefeller’s donation could finally be folded in.
Wyoming declares war on a monument
The proclamation detonated. Wyoming’s governor threatened to use state police to evict federal officials; the state sued the Park Service; newspapers compared Roosevelt’s signature to Pearl Harbor and the annexations of dictators. That May, several dozen armed ranchers, joined by the aging Hollywood star Wallace Beery, drove more than 500 cattle across the new monument in open, well-publicized defiance, daring rangers to intervene. The rangers, sensibly, waved them through. Congress passed a bill abolishing the monument outright; Roosevelt killed it with a pocket veto. The state’s lawsuit failed, the war absorbed the country’s attention, and the monument, starved of funds by hostile appropriations riders, simply outlasted its enemies.
Peace came in 1950, on terms that tell you how bitter the fight had been. Congress merged the monument and Rockefeller’s 32,000 donated acres into an enlarged Grand Teton National Park, in exchange for concessions written into law: existing grazing rights continued, Wyoming was compensated for lost taxes, an elk hunt was permitted inside the park, and, most tellingly, the Antiquities Act was amended so that no president could ever again proclaim a national monument in Wyoming without the consent of Congress. It remains the only state with that exemption, a permanent legislative scar from the Jackson Hole fight.
The valley, meanwhile, became what Albright and Rockefeller had pictured from the overlook in 1926. The billboards and dance halls are gone; the sagebrush flats run unbroken to the river; and several million visitors a year photograph a landscape that exists because a rich man lied about who was buying it, a Congress refused it, and a letter finally observed, with perfect courtesy, that if nobody wanted the Tetons’ front yard, the market surely would.
