Is there a pattern?

If we step back and look at the eighty-year history of the National Park Service we will see a pattern. Few have heard of John Oliver or Mrs. Burchfield or Walter Gregory or other multi-generational residents of the small community of Cades Cove, Tennessee. They were some of the first to feel the sting of the government forcing them off their land for the purpose of purging the local residents from the midst of land they wanted to consecrate as a national park. Their land is now a part of the Great Smokey Mountain National Park.

Their story is written about in the book Cades Cove, A Southern Appalachian Community, published by the University of Tennessee. In Chapter 10, titled Death by Eminent Domain, Professor Durwood Dunn describes the heroic battle Mr. Oliver waged in the courts in his effort to resist being extricated from his home which was in his family for four generations. This book is available at the UAA Library and on Amazon.com. They were promised that they could stay and live in their homes and work their land when the park was first proposed but as time went on they were systematically driven out. The National Park Service has used these same methods to frustrate, intimidate and eventually remove the private inholders they want removed in many of our national parks.

Those familiar with what has happened and is happening to inholders and park users in the Denali National Park say Wrangell- St. Elias is right on schedule in the Park Service’s timeline of changing land use and tightening down on inholders. One simply needs to look at the age of the park to see where it is on the timeline.

Denali National Park was created in 1917, Wrangell-St. Elias in 1980. It is some sixty years younger than Denali, but the Park Service is not like a miner or a homesteader. It does not grow old and die; the leadership just changes hands and continues to march on. Mr. Ross’s observation that park employees are only temporary is true when speaking of the individuals. However the Park Service has a life of its own. Born in 1872, with 338 parks under its control, it shows no signs of ageing or atrophy.

Individuals like Mr. Frederick actually become tools in the hands of the Park Service. Regardless of how this trial turns out, whether he is found guilty or innocent, the Park Service wins. They have exerted tremendous pain and suffering on Doug and communicated loud and clear to all those watching that they are a force to be reckoned with. Every one on their team goes home, well paid, and never inconvenienced. Mr. Frederick however has suffered incalculable costs. If found guilty his fine will be just another few thousand dollars added to his already twenty thousand dollar loss, not to mention his personal losses. If he wins, he loses, if he loses, he loses.