I Remember Bates

A rare day in Arches history Bates Wilson in full National Park Service uniform doing paperwork in the old CCC barracks office, 1960. Courtesy of author.

I Remember Bates

BY LLOYD M. PIERSON

HISTORY CAN BE WRITTEN IN MANY WAYS and for many reasons. One method is to report on the life and times of an individual and by doing so give insight and information on the events and significance of the period that the individual was associated with. Such is the intent here.

Bates E. Wilson was a man of his time and place who, by fully participating in that time and place, made things happen that have affected and will continue to affect the lives of many people in many ways. One need not reiterate the obvious and well-documented chief accomplishments of Bates—the establishing of Canyonlands National Park and the upgrading of Arches from a national monument to a park. Others have covered that ground.1 But perhaps we can better understand the man and the times that brought about those events and others by recounting some vignettes that show both the foibles and important attributes of the man.

The practical background that finally brought Bates to Moab and southeastern Utah in 1949 consisted of an upbringing on a dude ranch run by his father who had come west to Silver City, New Mexico, from the East for his health. Bates was born in Silver City on May 28, 1912. His education included the Lawrenceville, New Jersey, prep school that gave the western cowboy ethic in him a culture shock of sorts. The period before World War II saw him in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he was involved in an ill-fated ski resort and a Civilian Conservation Corps program for the National Park Service that built Hyde State Park, the regional office building, and the acequia madre—the principal canal running through the city His crews were mostly the Spanish-Americans from the area.

He married his first wife, Edie, in Santa Fe in 1933, and from this union were born three children, son Allan and daughters Julie and Caroline Later, after a divorce in Moab about 1970, he married Robin who had two adopted daughters, Lynn and Anne, the latter of whom he adopted.

His permanent Park Service career began at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, Arizona, where, after taking the park ranger examination, he became the acting superintendent just before the start of World War II. During the war he served in the Navy Seabees, combat construction battalions in the Pacific area After the war he continued his Park Service tenure as superintendent of the historic area, El Morro National Monument, New Mexico, until he was transferred in 1949 as superintendent of Arches National Monument just north of Moab, Utah. There he dedicated his talents and efforts to the preservation and establishment of Canyonlands National Park. He received the Department of the Interior Meritorious Service Award and a posthumous induction into the Utah Tourism Hall of Fame.

I had the good fortune to spend the years 1956 to 1961 working with Bates at Arches National Monument (now Park) and continued a relationship with him until his death in 1983. He was my boss and had a great deal of control over my career, but his relationship with me was more like that of an older brother or an uncle. I enjoyed his companionship, and we enjoyed life and did many things together— from exploration and park planning to deer hunting, fighting fires on the mountain, and partying, along with mundane park work.

Bates was slender in build but with a cowboy's wiriness coupled with a great deal of stamina. His energy seemed boundless no matter what he was doing, and he never lacked for something to do. If he could not handle it by himself, he managed to enlist aid one way or the other.

A year or two before I came to Arches a visitor had fallen while climbing Landscape Arch and had been killed. Visitors had also occasionally gotten lost in the monument or out on the nearby lands administered by the Bureau of Land Management, particularly the Dead Horse Point and White Rim area between the Green and Colorado rivers No one except the county sheriff and us park people took much responsibility, at the time, for finding people in trouble.

Bates took it upon himself to train his few park personnel and his Explorer Scout Troop in the rudiments of search and rescue work and especially in the art of rappeling. Rappeling was a necessity for search and rescue work in this land of many vertical pitches, deep canyons, and rugged mountains.

Arches had inherited a large case of surplus nylon climbing ropes and, although I was never quite certain if they were safe (why else would they be on surplus?), we made good use of them in our training and search and rescue. The Explorer Scouts became quite adept with the ropes and performed several rescues under Bates's leadership. He had them so well trained and self-confident that they went out on their own one evening in the late 1950s when Bates was not available and performed a difficult canyon rescue in a very creditable fashion.

One of the nervier Scout rapellers was Tug Wilson, Bates's son. I watched in apprehensive awe as Tug let himself down a sheer cliff face for what seemed an eternity in the search for the old man who died the summer of 1957 out near Upheaval Dome. Ed Abbey's report of this event in Desert Solitaire did not mention Tug's efforts and little explained the search group's procedures and problems.2

On the new park study trip in May 1959 I had the dubious honor to belay, with the aid of a huge sandstone boulder, Bates's rope climb up a slanting rocky trail high on a canyon wall to a ledge some five hundred feet above the floor of Horse Canyon in the Needles area. He wanted to get a closer look at a set of prehistoric Anasazi granaries with a series of red and white painted figures on the cliff face above them. He had discovered them with field glasses from the canyon bottom and just had to get a good look at them. He had the rope tied around his waist and I let it out slowly as he climbed. I guess the theory was if he slipped off the trail he would have swung there like a pendulum on the face of the cliff until we pulled him up or the rope broke or I let go of him. Fortunately, he scrambled up the trail like a mountain goat and came back with some good pictures of the rock art and the ruins

Rope had always been an important part of Bates's life. His teenage experience at the eastern prep school involved one Being a rough westerner by eastern standards, a little smaller than most boys his age, and a cowboy at heart, he found a little rough going socially at first. Fortunately, he had brought his lariat and quietly won the respect and friendship of the eastern dudes with his repertoire of western cowboy rope tricks in the fashion of Will Rogers, who was a Broadway star of the time.

Bates was not only athletic but also agile of mind. He cooked beef at Anderson Bottom on the Green River for the first night big feed the tourist promotion people were having for boaters on the 1959 Annual Friendship Cruise Boaters started out from Green River, Utah, in their motorboats, came down the Green River to its confluence with the Colorado River, and then up it to Moab. It was a two-day trip. Anderson Bottom was considered the midway point where it was traditional to make camp and gas up the first night out. High point of the stop was a cowboy-style dutch oven steak fry with all the trimmings—Bates's contributions.

Access to the bottom from Moab was easy via the Mineral Canyon Trail (also called the Horsethief Trail) down into the Green River canyon and then by boat across the Green River to Anderson Bottom. We had towed a motor boat down to the launch site on the Green. In the rear of the boat was a large, semi-frozen quarter of beef. Somehow in launching the boat we got into trouble. Either the boat did not get untied from the trailer or the beef was too heavy for the small boat. At any rate, when the trailer with the boat was backed into the water the rear end of the craft, instead of floating free as it should have, continued to go lower in the water until it sank The quarter of beef was not cooperating either It floated out of the boat and started to head downstream for California.

I must have stood with my mouth open envisioning a steak fry with no steak. Before I could close my mouth Bates had popped into the swift muddy river and was wrestling, as best he could, that cold hunk of cow toward the shore After some struggling, the use of the boat's anchor chain for a tow rope, and a little cursing and shouting we did get Bates and the beef to shore and the boat pulled out of the water and bailed out It was with a great sigh of relief that I waved farewell to a wet Bates, the boat owner, and a quarter of beef and headed home to a warm bed and a less hectic situation. As the river beef incident illustrates, Bates did have occasional times when his mental processes were not always perfectly focused.

Although we had arrest authority as Park Service employees and even had one .38-caliber World War II surplus Smith and Wesson revolver between us (which we kept locked in the safe), we had no real law enforcement training, let alone much use for it at the time. I don't believe we even had a citation book on hand. When accidents occurred on the roads in Arches we simply called the sheriff or his deputy, an ex-Episcopalian minister we called "Dragnet," to investigate.

On the other hand, we were steeped in the tradition of "Boss" Pinkley, the legendary character that had run all of the national monuments in the Southwest until World War II His philosophy was one of service and help to the traveling public, our visitors and taxpayers. So it is understandable that Bates had a mental block the day a drunk drove into headquarters looking for the way to Moab One of us should have arrested him, for the guy was so drunk he was barely coherent. Ever helpful, Bates talked with him at some length and finally got him headed for town.

Suddenly Bates realized that his wife was in town, probably picking up one or both of his daughters from school and was most likely on the same stretch of highway as the drunk. After a moment of panic he called the local edition of the state highway patrol Fortunately the trooper was in town and quickly got out on the highway to corral the drunk. We sat down with the Park Service manual and tried to figure out how to make an arrest It did not seem to be in any of the manuals we had.

As anyone who has read about Bates knows, he was no great shakes when it came to official NPS uniform wearing I do not recall when the government began to give us a uniform allowance, but even then I am certain that money had much to do with the completeness of the uniforms we wore We simply were not rich enough to be able to wear the uniform all of the time and in all situations. There was no such thing as a work uniform, and we did much more physical labor than public contact or office work We had no fancy visitor center, and the office in the front corner of the old converted Civilian Conservation Corps army-type barracks was dusty and sandy much of the time from the periodic wind storms in the canyon So, the uniform of the day usually consisted of work shoes, blue jeans, grey NPS shirt with pinned-on badge, no tie, and either a straw cowboy-style hat (Bates) or the NPS broad-brimmed hat (me).

There were times when we did dress up in full uniform. One occasion in 1960 was when the regional director (Bates's boss) and his assistant came to see us. We both had on our uniforms with the Eisenhower or short jacket. The visitors were not overly impressed. We thought we looked pretty snappy We checked out the new visitor center, the new house, and roads that had just been completed. I had salvaged the toilet bowl from the old shack my wife and I and two children had lived in for four years as a reminder of the "good old days" and placed it on the patio of the new house with a crop of sweet peas growing in it No comment came from the visitors from Santa Fe nor any other sign of a sense of humor.

They did take us to task for not placing a "Park Ranger" decal on our new station wagon. To have the decal sign displayed was a new regulation as was the light green color of the vehicle, but we could find no appropriate place for the decal on the streamlined surface of the wagon We thought the red light and siren pretty much told the story anyway And we still did not have a citation book and still kept the .38-caliber pistol in the safe The regional director had no suggestion as to where to put the decal when asked. We figured it out later by putting it on a piece of masonite and mounting it upright on the front of the hood. It looked like the devil but it was official and that's what counted.

About this same time Bates and I made a trip to Santa Fe to try to iron out, unsuccessfully, some monument personnel problems. By then we had an administrative assistant who ran Arches in our absence While we were in Santa Fe our friend, regional naturalist Natt Dodge, took us to lunch with his Kiwanis Club Natt had been secretary of the club for many years and, knowing that Bates belonged to the Moab Lions Club and I to the Moab Rotary Club, he jokingly made out cards that indicated we had attended a Kiwanis meeting and were entitled to credit at our own clubs for a makeup meeting and sent them to our respective clubs.

I never knew how Bates made out at the next Lions meeting but I was placed on the grill at Rotary. Hard-pressed to avoid a large fine for this gross infraction, I finally made up a wild story New Mexico, I told them, was the only state where the laws were bilingual, using both Spanish and English (true at the time), and I honestly thought, when asked to attend Kiwanis, that Kiwanis was the Spanish word for Rotary. A blatant lie of course but all in fun and, after much laughter, I was off the hook.

Bates's ability to get along with anyone, rich or poor, educated or not, no matter their position in life was probably his greatest asset. Having grown up with Spanish-American and Mexican kids in Silver City, New Mexico, he spoke a passable brand of New Mexican Spanish. Periodically, some of the local Moab Spanish speakers who had worked for or knew Bates would show up at headquarters with problems. He would try to help them. I remember long conversations in a mixture of Spanish and English as he tried to work out a solution. My college Spanish was not up to understanding it all, but Bates seemed to get everything straightened out just fine.

We also had yearly contacts with the Basque sheepherders who would come down Salt Valley through the Arches to their BLM grazing allotment just outside the monument in Cache Valley. Again, a long conversation in Spanish, a plate of beans and mutton in the sheepherders' spic and span wagon, and we all understood what was going on and where each other's properties were.

The young people of Moab looked up to Bates too. After the new paved road up the hill behind headquarters at Arches and on to the Balanced Rock was finished in 1958 we began to pick up a lot of garbage on weekends as some of the local teenagers started to use the parking lots for beer parties. One bunch Bates caught one Saturday night had really trashed the place He knew them all, but instead of arresting them he gave them an ultimatum. After school some time in the next week they were to pick up all the trash along the state highway between town and the Arches entrance. He would furnish the truck to haul it away. The group thought that a fair deal (they didn't know we had no citation book so it was partially a bluff) Not only did the trashers turn out but half the high school was there picking up litter, including Bates's oldest daughter. They had a ball, the highway looked great, and the message got across.

When the new visitor center and new house were being built in 1960, a part of the package included paving the road from the visitor center past the houses and future house sites to the utility area. The project supervisor that the Western Office of Design and Construction sent out to us from San Francisco was an architect. He flatly told us that he would have nothing to do with the road when the contractor came to him to get some engineering surveying done. Bates was a little nonplused, to say the least Someone had to run levels on two or three culverts to be placed in the road fill so that the water would run the right way—downhill.

Bates borrowed a transit and a range pole from someone in Moab, since we had no equipment like that, and we went to work. We both had some elementary surveying in our past, but memory is sometimes too short. Things went well until we got to the mathematics stage, and we could not remember whether to add or subtract on the range pole to get the proper inclination to the culvert for proper drainage. Our only excuse was that this was really not in our job description; but we finally did get the job done correctly. We proudly dubbed ourselves the "Eyeball Engineering Company," but never took another job. Bates also quietly got the project supervisor replaced; one of the few times I ever saw him upset over people problems.

Those were the days when the superintendent of an area did most of the planning himself via the master plan within the generous NPS guidelines and with or without help from higher authority and design office as the area needs dictated It worked well in the smaller areas, particularly with a practical man of vision, experience, and foresight like Bates. Some of his planning was based on prior planning and local political realities, but Bates had an intimate on-theground knowledge of his two, later three, areas—Natural Bridges, Arches, and Canyonlands. He had a knowledge that most superintendents in the NPS rarely possessed because of the short time they were assigned to an area or the size of it. Bates had the benefit of an unhurried length of time on the job and knew exactly what he wanted and what the visitor needed in the developments for his areas.

His development plans were geared as much to avoiding management problems as they were to providing visitor services. For example, he studiously avoided permanent concession installations because they are a perpetual headache with their constant expansionist outlook and their usual political clout that interfered with good management. He could see that the time had come for free enterprise to take over outside the parks and in the nearby small towns where the tourists and local entrepreneurs would both benefit rather than the monopolies some concessionaires enjoyed in some parks. Bates's honesty and pragmatic approach to things usually convinced the final decision makers of the validity of his planning.

Bates had walked the possible road alignments for both Natural Bridges and Arches and, together with the Bureau of Public Roads engineer assigned to the construction job, they reached a final route. He located water sources at Bridges and together we relocated the old boundary established by W. B. Douglas in 1908. With good U.S. Geological Survey maps of the Bridges area produced in the early 1950s we pursued the enlargement of the monument from the natural metes and boundaries of Douglas to the rectangular survey system of the BLM's cadastral engineers The old boundaries looked more natural and conformed to the landscape, but we bowed to modern survey techniques and stayed with breakdowns of the one square mile section system. Bates was the conservative here, and I was somewhat greedy about taking land away from the BLM for the expansion of Natural Bridges The final boundaries, after several reviews by the Department of the Interior, NPS, BLM, and state agencies in the early 1960s, came out to a fairly respectable size and protected the monument much better. The new boundaries avoided the possibility of a large hotel dominating the scene overlooking any of the natural bridges by being far enough back from the bridges to provide a good buffer zone.

The men who ran the old Southwestern Monuments for the National Park Service prior to the 1960s had to be jacks-of-all-trades. There was little money, and many monuments were so far from a town that one could never get a plumber, carpenter, mechanic, or electrician to come out to the area for any reasonable amount of money Bates was no exception; he handled many jobs himself in spite of being only five miles from town.

On one occasion, Bates and his son Tug were installing a water line in a trench they had hand dug to get water into an old trailer that was to become the residence for our newly appointed administrative assistant and his family. While Bates and Tug were sweating it out in the trench like World War I soldiers, up wheeled a big pink Cadillac and out hopped a chubby red-faced individual who proceeded pugnaciously to ask Bates if he had a "ticket" to do that kind of work. Bates asked just what he meant, and the red-face announced that one had to have a plumbers union card or a permit to do that kind of work. Bates smiled and told the pink Cadillac owner that he was wrong The union representative pushed his case and insisted that Bates and Tug both needed union cards. That tore it for Bates, and in his dirty blue jeans, straw hat, and old Park Service shirt he pulled himself up to his full height and said, "I am the superintendent of this area and this is my son who is working for nothing and I don't need a permit to do this job and if you are thinking about going up on our new road job to talk to anyone, forget it You can wait down here until 5 P.M. when the men get off from work and talk to them then." Red-face, the union organizer, left.

Bates had a soft heart even when someone was violating his park. On our way home from Moab one day we were astounded to see a crew alongside the highway inside the Arches boundary blissfully erecting a king-sized billboard They already had the holes drilled and two or three poles put up. I suggested we let them complete the job and then make them take it down. Bates vetoed that idea. He stopped and told them the facts of NPS regulations and that it was not the place for the billboard They were actually grateful, for once, as Bates had saved them a great deal of time, money, and embarrassment plus a possible fine.

When we finally got the new visitor center at Arches in 1960 we all thought we were in some kind of special heaven for park rangers Bates had a time adjusting to the new building, especially his large, clean, undusty, light, and airy office, the first in his NPS career. He wanted to drag in the old World War II surplus furniture we had been using in the old CCC barracks office building, but administrative assistant LyleJamison and I decided we had the money and were going first class for a change with new furniture.

For the superintendent's office we bought Bates a large counciltype desk unbeknownst to him—a desk with the proper dignity and status a superintendent deserved When it came and we set it up, he really did not want to have anything to do with it. He had been Park Service poor for so long that he felt out of place with a decent piece of furniture. He recovered, however, and so did his sense of humor.

The building architect had designed a contact desk with a narrow horizontal slit window behind it that gave a view into the administrative assistant's office. The theory was that in slack times, with few visitors, the administrative assistant could work at his desk until he saw a visitor through the window and then come out and make the contact. One day I caught Bates tossing peanuts through the open window at Lyle Jamison, who detested the setup.

Poverty was a fact of life at Arches prior to about 1960 We began to live a little when the Atomic Energy Commission closed out its southeastern Utah field camps and the uranium mill at Monticello in the late 1950s. Nuts, bolts, and pipe fittings were some of the special items Bates latched on to. The- disposal agent for the AEC was in Grand Junction, Colorado We received lists of available surplus items and personal visits from the disposal agent, a gentleman we referred to as "Santa Claus" Thompson.

The one catch to all the largess was that Thompson had set things up in large lots and it was "all or nothing." Consequently, we wound up with many things we had no earthly use for, like a fourfoot-long monkey wrench But the good stuff made up for it, and Bates was in hog heaven ordering things and all for free.

We convinced Santa Fe, the regional office, that we needed a jeep that was advertised on surplus. We did have miles of dirt road, and since access to our boundaries from outside was viajeep trails we had rarely checked the boundary To supply parts for the new secondhand jeep we picked up another on surplus for "spare parts."

One day I noticed the administrative assistant making out a purchase order for about $1,000 worth of nuts and bolts. As I glanced out the window I saw the maintenance man driving in with at least a similar amount of nuts and bolts in the back of the dump truck I thought this a little much as we really had all we could possibly use in the back room. The purchase order was torn up.

Bates finally got called on the carpet by the region for his surplus acquisitions. I do not know whether it was the extra jeep, the stainless steel four-by-eight-foot, quarter-inch-thick plates, or the portable building at Natural Bridges, but he was in hot water for a while. There was little surplus left by then anyway, so it really did not matter. Life went on at Arches but a life made somewhat easier by all the loot we had accumulated I would be willing to bet there is still some of it in storage in the Arches maintenance area today, thirtyfive years later.

When it came to dedicating new NPS facilities it was almost de rigueur to stroke many politicians from the various levels of government—local, state, and federal—by allowing them prominent exposure at the dedication ceremonies whether they actually had anything to do with getting the facility or not. Bates added a new twist with his innate sense of propriety, history, and fairness When arranging dedications of the new visitor center at Arches and the new roads through the monument it was not politicians or even the NPS hierarchy that were given the spotlight of cutting the obligatory ribbon In the case of the visitor center it was the widow of Dr. J. W. Williams, the local medic who had done so much to promote the area. A new road to the Windows section of the monument was dedicated by the widow of our long-time super-efficient maintenance foreman, Merle Winbourn.

Although Bates was not particularly a political animal in the sense that he was involved in local politics (it was forbidden for federal employees), he did have political savvy and made many political friends through his personality Strangely enough he was a registered Republican and many of the political friends that helped him promote the establishment of Canyonlands National Park were good Democrats. Chief among these was Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall.

About the time of the establishment of Canyonlands National Park attempts were made to transfer Bates to Salt Lake City into a state coordinator job for the NPS, a political sop to the state government which was feeling left out of park planning Bates resisted the transfer He wanted to continue his work in the Moab area, away from a big city with his family and friends Apparently some jealousy existed in the NPS. The hierarchy did not want Bates to become superintendent of Canyonlands, for they would have to give him a big promotion compatible with the job. They probably also had some "fair-haired boy" already picked out for the post. Secretary Udall solved the problem by announcing Bates's appointment as superintendent of Canyonlands in Salt Lake City one happy day. Bates also served as state coordinator a few days each month and maintained an office in Salt Lake City, but mostly he was superintendent of Canyonlands, the love of his Park Service life.

Afew years later I thought Bates's luck had run out and he probably would be transferred to some desk job in Washington or a backwater park. The administration had changed, and his Democratic friends, Udall and Sen Ted Moss of Utah, were on the way out But the new Republican Department of the Interior solicitor turned out to be Mitch Melich, a lawyer from Moab who had run for governor on the Republican ticket and lost. Mitch and Bates were long-time close friends, so Bates stayed on in Moab until his retirement in 1972.

As the Park Service became bigger and life in general became more complex a different type of park ranger started to show up. They were well educated, intelligent people of both sexes, who had fallen in love with "nature," ironically, for some of them, as the result of a book by one of Bates's seasonal rangers some time earlier, one Ed Abbey. Most of them were city types, however, with little experience in the desert or a wilderness and, much to Bates's complete frustration, many of them could not drive a car, let alone a jeep. At the same time, his Canyonlands staff included many employees from big parks and elsewhere who had been foisted off on him with no chance of his rejection so that his life became somewhat difficult—his payment from the Park Service for the political clout he commanded

Coincidentally, some of the plans for the new park were slow in realization and were being altered to fit revised conservation thinking Development was not coming fast enough for those locals who stood to benefit financially or politically. Bates was harangued in the press and in person. Today, with almost a million visitors to Moab each year, some of these same people are still complaining—this time about the problems of higher taxes, loss of political clout to newcomers, helicopters, hikers and bikers, and tourists, all brought about by the park development they wanted. Bates must be chuckling. These things may have been a contributing factor to his retirement some eight years after the establishment of Canyonlands National Park.

In retirement he went back to his roots and bought a hay ranch nestled in a valley among the red rocks he so loved It was there in a happy retirement that he died of a heart attack in 1983.

Bates had a great sense of history and its importance in the scheme of things This was fostered by the fact that one of his ancestors, for whom he was named, had been in Lincoln's cabinet.3 He had a letter, from Lincoln to ancestor Bates, proudly framed and displayed on the wall of the old stone house at Arches where he and his family lived. It hung right next to an ancient Navajo blanket. The blanket represented his interest in Native Americans, both ancient and contemporary.

In his explorations of the Needles area he came to realize that the archaeological values in the canyons on the north side of the Abajo Mountains were practically pristine and of importance in the overall study of southwestern archaeology. They were also in extreme danger from vandals who had been given easy access to the area. He organized his Scout troop to survey the prehistoric ruins in Horse Canyon, a drainage of Salt Creek, in March 1952. This apparently came at the suggestion of Alice Hunt, a student who was doing an archaeological survey of the LaSal Mountains for her master's degree at Denver University while her husband, Charles Hunt, was studying the geology of the mountains for the U.S. Geological Survey. The Scouts recorded the sites, mapped them, and photographed them, but no collections were made in spite of the fact that they found several whole pottery vessels In May of that year Bates took Alice into the Needles and they collected the pots, thus bringing to the attention of the archaeological profession the importance of the Needles resources.

The survey conducted by Bates's Boy Scout troop and the report by Bates and Alice Hunt forced things into focus for University of Utah archaeologists. The Anthropology Department under Jesse D. Jennings quickly got involved surveying and excavating sites in the area Jack Rudy, a graduate student, excavated, with the help of some of Bates's Scouts, nine sites in Beef Basin just south of Horse Canyon in the summer of 1953 after survey efforts in September 1952.4

Bates's feelings for history and archaeology also allowed me to get involved with historical and archaeological preservation via the establishment of a local museum and a statewide archaeological society. Working for a person less sensitive to these values would have been much less productive for me. Conservation efforts would have suffered, for much government time and material went into these activities.

Bates's philosophy was first one of conservation and preservation of the areas he loved, Canyonlands, Arches, and Natural Bridges. He went about this task in the way he knew best, guided by the cultural and NPS parameters of the time. This called for making the major attributes of the Park Service area available to the public but maintaining the rest as natural or wilderness. Usually it was figured that 5 percent of the park would be developed and 95 percent left to mother nature. In other words, Bates was development oriented to the visitor needs of the time. Campgrounds, visitor centers, flush toilets (he had cleaned out enough outhouses to last two lifetimes), paved roads and trails, employee housing, and interpretive signing were all in his development textbook. Times changed. Unpredictably, visitor use and desires changed over the years, and the loudest voices began to call for more wilderness and less development. This has resulted in such things as a paved road in the Needles dead ending at the edge of a canyon where a fancy bridge was to cross it One must put Bates's philosophy into the proper time frame. In the 1950s and 60s the National Park Service was the major agency providing outdoor recreation in the U.S. and all facets of it. State parks were few; Utah had none. The Bureau of Land Management paid little attention to anything but cows and miners, and the U.S. Forest Service wished recreation would go away—trees were more important.

Bates was caught in the middle—cussed by ultra-conservative outdoor types for developments and by the ultra-conservative entrepreneurs for not following through on promised developments that they thought would bring dollars into the local economy The important aspect of what Bates had accomplished was lost to many because of this conflict. His efforts to get Canyonlands set aside and Arches and Natural Bridges expanded meant that these areas were dedicated to all Americans not just a few who wished to exploit and/or destroy them in the name of progress and business.

If Americans had not become so rich that too many of them could afford four-wheel-drive vehicles and if they had not been so prolific in producing more Americans, Bates could probably have had his first wish for the Needles. That was a nice little area set aside for the few aficionados of jeeps in the early 1950s to visit. His vision expanded as he talked with others about Canyonlands, and, in spite of political pressures, he got pretty much what he dreamed for Canyonlands much to the enjoyment of everyone involved, even the pessimists. As the plaque at the Arches visitor center says, "Canyonlands will remain forever a monument to his memory, a tribute to his leadership, and his legacy to future generations."

NOTES

Mr Pierson lives in Moab, Utah.

1 Most of the accolades to Bates mention his dutch oven cooking skills with his park accomplishments One did beget the other See the following: Clayton G Rudd, "Editorial," Naturalist 21 (summer 1970): 1; M S Pendelton, "He Walked with Giants," From the Canyons (August 1984): 6, 7; Dave May, "The Trouble with Bates," Canyon Legacy 1 (fall 1989): 18-21; Rowe Findley, "Canyonlands," National Geographic 140 (July 1971): 79-80; "Park Chief Turns to Ranching," Denver Post, May 3, 1972; and 'What Utah Owes Bates," Salt Lake Tribune, c May 1972.

2 Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1968), pp 206-16 What Abbey called "The Deadman at Grandview Point" was an incident that actually occurred at Upheaval Dome.

3 Bates was named after Edward Bates (1793-1869) Lincoln's attorney general A lawyer and politician born in Goochland County, Virginia, Edward practiced in Missouri, fathered seventeen children, and died in St Louis.

4 Jack R Rudy, Archeological Excavations in BeefBasin, Utah, University of Utah Anthropological Papers, Number 20 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1955) Alice P Hunt and Bates E Wilson, "Archaeological Sites in the Horse Canyon Area, San Juan County, Utah," MS, 1955, on file in University of Utah Anthropology Department, Salt Lake City; personal communication from Allan D Wilson, Bates's son, July 6, 1982.