Mr. Davison

If a polite stranger ever introduces himself as Mister Davison, friend, put your hand on your deed. In the summer of nineteen twenty-three a handful of people met in Maud Noble's cabin and agreed there was one way to save this valley. Somebody with a great deal of money would have to buy it. A year later a quiet gentleman came west with three of his sons, and the park men had strict orders not to talk business with Mister Davison. He was John D. Rockefeller Junior, traveling on his middle name. Horace Albright of Yellowstone obeyed those orders to the letter. He merely mentioned a little hill above Jackson Lake, with a fine view, for a picnic. In nineteen twenty-six the Rockefellers came back and drove from Moran down to Jenny Lake, the same country you've been crossing the other way. They passed what Albright called a woebegone-looking old dance hall, a burned-out gasoline station, billboards, and a bootleg joint. Rockefeller asked for a map and a list of the offending properties, with prices. That winter Albright carried his list to New York. Rockefeller looked it over and said, "Mister Albright, this isn't what I wanted from you." It took Albright a minute. The man didn't want the eyesores. He wanted everything. All the private land north of Jackson. So they dreamed up a hunting club. A company, with the real purpose kept secret so the prices wouldn't climb. They had a world-class middleweight wrestler named Mike Yokel buying land. And for field agent they hired the Jackson banker, Robert Miller, the one locals called Old Twelve-Percent, a bitter enemy of the park, who always said nobody told him what it was for. Word got out, and the fight ran on for twenty years. Even the card parties got awkward. By nineteen thirty-eight Rockefeller was asking if the land would fetch fifty cents on the dollar. In nineteen forty-three Franklin Roosevelt went around Congress and signed a monument, and armed ranchers trailed some five hundred cattle across it, with Wallace Beery of the movies riding along. One of those ranchers was Cliff Hansen. Rockefeller handed over better than thirty-two thousand acres, and in nineteen fifty it all became one park. Hansen went on to be governor and a United States senator, and decades later he allowed that the bigger park had served the public after all. Put that senator at a fence, looking over the ground he once rode across to stop it. Then put a quiet man on a little hill above the lake, a Mister Davison. He had his picnic. He got his valley.