Hot Springs: The Oldest Protected Land in America

On April twentieth, eighteen thirty-two, President Andrew Jackson signed an act of Congress reserving the hot springs at what is now Hot Springs National Park from private settlement. It was a bureaucratic gesture at the time, a federal claim on a remote stretch of Arkansas Territory where the thermal water emerged from the earth at roughly sixty-two degrees Celsius. No one in Washington fully understood what to do with it. But the federal government had done something it had never done before: it had protected a piece of land from private development on the grounds that the land itself had public value.

Yellowstone would not be set aside for forty more years. The National Park Service would not exist for eighty-four more years. Hot Springs was simply there, in legal limbo, managed by no agency, visited by an increasing number of people who believed the water cured rheumatism, syphilis, and the accumulated damage of hard labor, and administered through a succession of ad-hoc federal arrangements that never quite resolved into a coherent policy.

The anomaly persisted for nearly ninety years. On March fourth, nineteen twenty-one, the site finally received the formal designation of National Park, making it the forty-eighth such unit in the park system, though its underlying federal reservation dated back four decades before the first.

The same president who signed the Hot Springs reservation in April of eighteen thirty-two had signed the Indian Removal Act two years earlier. Andrew Jackson's federal government protected these thermal springs while systematically expelling the Indigenous peoples from the surrounding landscape. Both acts were federal land policy. Both bore his signature. The park and the trail were the same administration's work.