Jackson Hole: The Valley That Almost Became a Ranch

Jackson Hole, the valley floor between the Teton Range to the west and the Gros Ventre Mountains to the east, became Grand Teton National Park in nineteen twenty-nine. The story of how it got there is messier than most national park origin stories.

The valley had been ranched since the eighteen eighties. When the National Park Service proposed expanding the park to include the valley floor, the ranching community and the state of Wyoming opposed it vigorously for two decades. The argument was partly economic, partly cultural: the valley had been worked land, and making it a park would end that. Congress blocked park expansion bills repeatedly through the nineteen thirties and forties.

Franklin Roosevelt resolved the impasse by proclamation in nineteen forty-three, designating the valley floor as Jackson Hole National Monument under the Antiquities Act. The monument was legally separate from the park but achieved the same effect. Wyoming's congressional delegation was furious. Congress passed a bill to abolish the monument. Roosevelt vetoed it.

The monument and the original park were merged into the current Grand Teton National Park by Act of Congress in nineteen fifty, five years after Roosevelt died. Ranchers who had held grazing permits in the monument were allowed to keep them for the duration of their lives. The last life tenancy grazed cattle in the park until nineteen ninety-four.

The valley you see today, with its clear sightlines to the Tetons and its absence of development across the flat floor, exists partly because a president chose to use executive authority to override a two-decade political stalemate.