Rockefeller's Secret and the Park That Took Twenty-Four Years

In the summer of nineteen twenty-six, a real estate company called the Snake River Land Company began quietly buying ranchland in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The company's agents paid fair market prices and asked no unusual questions. The sellers, small-scale ranchers and homesteaders in the valley below the Teton Range, had no particular reason to inquire about the buyer's identity or intentions. That was the point.

The Snake River Land Company was a front. The buyer was John D. Rockefeller Junior, the son of Standard Oil, one of the wealthiest people in the United States. He was purchasing the land to donate it to the federal government, to expand Grand Teton National Park beyond the mountain range itself into the valley below. The park, established in nineteen twenty-nine, protected only the peaks. Rockefeller believed the valley was the essential complement.

When his identity and intentions became known, Wyoming politicians were outraged. The state's congressional delegation blocked park expansion for over two decades. Rockefeller, by then in possession of approximately thirty-five thousand acres he could neither sell without betraying the purpose nor donate without congressional consent, waited. In nineteen forty-three, Franklin Roosevelt used the Antiquities Act to designate a Jackson Hole National Monument over Congress's explicit objection. Wyoming sued. The lawsuits failed. In nineteen fifty, the land was finally accepted and the park expanded to something close to its current boundaries.

The ranchers who had sold to Rockefeller's agents had no recourse. The purchase prices had been paid. The land was gone. Some had sold under the impression that the land would become a game preserve open to grazing; the reality was more restrictive. The cabin where the original discussions about a park expansion had taken place, the Maude Noble Cabin at Menor's Ferry, is still here. The ferry site dates to eighteen ninety-four. The meeting where the park-expansion idea was formally organized among conservationists took place here in nineteen twenty-three, three years before Rockefeller's agents began buying.

The gap between the idea and the outcome was twenty-seven years. The valley was worth it, which is probably what Rockefeller told himself. The ranchers would have disagreed.