American Realities with Bill Youngs
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    • Summary
  • About Me
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    • Illustrative Films
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    • A Walk Through Turnbull
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    • Gods Messengers: Religious Leadership in Colonial New England, 1700-1750 >
      • Table of Contents
      • Preface
      • Chapter 1: The Ministers and Their Times
      • Chapter 2: The Minister's Calling
      • Epilogue
      • Appendix: Length of Ministerial Settlement
      • Abbreviations
    • The Congregationalists >
      • Timeline
      • Bibliographic Dictionary of Leaders
    • Eleanor Roosevelt: A Personal and Public Life >
      • Prologue: The South Pacific, 1943 >
        • Eleanor Roosevelt South Pacific
      • A Victorian Family
      • The Legacy
      • Growing Up
      • Eleanor and Franklin
      • A Politician's Wife
      • Grief
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      • First Lady
      • The Democratic Crusade
      • On Her Own
    • American Realities (Book) >
      • History as a Story
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      • Volume One >
        • The Native Americans
        • The English Background
        • The British American
        • Reform in Colonial America
        • Divided Loyalties
        • The American Revolution
        • Testing the Constitution
        • Republican Nationalism
        • The Limits of Jacksonian Democracy
        • Abolitionists and Anti-abolitionists
        • Texas Revolution
        • Reform in the Early Republic
        • Manifest Destiny
        • A Slave's Story
        • The Civil War >
          • Two Soldiers
      • Volume Two >
        • The “Taming” of the West
        • Beyond Emancipation
        • The New Industrial Era
        • The Birth of Environmentalism
        • New Immigrants
        • Expanding American Democracy
        • World War I
        • Modernity versus Tradition
        • The New Deal
        • Total War
        • The Cold War
        • The Civil Rights Movement
        • Turmoil on the Campuses
        • The New Computer Age
        • America, the Cold War, and Beyond
      • Additional Essays >
        • Norsemen in the New World
    • The Fair and the Falls >
      • Part I: Possessing the Falls >
        • Chapter One: James Glover: Purchasing the Falls
        • Chapter Two: Waiting for the Indians
        • Chapter Three: Harnessing the Falls
        • Chapter Four: "The World's Fair of the Northwest"
        • Chapter Five: The City Beside the Falls
      • Part II: Rediscovering the Falls >
        • Chapter Six: The Twilight of Old Spokane
        • Chapter Seven: Urban Blight and Urban Renewal
        • Chapter Eight: King Cole and The Heart of a City
        • Chapter Nine: Visualizing a World's Fair
      • Part III Redesigning the Falls >
        • Chapter Ten: From Spokane to Paris >
          • Tom Foley's Turn
        • Chapter Eleven: Wooing the Foreign Exhibitors
        • Chapter Twelve: Wooing the Domestic Exhibitors
        • Chapter Thirteen: The Environmental Debate
        • Chapter Fourteen: Building the Fair
        • Chapter Fifteen: Marketing, Money, and Management
      • Part IV: The Fair by the Falls >
        • Chapter Sixteen: Opening Day
        • Chapter Seventeen: A Mingling of Peoples
        • Chapter Eighteen: Days at the Fair
        • Chapter Nineteen: The Press of New Ideas
        • Chapter Twenty: The Final Tally
      • Part V: An American Environment >
        • Chapter Twenty-One: Spokane Falls, An American Environment
      • The Fair and the Falls Map
  • Spokane Falls as World Heritage Site

Serenity: The Watchword of Crater Lake National Park

Fireside Talk: Serenity: The Watchword of Crater Lake National Park 
J. William T. Youngs
9/28/2012

We studied Crater Lake for this week's assignment in the Burns and Duncan film and book, The National Parks. They tell us that in 1870 a young Kansan named William Gladstone Steele was skimming a newspaper "that had been used to wrap his lunch" when he ran across an article about a "sunken lake" in Oregon. Fifteen years later he actually saw the lake. He described it in this way: 

Imagine a vast mountain six by seven miles through at an elevation of eight thousand feet, with the top removed and the inside hollowed out, then filled with the clearest water in the world, to within two thousand feet of the top...and you have a perfect representation of Crater Lake.(109)

By planning and coincidence I happened to be at Crater Lake in September, 2012, on the very day that my "History of the American National Parks" online course was beginning. I had been there before, camping a few miles from the rim. But this time I had stayed at the Crater Lake Lodge, right over the lake. In the morning the guests went out in the balcony alone or in small groups, and for each of us there was a sense of being in the presence of something extraordinary. For me the power of the lake was quite different from the power of the dramatic seashore of Maine, the towering peaks of the Grand Tetons, or the thunder of Yellowstone Falls. The essential quality of Crater Lake is a profound stillness. It seems to say, "I have no need for a showy display of pounding water or towering peaks. I am simply here."

Have a look at the little film I made that morning by the lake and decide what you think: