A Place Called Jackson Hole: A Historic Resource Study of Grand Teton National Park

Daugherty, John; Crockett, Stephanie; Goetzmann, William; Jackson, Reynold

When Chief Naturalist Chuck McCurdy hired me to fill the park historian position at Grand Teton National Park in 1980, had anyone told me I would work and live there for 11 years, my response would have been "no way." Nor did I envision writing a history of Jackson Hole. Plenty of histories had been written about the valley, so why write another? Like everything else the federal government does, the answer lies in federal law, in this case a law titled the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966. It created the National Register of Historic Places which, for the first time, recognized sites, districts, buildings, and structures of local, state, and national significance. None of the histories of Jackson Hole evaluated any of these resources systematically or in the depth needed to nominate properties to the National Register. For this reason, I researched and wrote this history. Officially, this document is a Historic Resource Study (HRS), a National Park Service baseline research report. Its main goals are threefold: (1) prepare a historical overview of the park; (2) collect, evaluate, synthesize, and present results of research concerning the historic resources of Grand Teton National Park; and (3) develop narratives of historic contexts appropriate to the park and its resources. A context organizes information based on a cultural theme within a geographical and chronological framework. The table of contents is a list of contexts. In addition, I added two purposes very important to me and, I hope, to the park and public. First, as a park interpreter, I prepared this study to provide baseline information for educational and interpretive purposes. In my experience, too many cultural resources reports do not serve interpretation well, and as a result, go unused, gathering dust on a shelf. Finally, history, in addition to being as accurate as sources allow, is at its best a good story. I hope readers will find this a good story. There are two things this study does not do. Because of limited time and funding, I concentrated my research on gathering information relevant to properties and sites in the park. With few exceptions, I did not conduct detailed research on properties outside park boundaries. Nonetheless, the contexts of the chapters apply to the general history of the valley. Also, I did not write about events well documented in other histories of Jackson Hole, such as the shoot-out at the Cunningham cabin and the so-called "Indian Scare of 1895."

A Place Called Jackson Hole: A Historic Resource Study of Grand Teton National Park

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