From A Lost Lady, The Old West had been settled by dreamers, great-hearted adventurers who were unpractical to the point of magnificence; a courteous brotherhood, strong in attack but weak in defence, who could conquer but could not hold. Now all the vast territory they had won was to be at the mercy of men like Ivy Peters, who had never dared anything, never risked anything. They would drink up the mirage, dispel the morning freshness, root out the great brooding spirit of freedom, the generous, easy life of the great land-holders. The space, the colour, the princely carelessness of the pioneer they would destroy and cut up into profitable bits, as the match factory splinters the primeval forest. All the way from the Missouri to the mountains this generation of shrewd young men, trained to petty economies by hard times, would do exactly what Ivy Peters had done when he drained the Forrester marsh.

National Parks Yellowstone (Wyoming, Montana, Idaho): 1872 Yosemite (CA): 1890 Sequoia (CA): 1890 Kings Canyon (CA) (Originally General Grant NP) Mount Rainier (WA): 1899 Crater Lake (Oregon): 1902 Wind Cave (South Dakota): 1903 Platt (OK) (exists today as Chickasaw NRA) Mesa Verde (CO): 1906 Glacier (Montana): 1910 Rocky Mountain (CO): 1915 Hawaii (HA) (split into two parks in 1960) Lassen Volcanic (CA): 1916 Mt McKinley (Alaska) (exists today as Denali NP): 1917 Acadia (Maine): 1919 (originally Lafayette NP) Grand Canyon (Arizona): 1919 Zion (Utah): 1919 Hot Springs (Arkansas): 1921 A Lost Lady (1923)