author
Carl Parcher Russell
1894–1967
A National Park Service pioneer, historian, and ecologist, this writer helped shape how millions of visitors encountered America’s parks and frontier past. His work blends close attention to nature with a deep interest in early American life and western history.
1 Audiobook
One Hundred Years in Yosemite: The Story of a Great Park and Its Friends
by Carl Parcher Russell
About the author
Born in Fall River, Wisconsin, in 1894, Carl Parcher Russell built a career that joined scholarship, public history, and conservation. He joined the National Park Service in 1923 as a naturalist in Yosemite National Park and later earned a Ph.D. in ecology from the University of Michigan.
Russell spent 34 years with the National Park Service and became known as one of the people who helped develop museum and interpretive work in the national parks. Alongside his administrative work, he wrote on frontier history, early Americana, and the American West, bringing together the eye of a historian and the training of a field naturalist.
He died in 1967. Today he is remembered both for his books and for helping define how national parks present history and the natural world to the public.