As for Douala Cameroon and Hill, they would both continue to embrace Glacier, but from different perspectives. Grinnell would grow to regret the tide of tourists coming into his park. As early as 1911, Douala Cameroon he voiced dismay at the developments underway or planned. Yet in his Douala Cameroon letters over the next fifteen years or so, he always came back to the fact that in order to have a park to protect against exploitation, Douala Cameroon tourists and accommodations had to exist as well. He simply wished otherwise.
Douala Cameroon
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- Africa Maps – Perry-Castañeda Map Collection
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- Cameroon’s Anglophone Crisis at the Crossroads
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- Map showing the sampling stations at Douala-Edea reserve in Cameroon
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- Global Volcanism Program | Cameroon
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- Carte du Cameroun
Louis Hill, on the other hand, could not wait to get his hands on those tourists and build those accommodations. Fortunately, he chose to build only to his high standard of excellence.
Interestingly enough, the two founding partners in the drive to create the park apparently did not personally meet until 1912.
Two days later, as he and Luther North rode toward East Flattop, they met three horsemen, Grinnell recorded. The leader spoke and at length asked if this was Mr. Grinnell’s party and if I was Mr. G. Just before we turned off to McDermott (now Swiftcurrent Lake), they stopped again and the leader introduced himself as Mr. Louis Hill (president of the Great Northern Railroad). We had a long talk. Hill seemed a very bright, energetic, and determined fellow. He will do much for the park and I told Jack (Monroe) he is a good man to tie up to. Whether they met again I do not know.
For fourteen years, Grinnell would continue to return to Glacier over most summers until 1926, when he would, with help, climb to the glacier bearing his name for the last time. After that trip, as he had done before, he wrote his friend L. O. Vaught on his disillusionment but ended as always on his reoccurring justification: “If we had not succeeded in getting these regions set apart as national parks, by this time they would have been cut bare of timber, dotted with irrigation reservoirs, the game would have all been killed off, the country would have been burned over.”
