Halfdome Photo by Staff Photographer Walt Manciini

By Staff Writer Steve Scauzillo

Without the idea of preserving wildlands that started June 30, 1864 during the Civil War, when Abraham Lincoln signed the Yosemite Grant, there would be no Yellowstone, technically the nation’s first national park. There would be no cathedrals of earth and stone, as Europeans call Yosemite, Zion, the Grand Canyon, etc.

In a gimmick taken from the holiday movie “It’s a Wonderful Life,” Burns described what some parks would be like without that first act of conservation in 1864. Like the angel who showed George Bailey what would happen to his hometown if he were never born, Burns said without the national parks: “Zion would be gated. Yellowstone would be a down-on-its-luck resort called ‘Geyser World.’ ”

Nearly 150 years ago, with 11,000 men dying each day and a nation on the verge of splitting apart, Lincoln signed the Yosemite Grant, which gave the land to California.

But without funding or enforcement, some of the giant sequoias of Mariposa Grove were logged and Alpine Meadows became denuded by flocks of grazing sheep from poaching herders.

It took visionaries such as the Scottish-born John Muir and later, President Theodore Roosevelt, to persuade Congress to make Yosemite a true national park.