Preface I can still picture the tattered scrap of paper my National Park Service (NPS) supervisor had thumbtacked to her gray cubicle wall: Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature''s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.1 These inspirational lines from John Muir''s Our National Parks were a favorite among rangers I worked with, if a bit too saccharine for my tastes. My twenty-­something self had chosen the wry prose of Edward Abbey to grace my own gray cubicle wall. I found it refreshing to re-­read his polemic about letting tourists take risks (like getting "lost, sunburnt, stranded, drowned, eaten by bears, [and] buried alive by avalanches") and, more happily, letting park rangers range ,2 while I hammered out press releases, designed employee newsletters, or planned for special events -- from behind my desk. During my thirteen seasons working for the NPS in Grand Teton National Park, I "ranged" whenever I could. As I hiked and climbed all over the Tetons, I felt the peace, freshness, energy, and carefree mood Muir had championed.

I wanted park visitors to feel those things, too, and to appreciate firsthand the mysterious ways that the more-­than-human world acts upon us -- ways that researchers today are beginning to understand much better than when Muir was adventuring in the Yosemite Valley. Romantic though they may be, Muir''s words anticipate one of my goals for this book: to consider how the physical environment makes people feel things, how it shapes the "flows" of peace and many other affects at NPS sites. Memorials Matter is not about big-­ticket destinations like the Tetons or Yosemite National Park, which rely mainly on striking natural beauty and recreational opportunities to draw crowds. This book is about Western memorials where education, rather than recreation, is the main attraction. When it comes to memorials, everyone''s a critic; that is, nearly everyone I spoke with about this project had a favorite memorial I simply must include. Seldom are those favorites in the American West. Civil War battlefields in the South are popular suggestions, as are the 9/11 Memorial, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and others in big East Coast cities. So why the West? For one thing, the region has long been tied to national identity, and in a book about public memory, national identity is very much at stake.

For another, considering the West''s signature environments -- its open spaces, vast deserts, towering mountain ranges, lush coasts, and idyllic islands -- adds a new dimension to the study of public memory. Memorials serve a range of functions. Most are meant to be redemptive in some way: to confront loss, trauma, or violence; to provide healing for those involved; and, sometimes, to promote justice for the victims. Jay Winter describes a memory site as a "moral message" in material form.3 More recently, Erika Doss explains how memorials in the United States have increasingly become places of contestation, "subject to the volatile intangibles of the nation''s multiple publics and their fluctuating interests and feelings."4 Many memorials today are designed to bring previously silenced voices to the fore or to promote cultural pluralism. But do they succeed? And if so, what is the role of the physical environment -- both natural and built -- in shaping our feelings at these "archives of public affect"?5 With these questions in mind, I visited selected sites managed by the NPS, the agency that paid and housed me through thirteen of my best summers and inspired my research in ways I didn''t anticipate at the time. More importantly, it''s an agency with a huge responsibility for narrating the intense history of the U.

S., and so, for managing the relationship between public memory and national identity. I initially wanted to constrain my study to war memorials, but I worried this narrow designation would limit the range of sites I could access. I soon realized, however, that if I thought instead about conflict then the designation wasn''t narrow at all. Nearly every landscape in the West bears witness to, and contains physical traces of, historical conflict. There was no way, in a project like mine, to catalogue all the wars and other forms of violence that mark the region''s history. Confining my data set to Western memorials run by the NPS was a way of keeping the scope manageable, and it worked, although I quickly learned how complicated the category of "memorial" can be. While the NPS uses "park" as a catch-all word for the more than 400 sites it manages, I claim "memorial" for my umbrella term.

The NPS loosely defines a memorial as "commemorative of a historic person or episode."6 "Memorial" also tends to be the colloquial choice for sites of national significance that commemorate trauma, as most of those in my study do.7 In a broad sense, then, the label fits for all the sites in this book: three national historic sites, two national memorials, one national monument, and a national recreation area. But even sites that share an official designation -- for instance, the relatively obscure Coronado National Memorial and the iconic Mount Rushmore National Memorial -- don''t necessarily have much else in common. And in some cases, as with Mount Rushmore, it''s not clear why "memorial" is the right word at all. Although "memorial" and "monument" are often used interchangeably in popular discourse, they mean different things. At some sites in the West, the landscape itself is deemed "monumental" because of its extraordinary size and beauty. More often, monuments refer to built structures on a grand scale (think Washington Monument), which tend to (but don''t always) celebrate dominant national narratives and reinscribe official histories.

8 Memorials, by contrast, can be as simple as a plaque and tend to mark sites of grief or trauma. Memorials recognize a messier past and give expression to American publics that are "diverse and often stratified."9 With increasing attention to identity politics, the trend in American commemorative culture has been toward memorials. Some monuments contain memorials, as is the case with WWII Valor in the Pacific National Monument, which encompasses the USS Arizona Memorial. And some memorials contain monuments: Coronado National Memorial includes several obelisks that function as monuments marking the U.S.-Mexico border. In short, it''s complicated.

I make it a priority to be clear about my own terminology in each chapter. The NPS has a challenging job. The agency was formed and began managing natural and cultural resources in 1916, and attention to the latter has increased substantially since then. Its responsibility for public lands is vast, not only in terms of the types of national sites it manages -- now including wild and scenic rivers, scenic trails, historical parks, parkways, lakeshores, and seashores, among others -- but also in terms of the amount of total land area in the system, which has doubled since 1973.10 The fact that the NPS is not supposed to have a political agenda -- uniformed rangers are prohibited from talking about politics or even so much as recommending local restaurants -- also makes it an interesting case study. Not only do NPS managers have to negotiate a contradictory mission dedicated to both enjoyment and preservation, but NPS employees are also supposed to practice an ideological and political neutrality intended to ensure democratic access for all visitors.11 Still, the NPS wants to engage visitors emotionally as well as intellectually.12 Even if the agency''s neutrality means its staff can''t tell us exactly how we should feel, emotions themselves are never neutral.

The NPS manages more than just natural and cultural resources, then: It also manages affects . One goal of Memorials Matter is to flesh out those feelings. Terry Tempest Williams pursues something similar in her book, The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America''s National Parks , a project that explores the value of parks at the agency''s centennial anniversary. She asks: "What are [park visitors] searching for and what do we find?"13 My own answer to this question is in some ways similar to hers: "perhaps it is not so much what we learn that matters in these moments of awe and wonder, but what we feel in relationship to a world beyond ourselves, even beyond our own species."14 I am less focused on moments of "awe and wonder" than Williams is, though. Some of the landscapes in my project are quite subtle, not awesome or wondrous in the way the nation''s most dramatic parks (and many of its earliest public lands) typically are. I thought I might be able to detect a singular NPS tourist affect, a mood that remains more or less consistent across NPS-­managed sites. For one thing, most tourists are on vacation, so aren''t we predisposed to enjoy ourselves, or at least to bring a certain carefree mood to our travels? What other common affective ground might there be among NPS visitors? Is NPS tourism a genre? Does it have a grammar?15 Are there affective stages -- perhaps a progression from inquisitiveness to horror (or grief, or anger) and contemplation to catharsis -- one is supposed to go through at sites of tragedy, like Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site or the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor?16 What about at others, like Golden Spike National Historic Site, which are mainly celebratory? Could I come up with a grand theory of NPS tourist emotions, something like the stages of grief made famous by psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-­Ross,17 which applies across a range of memory sites?<.