Founding advocate who created Crater Lake National Park
Appears in 1 documentary
William Gladstone Steel arrived in Oregon as a teenager in the 1870s, and the landscape seized him completely. Where others saw wilderness to be tamed, Steel saw something worth defending — a conviction that would make him one of the most consequential conservation advocates the Pacific Northwest ever produced.
Steel was born in 1854 in Stafford, Ohio, and moved with his family to Portland, Oregon, in 1872. It was there, according to his own telling, that he first read about Crater Lake — the impossibly blue caldera lake formed from the collapse of ancient Mount Mazama roughly 7,700 years ago. Steel read a newspaper account of the lake wrapped around his lunch and became, on the spot, a man with a mission. He would not see Crater Lake in person until 1885, but when he did, the experience only deepened his resolve. The lake sat at 6,178 feet above sea level, ringed by volcanic cliffs dropping nearly 2,000 feet to water of extraordinary clarity, and Steel decided it must be protected from the grazing, logging, and commercial exploitation that had already scarred so much of the American West.
What followed was seventeen years of relentless campaigning. Steel wrote letters, lobbied congressmen, organized expeditions, and cultivated relationships with scientists and government officials. He arranged for the United States Geological Survey to formally study the lake. He gave the lake’s features their names — Wizard Island, Phantom Ship, the Watchman. He understood instinctively what modern advocates have since confirmed: that naming a place is the first step toward owning its story, and owning its story is the first step toward saving it.
Steel’s campaign succeeded on May 22, 1902, when President Theodore Roosevelt signed legislation establishing Crater Lake National Park — the fifth national park in the United States. Steel was 47 years old and had spent the better part of his adult life working toward that single legislative moment. He was appointed to the park’s first civilian oversight commission and later served as park superintendent from 1913 to 1916. He continued advocating for the park until his death in 1934.
His methods anticipated the template that conservation organizations would refine throughout the twentieth century: build scientific credibility, generate public sentiment, and work the machinery of federal government with patience and persistence. Steel operated without the institutional backing that later advocates would enjoy. He often financed his own lobbying trips, sometimes at personal financial cost, and the effort left him in difficult economic circumstances for stretches of his later life.
Steel’s story also carries a tension that runs through much of American conservation history. The land he fought to protect had been home to the Klamath people for thousands of years — the same geological and ecological continuity that made Crater Lake scientifically remarkable made it culturally sacred. The national park model that Steel championed, while preserving landscapes from industrial destruction, also formalized the exclusion of Indigenous peoples from lands they had inhabited and managed for millennia. Crater Lake’s 1902 designation is simultaneously a conservation triumph and a chapter in a longer story of displacement, a pattern that connects directly to episodes like the 1957 flooding of Celilo Falls — another ancient site where federal action erased thousands of years of Native presence in the name of a different kind of progress.
Crater Lake today draws roughly half a million visitors each year. The water remains among the clearest and deepest in the world — 1,943 feet at its maximum depth. The rim road Steel lobbied to have built traces the caldera’s edge, giving travelers a view that has changed little since Steel first stood there in 1885 and decided it was worth a fight.
Wizard Island still carries the name he gave it. The Steel Visitor Center at Crater Lake bears his name. And the park itself — volcanic, silent, impossibly blue — is the most lasting monument to what a single determined person, working without institutional power or personal wealth, can accomplish when they find the right landscape and refuse to let it go.
A foundational account of Crater Lake's geological and human history, essential context for understanding the landscape Steel dedicated his life to protecting.
Ken Burns's companion volume traces the broader national park movement in which Steel's Crater Lake campaign played a pioneering and often overlooked role.
On March 10, 1957, the gates of The Dalles Dam closed on the Columbia River. Within hours the rising water covered Celilo Falls, where Native people had fished from wooden platforms for eleven thousand years, and tribal members stood on the banks weeping as the oldest continuously used fishing site in North America went silent.