Yellowstone's Women Rangers in the 1920s: Did They Design Their Own Uniforms?

Frieda B. Nelson in uniform, 1926. Yellowstone National Park photo, YELL 42891.

In the 1920s Yellowstone's superintendent, Horace M. Albright, was one of the few superintendents hiring women as park rangers. Unlike W. B. Lewis at Yosemite, he did not use a superintendent's discretion to exempt them from the National Park Service uniform. In a 1978 oral history interview he recalled being teased by other superintendents, because the Service had never had women doing this kind of work or wearing the uniform.

A National Park Service article argues that these women dressed by the book. It takes on a popular story: that because the Service had no women's uniform, rangers such as Marguerite Lindsley and Frances Eva Pound were left to their own devices and designed their own. R. Bryce Workman's book National Park Service Uniforms: Breeches, Blouses, and Skirts, 1918-1991 says the Service had no provisions, uniform or otherwise, for women, who were therefore left to decide for themselves what to wear, and many authors have speculated along the same lines. The article's authors compared published and unpublished family photographs, among them previously unseen ones from Lindsley's family (she later became Marguerite Lindsley Arnold), and photographs in the Service's archives with the regulations of the day. In their view the apparent contradictions are entirely consistent with the rules.

The temporary rangers' outfit, 1920 to 1922

From 1920 to 1922 temporary rangers did not have to wear the standard uniform. The regulations instead set a "prescribed temporary ranger uniform": riding breeches, puttees (leather wrap-around shin guards), shoes, a gray wool shirt, a dark green tie, a Stetson hat, USNPS collar ornaments and the temporary ranger's sleeve insignia, called a brassard.

No confirmed on-duty photographs exist of the rangers Isabel Bassett Wasson (1920) and Mary A. Rolfe (1921). Family photographs from the early 1920s do show Lindsley in a collared gray shirt, a dark necktie, shoes and a Stetson: no puttees, but otherwise a good match for the prescribed outfit. One photo is tentatively dated 1921 because of smeared ink, and another is clearly marked 1922 on the back.

The belted coat she wears was not a ranger coat, but the regulations before 1923 say nothing about coats for temporary rangers, though Yellowstone's rangers needed them even in summer. It looks like one she wears in family photos from about 1918, before she worked for the Service, so she simply wore a coat she already owned, probably with Albright's approval. She also does not appear to wear the collar ornaments, sleeve insignia or badge that the regulations called for.

From 1923: the standard uniform

From 1923 every temporary ranger had to wear the standard NPS uniform. Photographs show several of the women who served after that date in uniform, so the authors think it reasonable to assume that all of Yellowstone's women rangers wore either the standard uniform or an approved variation of it. Frieda B. Nelson (1925-1926), pictured at the top of this page, wore the standard uniform with the coat buttoned right to left, an adaptation for women, and still needed suspenders to keep her trousers up.

A different coat: Frances Pound

Frances Pound in her uniform, with a coat inspired by Lindsley's, ca. 1926-1929. Yellowstone National Park photo, YELL 42774-03.

Photographs of Frances Eva Pound (1926-1929) show a coat cut differently from the standard one, and some authors have used that to claim she designed her own uniform. The article answers that Nelson and others show Yellowstone's temporary women rangers wearing the standard uniform. It says it is unclear why Pound chose otherwise, but in a 1997 oral history interview she recalled that her coat was inspired by Lindsley's, and the authors can now show it was modeled on the permanent ranger uniform Lindsley would have been wearing when Pound was hired.

Pound also recalled that her mother and Grace Albright, the superintendent's wife, made the pattern for her 1926 coat, which has an A-line shape like Lindsley's, more buttons, and lapels closer to the standard coat's. The authors doubt that Mrs. Albright would have made "knock off" uniform coats without her husband's approval, and in 1997 Pound remembered that NPS Director Stephen T. Mather himself approved the design. If so, the coat was an approved exception to the regulations, and so consistent with them.

Lindsley as a permanent ranger

The well-known "Peg and Rex" photograph of Lindsley with a horse was long dated to about 1925, but the authors say that cannot be right: the outfit does not match her temporary uniform, so the picture cannot be earlier than 1926. Rex was a horse that, according to the Arnold family, belonged to Ben Arnold, her future husband, who began working in the park in June 1927, so a photo of her with Rex should be later than that.

Marguerite Lindsley and Rex the horse, ca. 1927-1931. A Stetson hat, which may have belonged to Ben Arnold, lies on the ground, and the badge is on her coat. NPS History Collection photo.

Many photographs show Lindsley in her uniform coat with a collared shirt and tie, but several show her in uniform and badge with a white shirt open at the neck. All the known images of that kind date to August 18, 1927, and look posed, and at least two magazines profiled her in 1927. The authors offer two explanations: a publicity request (it would not be the first time a magazine asked a woman to remove a necktie to "soften" her look), or a local exception made in mid-1927 to allow the open shirt without a tie, perhaps in answer to recommendations that the Service stop hiring women rangers. She is documented in shirt and tie as of March 1927.

Rangers in full uniform at the 1926 ranger conference; Marguerite Lindsley stands in the middle of the group. Frances Pound provided coverage at the park entrance station, which led to a temporary ranger job that summer. Yellowstone National Park Archives.

Herma Albertson, hired in 1929 as a ranger-naturalist rather than a park ranger, wore the standard uniform until she resigned in 1933. A year after the 1927 photo shoot, Lindsley gave up her permanent job to marry Everett LeRoy "Ben" Arnold. Pound's position ended in 1929 and Irene Wisdom's in 1930, and in 1931 Lindsley Arnold resigned from the Service as well. It would be decades before Yellowstone hired women rangers again.

Was her coat red?

Workman guessed that the "hunting coat" in the "Peg and Rex" photo was probably red. The authors reject the guess: official NPS uniforms have pretty much always been green and gray (they set the 1970s aside), Workman offers no evidence, and the idea may come only from his calling it a hunting coat, which brings English riders in red coats to mind. They point instead to a 1927 Christian Science Monitor profile that speaks of Lindsley's olive-green uniform, and to a Sunset Magazine article from November that year, "She Is a Real Ranger," which describes her tailor-made uniform of forestry-green whipcord and notes the permanent ranger brassard on her sleeve. Albright, who championed the uniform and a consistent public image, would hardly have allowed a red hunting coat, and the other women rangers wore green.

Lindsley is not in uniform here, which the article says does not show how she dressed most of the time at work, as Workman states. NPS History Collection photo.

Albright recalled in 1978 that Lindsley wore the full uniform all the time, jacket included, and boots too, as rangers did then, and he remembered nothing unusual about the clothes of the several women rangers he described. In a September 1962 interview, Herma Albertson Baggley called Lindsley her ideal of a woman in uniform. That contradicts Workman's claim that Lindsley did not often wear her uniform, which the additional photographs do not support either. Like uniformed employees today, the authors write, she wore her NPS uniform regularly and with pride, as a temporary and as a permanent ranger.

What the article concludes

Yellowstone's women are notable for much more than their clothes, the authors say, but the record should be corrected: the early women rangers wore the NPS standard uniform. Suggestions that they wore what they liked or designed their own outside the regulations rest on the mistaken belief that the standard uniform was for men only. That myth, they add, led many to see the "new" women's uniform of 1943 as a step forward for women when it was arguably a step back.

Sources

• National Park Service, Dressing the Part: A Portfolio of Women's History in the NPS, the collection this article belongs to.
• National Park Service, "Girls" in Uniform; rewritten in hubnx's own words.