Clare Marie Hodges, Yosemite's First Woman Ranger

Ranger Clare Hodges; note the round ranger badge on her shirt. Yosemite National Park photo.

For a hundred years, Clare Marie Hodges was thought to be the National Park Service's first woman park ranger, for her summer at Yosemite National Park in 1918. She is now known to have been the third. She was still the first woman ranger hired at Yosemite, and the first to be publicized as a ranger during her lifetime.

Before the badge

Hodges was born on December 1, 1890, in Seaside, Santa Cruz County, California, to John Crouch Hodges and Mary Ada Stolder. At San Jose College she especially liked botany.

She knew Yosemite long before she worked there. In 1904, at 14, she and her family rode horseback for four days to reach Yosemite Valley, and she also traveled into Tenaya Canyon and from the valley to Tuolumne Meadows, where she returned five or six times after her first visit in 1913. Several of her poems about the park were published in 1914, and in 1916 she began teaching at the Yosemite Valley School, getting to know its landscapes and trails even better.

Becoming a ranger

In spring 1918 she heard rangers complaining that they could not fill posts left empty by men away fighting in World War I. After two years of teaching in the valley, she went to Superintendent W. B. Lewis, telling him he would probably laugh, but she wanted to be a ranger. Lewis answered that he had already been thinking of hiring a woman ranger and just had not found the right one. She was hired as a temporary ranger on May 22, 1918, with a badge and a salary of $900 a year. As a temporary ranger she did not wear the authorized 1917 uniform; the Park Service tells the story of early ranger uniforms in The Odd 'Man' Out.

She rode horse patrol through remote parts of the park and reported to the chief ranger like the men. One job was carrying the gate receipts from Tuolumne Meadows to park headquarters, an overnight ride. In an interview printed in The Lima News on June 1, 1919, she said, "My life as a ranger is not as wild and woolly as it sounds." Besides patrols, she registered tourists, issued auto permits, assigned campsites, sealed visitors' firearms so they could not be used in the park, wrote reports and answered the chief ranger's telephone. She also said, "Women can do all kinds of things and enter new fields of work if they care to."

Ranger Clare Hodges at Yosemite, about 1918. Yosemite National Park photo.

Later life

Her temporary appointment ended on September 7, 1918, and she married Earl L. Seiverson; their son, Forest Glen, was born in 1920. How that marriage ended is unknown, but in 1925 she married Peter Wolfsen, and she later had a daughter. She worked as a naturalist at a Seventh-day Adventist summer camp at Wawona, teaching botany and horsemanship and laying out nature trails. Wolfsen died in Yosemite Valley on July 29, 1958, after 33 years of marriage.

In 1963, at 72, she married Ernest J. Morris in Tulare, California. Seven years later, on June 20, 1970, she died of cancer in Loma Linda, California. She is buried in Merced Cemetery.

Sources

• National Park Service, Harpers Ferry Center: "Clare Marie Hodges," part of Dressing the Part: A Portfolio of Women's History in the NPS. It draws on the NPS Oral History Collection, Polly Welts Kaufman's histories of women in the national parks, R. Bryce Workman's history of women's NPS uniforms, and newspaper reports of 1918–1919. The source writes "Seven-Day Adventists"; the name is given correctly here.