Stephen Mather's Glamping Gear: A 1915 Camping Trip and a Sleeping Bag That Went Missing

"Glamping" entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 2016: camping with the comforts of home — good food, a soft bed. The word is new, but the idea helped create the National Park Service (NPS). A lavish 1915 backcountry trip won the agency crucial allies, and the high-end camping outfit friends later gave its first director, Stephen T. Mather, survives in part in the NPS History Collection — after going missing more than once.

Stephen T. Mather, about the 1920s. NPS History Collection

Mather's task

Stephen T. Mather (1867–1930) was a wealthy, well-connected businessman before he became the first NPS director in 1917. He joined the Sierra Club in 1904, climbed Mount Rainier with it the next year, and became a devoted mountaineer and conservationist; on a 1912 trip through the Kern River Canyon and Sequoia National Park with his wife, daughter and nine friends, he met John Muir on the trail.

On January 21, 1915, Mather was sworn in as an assistant to Interior Secretary Franklin K. Lane. There were 13 national parks and 18 national monuments, but no bureau to run them consistently or defend them. With his 25-year-old assistant Horace M. Albright, Mather had to persuade Congress to fund the parks and create a parks bureau, build that bureau, excite the public, make the parks easier to reach, and win protection for the parks' integrity. In his first 11 months he traveled at least 30,000 miles promoting the cause.

The Mather Mountain Party, 1915

From July 14 to 27, 1915, Mather took 18 men — Interior Department staff, writers and editors, authors, photographers, conservationists, politicians, businessmen and scientists — into California's Sierra Nevada, paying all their expenses.

• Sequoia ranger Frank Ewing and a crew of wranglers handled the horses and pack mules, the fires and most chores.
• Cook Ty Sing and his assistant Eugene served feasts — cantaloupe and grapefruit, eggs, sausage, pancakes with maple syrup, fresh sourdough bread, steak, fried chicken, venison, trout, apple pie — and one night an English plum pudding with brandy sauce.
• Dinner was served on white linen with napkins, silver and china, and the two cooks somehow washed and ironed the linen daily while packing, traveling and cooking.
• Everyone slept on the latest air mattresses and sleeping bags, with bicycle pumps on hand to inflate them.

The Mather Mountain Party dining in the Giant Forest, July 15, 1915; Mather sits at the head of the table, left, and Ty Sing, in an apron, stands behind the middle of the table. NPS History Collection

It worked. The guests became champions of the parks: they backed buying the Giant Forest, enlarging Sequoia, and extending General Grant National Park to take in the Kings Canyon area, and most agreed a park service was needed. The writers, editors and politicians among them kept up the publicity before — and long after — the NPS was created on August 25, 1916. None of the trip's gear is known to survive.

A gift from friends, about 1926

Around 1926, four close friends — Albright, Oliver Mitchell, Francis Farquhar and Charlie Carnahan — gave Mather a deluxe camping outfit. Albright described it in a 1931 memo: "The bag itself is a Woods eiderdown sleeping bag, one of the best made… It is a fine outfit, worth approximately $200" — roughly $3,350 today.

Striped wool blanket from Mather's camping gear. NPS History Collection

Mather's air mattress. NPS History Collection

Mather's pillow. NPS History Collection

The sleeping bag goes missing

Mather suffered a stroke on November 5, 1928, resigned on January 8, 1929, and was succeeded by Albright on January 12. He died on January 22, 1930, aged 62.

Charles Goff Thomson, 1929. Crater Lake National Park photo

Thomson's inventory: a large Woods-Arctic sleeping bag with an air mattress, two wool blankets, a pillow and a collapsible bucket, packed in a heavy canvas bag with leather ends and Mather's name faintly marked — plus, on his tag, a comforter and mosquito netting, and a pair of engineer boots tied outside. He stored it tagged "Not to be used under any circumstances. This bag is property of Director Horace M. Albright."

Thomson's 1931 tag listing the contents of Mather's bag. Yosemite National Park photo

The tag marking the gear as Albright's. Yosemite National Park photo

What survives

Albright left the NPS on August 9, 1933 — apparently without the gear he had fought for. It likely sat in the Yosemite warehouse for years, then turned up at Yellowstone by 1966, when a photo showed only the air mattress, pillow, one blanket and the bucket in Mather's bag. The sleeping bag, the other blanket, the comforter, the netting and the boots were gone.

Did Albright take the sleeping bag? Did Thomson, who stayed at Yosemite four more years and had Mrs. Mather's blessing? Since the gear wasn't museum property, anyone could have taken it — or it may have been used in a park's equipment cache until it wore out. No record has been found.

Around 1968, Yellowstone sent the gear back to Yosemite, which added it to its museum — Thomson's tag still attached. Six years later Yosemite passed the mattress, blanket and pillow to the NPS History Collection; the duffel and bucket remain at Yosemite.

What remained of Mather's camping gear in 1966. Yellowstone National Park photo

Sources

Based on "50 Nifty Finds #12: Glamping Gear," NPS History Collection, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain, drawing on Horace M. Albright's memoirs, which are paraphrased here. Quotations are from the NPS correspondence and period advertising it reproduces. The source's "Odgensburg" is corrected to Ogdensburg, and its occasional "Thompson" to Thomson.