History of the National Park Service reduce poaching and other misuse of the park, the U.S. Army established a fort in the area in 1881 and began park protection, establishing a pattern that would be continued by later park rangers. In 1875, Mackinac National Park was created on a resort island in Lake Huron in Michigan, the second national park. As at Yellowstone, the army garrison at Fort Mackinac were in charge of supervising and improving the park. The fort and the national park were turned over to state control in 1895. U.S. cavalry units took up a position in California-controlled Yosemite Park in 1891 and
History of the Yosemite area John Muir Wilderness were also protected under the act and include regions removed from the park immediately before it was unified with the state grant in 1906. The "Yosemite Firefall", in which the embers from a bonfire were pushed off a cliff near Glacier Point to create a spectacular effect, was ended in 1968 because it was deemed to be inconsistent with park values. The firefall was occasionally performed in the 1870s and became a nightly tradition with the founding of Camp Curry. Broader tensions in American society surfaced in Yosemite when a large number of youths gathered in the