In 1929, in Montana’s Glacier National Park, a park ranger caught a poacher. The Ranger escorted the poacher out of the area, only to, in his own words, “…slam his head against a tree. I knocked him out cold and he dropped like a log.” It was not an isolated case.
Pennaz writes:
The US Park Ranger has had an inconsistent history of both militarised practice and appearance over time. US National Parks were de-coupled from the US military when they were transferred to the civilian-run National Park Service (NPS) in 1916. Since their very conception in Park Service strategic planning meetings in 1912 and 1915, US National Park Rangers have been explicitly asked to fill a suite of roles beyond that of enforcer of territorial conservation spaces and national law—as friendly hosts and guides, as rescuers, firefighters, and as medics.
Yet in the early days when they acted more like frontier sheriffs, National Park Service Rangers wielded a formidable arsenal to back up their authority. According to Pennaz, this included shotguns, pistols, rifles, and even Thompson machine guns. These weapons were not always used with caution; Pennaz notes that Rangers would fire at motorists over relatively mundane matters. Rangers were also known to force not just poachers off the land but also native tribes and crop growers.