NATIONAL PARKS ASSOCIATION An independent, non-profit organization with nation-wide membership guarding America's heritage of scenic wilderness Founded 1919 1214 Sixteenth Street, N.W. Washington 6, D.C. Everglades, Florida, Feb. 18, 1948 EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE Austin H. Clark Harold J. Coolidge, Jr. Delos E. Culver Joshua Evans, Jr. Francis M. Goodwin F.S. Lodge Edward A. Preble W.T. Swingle Huston Thompson William P. Wharton Charles G. Woodbury OFFICERS William P. Wharton President Charles G. Woodbury Vice President Harold J. Coolidge, Jr. Secretary Joshua Evans, Jr. Treasurer Devereux Butcher Executive Secretary and Editor Fred M. Packard Field Secretary Dear Governor Caldwell, Have been in the vicinity of Everglades National Park for 3 weeks. Spent 2 days seeing spoonbills and other rare species on Florida Bay. Have been around Cape Sable by boat from Coot Bay to Gorfield Bight. But almost everywhere, people - local people too, - are expressing disappointment because to them there's nothing in the way of scenery. Yesterday I found an answer to this. I went on the logging railroad of the Lee Cypress Co. north of Everglades and saw the big cypress - royal palm country. I have been in almost all the national parks, from Maine to California and Washington. I feel competent to state that this big cypress with its royals towering even above the tallest hardwoods is one of the nation's most thrilling exhibits of nature. It is as unique as the rain forest in Olympic National Park and as important, from the tourist point of view, as the California redwoods. When Dr. Buswell, botanist at the University of Miami, expressed it in this way to me, I was skeptical. Now I know he was right. all of the big cypress slough extending from north of the Tamiami Trail about 2 miles west of the crossing of the Everglades-[Immokalee] road is of the very highest national park calibre, and in the original plan, Publishers of NATIONAL PARKS MAGAZINE