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Born in 1876, McCroskey traveled west from Tennessee as a toddler with his parents and nine siblings on an immigrant train. The family stopped in Hollister, California, while McCroskey’s father went ahead by boat from San Francisco to Portland, Oregon, then by river steamer to Almota, Washington, and finally by stage to Colfax. After locating a 640-acre homestead near Steptoe, he sent for the 11 members of his family. When they arrived at the base of Steptoe Butte, they found their father had already begun constructing a crude, one-room cabin with an attached kitchen and a leaky roof.

They spent the first difficult summers on the Palouse busting sod, plowing under bunchgrass, and preparing the fields for crops. The winters were severe and accompanied by deprivation and illness. Virgil worked the farm until he was college age. In 1892, he joined the first preparatory class at the newly created Washington Agricultural College and School of Science, now WSU. He graduated in pharmacy in 1899, and, after personal encouragement from “Dr. Bryan,” as he called the college’s third president, he went on to complete two other degrees, in history and economics, one year later. He was one of the first editors of the Evergreen and “can tell you all about the early history of the college, especially the potato patch and the rotten egging,” recalled the 1899 Chinook yearbook. He went to work as a pharmacist in drugstores in Walla Walla, Waitsburg, and Olympia for the next five years. In 1903, he bought the Elk Drug Store in Colfax, which he operated for another 20 years, a period in which “it wasn’t too hard to get a prescription for alcohol during prohibition,” recalls one Whitman County resident.

That same year, 1903, McCroskey became a charter member of the Washington Outing Club, qualifying by a successful ascent of Mount Rainier, which had only recently been preserved as one of the first national parks. A series of other inspirational outings to Mt. Hood and other Northwest peaks would follow.

In 1938, he embarked on a formative automobile road trip to Tennessee to see his birthplace. On his way home, he drove across the southwestern U.S. and toured Grand Canyon, Zion National Park, Bryce Canyon, Painted Desert, Yosemite, Sequoia National Forest, and Crater Lake. The next year he visited Yellowstone National Park and the Grand Tetons, also by car.

Energized by his visits to America’s new national parks, as well as his world travels—he eventually toured Asia, the South Pacific, and New Zealand—McCroskey felt increasingly called to promote a similar park preservation concept on the Palouse, with hopes of designating the region’s natural wonders as state parks. And unlike today’s conservationists, who cringe at road building, McCroskey placed particular importance on creating access for motorized vehicles to the sites, convinced, as Roosevelt was, that the automobile would revolutionize Americans’ appreciation for nature—simply by getting them there.

Over a 30-year span between the mid 1920s and 1955, McCroskey made a series of shrewd, strategic land deals to patch together parcels of land he was convinced were worthy of perpetual protection.

The large McCroskey family had great influence. Virgil’s father, who was once county sheriff, was credited with drawing thousands of Tennesseans to Whitman County. Virgil’s uncle was a prominent farmer, banker, and state senator and one of WSU’s first regents. One brother became a Superior Court judge, another the mayor of Colfax. Family affairs—weddings, deaths, land deals—made headlines in Spokane.

The family eventually grew so big the joke was that you couldn’t go bird hunting near Steptoe without hitting a McCroskey.

In 1927, Virgil and his brother, George, began lobbying to preserve Steptoe Butte as a historical landmark, a desire shared by the Washington State parks commission, which placed it on its list of proposed parks in 1927. More than a decade later, in 1936, Spokane conservationist Aubrey White traveled to Colfax to pitch McCroskey’s cause to the skeptical Colfax Chamber of Commerce.

“He had a heck of a time,” recalls Lavelle Gardner, an Oakesdale history buff who remembers McCroskey’s battle.

Slowly, McCroskey won over or out-negotiated each and every recalcitrant landowner on the butte. The process spanned nearly 20 years.

Yet McCroskey’s fight was only beginning, for one park was not enough.

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