As the main gateway to Grand Teton National Park, the Craig Thomas Visitor and Discovery Center offers tourists their first glimpse of park history. But after the country’s parks and monuments took an ax to signage in response to a March 2025 executive order, one side of an early surveyor is not expected to be reinstalled.
It’s a win for the Trump administration’s efforts to change which parts of history reach the public at the country’s parks and monuments. A recent court ruling enables the removal of more signs, following the first known in Grand Teton.
The sign asking visitors to reckon with both sides of early surveyor Gustavus Cheyney Doane’s legacy was removed during the center’s winter closure. The sign on Doane had acknowledged his role as an important settler of the region who also boasted about his involvement in the 1870 Marias Massacre of 170 Blackfeet Nation women and children.
In June, a federal judge in Massachusetts mandated signs be reinstalled across the park system by July 3. But before that deadline passed, the Trump administration successfully appealed the lower court’s order. As a result, the National Park Service can keep removing signs.
On July 7, park employees confirmed to KHOL that the sign was removed in response to a May 2025 order from the Department of the Interior to fall in line with the executive order. Previously, the park declined to comment on a connection to the Jackson Hole News & Guide and KHOL.
“We were told to remove it as part of the compliance with the Secretary Order 3431,” an informational desk staff member told KHOL before directing further questions about sign removals to the National Park Service press office.
The now-removed sign once sat below a statue of Doane. Its removal suggests it fell into the category of signs that provide “negative” depictions of history, as suggested in the executive order.
Additional signage seen in July 2025 that prompted visitors to ponder the park’s relationship to its past is now removed, including a sign that read: “How do we acknowledge the good and bad of a historic figure?” (Jenna McMurtry / KHOL)
Park spokespeople didn’t respond to requests for comment. In an email, the Interior Department said it aims to tell a “full and accurate story of American history, including subjects that were minimized or omitted under the Biden administration.”
But Tom Rodgers said that’s not what’s happening. A registered Blackfeet Nation member, Rodgers lobbied to remove Doane’s name from a mountain in Yellowstone National Park during the Biden administration. He also goes by his Blackfeet name, One who Rides his Horse East.
“Now we have to fight the battle all over again, because there are no permanent victories,” Rodgers told KHOL after the sign was removed. “There’s only permanent battles for people who seek to tell a different story.”
Alan Spears is also advocating for a fuller depiction of the park’s shapers. He’s the senior director of cultural resources at the National Parks Conservation Association, which filed the lawsuit with other advocacy nonprofits, to force the reinstallation of signs removed across the country’s more than 400 monuments and parks.
The federal judge first ruled in his organization’s favor in June. But by July 2, a U.S. appeals court dismissed the lawsuit, claiming it did not have grounds to prove damage from the Trump administration’s sign removals.
Spears said the ruling “clears the way for the park service at the behest of the administration to either continue removing or finally remove all of those interpretive material and replace them with new signage.”
The ruling means the Trump administration can continue removing signs despite that visitors are largely in favor of keeping them and adding more information to them. In the meantime, advocacy groups have no plans to slow down as they track which signs continue to be removed.
