Gerard Baker grew up on a reservation where his dad was a rancher and all he knew was ranching. So Gerard thought he wanted to be a rancher. He didn’t know anything else. Although his house was 30 miles from the nearest national park, he didn’t know anything about it or about any possible paths in parks services. He went to college in Bismarck, N.D., and flunked out. Disappointed, his family told him he wasn’t a warrior and he couldn’t beat a pile of books. He looked at what he was going to do and the parks services seemed something he would be interested in. Gerard began cleaning toilets at a local campground and registering campers. By the time he got through that first summer, he realized that’s the area he wanted to be in for the rest of his life. Gerard began his career in the park services and the bottom rung— cleaning restrooms and picking up trash on the campgrounds. But his perseverance led him to work his way up to superintendent of Mount Rushmore where he also became the first American Indian to be superintendent of the national monument.