The Wild West of Yester-Year
Yellowstone National Park
By Rachel Kovaciny
We took our kids to
Yellowstone National Park last summer. My husband and I both
had fond memories of visiting Yellowstone when we were
young, and wanted our kids to experience it for themselves.
The history of our
country’s first National Park begins in the 1700s, with the
mountain men and fur trappers that explored the area. They
told others about the strange natural wonders they found
there, such as the geysers, but others scoffed at them for
telling “tall tales.” The only ones who knew about it, other
than them, were the various American Indian tribes who
visited the area to quarry obsidian, which they used to make
sharp stone objects like knives and arrowheads. A Shoshone
band, the Tukudika, lived in the area year-round, but the
Crow and Sioux regularly visited along with other tribes
from time to time.
John Colter, a
member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, explored the area
in 1807 and 1808, and corroborated the mountain men’s
reports. Colter’s reputation as a reliable explorer led
people to believe what he had to say. But it wasn’t until
1869, after the American Civil War, that people from the
East Coast began traveling out to visit this fabled area
filled with awe-inspiring colorful geysers.
Thanks to the travel
accounts of such visitors, other Americans grew interested
in seeing Yellowstone. The railroad boom made this
long-range tourism possible. The head of the Northern
Pacific Railroad hoped by touting Yellowstone as a tourism
destination, he could gain support for extending his
railroad lines through Montana.
In 1871, a geologist
named Ferdinand V. Hayden took photographer William Henry
Jackson and painter Thomas Moran on an expedition to
Yellowstone. Congress commissioned Hayden to bring back a
report about the area’s suitability for being set aside as a
nature preserve. The photographs and artwork Jackson and
Moran brought back were key in convincing senators that
Yellowstone was a very special place worth spending
government money to care for.
On March 1, 1872, President Ulysses S. Grant signed
the Yellowstone National Park Protection Act, which stated
that this land was “hereby reserved and withdrawn from
settlement, occupancy, or sale under the laws of the United
States, and dedicated and set apart as a public park or
pleasuring ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the
people.” While this was not the first national park in the
world (that honor goes to a Mongolian park set aside in
1783), it was the first in the United States. It established
an important precedent for preserving parts of our land in
their natural state for present and future generations to
enjoy.
Yellowstone National
Park covers two million acres of land in Idaho, Montana, and
Wyoming. Its creation was not popular with the people who
lived in and around the new park—American Indians were now
forbidden to hunt or gather materials within its boundaries,
and the entire Tukudika tribe was removed from the park and
resettled on a new reservation. White settlers in the area
could no longer hunt game in the park, either.
Early visitors to
the new National Park were the hardy sort of adventurers who
would have explored it, anyway. The West was still quite
wild at the time—the Battle of Little Bighorn took place
only 150 miles away from Yellowstone in 1876. A year later,
Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce and his followers sought
refuge in Yellowstone while evading the U. S. military, and
even took some tourists hostage for a brief time.
By the 1880s, the
West was getting pretty well tamed. The Mammoth Hotel opened
inside the park in 1883. Railroads built special spur lines
to the park, and by 1915, motorcars were being used to
explore Yellowstone. The U.S. Army managed and maintained
the park until 1916, when the National Park Service was
created and took over the job. By 1923, over 100,000 people
were visiting the park each year. The number of visitors hit
the one million mark in 1948, then doubled in 1965. In 2023,
over 4.5 million people visited Yellowstone National Park...
and five of them were named Kovaciny and rode in a blue
minivan all the way from Virginia to get there. We spent
more time driving there than we did inside the park, but the
experience and our memories of it were well worth it. ♦