5. Fort Yellowstone
To most nineteenth-century conservationists, the military's arrival at Yellowstone marked a clear turning point in the park's fortunes. John Muir, for instance, rejoiced at seeing Yellowstone “efficiently managed and guarded by small troops of United States cavalry.” “Uncle Sam's soldiers,” the Sierra Club president enthused, are “the most effective forest police.”[1]“I will not say that this Rocky Mountain region is the only part of the country where this lesson of obedience to law is badly needed,” agreed Charles Dudley Warner in Harper's magazine, “but it is one of them.” Like Muir, Warner saw Yellowstone's military administration as a notable improvement on its civilian predecessor: “Since the Park has passed under military control, fires are infrequent, poaching is suppressed, the ‘formations’ are no longer defaced, roads are improved, and the region is saved with its natural beauty for the enjoyment of all the people. … The lawless and the marauders are promptly caught, tried (by a civil officer), fined, and ejected.” The conclusion to be gathered from such evidence was clear: “The intelligent rules of the Interior Department could only be carried out by military discipline.”[2]
Sharing Muir's and Warner's enthusiasm for “military discipline,” many conservationists soon suggested that much of the rest of the federal government's conservation program be delegated to the military. In 1889, the American Forestry Association (AFA) passed a resolution recommending that the army “be employed to protect the public forest from spoliation and destruction.”[3] The following year, Charles Sargent,
Yet at the very moment that the national press was holding up the military at Yellowstone as a model to be emulated nationwide, quite a different perspective was being voiced in the newspapers from the small Montana villages bordering the park. To the correspondents for this local press, the sight of armed soldiers patrolling the park represented not a triumph of conservation but rather the unwarranted imposition of martial law. “Military rule in time of profound peace is distasteful to the American people under any conditions,” charged the Livingston Enterprise, a newspaper whose general assessment of the army's involvement with conservation was perhaps best conveyed by the headline “Military Government and How It Is Employed in Yellowstone Park to Work Hardship on Law-Abiding Citizens of Montana.”[6] Even the Livingston Post, typically the Enterprise's ideological sparring partner, viewed the army's presence at Yellowstone with alarm. Noting “the American sentiment against a military law,” the Post portrayed the various army officers who served as Yellowstone's acting superintendent as authoritarian despots.[7] A favorite target of abuse was Captain George S. Anderson, the park's superintendent from 1891 to 1897. An avid sportsman and a member of the Boone and Crockett Club, Anderson was particularly aggressive in his efforts to rid the park of lawbreakers, for which he was regularly lionized in the pages of sporting journals such as Recreation and Forest and Stream.[8] Locally, however, the captain's endeavors earned him the nickname “the ‘Czar of Wonderland’”—a moniker no doubt designed to underscore the “un-American” character of the army's conservation policies—and the scorn of newspapers such as the Post: “Capt. Anderson's greatest activity has taken the form
The animosity behind such critiques derived in large part from the confrontations between residents and the army that began almost immediately after the military arrived at the park. Under Yellowstone's previous, weak civilian administration, many settlers had treated the park much as they did undeveloped property elsewhere in the American countryside—as land open to timbering, grazing, hunting, and foraging by local community members. Such practices, however, conflicted with the army's attempts to institute the technical oversight and state simplification that conservation demanded. Thus, even though the villages surrounding Yellowstone were founded after the park's creation in 1872, the result was a situation not unlike that in the Adirondacks, where many of the region's inhabitants perceived conservation as interfering with their preexisting rights to the natural world.[10]
As in the Adirondacks, one early point of conflict concerned the park's timber. Because of Yellowstone's remote location, regulations against the cutting of trees had lain dormant until 1883, when the establishment of Gardiner on Yellowstone's northern border propelled the issue to center stage. Alarmed at the removal of lumber by the park's new neighbors, the Department of the Interior tightened its ban on tree cutting. Yellowstone's civilian superintendent, Patrick Conger, placed the town's residents under close surveillance (“near the village of Gardiner I found it necessary to place some men, not only to watch the hunters, but to keep the villagers from stealing wood from the Park”), but with limited success.[11] Although Conger's force of ten assistants did catch a few inhabitants of Gardiner loading up wagons with firewood and building supplies, many residents, when informed that “they would have to stop cutting and hauling wood off of the Park,” responded in a manner similar to that of a “Mr. Wannakee” of Gardiner: “He said he did not care what you [Conger] said, if he wanted a load of wood he would go and get a load, and I could report him if I wanted to. He said that he would not be afraid to stand trial or such words to that effect.”[12]
Viewing their cutting of wood as a justifiable subsistence use of the environment, Gardiner's residents circulated a petition calling on the Department of the Interior to revise its policies. Signed by fifty male
From the perspective of the park's newly arrived military commanders, this practice of letting locals gather wood in Yellowstone was far too openended. It allowed residents too much discretion in deciding what constituted “down wood,” and it gave poachers and other wrongdoers a pretext for wandering, unsupervised, throughout the park. In its place, the army instituted a system of permits, which required the town's residents to get approval in writing before gathering wood from parklands. Besides allowing for the more precise dictation of where and when wood could be gathered, this arrangement enabled Yellowstone's superintendents to exercise a form of social control over Gardiner in which informers and others sympathetic to the park authorities were rewarded with permits while poachers or other lawbreakers could have their woodgathering privileges withheld.
The mass of correspondence that this new policy generated documents Gardiner residents' reliance on park timber for a variety of subsistence uses. Joseph Duret asks that he be allowed to gather two loads of driftwood from along the Gardiner River to be used as firewood; Richard Randall requests permission to cut logs “to be used in building a house and stable at Gardiner”; S. C. Gassert inquires whether the superintendent would “send me a permit to get some wood for fuel out of
In 1898, apparently dissatisfied with its permit system, the military declared all gathering of wood in the park illegal. “Another order of this season,” reported the Livingston Enterprise, “prohibits the townspeople from hauling wood for domestic uses from a burned tract on the slopes of Sepulcher Mountain, which had hitherto been permitted. … citizens of Gardiner are prohibited from getting wood for home consumption from the limits of the Park.”[17] Local residents opposed to the measure continued to sneak wood out of the park (an activity for which Joseph Duret, among others, was arrested and fined in 1908). But access to timber never became as bitterly contested an issue at Yellowstone as it did in the Adirondacks. Nor did there arise in Gardiner organized gangs of timber poachers akin to the “State Troops” or “Grenadiers” that during this same period challenged the authority of conservation officials in New York.[18]
Understanding why the local response to the ban on timber cutting developed so differently in the Adirondacks and in Yellowstone reveals a great deal about the distinctive character of conservation in each region. It was not that the residents of each area differed markedly in outlook—indeed, inhabitants of both places seemingly agreed that there was little illegal about the appropriation of game or wood for subsistence purposes. But whereas conservation in the Adirondacks had involved the placing of state controls over a preexisting grid of human communities, Gardiner had been founded after Yellowstone's creation. (There were, of course, human communities that predated Yellowstone National Park, but these had been Indian communities, whose rights to parklands the federal government had extinguished.) This difference alone created quite different spatial arrangements at the two locales. Gardiner, for instance, was situated on the edge of the park, rather than being surrounded on all sides by state land as were many communities
The final reason why the theft of timber never achieved the prominence in Yellowstone that it did in the Adirondacks had to do with the relative ecologies—and resulting economies—of the two regions. Unlike upstate New York, the area abutting Yellowstone never developed an active timber industry. (In fact, when Gardiner was founded in 1883, the first homes erected in the village were all constructed out of unmilled logs because of the lack of any local sawmill.) While such conditions were in part a reflection of Yellowstone's remoteness, they also had much to do with the composition of the region's forests. The park's dominant tree, the lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta), was only marginally marketable—indeed, elsewhere in the West, foresters, considering the lodgepole something of a pest, devoted considerable energy to eradicating it and encouraging more valuable species of trees to grow in its place. Consequently, there were few outlets for timber poached from Yellowstone and no especially valuable cuts of lumber—like the “fiddle butts” of the Adirondacks—that made particularly tempting targets for thieves.[19]
In contrast, because many of the settlers around Yellowstone established ranches on the grass-rich plains of the Yellowstone Plateau, park officials found themselves faced with an issue that had rarely troubled their counterparts in the Adirondacks: the grazing of livestock within park borders. Prior to Gardiner's founding, park authorities had not even anticipated such an issue arising. As a result, there were no standing regulations about grazing when the town was created. As in imany other rural communities, Gardiner residents often let their animals roam loose. Since the boundary with the park was unfenced, domestic stock from the village soon made its way into Yellowstone, just as wildlife from Yellowstone often ventured out of the park.
Initially, Yellowstone's military superintendents, continuing the policy of their civilian predecessors, tolerated the incursions of livestock into the park. But as the region's populations of antelope, deer, and elk
Nevertheless, many locals continued to graze their animals in the park, leading the army to increase its penalties. In 1900, Colonel Samuel B. M. Young implemented a policy of driving any loose domestic animals found in the park out through the distant Wyoming entrance, escalating Gardiner residents' complaints about being subject to an un-American tradition of martial law. “In days gone by the National Park has been ruled over by refmany an autocrat, many who would make the Czar of Russia ashamed that he ever ascended the throne,” wrote one Gardiner inhabitant; “but of the long list of those who have made life miserable for residents of the upper Yellowstone country none could compare with Col. S. B. M. Young.” Residents expressed particular frustration with the army for allowing a seemingly arbitrary boundary to curtail a well-established right to graze local public land:
For years the cows and horses at Cinnabar and Gardiner had been permitted to graze on the public domain without molestation. Only an imaginary line divided the world from the czar's domain, and, as long usage had made all grass look alike to the animals around Gardiner, it not infrequently happened that some strayed across this imaginary line and clipped a few mouthfuls of bunch grass from Uncle Sam's possession. But this was too much for the colonel. The idea of a plebeian cow or horse eating off the same domain with the petted animals of the Park rankled in his bosom to such an extent that an order was soon issued that any animal caught grazing on the Park side of Gardiner would be driven to Mammoth Hot Springs and from there escorted out of the Park on the Wyoming side. From the point of exit back to Gardiner, outside the confines of the Park, meant a nice jaunt for the unfortunate animals of a couple of hundred miles, and while it no doubt added greatly to their digestive qualities it provoked an epidemic of indigestion among upper Yellowstone residents that made the colonel the victim of more
Despite several other punitive measures, roaming livestock plagued Yellowstone officials well into the twentieth century. In 1903, rather than increasing its penalties further, the army tried a new approach: erecting a wire fence for about four miles along the northern boundary of the park. “This fence has long been needed, and it now affords a means of keeping stock of all kinds off that section of the park.” In 1914, soldiers replaced much of this woven wire fence with an even more imposing barrier: a set of five-foot-high steel spikes designed “to keep cattle and dogs out of the park.”[22]
Such fence building reinforced another project of the army's: the delineation of all of Yellowstone's boundaries. As early as 1878, officials had acknowledged that, much as in the Adirondacks, conservation regulations could be enforced only if the spaces where they applied were clearly bounded: “That the special rules and regulations, necessarily anomalous and conflicting with the roving-hunter habits of the surrounding mountaineers, cannot be effectively enforced without the limits of their operations (the boundaries of the park) being established and plainly marked, is too evident for controversy.” But attempts by the civilian administration to mark the park's borders had stalled, leading Captain Harris, after taking office in 1886, to plead for funds to complete such a project: “The present uncertainty [of the boundaries] is a constant invitation to lawless hunters and others to encroach upon the Park, and adds greatly to the annoyance and labors of those charged with its protection.”[23]
Later superintendents were to echo Harris's pleas, for it was obvious that making any official judgment about the legality of certain practices—such as when hunting constituted poaching, when the cutting of a tree was stealing, or when the building of a home represented squatting—hinged on fixing these activities in space. Complicating this task was the peculiar nature of the park's borders. Since the congressmen who had originally set Yellowstone's perimeters in 1872 had had only the vaguest idea of the topology of the area, the park's rectangular borders did not follow any convenient, “natural” boundaries such as rivers but rather cut across streams, mountain ranges, and other geographical features in a way that often proved disorienting when viewed from the ground.
As in New York's Forest Preserve, mapping and marking boundaries therefore emerged as fundamental to establishing administrative control of the park. The military officials at Yellowstone floated a number of plans designed to accomplish this mission. Some favored the construction of “a suitable fence … inclosing the entire reservation,” while other supervisors were partial to a scheme to cut “a wide swathe … along the entire boundary line wherever timber exists.” Both plans proved unworkably expensive, but between 1900 and 1903 the army did dispatch surveyors from the Corps of Engineers, who mapped the park's borders and erected stone boundary markers every half mile along Yellowstone's perimeter.[24]
During this time, the army also embarked upon a program to simplify the trails within the park. Upon its arrival at Yellowstone, the military had discovered a latticework of paths, some produced by Indian peoples, others “originally made by hunters, trappers, and prospectors,” crisscrossing the park. In place of this dispersed network, the army established a system that funneled travelers through just four entrances, corresponding to Yellowstone's north, east, south, and west sides—an arrangement that allowed soldiers to monitor closely the comings and goings of visitors. At each entrance, “as a precautionary measure against violations of the laws relating to hunting and forest fires,” troops took down the name, address, and intended length of stay of every visitor.[25] Those who journeyed through Yellowstone after the summer tourist season were subject to even more checks. “All persons traveling through the park from October 1 to June 1 should be regarded with suspicion. They will be closely questioned and carefully inspected, and, if necessary, will be watched from station to station.”[26] Even if one possessed the requisite permit for offseason travel, it had to be “presented at each station passed and … carefully scrutinized by the man in charge of the station,” who then had to endorse the permit on the back. Those who lacked the proper permission or endorsement, or who were deemed to have tarried unnecessarily between checkpoints, were liable to be detained by park authorities.[27]
The establishment of official entrances also allowed the army to control what visitors brought into the park. To prevent Yellowstone from becoming “a thoroughfare for sportsmen, hunters, and game slaughterers,” the army forbade the transportation of game (even that killed legally outside the park) across park borders, prompting “much adverse criticism by hunters and guides.”[28] The military also issued
The fact that targmany locals learned how to slip this red tape off their rifles and to hunt in the park as before provides an apt illustration of the ability of the region's residents to elude the army's controls. This resistance manifested itself in etmany ways, most dramatically in the creation of a shadow landscape of surreptitiously erected footbridges and “unfrequented and little known trails,” used by those who wanted to sneak past the official entrances and gather an illegal load of wood or poach some game.[30] A number of poachers even built cabins or dugouts in the park, where they could hide for the night and hastily preserve any illicit game before smuggling it out over Yellowstone's borders. These structures were secreted at regular intervals in the densest forests of the park where they were unlikely to be stumbled upon by passing tourists or Yellowstone officials. Although its traces were, as intended, indistinct, this shadow landscape extended throughout the park, an illicit counterpoint to the officially sanctioned tourist landscape of hotels and campsites that spread across Yellowstone in the late nineteenth century.[31]
If most of the ever-increasing numbers of tourists to Yellowstone were unaware of the network of hidden trails and cabins throughout the park, so, too, were park officials. It was not that the various army officers who served as the park's acting superintendents during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were ignorant of the violations that occurred within Yellowstone's bounds. As Captain Anderson admitted in 1891, “I am satisfied that both hunting and trapping are carried on within the limits of the Park.” But the shadow landscape of poachers and other wrongdoers nonetheless remained difficult for Yellowstone's military managers to penetrate. Contrary to the predictions of conservationists, “many soldiers did not immediately take to their new roles as law enforcers. “The enlisted men of the Army,” explained Colonel Samuel B. M. Young, “are not selected with special reference to the duties to be performed in police patrolling, guarding … and in protecting
All too often, the soldiers guarding Yellowstone resembled the unit that Lieutenant Elmer Lindsley inspected in 1898: “absolutely unfamiliar with the country and their duties as game wardens.” Even under the best of circumstances, the constant transfers involved in military life meant that just as the soldiers at the park had begun to master Yellowstone's rugged geography and the cumbersome cross-country skis used in winter patrolling, their tour of duty at Yellowstone had drawn to a close. “The troops assigned from time to time for guard duty in the park can scarce all become familiar with its topography and trails ere a just regard for the proper maintenance of organization and discipline and division of duties … require their withdrawal,” noted Young. These shifts in personnel did not go unnoticed by local residents, who often timed their lawbreaking so that it occurred when the troops stationed at the park were unseasoned new arrivals. “From “many sources information comes to this office that preparations are in progress by lawless characters for poaching on a large scale during the present season,” wrote the colonel in 1897. “These people are encouraged by the knowledge that all my soldiers are new and untrained in the duties necessary to protect the Park properly.”[33]
The inexperience and indifference of tymany of the soldiers assigned to guard Yellowstone also appear to have made them susceptible to various forms of petty corruption. Army records from 1902 reveal repeated instances of soldiers colluding with local lawbreakers. In February of that year, Colonel John Pitcher, the park's acting superintendent, notified the secretary of the interior that a Sergeant Knapp at the park had been caught trafficking in elk teeth.[34] The following month, Pitcher received a series of letters from Ed Romey, a scout assigned to patrol the park's southern boundary, detailing several cases of corruption among Yellowstone's enlisted men. In one instance, a poacher traded a pistol to two soldiers for the skins from several moose. In another, “a soldier named Flegal … made a deal with two poachers to drive two buffalo out of the park so that poachers could get them.”
Although all the available evidence indicates that the majority of soldiers performed their duties in an honest manner, local newspapers preferred to emphasize the “venal and corrupt” features of the army's management of the park.[37]“The acceptance of bribes,” maintained the Livingston Post, “is ‘so open and notorious that westerners have ceased to express surprise at it.’” The Post even charged one enlisted man with soliciting so pemany illicit payments during his tour of duty that he was able to buy a large ranch near the park upon his discharge.[38] On the most immediate level, such accusations reflect the antagonism that “many residents felt toward the park's military supervisors. But they can also be read as attempts to disprove a key element of the logic of conservation. Rather than delivering the enlightened oversight of natural resources that its advocates had promised, conservation seemed instead to create new opportunities for corruption and mismanagement. As one resident of Gardiner put it, “the military up at the Park was all a fake. … it didn't protect the Park and was no good.”[39]
One reason the soldiers posted to Yellowstone may have been so vulnerable to corruption was the necessarily decentralized nature of law enforcement at the park. To counteract the hidden network of paths and hideouts used by local poachers, the army erected its own far-flung system of trails, cabins, and guard posts, designed, in the words of Frederic Remington, to leave “the track of the cavalry horse-shoe in the most remote parts of the preserve, where the poacher or interloper can see it, and become apprehensive in consequence of the dangers which attend his operations.”[40] At each guard post, the army deployed “three to ten enlisted men,” often leaving the soldiers isolated for weeks at a time with little official oversight. During the 1890s, the military supplemented these posts with a network of log cabins spaced a day's journey from one another. Nicknamed “snowshoe cabins” because they were primarily used for winter patrolling, these structures allowed the army to extend its reach into the remoter, previously unguarded sections of
This adoption of winter patrolling highlights a central component of the army's tenure at Yellowstone: the appropriation of tactics used in Indian warfare for peacetime conservation. The flow of techniques from combat to conservation was no doubt reinforced by the frequent shifts between the roles of Indian fighter and park policeman that pagmany soldiers engaged in during Yellowstone's early years. Several troops serving at the park, for instance, came directly from assignments against “hostile tribes,” while others were “ordered into the field on account of … Indian troubles” during their tours of duty at Yellowstone.[42] But this appropriation of military tactics for use in conservation likely made sense to army officials for other reasons as well. To capture elusive Indian opponents, for example, the army had found winter campaigns and the use of regularly spaced supply depots invaluable. The establishment of “snowshoe cabins” and winter patrols at Yellowstone enabled the military to apply these familiar tactics against another elusive target: poachers. Similarly, having discovered its unfamiliarity with the geography of the Far West to be a hindrance in Indian campaigns, the army began after the Civil War to employ Native Americans and other locals as scouts whenever possible. This policy, first made official under the Army Act of 1866, was also well suited to Yellowstone, where the army found itself lacking “men who are accustomed to the mountains.” Following wartime precedent, the park's military superintendents soon hired scouts from among the local populace—men capable of guiding army patrols and of “measur[ing] wits, experience, and mountain skill with [the] other mountain men who constitute by far the most dangerous class of poachers.”[43]
In certain respects, the peculiar demands of conservation expanded the role of the park's scouts. Unlike wartime scouts, whose duties seldom extended beyond directing army columns to hostile encampments, Yellowstone's scouts often worked undercover in the communities abutting the park, tapping into the rumors and gossip about violations of park rules that circulated among the region's residents yet remained inaccessible to Yellowstone's authorities. When seeking to capture a “gang [of poachers] who had been operating from Idaho” in the 1890s, Captain Anderson turned to secret operatives, “who went among the residents of that country, and brought me back a full report of their names, and their places of operation.”[44] Anderson's successor as acting superintendent, Colonel Samuel B. M. Young, continued this policy,
Not surprisingly, such undercover operations generated considerable unease in eremany of the villages surrounding Yellowstone. One Montana newspaper complained that Yellowstone authorities had “spies at every turn”; another spoke derisively of the park's “mysterious scouts.” As one officer explained to his superiors, “The people are very suspicious of us and it is hard to get information, and harder still to get reliable information.”[46] Added the scout Ed Romey:
Why they [the local inhabitants] all say how is it. We never yous [used] to see a scout or a soldier in this section of country. And now they have soldiers stationed on Bechler [River] and we don't know when we are talking to a scout.[47]
Not that such confusion always lasted for long. Locals were often quick to discern who was on the army's payroll. Much as happened with New York's foresters, f">many of Yellowstone's scouts became “so well known that their presence in the section of country where these men [poachers] live is the sign, either for them to clear out, or to surround themselves with such safeguards that it is impossible to secure evidence against them.”[48]
Like their New York counterparts, Yellowstone's scouts occupied a contested place in the region's social order. To [.many residents, the park's scouts functioned simultaneously as emblems of an intrusive state and as guardians of the local community. Rarely able to reconcile these roles with much success, the scouts often found themselves criticized by fellow residents for failing to fulfill one or another of their responsibilities. “There is a great deal of game killed in and out of the Park[,] and the scouts never made a pretense of capturing the hunters,” complained a correspondent in Gardiner's shortlived newspaper, Wonderland, in 1903. “Instead of being out on the line watching the game, as they are told to do, they loaf around the saloons in Gardiner and Cinnabar until evening; then ride to the post and report … that everything is O.K.” A few locals even charged that the scouts were not as law-abiding as they pretended. As one sarcastic inhabitant of Gardiner put it, he hoped to “trap the beaver and kill the buffalo and get on as a scout, and ride a sorrel horse and wear a big six-shooter with ‘U.S.’ on it.”[49]
Despite such charges of corruption, several of the locals volunteering for the scout position professed an apparently genuine desire to restrain the environmental abuses of fellow community members. “I know all of the pochers that live at Henerys lake and the Madison Bason and I would like to have them stoped if posiable,” wrote one resident, offering himself for the position.[50] Another settler from Jackson Hole presented as his credentials the fact that he had “incurred the displeasure of nearly all my neighbors through my upholding the protection of the game[,] for the majority of them are trappers. … I will do so to a much greater extent if I can receive the appointment of warden.” A subsequent letter clarified the reasoning behind the wouldbe scout's position: “This is one of the best game countries that I know of. … Now with a good game warden here and the Park on the north, we can do much in the way of preserving the game.”[51]
A more detailed portrait of the scouts can be found in the diaries that the army required all scouts to keep during the late 1890s. Generally, while on duty, the scouts followed a well-established routine. Accompanied by a few enlisted men, the scouts would ride—or, if the snows were deep, ski—from point to point in the park, checking on the location and well-being of Yellowstone's wildlife, and looking for the tracks that might indicate the presence of poachers in the park. The diary entry of the scout James Morrison for November 24, 1897, was typical: “Took back trail down Fawn Creek about 4 miles, thence south along Quadrant Mountain to Indian Creek and up it about 4 miles to snowshoe shack, where we camped. Saw about 150 elk;,;: many signs of beaver on this creek. Distance traveled, about 15 miles.” For the most part, scouts focused their patrols along Yellowstone's periphery, where they would search for “fresh trails leading to the park” and listen for the gunshots that indicated that poachers were in the vicinity.[52]
While the scouts searched for poachers, the park's poachers, in turn, searched for the scouts. Noted one resident to Yellowstone authorities, “People who make a business of poching have studied the moovements of your Patrole.” Astute lawbreakers soon learned how to turn many of the scouts' tactics against them. The army's regular system of patrol cabins, for instance, made the location of scouting parties easy to predict. “Experiance has tought them [poachers] that the patrole plan on getting back to their quarters by dark if not earlier, and they ar not far from their station before 8 AM. So they [poachers] do their hunting early morning but more often leight of an evening.”[53] In addition, poachers discovered that firing a shot into the air could often trick
To counteract such tactics, the army soon ordered the scouts to conceal their movements and camping spots. “During the winter period,” mandated the army's regulations of 1907, “patrolling and scouting will be constantly carried on, and when camps are made they will, if possible, be selected so as to be hidden from poachers who may be in the park. Patrols and scouts will avoid the regular trails as far as possible, and will vary their different trips as much as the character of the country will allow.”[55] To achieve such goals, patrols would often split up and approach their destination from several directions or switch their locations under cover of darkness. Explained one scout, “My idea for doing this [breaking camp] at night is to keep the hunting class of people thinking the camps were still out where they were.”[56]
If one part of the scouts' job was making extensive, unobserved reconnaissances of Yellowstone, the other involved remaining in place, watching and waiting. Occasionally, scouts would situate themselves on a high ridge from which they could watch the park's borders, as Scout Whittaker did on a peak overlooking Gardiner on November 11, 1898. From this vantage point, he was able to witness two men using a clever subterfuge to mask their attempts at poaching in the park. They began by deliberately driving a herd of horses into the park: “My opinion,” wrote Whittaker in his diary, “is they are men who intend to kill some antelope and if caught they will say they were looking for horses that will be their excuse.” A few hours later, Whittaker spotted the men herding the horses back out of the park—and, while so doing, trying (unsuccessfully) to drive some of the park's antelope out with them.[57] More commonly, long waits ensued whenever scouts happened upon a poacher's campsite or a freshly killed animal. The scouts would stake out these positions, hoping that the poachers might make a return appearance to reclaim their prey. In the winter of 1898, Sergeant M. J. Wall had several such experiences. At one point he discovered a “poachers' cabin on Buffalo Mountain. … There was a fire burning inside, but no one at home. I looked all around and saw some mink skins and what I thought to be fox skins.” Wall “waited to see if anyone would show up,” but his arrival must have spooked the occupants, for they did not
While the scouts' duties were largely routine (“monotonous, toilsome, and uneventful work,” in Frederic Remington's words), lurking beneath the daily tedium of patrolling and surveillance lay the potential for violent confrontation at any time.[59] An excerpt from the diary of Scout Whittaker provides a vivid illustration of the suddenness with which such incidents could occur. On November 24, 1898, Whittaker, hearing some shooting near the antelope herd that wintered along Yellowstone's northern boundary, went with one of the park's soldiers to investigate: “We struck the trail of two men they went within ten feet of the line then followed along the line toward Reese Creek I sent sgt Wall off to my right and told him to watch for anybody that might come that way while I would follow the trail made by the two men I did not go over ¾ miles when two shots were fired directly at me after the first shot I droped down on my knee and got ready to shoot but I did not see where the first shot came from but I saw the flash of the second one and whoever it was that did the shooting got up and ran down a little draw or ravine by the time I got to where the shot was fired they were all of 300 yds away but I fired two shots at them don't believe I hit either.”[60] The scout Jim McBride related a similar incident from the early 1900s: “Two of us found a fellow near Snake River, whom we suspected of possessing furs. I started up to him and he shot at me. I dropped on the ground and lay behind a rock while he fired seven times. When he had emptied his rifle I knocked him off his horse with the butt of my gun.”[61]
Perhaps the most significant insight to emerge from the scouts' diaries, however, is an awareness of how difficult it was for Yellowstone authorities to catch wrongdoers. The diaries are filled with references to hearing gunshots, finding dead or wounded animals, encountering the campsites and tracks of poachers, and the remains of trees cut by timber thieves. Yet, despite near-constant patrolling, the scouts were able to capture only two wrongdoers during the winter of 1897–98—a rate consistent with present-day studies of poaching, which conclude that authorities typically apprehend only 2 or 3 percent of all game-law violators.[62]
The first of those arrested was the colorfully nicknamed “Horse Thief Scotty” Crawford, whom a patrol led by Scout Whittaker seized on the park's northern border. Some days earlier, Whittaker and his men had spotted Crawford's camp, located some “five hundred yards outside of the north boundary, conveniently close to watch both the mountain sheep, elk, and antelope on Gardiner flat and Mount Everts,” and had kept it under steady surveillance. Only when it seemed as if Horse Thief Scotty, rifle in hand, had crossed over into the park in pursuit of game, did Whittaker and his escort emerge from their hiding place. Crawford quickly dropped his rifle in the snow and tried to cover it up, but it was found by one of the soldiers of the patrol, as were some six hundred pounds of elk meat that Crawford had hidden underneath a blanket in a nearby aspen grove. This seemingly airtight case against Horse Thief Scotty quickly fell apart, however, when it turned out that he had been apprehended several yards outside of the park. The army turned Crawford over to the county sheriff on charges of violating Montana's game laws, but “a jury composed of men more or less engaged in breaking the Montana game laws” soon acquitted Horse Thief Scotty of all charges.[63]
The case of Thomas Miner, the other man Scout Whittaker arrested during the winter of 1897–98, came to an only slightly more satisfactory conclusion. Miner, who inhabited a small cabin near Gardiner, was hunting legally outside of Yellowstone when he spotted an elk. Miner's first shot only wounded his target, and the elk fled several hundred yards south into the park, where Miner finally killed and butchered the animal. For such behavior, Scout Whittaker felt “duty bound to arrest” Miner, who ended up spending thirty days in the guardhouse at Fort Yellowstone.[64] Judging from newspaper coverage of the incident, local sympathy was on the side of Miner, who seemed less like a rapacious poacher than an ordinary citizen tripped up by an unusual set of circumstances. “The offense was slight and should have been condoned,” opined the Livingston Enterprise. “[Miner] has always been regarded as an honest, truthful man.”[65]
In retrospect, then, neither of the apprehensions during the winter of 1897–98 culminated in a clearcut victory for park authorities. Horse Thief Scotty eluded all punishment, thanks to a sympathetic jury, while the arrest of Tom Miner—a man who would seem to fit only the narrowest definition of a poacher—doubtless reinforced local perceptions that Yellowstone's military administrators cared more about legal fine points than about the wellbeing of the rural folk living near the park. Other
Such assessments were more accurate than their authors may have realized. From a presentday perspective, even a number of the military's supposed successes at Fort Yellowstone appear far more limited than most nineteenth-century conservationists recognized. Indian incursions into Yellowstone, for instance, did decrease significantly during the military's years at the park. But closer examination suggests that this was as much the product of changes going on outside Yellowstone as it was of any actions taken by the army. Each passing year, increasing numbers of Euro-Americans settled in the areas abutting the park, claiming the open public lands on which Indians had previously hunted. These newly arrived ranchers and farmers had little tolerance for the annual hunting expeditions of the Bannock, Shoshone, and Crow—especially since native peoples were not bound by the same game laws that non-Indians were theoretically obliged to obey. Observed the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in 1894, “Complaints were [recently] received from Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana that parties of Indians were continually leaving their reservations with passes from their agents to make social and friendly visits to other reservations; that en route they slaughtered game in large quantities merely for the sake of killing and for the hides, particularly in the country adjacent to the Yellowstone National Park. … if such depredations were allowed to continue, it would probably result in a serious conflict between the white settlers and the Indians.”[67] As predicted, “serious conflict” did indeed erupt, most notably in July 1895, when a self-proclaimed posse of twentyseven men from Jackson Hole “arrested” several families of Bannock Indians “for wantonly killing game” to the south of Yellowstone park. On previous occasions, local settlers had confronted Indian hunting parties with little violence. This time, however, when the alarmed Bannocks tried to escape into the woods, posse members opened fire, wounding five and killing one of the fleeing Indians.[68]
Although this unprovoked assault occasioned both a federal investigation and considerable public outcry, it was the settlers who emerged
If in this instance the army exercised less control over events than most conservationists realized, in other cases the military's policies produced outcomes far different than intended. Such was the case for the army's aggressive campaign against forest fires, initiated the very day that troops marched into the park (indeed, the first sight to greet Captain Harris and his soldiers when they arrived at Yellowstone in 1886 was “three large fires raging in the Park,” and Harris's first order as acting superintendent was to direct his forces to extinguish the blazes).[70] Previous civilian superintendents had also made attempts to prevent fires in the park, but the army, by setting up a “ceaseless and numerous system of patrols” and by mobilizing the two to four hundred enlisted men posted to the park, soon established an impressive record of locating and stopping forest fires before they could spread (a record no doubt facilitated by the decrease in fire-setting Indian hunting parties during this period). In 1888, the army limited the fires in the park to one hundred; the following year, this number was down to seventy, with most of them being small, localized blazes. By 1895, the officer in charge of Yellowstone could boast that “in the four seasons during which I have been in the Park but one fire of any magnitude has occurred.”[71]
The full effects of this campaign did not become apparent until decades later. Army officers believed that by preventing forest fires they were defending Yellowstone against destruction, but their policy actually led to dramatic alterations in the park's ecosystem. In the lower elevations,
The army's management of Yellowstone's wildlife had similarly unexpected results. Hoping to increase the park's ungulate population, the military launched periodic campaigns against mountain lions, coyotes, wolves, and other predators.[73] Combined with the army's efforts against Indian hunters and white poachers, these measures reduced?] many of the checks that had long restrained the park's elk population. As early as 1895, Captain Anderson noticed that the elk at Yellowstone were growing so plentiful as to “possibly make them more numerous than the food supply could well support.” By 1909–10, superintendents estimated that the park's elk herd ranged from 30,000 to 40,000 animals. (Later ecologists, expressing some reservations about the army's census techniques, have revised these figures downward, suggesting that the elk population may have climbed from some 5,000 to 6,000 animals in the 1880s to around 10,000 by the early 1900s.)[74] The soaring number of elk heightened the pressure on the park's grazing lands, triggering soil erosion and a decline in the aspens and willows that were among elks' favorite browse. The park's beaver population, which relied on aspens and willows to build their dams, proved unable to compete with the resurgent elk, leading Yellowstone to lose many of these aquatic rodents, and with them, the ecologically rich wetlands that their ponds had once sustained.[75]
This array of undesired outcomes to the army's policies at Yellowstone points to a central danger of conservation's program of state simplification. In theory, concentrating decision making in the hands of a few highly trained officials ensured that natural resources were administered in the most enlightened manner possible. In practice, however, this centralization increased the potential for disaster, especially when those in power misjudged—and over simplified—complex natural systems. While such perils existed everywhere conservation policies were enacted, they loomed especially large at Yellowstone during the years it was under the military's management. With little other training to guide