CHAPTER 4. NATURE AND NATION
1. Frank D. Carpenter, “The Wonders of Geyser Land,” in Adventures in Geyserland, ed. Heister Dean Guie and Lucullus Virgil McWhorter (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1935), 25. For a useful overview of Yellowstone's topography and ecology, see Dennis H. Knight, Mountains and Plains: The Ecology of Wyoming Landscapes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 215–32; and Don G. Despain, Yellowstone Vegetation: Consequences of Environment and History in a Natural Setting (Boulder, Colo.: Roberts Rinehart, 1990). A discussion of the origins of the nickname “Wonderland” can be found in Aubrey L. Haines, The Yellowstone Story: A History of Our First National Park (Niwot, Colo.: University Press of Colorado, 1977), 1:354, n. 55. Lee Whittlesey discusses early touristic images of Yellowstone in “‘Everyone Can Understand a Picture’: Photographers and the Promotion of Early Yellowstone,” Montana 49 (summer 1999): 2–13.
2. Carpenter, “The Wonders of Geyser Land,” 91–98. A useful summary of the Nez Perce “war” can be found in Robert M. Utley, The Indian Frontier of the American West, 1846–1890 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984), 189–193; and Haines, The Yellowstone Story, 1:216–239. While Carpenter and his sisters survived their encounter with the Nez Perce, the Indians killed two tourists in skirmishes in Yellowstone.
3. The American Association for the Advancement of Science, for instance, took an active interest in conditions at the park, petitioning the federal government in 1877 to expand its protective efforts at Yellowstone before “irreparable injury to natural accumulations of the highest value in scientific investigation” occurred. See U.S. Congress, House, Protection of Yellowstone National Park, 45th Cong., 2nd sess., 1877–78, House Ex. Doc. 75 (Serial Set 1809), 5. For other examples of some of the scientific papers produced, see “The National Park in 1889,” Forest and Stream 33 (November 21, 1889): 341. The reference to Yellowstone as a “laboratory” comes from Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 113.
Yellowstone's significance as a symbolic national landscape was such that Congress purchased a rendition of it, The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, from the famed landscape painter Thomas Moran in 1872. The seven-by-twelve-foot canvas hung in a prominent position in the Senate lobby for years afterward. Alfred Runte, National Parks: The American Experience, 2nd ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 39. One cannot help wondering if, as a young country whose very existence the Civil War had called into question, the United States found Yellowstone's evocation of primeval nature a useful way to convey what Benedict Anderson has termed “that image of antiquity so central to the subjective idea of the nation.” See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 1991), 44.
4. The quote on “greatest wonders of Nature” comes from Nathaniel Pitt Langford, The Discovery of Yellowstone Park: Journal of the Washburn Expedition to the Yellowstone and Firehole Rivers in the Year 1870 (1905; reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972), 97. For a useful study of the debate surrounding Yellowstone's creation, see Katherine E. Early, “For the Benefit and Enjoyment of the People”: Cultural Attitudes and the Establishment of Yellowstone National Park (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1984).
5. U.S. Congress, House, Boundaries of Yellowstone National Park, 53rd Cong., 3rd sess., 1894–95, H. Rept. 1763 (Serial Set 3346).
6. For a discussion of Yellowstone's role in shaping federal policy making, see Louis C. Cramton, Early History of Yellowstone National Park and Its Relation to National Park Policies (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1932).
7. Joel Janetski, The Indians of Yellowstone Park (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1987), 57. Although Euro-American settlers called this route the “Bannock Trail,” it was actually used by many Indian groups.
8. Alston Chase, Playing God in Yellowstone: The Destruction of America's First National Park (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986), 98. Obsidian from Yellowstone was a common trade item among local Indians and was traded from group to group for long distances; indeed, it has been found as far away as Ohio. Janetski, Indians of Yellowstone Park, 6, 22; Hiram Chittenden, The Yellowstone National Park: Historical and Descriptive (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke, 1895), 11. On page ten of this work, Chittenden provides a map of some of the more notable early Indian trails.
9. Julian H. Steward, Basin-Plateau Aboriginal Sociopolitical Groups (1938; reprint, Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1970), 192–93, 207–9; and Frederick E. Hoxie, Parading through History: The Making of the Crow Nation in America, 1805–1935 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 47–53. An excellent survey of the uses that Indian peoples made of Yellowstone can be found in Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness, 41–53. See also Robert F. Murphy and Yolanda Murphy, “Northern Shoshone and Bannock,” in Handbook of North American Indians: Great Basin, ed. Warren L. D'Azevedo (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1986), 285–86, 307–10; and Ake Hultkrantz, “The Indians of Yellowstone Park,” Annals of Wyoming 29 (October 1957): 125–49.
10. U.S. Department of the Interior, Annual Report of the Superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, 1880, by Philetus W. Norris (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1881), 605; U.S. Department of the Interior, Annual Report of the Superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, 1879, by Philetus W. Norris (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1880), 11; Langford, Discovery of Yellowstone Park, 92; Gustavus Doane, Yellowstone Expedition of 1870, 41st Cong., 3rd sess., Senate Ex. Doc. 51 (Serial Set 1440), 26.
11. Aubrey Haines, Yellowstone National Park: Its Exploration and Establishment (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1974), 48; Doane, Yellowstone Expedition of 1870, 5; W. H. Jackson, Descriptive Catalogue of Photographs of North American Indians (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1877), 70–71. For accounts of the Bannock and Shoshone as guides and horse thieves, see William A. Jones, Report upon the Reconnaissance of Northwestern Wyoming, including Yellowstone National Park (Washington, D.C.: GPO), 16; and George Francis Brimlow, The Bannock Indian War of 1878 (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1938), 222–23. For more on Hayden, see Mike Foster, Strange Genius: The Life of Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden (Niwot, Colo.: Roberts Rinehart, 1994).
12. Doane, Yellowstone Expedition of 1870, 19, 26; Walter Trumbull, “The Washburn Yellowstone Expedition,” Overland Monthly 6 (May 1871): 436. The quote from Carpenter's sister can be found in Mrs. George Cowan, “Reminiscences of Pioneer Life,” in Adventures in Geyserland, ed. Heister Dean Guie and Lucullus Virgil McWhorter (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1935), 286. Such pronouncements also filtered down into the tourist literature. As one guidebook confidently stated in 1884, “Indians avoided it [Yellowstone] as a place inhabited by evil spirits.” William Hardman, A Trip to America (London: T. Vickers Wood, 1884), 154.
13. Carpenter, “The Wonders of Geyser Land,” 127–28; A. Chase, Playing God in Yellowstone, 109; Willard Parsons, Middle Rockies and Yellowstone (Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall-Hunt, 1978), 48–53; T. Scott Bryan, The Geysers of Yellowstone, rev. ed. (Boulder: Colorado Associated University Press, 1986), 17.
14. Such modes of thought have deep antecedents. William Cronon describes a nearly identical situation more than a century earlier in colonial New England. Cronon, Changes in the Land, 54–57.
15. John J. Craighead, “Yellowstone in Transition,” in The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem: Redefining America's Wilderness Heritage, ed. Robert B. Keiter and Mark S. Boyce (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 27; Dale
16. Doane, Yellowstone Expedition of 1870, 5–6; Philip Sheridan, Expedition through the Big Horn Mountains, Yellowstone Park, Etc. (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1882), 8–9. For accounts of the ecological effects of native use of fire, see Langston, Forest Dreams, Forest Nightmares, 259–60; and Knight, Mountains and Plains, 227. Even in 1898, a visitor to the region could observe that “there is very little commercial timber within this area[,] owing to the fact that it has been in the past persistently burned by the Indians.” Walcott to Secretary of the Interior, September 16, 1898, Records of the Department of the Interior, Patents and Miscellaneous, Entry 168 (Records Relating to Forest Reserves), Box 1, RG 48, National Archives.
17. John Wesley Powell, Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States (1878; reprint, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), 27–28. Unlike most of his contemporaries, Powell later revised his opinion of Indian fire-setting. A similar effort to control forest fire took place at much the same time in colonial India, where, as K. Sivaramakrishnan has noted, “By attempting to banish fire from the landscape, European forestry distinguished modern forest management from the primitive techniques it claimed to supersede.” Sivaramakrishnan, “Politics of Fire and Forest Regeneration,” 145.
18. Mann to Superintendent of Indian Affairs, September 28, 1865. Reprinted in Dale Morgan, “Washakie and the Shoshoni: A Selection of Documents from the Records of the Utah Superintendency of Indian Affairs,” Annals of Wyoming 29 (October 1957): 215.
19. For a discussion of American ideas of wilderness and their impact on Native Americans, see William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground, ed. Cronon, 79. The linkage between the rise of national parks and Indian reservations is explored in detail in Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness, 27–39. The specifics of treaty making in the Yellowstone region are as follows: a series of treaties in 1855, 1866, and 1868 confined the Blackfeet to a reservation in northern Montana. An 1867 executive order by President Andrew Johnson placed some bands of the Bannocks and Shoshones on the Fort Hall reservation in Idaho. The second Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868 located the Crow on a reservation in southern Montana, while the Treaty of Fort Bridger, also in 1868, established the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming for other Bannock and Shoshone bands. An 1875 executive order assigned the remaining Bannocks and Shoshones to the Lemhi Reservation in Idaho. See Dale K. McGinnis and Floyd W. Sharrock, The Crow People (Phoenix: Indian Tribal Series, 1972), 41; Hultkrantz, “Indians of Yellowstone Park,” 145; U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1881 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1881), 263–71.
20. The phrase “landscape of enclaves” comes from Sarah Deutsch's essay, “Landscape of Enclaves: Race Relations in the West, 1865–1990,” in Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America's Western Past, ed. William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 110–31.
21. U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1882 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1882), 499; U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1883 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1883), 313–14. For a description of the shortage of rations on the Crow reservation to the north of the park, see Hoxie, Parading through History, 114–15.
22. U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1895 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1896), 65–66; “Indian Hunting Rights,” Forest and Stream 46 (May 30, 1896): 429.
23. “A Case for Prompt Action,” Forest and Stream 32 (April 11, 1889): 233. The figures for early tourists to Yellowstone are from Haines, Yellowstone Story, 2:478.
24. U.S. Department of the Interior, Annual Report of the Acting Superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, 1889, by Moses Harris (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1889), 15; U.S. Department of the Interior, Annual Report of the Superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, 1886, by David W. Wear (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1886), 7; U.S. Department of the Interior, Annual Report of the Superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, 1877, by Philetus W. Norris (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1878), 837.
25. U.S. Department of the Interior, Annual Report of the Acting Superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, 1889, 15–16; “A Case for Prompt Action,” Forest and Stream, 233–34. The quote about “game-butchery” comes from “Protect the National Park,” Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper 68 (April 27, 1889): 182.
26. U.S. Department of the Interior, Annual Report of the Acting Superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, 1889, 16; see also “A Case for Prompt Action,” Forest and Stream, 234.
27. See the scouts' reports reprinted in U.S. Department of the Interior, Annual Report of the Acting Superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, 1889, 16–17.
28. See, for example, Harris to Muldrow, August 24, 1888, “Letters Sent, March 17, 1887-August 18, 1889,” Bound Volume II, Item 214, Yellowstone National Park Archives. (Hereafter YNPA.)
29. “A Case for Prompt Action,” Forest and Stream, 234.
30. U.S. Department of the Interior, Annual Report of the Superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, 1878, by Philetus W. Norris (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1879), 9.
31. U.S. Department of the Interior, Annual Report of the Superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, 1880, 3. For copies of the treaties signed with the Crow, Shoshone, and Bannock, see U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1880 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1880), 277–78. Despite Norris's urgings that the members of these tribes not enter the Yellowstone park, nothing in these treaties placed such limits on Indian mobility.
32. U.S. Department of the Interior, Annual Report of the Acting Superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, 1889, 13.
33. “A Case for Prompt Action,” Forest and Stream, 235.
34. U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1888 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1888), 244–45; Woodbridge to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, August 24, 1886 (1886: Letter 23,077) Letters Received, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, RG 75, National Archives. (Hereafter LR/BIA.)
35. Wingate's turn of phrase seems particularly poorly chosen, given that several of the best-known inhabitants of the Adirondacks were, in fact, Native Americans. For accounts of the Indian incursions into Yellowstone in 1886–87, see Wear to Muldrow, June 1, 1886 (1886: Letter 14,893) LR/BIA; Harris to Muldrow, August 22, 1887 (1887: Letter 22,870) LR/BIA; Woodbridge to Atkins, September 15, 1886 (1886: Letter 25,659) LR/BIA; and George W. Wingate, Through the Yellowstone Park on Horseback (New York: Orange Judd, 1886), 140. Later Indian hunting expeditions and fire setting are discussed in Cooper to Warren, May 5, 1891 (1891: Letter 17,211) LR/BIA; Hermann to Secretary of the Interior, November 5, 1898 (1898: Letter 50,866) LR/BIA.
36. U.S. Congress, House, Report of the Committee on Expenditures for Indians and Yellowstone Park, 49th Cong., 1st sess., 1885–86, H. Rept. 1076 (Serial Set 2438), LIII, 265.
37. “Our National Parks,” Forest and Stream 37 (December 3, 1891): 385.
38. U.S. Department of the Interior, Annual Report of the Superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, 1886, 7.
39. See William L. Simpson, “The Game Question in Jackson's Hole,” Forest and Stream 51 (December 10, 1898): 468; S. T. Davis, “Game in Jackson's Hole,” Forest and Stream 52 (January 21, 1899): 47; as well as the reference to encountering a “man, once white” in Mary B. Richards, Camping Out in the Yellowstone (Salem, Mass.: Newcomb and Gauss, 1910), 15.
This fear that whites might revert to an Indian-like savagery was not unique to Yellowstone. As early as 1782, Crèvecoeur was complaining of “new made Indians”: Euro-Americans who “have degenerated altogether into the hunting state.” Similarly, Richard Slotkin has demonstrated “the metaphorical equation of Indians and [white] strikers” as “savages” and “murderous reds” that took place in the urban press during the late nineteenth century. J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (1782; reprint, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1957), 49; Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (New York: Atheneum, 1985), 480–84.
40. For a discussion of the “ignorance” of Indians concerning game and fire laws, see “Their Right to Roam,” Forest and Stream 32 (April 18, 1889): 253.
41. “The Indian and the Big Game,” Forest and Stream 41 (August 19, 1893): 137.
42. “Snap Shots,” Forest and Stream 50 (January 22, 1898): 61.
43. U.S. Department of the Interior, Annual Report of the Superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, 1879, 21; U.S. Department of the Interior, Annual Report of the Superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, 1880, 39; W. E. Strong, A Trip to the Yellowstone National Park (Washington, D.C., 1876), 28, 92–93; see also the illustrations in the Daily Graphic, July 11, 1878.
44. W. E. Strong, Trip to the Yellowstone National Park, 92–93.
45. H. Duane Hampton, How the U.S. Cavalry Saved Our National Parks (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971), 33–34; Haines, Yellowstone Story, 1:213–14.
46. W. Scott Smith to Teller, October 15, 1883, in U.S. Congress, Senate, Correspondence on Yellowstone National Park, 48th Cong., 1st sess., Senate Ex. Doc. 47 (Serial Set 2162), 17. Background information on the assistant superintendents can be found in Haines, Yellowstone Story, 1:292–93.
47. Wear to Secretary of the Interior, September 7, 1885, Records of the Department of the Interior, Yellowstone National Park, 1872–1886: Concerning Superintendents, 1872–1886, Roll 4, (M62) RG 48, National Archives.
48. Conger to Secretary of the Interior, November 27, 1883; U.S. Congress, Senate, Correspondence on Yellowstone National Park, 25.
49. U.S. Department of the Interior, Annual Report of the Superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, 1886, 6, 11. See also U.S. Department of the Interior, Annual Report of the Superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, 1882, by P. H. Conger (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1883), 6.
50. Trevanion Hall to C. W. Stewart, August 19, 1885. Records of the Wyoming State Auditor, Correspondence, July 1885–October 1885, Wyoming State Archives. All misspellings reflect the original letter. The passage about squatters in the park comes from a letter written to the secretary of the interior quoted in Richard A. Bartlett, Yellowstone: A Wilderness Besieged (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985), 119. See also U.S. Department of the Interior, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior, 1885 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1885), 71–72; and U.S. Department of the Interior, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior, 1889 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1890), CI–CIII. For more on the ejection of squatters, see Livingston (Mont.) Enterprise, December 13 and December 20, 1884; and Records of the Wyoming State Auditor, Financial, December 1884, Yellowstone National Park Justice of the Peace, Wyoming State Archives.
51. Haines, Yellowstone Story, 1:195; U.S. Congress, House, Report of the Committee on Expenditures for Indians and Yellowstone Park, L; U.S. Congress, House, Inquiry into the Management and Control of the Yellowstone National Park, 52nd Cong., 1st sess., 1891–92, H. Rept. 1956 (Serial Set 3051), 214–16; Bill Whithorn and Doris Whithorn, Photohistory of Gardiner, Jardine, Crevasse (Livingston, Mont.: Park County News, 1972), 1.
52. U.S. Department of the Interior, Annual Report of the Acting Superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, 1887, by Moses Harris (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1887), 11, 25–26.
53. William T. Hornaday, Our Vanishing Wildlife: Its Extermination and Preservation (New York: New York Zoological Society, 1913), 337.
54. Haines, Yellowstone Story, 1:312–13, 322–23.
55. Quoted in Hampton, How the U.S. Cavalry Saved Our National Parks, 41.
56. Ibid., 42, 51; P. Sheridan, Expedition, 9. See also U.S. Congress, Senate, Agreement with Certain Parties for Privileges in Yellowstone National Park, 47th Cong., 2nd sess., 1882–83, S. Rept. 911 (Serial Set 2087), 5.
57. “Can the Nation Defend Its Forests?” Garden and Forest 2 (April 3, 1889): 157. A more extensive account of the use of the army to maintain internal security can be found in Joan M. Jensen, Army Surveillance in America, 1775–1980 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991).
58. Quoted in Hampton, How the U.S. Cavalry Saved Our National Parks, See also U.S. Department of the Interior, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior, 1886 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1886), 75.
59. U.S. Department of the Interior, Annual Report of the Superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, 1889, 10–11.
60. For a discussion of the role played by the army in the emergence of the modern American state, see Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 85–120, 212–47. The army's influence on its ultimate successor, the National Park Service, is obvious in several regards. When the newly formed Park Service reestablished civilian control of Yellowstone in 1918, it adopted much of its uniform from the army dress of the day. Moreover, the first rangers at the park were all soldiers whom the army had specially discharged so that they could then be hired by the Park Service. See Haines, Yellowstone Story, 2:289; and “Uniforms of Forest Officers,” Forestry and Irrigation (August 1908): 446.