They also had larger visions for the future of their nations, rooted in their beliefs about who should have rights as citizens and who should control the undulating prairies, jagged mountain peaks, and fertile valleys of the West.
I tell you what: Yellowstone is huge. It's bigger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined, and you can feel it if you try to drive the entirety of the "double loop" that makes up the park roads. It seems incredible, as you journey through it, that such a place was preserved forever by presidential proclamation, an absolutely colossal land set aside for public marveling and enjoyment, set aside, really, just to set it aside. But, of course, it wasn't an inevitability; the preservation of Yellowstone as the world's first national park under Ulysses S. Grant was the end result of decades of exploration, persuasion, and advocacy--and also, in the case of Indigenous people, dispossession. Megan Kate Nelson's Saving Yellowstone tells the story of the park's preservation through the eyes of three men: explorer Ferdinand Hayden, railroad tycoon Jay Cooke, and Lakota leader Sitting Bull.
It's Hayden who is the book's focus by far, an ambitious naturalist whose aims in exploring the Yellowstone valley were as much about his own stature as the advancement of science. When Hayden and his team set out for Yellowstone, it was nearly unknown to white Americans. Just two years before, the Langford expedition had confirmed the "tall tales" that western trappers had been telling about the Yellowstone for years: towering hot geysers, brilliantly colored pools, and land that smoked. (It had also brought national attention to the area when one of its members got lost for a month before being miraculously saved.) But it was Hayden's expedition, as Nelson tells it, that convinced the public, and President Grant, to set the "wonderland" aside, not least because Hayden cannily brought along a photographer, William Henry Jackson, and a painter, Thomas Moran, both of whose images brought the remote landscape into a national consciousness.
Nelson contrasts Hayden and his expedition with Jay Cooke, a railroad tycoon who nearly went bankrupt trying to build a railroad to the Yellowstone area that would open it up to general tourism. It was Cooke's railroad that brought the ire of Sitting Bull, who rightly saw the encroachment of the trains as an imposition on the land that had been protected by treaty, and who periodically attacked soldiers and survey teams. "That the creation of America's national parks required Native land dispossession is a hard truth," Nelson writes, "one that does not often appear in popular accounts of this movement." A great deal of what Nelson writes about was already familiar to me from watching Ken Burns' National Parks: America's Best Idea, but I did find that Nelson's realist cynicism about the violent requirements of the creation of Yellowstone was an effective balance to the Burns' idealism, even as he takes care to mention the indigenous owners of the parks' land.
It was the inclusion of Sitting Bull and the Lakota perspective that drew me to Nelson's book, though in the end neither the Lakota chief nor the railroad tycoon is really at the heart of the story in the way that Hayden is. (And though I suppose it's outside of the book's scope, I thought it was interesting that the 1877 flight of the Nez Perce through the Yellowstone, in which several white tourists were killed in retaliation for U.S. Army ambushes, was omitted entirely.) I also thought that Nelson's attempts to connect the preservation of Yellowstone to larger themes about Reconstruction in America fell a little flat. Toward the end of the book she notes that Grant and his allies would have seen no contradiction between preserving the rights of Black Americans and dispossessing the Lakota, seeing them both as part of a larger project of civilizing the country--but this was a theme I thought might have been developed more.
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