American History Hit - Yellowstone

Episode Date: January 30, 2023

For thousands of years, nomadic Native American peoples crossed the Yellowstone River basin, in awe of its stunning landscape and geothermal wonders. Very few colonial Americans had set sight on its mountains, geysers and hot springs before geologist Ferdinand Hayden and his party arrived in the summer of 1871. Hayden's survey, the first of the region, contributed to Yellowstone becoming the first National Park in America. But while the Yellowstone Act of 1872 protected the area from development by private business, it dispossessed the Native Americans of their ancestral land.Produced by Benjie Guy. Mixed by Anisha Deva. Senior Producer: Charlotte Long.For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. It is July 21st, 1871. Geologist Ferdinand van der Veer Hayden and his survey team have reached the Yellowstone River basin.

They are following the Gardner River, a tributary of the Yellowstone, when Hayden reaches the top of a hill and looks down on an otherworldly site. Steam rises mystically from pools of water embedded on terraced steps of white, brown, and cream-colored limestone rock. A scene Hayden had heard about, described by trappers and the few, colonial travelers to the region in years previous, but barely believed. This huge, impressive geothermal feature will become known as mammoth hot springs. It is by no means the last natural phenomenon that Hayden and his party will encounter, erupting geysers, bubbling mudspots, and hissing steam vents abound in a landscape of stunning vistas, as they compile the first

survey of what will become Yellowstone National Park. While we may think today that the preservation of such a place is a given. Competing interests in a reconstruction era America meant this would not necessarily be so. Greetings all, I'm Don Wildman, and welcome to another episode of American History Hit. Thanks for listening. One of the great glories of American life and culture is our national park system, a vast collection of some of the most breathtakingly beautiful lands known in creation, preserved in perpetuity by the U.S. government for the enjoyment and pleasure of its people. in a public sense, every American possesses some small piece of these parks. And yet so few of us really have any notion of the mammoth task it was to create them,

the epic complications behind the effort. And certainly this is true of the very first one, Yellowstone National Park, enacted by Congress in March 1872, and signed into existence by President Ulysses S. Grant. It was the first time a national government ever took on such a monumental challenge. and then coped with the consequences. It was unprecedented, a federal effort to preserve land when land in this country was a major currency. It was all driven by a rather small circle of men. It was their vision, their campaign to explore, survey, and then protect this region. And it all happened against the backdrop of what was a fractured and fragile nation, just regaining its footing

after a horrible war. Thankfully, we have a guide into this wilderness of a story. Megan Kate Nelson is an acclaimed historian, author of a list of books, including Ruination, great title, and Three-Corned War, a Pulitzer Prize finalist. But today we're discussing saving Yellowstone, exploration, and preservation in Reconstruction America, came out just last year, and I'm thrilled to discuss it. Megan, Kate Nelson, welcome to American History Hit. Thank you so much, Don. Thanks for inviting me.

I'm a shame to admit this, Megan, but I've never visited Yellowstone National Park. I was going to ask you. That was going to be my first. question. I'm from South Jersey. We don't go that far. But in a way, this gives me a sense of purpose here, because like those Americans of your, before the 1870s anyway, I only have images of the place in my mind. I mean, they're video images and I'm saturated. But Yellowstone has always been this kind of mythical place full of crazy geothermal springs and grizzly bears. How much did Americans back then know about this place and how had they found out? Well, America.

Americans really didn't know anything about it until Ferdinand Hayden went in in 1871 and really documented it for the first time. Before that point, there had been a couple explorations. Trappers and traders and scouts had been in Yellowstone and had come out with all these tales, right, of exploding geysers and cliffs made of glass and mudpots and astounding waterfalls. and no one believed them because who would believe them? That seemed insane. Plus, all those scouts and trappers were just liars anyway, right? They like to tell a good story around the campfire. So no one really believed them. And it was really only in 1869 and 1870 when some civilians, some Montana officials, took kind of some short excursions into Yellowstone and started to talk about it and write it up and get some pieces published. That was really the first time Yellowstone really burst into, the American imagination. But it really took this federally funded scientific exploration to reveal everything or almost everything that was there in Yellowstone. To this day, Yellowstone is an isolated area of the country. I mean, certainly geographically. I mean, first we just need to nail this down. The sheer size of this park is almost unimaginable. It's bigger than the states

of Rhode Island and Delaware. I mean, really, it's that huge. And it straddles the continental divide. So one part of the park drains to the Pacific and the other part drains, I guess, to the Mississippi, I suppose, off to the Atlantic. And there are mountain ranges there. Waterfalls, you mentioned, 290 waterfalls, petrified forests, grand canyons created by Yellowstone River, the Black Canyon. I mean, there's multiple canyons. And much of it sits above a volcanic system called the Yellowstone Caldera, this supervolcano, which is a supervolcano, which is a, has erupted cataclysmically several times over the millions of years. And now, you know, manifests itself

in the geysers like old faithful and all the geothermal plumes of steam and so forth. I mean, really, no wonder people had this idea of this being a magical and mystical sort of strange nirvana or something. But was preserving the region ever really on the early minds of Americans? No, not really. And it really wasn't on Hayden's mind either. You know, he was a scientist. His job was to explore, Yellowstone to map it, to figure out what exactly was there, and to report back to the Department of the Interior and let the federal government do with it whatever they wanted. So he wasn't even thinking about preservation when he went in there. You know, there had been in the United States precedent for this idea that Americans really needed nature, especially as cities grew and expanded.

This is where we get the rural cemetery movement, the city park movement in the Antibank. Bellum period, the period before the war. And in general, people started to think more about spending time in natural spaces, you know, sort of like Thoreau and Walden, in order to recuperate, right, in order to regenerate themselves, in order to really enjoy nature, rather than using it or developing it for farms or ranches or mines. So there was an idea kind of out there about it. And there was a precedent from the Civil War, which is a very strange moment. It's always very interesting to me that in 1864, the federal wartime Congress decided, oh, here's something we should do. Let's give Yosemite Valley and the big trees to the state of California to manage.

This is, you know, a civil war action, which is just really interesting to contemplate. So there was precedent for saving land and giving it to governments, but no one had really thought about actually taking land from states or territories and giving it to the federal government, taking it out of development so no one could settle on it and letting people just go there to enjoy it. You immediately run into the inevitable conflict between these lands opening up as resources, you know, a way to make money, basically, the timber forests and everything else that's out there versus this kind of crazy notion of sequestering this land, of taking it out of business and putting it in the realm of the federal government, which itself was a. a very small entity compared to the power of the states in those days. I mean, this was really the beginning of this whole conflict between the federal government and the states, which happens on so many different levels. Yeah, and especially in this moment, which Hayden's survey leaves

in the summer of 1871, you know, right in the middle of reconstruction. So this is the period after the Civil War, which was, you know, a huge cataclysmic event for the United States, resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths. And that battle was fought not only over slavery and its future in the nation, but over, you know, who was going to have the power, the federal government or the states in a lot of different ways. So here again, we have this moment where a lot of conservatives and a lot of states' rights, adherence in the years after the war, are thinking, this is really federal overreach. Letting the federal government take up, which at that point was about 1.2 million acres of land in the West. Yellowstone National Park has now grown. It's about 2.2 million

acres now. But that's a huge amount of land to give to the federal government to take out of development. And, you know, states' rights adherence in both the South and the West just thought that was completely insane. You mentioned Ferdinand Hayden. Let's talk a bit more about him and this whole group of men who basically created these expeditions. It begins as a scientific and a geological survey, right? Yes, indeed. So Hayden is a really interesting guy, and he's one of the major protagonists in the book

because, of course, he leads this major expedition and then lobbies for the Yellowstone Act. He was a child of poverty of divorce. This made him quite unusual in the community of scientists during this time period because most scientists came from elite families. And even earlier, Thomas Jefferson was the sort of prototype of this,

the sort of gentleman scientist. And he was no gentleman, Hayden. He was scrappy. He was ambitious. He was kind of obnoxious. People either loved him or hated him. And he ended up going to Oberlin College where he discovered the sciences and discovered geology and discovered that he had a very unusual talent for picking up fossils, choosing fossils

and gathering them and selling them to scientists. So this was really his entree into that world. and he accompanied several federal surveys, which in the years before the war were led by the U.S. military. And their function was very much like his was in Yellowstone. They wanted to go out to these places, most of the time between the Pacific and the Mississippi River, and figure out what was there and map it and determine elevations and soil types and whether the land could really be used. So he went along on a couple of these. and ultimately after the Civil War was able to lead his own survey for the state of Nebraska.

But it's really interesting to look at these surveyors because they really were kind of independent contractors. And so every year they would lobby Congress for money. And then if they got the money, they would go out, do their explorations and their surveys for a couple months. Then they would come back, write up these 500-page reports, like these really long reports, submit them. and then turn right back around and start lobbying for money again. So they really had to hustle. And, you know, Hayden was in this group with John Wesley Powell and Clarence King, people that Americans really had heard of in that moment and still might know now.

And they were all fighting for supremacy in this field. So Hayden had gotten this idea to go to Yellowstone because he was actually really afraid that these civilians were going to take over and figure out what was there before he could. So he started to lobby for money in the spring of 1871, and Congress gave him $40,000 to go explore this relatively unknown region. The first knowledge of Yellowstone, at least among Euro-Americans, is from the Lewis and Clark expedition, right? One of the members takes off and goes up on his own. Yes, John Colter. Yeah.

And he begins the first reports of this amazing place that exists, this kind of fantastic environment of things. It just must have been catnip to these men, you know, who were curious about the West, also had an imperative need to go out and map it. But it begins this sort of almost generational curiosity in the area that Hayden becomes a part of. But it really gets kick in after the Civil War. Right in your title, though, it surprised me right off the bat. To be thinking about Yellowstone in terms of the Civil War and Reconstruction era is something I never really even considered. Yeah, this was one of. of the driving questions of the book, because when I realized that Hayden had done the survey in 71

and that it led directly to the passage of the Yellowstone Act in 1872, I thought, wait a minute, this is right in the middle of reconstruction. This is a kind of wild moment for the U.S. government, again, to be giving Hayden that much money to go and explore this place. Why would they do that? Why would a federal government that was mostly concerned with trying to bring some sort of order to the South and trying to protect black civil rights on the ground in the South, why would they be interested in the West? And I think it's for a couple of reasons. One was that the federal government was kind of testing the reach of its power in all regions in the U.S. during this period. And then I also think they were looking for something to bring Americans together.

You know, this was in the wake of the Civil War. They wanted people to feel good about something in their midst. And they had a sense, I think, that Yellowstone could be that thing. And certainly Hayden realized it almost immediately when he entered the Yellowstone Basin, that this is a place that was unique in all the world. And it was really nature that made the United States exceptional. Was the idea of a national park really a formed thought in those days? days? No, not really. I mean, there was a kind of sense that people needed places to go, places in nature where they could be undisturbed. There was a sort of growing sense that wilderness was important. But the Yellowstone Act was not a given. It was not inevitable. There were a lot of objections to it, a lot of conservatives who believed that, you know, you should never take land out of development. You should never take it away from white settlers, because that was the fundamental basis of two of America's most cherished myths by this point, right?

The American dream and manifest destiny. So why would you ever do that? And then, of course, the conservatives also were worried about this issue of federal overreach. But Republicans, who at this point, we have to remember that the parties were switched. So the Republicans were the kind of liberals who believed in big government in this moment. They were really invested in the idea that the federal government could make people's lives better, that the federal government could provide for citizens in a variety of ways. And in the South, that meant protecting their civil rights. And in the West, that meant providing wilderness spaces for Americans to recreate themselves. You know, it's like that double meaning of the term recreation. It's recreation, but it's also re-creation.

And people notice this. People actually made this argument in the 1870s that Yellowstone would provide that for Americans. So, Megan, this is an unprecedented moment for the federal government, for Ulysses S. Grant. Tell me about the actual legal act that has passed. So Hayden and several ever-interested parties began to lobby for the Yellowstone Act in December of 1871. And then the House and the Senate took it up in 1872 and argued and debated in January and February. and ultimately passed the Yellowstone Act, but it was not unanimous. And this is important to remember.

It was bipartisan, but not unanimous. 89% of Republicans voted for the Yellowstone Act, and 70% of Democrats voted against it. And the ones who voted no were from all over the country. But for the most part, they were united by these objections that the federal government really had no business taking land out of development. But the Republicans had such a huge majority in the U.S. Congress during Reconstruction that they were able to push it through. So it was almost a demonstration of what the federal government can do for the good of its people. Yes.

A healing moment almost after the destruction of the Civil War. If we think of Reconstruction at all, we think of it as something that only took place in the South. And we think of it as a failed experiment. But what I thought was really interesting about seeing reconstruction from Yellowstone in this moment was that here is a federal government that's really acting upon the highest ideals, right? At the very same moment that they are preserving Yellowstone for the benefit of the people, they're going after the KKK in the South aggressively and prosecuting them in order to protect black civil rights. And the federal government would not do either of those things again for at least 30 years and really into the 20th century. And so it's a remarkable moment. It's a real kind of apex moment, I think. I'll be back with more American history after this short break.

I'm Tristan Hughes, host of the ancients from History Hit, where twice a week, every week, we delve into our ancient past. I'm joined by leading experts, academics, and authors who share incredible stories from our distant history and shine a light on some of antiquity's great questions. Was the Oracle of Delphi really able to see into the future? The Oracle certainly operated, certainly gave many thousands these prophecies, and they were taken seriously in most cases. What can be discovered from lost civilizations? There was a lot of volcanic activity, and in one of these sites called Quicilco,

actually got covered with volcanic flows. And the early archaeologists, they used dynamite, you know, to get at this archaeology. And was King Arthur actually real? Ambrosis is far less well known. It looks as if he has got a significant impact on the creation of the Arthur story itself. You can expect all of this and more from the ancients on history hit wherever you get your podcasts. I hear people screaming in the ether talk about the indigenous people. I mean, here we are two white people.

talking about the goodness of Yellowstone National Park and all of it has done good for America. But these are obviously Native American lands we're talking about. Yes, absolutely. It is an inescapable fact that the creation of national parks rests on indigenous land dispossession. I mean, that's their reality. And there had been almost no discussion in the debates about the Yellowstone Act about indigenous land rights because white congressmen just didn't care. If those lands, happened to be covered in a treaty with any tribal nation, they would have just annulled it. The fact was that it was not.

The entirety of Yellowstone Basin was actually a shared space for multiple indigenous nations, including the Shoshone and the Banach and the Crow, and to some extent, the Lakota. And the fact that they used it all together kind of as common space as a thoroughfare, as a place to hunt, as a place for ritual and ceremony meant that what, tribal nation did not actually claim that space, which meant that it did not come under a treaty. But again, white Americans in this moment did not care. To them, native peoples did not have any land rights. And in fact, in the same session in which the U.S. Congress gave Ferdinand Hayden the funding to go to Yellowstone, they put a writer in an Indian Appropriations Act saying that

they were no longer going to make treaties with Native nations. And this meant that they no longer recognized native sovereignty. And that was a significant moment. It's really a moment that we should be talking about more in American history. Let's talk about it. This is something that Americans today do not realize that there was really a very calculated process involved in disenfranchising Native American tribes of whatever lands they were claiming. You know, the difference is that you had people I imagine. I'm just putting myself back in the minds of someone of that time. Tribal lands, these are were nomadic tribes. These were people who didn't claim land per se as European Americans considered it. That had to be the very specific difference, right? The conflict. Hey, they don't even design their

deeds. They don't have specific legal documents. So we have to come in and teach them how to do this. That was really the push pull there, right? Yeah, I mean, this was the view of white Americans that native people had no land claims, that because they were mobile societies for the most part, especially in this part of the country that we're talking about around the Yellowstone Basin, that that meant that they didn't actually have a sense of territoriality. And that actually was untrue. There were many tribal nations that claimed certain territories. And, you know, the Lakota in this period were very active about defending their lands,

which sat between the Missouri River and the Yellowstone Basin. They were also engaging in pretty constant warfare with their crow neighbors. trying to push them further west so that they could take their lands. And, you know, we don't often think about the conflicts between indigenous polities, which were almost always over territory, and access in this period to buffalo hunting grounds. So Yellowstone becomes a part of that fight in this period and in this region. But that was equally as significant.

Native peoples have their own indigenous enemies in this period and alliances. And then they're also fighting really on all sides, white encroachment on their territories. And this is what really produces what we know of is the Indian Wars in American history is this fight over land. Because indigenous people were not about to just give it up, even though white Americans believe that they should. I'm curious if Abraham Lincoln was aware of the place and thought anything of it. You know, I'm not sure. He definitely knew about Yosemite. and he definitely believed that the West was going to be a part of the future of the nation.

He had always advocated for the Western territories to be free from enslavement. And he did sign the acts that created the Homestead Act, right? And then also the Pacific Railway Act, which created the Transcontinental Railroad. So he was very interested in promoting and encouraging and supporting white settlement of the West. But I don't think that he actually knew by the time of his death what was actually in Yellowstone. He may have heard of it. But again, all of those early rumors, you know, Coulter's reports and the other fur traders and travelers, no one really believed them at all. And no one had ever, you know, been there because it was so hard to get to.

You mentioned the railways. This becomes the locomotive of this story, really. The drive to push a railroad up towards the northern reaches. Yellowstone becomes very useful in that picture, especially to someone named Jay Cook. Yes. Jay Cook was another really interesting figure. He grew up in Ohio, had a head for numbers, became a clerk in an investment bank, and then started his own investment bank, became quite famous and very wealthy during the Civil War, selling Union War bonds to support the war effort. And in the years after the war, he was really kind of searching around for another project that

would give him that sense of patriotism and make him even wealthier. So he decided to take a job raising financing for the Northern Pacific Railroad. And actually, most of his colleagues couldn't believe that he did it. I mean, everyone knew by this point that railroads were terrible investments. Like, they're really hard to finance. But the Northern Pacific was supposed to be the centennial line. It was supposed to be done in 1876 to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the nation. And so this really appealed to cook. But it was really hard for him to raise financing. No one really wanted to buy any bonds for the railroad. And so when he heard that Hayden was going out, he was like, oh, wait, because he really knew the power of publicity and marketing.

He was one of these early geniuses along those lines. And he figured that if Hayden produce some really good knowledge of Yellowstone, images of Yellowstone that he could then use to promote his railroad, which he wanted to go about 50 miles north of Yellowstone, that that would help him raise money for his railroad and then ultimately help him bring tourists along as passengers. Well, this has to be the first time people are thinking in these terms, a tourism of the American West. I mean, this is out there.

There's not even a railroad at the time to be thinking of that, to be selling that investment, And that asset had to be a tough meeting to take. Yes. The tourism industry in the United States took off a little bit in the 1830s with the Erie Canal and with people mostly, you know, traveling to Niagara Falls and to major sites on the East Coast. But transportation was necessary for all of that. And, you know, this is one of the reasons. Yellowstone is, I think, now the fourth most visited national park. They get around four to five million visitors every year just in that four or five months of visitation, which is kind of amazing.

And it's on everyone's bucket list. But many people have not been there because it is so hard to get to. Even for people who live in the West, it is difficult. And so you have to have that transportation infrastructure. And so Jay Cook thought this will be a way for me to advertise the railroad line. and then I can bring passengers along, and that will just help to earn money for the railroad and really embed it in the landscape and in the region. And he has an important ally in a certain president, President Grant.

Yes, indeed. Yes. Cook and Grant had known each other for a little while, and Cook's brother Henry was an advisor to Grant, and so they were pretty tight. Cook was able to lobby the federal government pretty effectively. He had a lot of money. and a lot of relationships. And he also was able to just kind of manipulate events so that he was the one who actually sent Thomas Moran, the landscape painter, to join Hayden, while Hayden was already kind of in the region,

didn't ask his permission, just sent him. And Hayden, you know, accepted Moran and said, you know what, that's fine because he too believed in the power of visual images to convey landscapes. Plus, never a bad thing to have. have a very wealthy investment banker as a benefactor. Sure. He was a big supporter of his campaign and so forth. It's interesting, though, that the images of the American West, it starts with the Hudson School

of Painting. I mean, those painters creating this sort of mythology, these romanticized versions of America, especially in the Hudson Valley. But it was true out there. They were incredible mountains that people had never seen. And, you know, all those painters basically brought that magic back to the East Coast and sold the vision of manifest destiny through imagery is still a dangerous world out there. Even in the 1870s, there's a great conflict going on with the tribes there, with La Cota, particularly, and one Sitting Bull. This is when he makes his name, culminating, of course, in Little Bighorn and that battle of greasy grass. But this was an ongoing conflict that was, how was this being negotiated in the context of creating the railroad and convincing Grant to make an act about this place?

Sitting Bull's life is so interesting. He, of all of the men in the book, he actually was born into the most elite family. His family were going back a long ways. Chiefs have very powerful figures in Lakota society. They were leaders of band called the Hungpapa. And the Lakota peoples at the time were referred to as part of the Sioux, kind of much larger kind of group of indigenous Americans. And Sittingville really emerged in the 1860s as a leader of the Hungpapa and the

the Lakota peoples, really in response to white Americans who are trying to travel through Lakota territory to get to the gold mines in Montana. There was a big gold strike there in 1863, 64. And they were successful in that fight. They pushed the U.S. Army and white civilians kind of out of their territory during that period. And it's really fascinating when you see in the federal records, they're all digitized and you can word search them now. And when you put Sitting Bull's name into that search category, he just starts to proliferate in the records in the 1860s. You just see him coming up again and again again and all kinds of reports in letters from territorial governors, from Indian agents, from the Department of War.

He just becomes a known person to the federal government because he is really asserting his people's sovereignty and asserting their right to their lands. And the central part of Lakota territory is the Yellowstone River Valley. And so, you know, the Yellowstone River is kind of born. It has its headwaters in the mountains, you know, kind of south of Yellowstone. And it comes out to the north and then makes this big arc all the way to the Missouri River. And Lakota peoples claimed that space. And Jay Cook was trying to run his railroad right through it.

And so in 1872, Sitting Bull started to, attack Northern Pacific Railroad surveyors and, and again, succeeded and push them back and really prevented Jay Cook from capitalizing on all of that good Yellowstone publicity. Cook was not able to get the financing. He wasn't able to lay enough track to get federal money to keep the railroad going. And then he committed the worst sin that a banker or person in finance can ever do, which is that he started to loan money from his investment bank to the railroad. And when the American economy started to get a little unstable in 1873,

his investors came calling for that money and he did not have it. And so Jay Cook and Company closed its doors, and this was one of the major bank failures that pushed the country into panic and depression. So I just thought that was a really unexpected outcome of this entire push, you know, Hayden going to Yellowstone and then producing his report and a lot of different kinds of articles and pieces on Yellowstone and all of these visual images coming out, sitting bull resisting any kind of encroachment and also the taking of these lands kind of in his vicinity. And then Jay Cook, you know, desperately trying to build this railroad to take advantage of everything Yellowstone had to offer.

And it all culminates in this great banking failure and national depression. And following this depression, I mean, that really is the trigger for Custer's explorations of the Black Hills, which really is known precious sacred lands of the Lakota people. And they go right in there and find gold and never mind all that, you know, and thus becomes the gold rush of the Dakotas. Following the creation of the park, Americans flocked Yellowstone and all as well. No, not at all. It takes decades before this happens. They try to manage it, but the Army moves in.

All kinds of things have to happen just to sort of control the place. It's really not that, you know, National Park as we know it today at all until the 20th century. No, not at all. I mean, in the first 10 years, there were really only about 500 to 1,000 visitors to Yellowstone on an annual basis. Partly that was because there was no transportation there. It was not easy to get there. And partly it was because in the 1870s, you know, the Lakota were extremely active and blocking any kind of access to Yellowstone from the east, which was one of the easiest ways to get there. So there was really no action in Yellowstone until 1883 when the Northern Pacific Railroad was finally completed.

And then you started to see a little more tourist traffic there. Okay, you've convinced me. I'm going. Please do. I think you would love it. Often people ask me, you know, how do you even go to Yellowstone and enjoy it now that you know all of this kind of history? And really, I think that it increases my enjoyment of Yellowstone and increases my kind of admiration of this place. I went first to Yellowstone in 1982 when I was 10 years old on a family vacation. I grew up in Colorado, so it was a little closer for me than it would be for you. But then I didn't go back again for 40 years until I was researching this book.

And now I've been twice. And it is just remarkable. I mean, it has everything, right? It has mountains. It has waterfalls. It has one of the highest freshwater lakes on the continent in Yellowstone Lake. And then all the charismatic megafauna, you know, the bison, the elk, the wolves, the bears. It really does have everything.

And I think it's important to know that you can go and you can appreciate that while also understanding the complexities of Yellowstone's history. And I think Yellowstone National Park is also doing quite a good job kind of impelled by this 150th anniversary year to integrate more indigenous history into Yellowstone National Park signage and events. And they are doing a better job, I think, now of really understanding and conveying that indigenous peoples have always been. been in Yellowstone, and they continue to have relationships with Yellowstone. And understanding that, I think, enriches our experience there. How does this become the National Park System? I mean, after it's founded, is it an inspiration for a larger network, or is that kind of an organic process?

Not really. This is another kind of interesting thing about Yellowstone is that it was the only National Park in the nation until 1890. And interestingly, 1890 was the moment in which Republicans regained control of all three branches of government. And it was also the moment of the census that declared that the frontier no longer existed in the United States. How did they do that? They defined the frontier state as a situation in which there were fewer than two people per square mile. So if there were more than two people, that meant that the area was no longer a frontier zone. And so by 1890, there were enough people living across the United States that the census determined there was no longer a frontier. And you know, whenever you feel like you're

about to lose something, you start to try and preserve it, right? So this is, you know, kind of a second initial burst of National Park creation in 1890. But it really took Teddy Roosevelt and his presidency, in the first years of the 20th century in order to really bring national parks to the fore and embed them in the national consciousness as something vital and important to the American character. I want to close this by reading the words at the end of your book, because they really say it all, I think, if I may, with your permission. Of course. Of course. In this context, Yellowstone promised to be a place that proved America's greatness by the, virtue of its natural wonders. But its geysers and mud pots revealed the reality of the strange country. The United States is both beautiful and terrible. It is both fragile and powerful.

And that, what lies beneath the surface in this nation, is always threatening to explode. Boy, that really says it all, including the volcanic caldera that is, you know, the supervolcano one day going to blow. Hopefully not in our lifetimes. Hopefully not. Yeah, Megan, thank you very much for joining us today. so much for having me, Don. It's been a pleasure. Thanks for listening to this episode of American History Hit. I hope you enjoyed it. Please don't forget to like, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I'll see you next time.

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