Dan Snow's History Hit - Yellowstone: The World's First National Park

Episode Date: March 6, 2022

This year is the 150th anniversary of the world's first national park of its kind, Yellowstone. Each year nearly four million people visit the park but many are unaware of how it was founded.Its founding act as a snapshot of key forces in post Civil War America; reconstruction and the Republican parties national project; industrialisation and the coming of the railways, and; and the resistance of Native Americans at risk of losing their homelands to white settlers moving westward.In this episode, we are joined by Megan Kate Nelson, author of Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America, who will unpick the complicated legacy of this iconic landmark.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. It's the 150th anniversary this year of the world's first national park of its kind, Yellowstone National Park. It is an astonishing place of course. Every year four million people go and visit the park but they're unaware probably of the rocky, sorry about that pun, history of its founding. It is of course tied up in the appropriation of indigenous land by the US government. It is part of that tragic story. It is part of the story of the US expanding, conquering, taking over and forging a continental power that stretched from coast to coast. Its history is also wrapped up in the end of civil war,

reconstruction, industrialization, the railways naturally and white settlers moving across America. It's a complicated, all-American story. You're going to recognize some of the big players here. It's also a cast, and you'll be hearing all about it from the very brilliant Megan Kate Nelson. She is the author of Saving Yellowstone, Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America. If you wish to hear quite a few other podcasts I've done about Reconstruction America, you can do so at History Hit TV. It's where all of these podcasts go and live

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There are no aliens on there or programs about how Hitler is still alive in Argentina. It's great. You're going to love it. Proper history, folks. But in the meantime, here is Megan Kate Nelson talking about Yellowstone. Enjoy.

Megan, thank you very much for coming on the show. Well, thank you so much for having me. I have a little secret, which is I have never been. I've never been to Yellowstone National Park. Well, not a lot of people have. I mean, it gets four million visitors a year. I think it's the fourth or the fifth most visited national park in the United States. But one of the reasons that a lot of people don't make it there is that it's still today really hard to get to. It is tucked into a corner of Wyoming, which is kind of right smack in the middle of the Rocky Mountain West. And, you know, you have to take a couple flights, you have to drive a couple hours even from there. So, and that was one of the geological and geographical facts that prevented scientific exploration of this region until 1870. Okay, so you mentioned the potential scientific discovery, the remoteness, the geology.

Is this what has made Yellowstone so important? Yes. Was it one of the last places that settlers of European descent arrived and thought, hey, this is a unique, incredible place, it needs protecting? It is a unique, incredible place. It needs protecting. It is a unique and incredible place. It is the largest geothermal field in the world. And just the sheer number of geysers and boiling mud pots and other kinds of geothermal features is really astounding. I'm not sure where the next largest one is. It may be in Chile, and it's just tiny in comparison. Just to give you a sense of the entirety of Yellowstone Basin, which itself, much of it is made up of a volcanic caldera, which has a lot of molten lava kind of

percolating pretty close to the surface, which could be a little disorienting and a little frightening. But the entire park is about five and a half times the size of Greater London. So it is enormous. And just the sheer size, the sheer quantity of geothermal features was like nothing that anyone had ever seen in the United States or really anywhere in the world. There had been some discoveries in Iceland and in New Zealand, but other than that, nothing like this and nothing so large. Am I right? It's still on top of that super volcano, which one day is going to wipe out all of America. Yes. Hopefully not soon.

I think the scientists don't believe that will happen for another couple hundred million years. So I think if we don't destroy the planet by other means before then, I think we're relatively safe from that particular threat. That's a big if, Megan. That's a big if. I know. Oh, I know. Yeah. So when did American settlers, explorers arrive at this place? And what was their significance before that to the indigenous people that were living there?

Indigenous peoples who were living in the area knew about Yellowstone, had traveled through it, hunted in it for thousands of years before Europeans even came to North America, before any scientists had any dreams of making their reputations there in the 19th century. So they were there using it for their own purposes. And it really wasn't until the Lewis and Clark expedition brought white Americans into that region that there began to be any kind of even rumors of what Yellowstone was and the kinds of wonders that lay within it. And for about 50 years, no one believed these stories. Most of the people who were encountering this space were trappers and guides and mountain men, people who were really inveterate liars and all the time and told all sorts of tall tales about the West.

And so no one believed them. And it was not until the late 1860s, kind of after the American Civil War ended, late 1860s, kind of after the American Civil War ended, that a couple of Montana boosters went exploring in the park in 1869 and then in 1870 and started to publish stories about this place. And at that point, it really came to the attention of the folks in the East that they really needed to explore this region for real. And Ferdinand Hayden, who was a scientist, a geologist, had been thinking about going to Yellowstone for quite some time, really thought it could make his reputation as a scientist explorer, and started to cook up plans for this in the winter of 1870, in the spring of 1871, and launched his expedition to Yellowstone,

winter of 1870 and the spring of 1871 and launched his expedition to Yellowstone, funded by Congress to the tune of $40,000 in the summer of 1871. And why the sudden natural park designation? What's going on in American politics and American culture and society that means that's suddenly something that is dreamt up? What were people keen to protect that means that they decide to slap a federal protection order on certain types of land? Yeah, this is a great question. And their ideas had been percolating about saving green spaces for people purely for enjoyment and recreation, probably for about 30 or 40 years. It began really with rural cemeteries, which people in the early 19th century decided were nice places to hang out and have picnics, and then grew into a city park movement. And so you see a lot of city parks being built and used starting in about the 1840s and 50s in the United States.

similar movement in England and Europe. But I think there was sort of at this time a growing sense because of industrialization and increased urbanization that people really needed green spaces to just go and sit in and walk through in order to kind of cure whatever was ailing them because of these increasingly intensive urbanized, industrialized lives. But there had not ever been a real effort by the federal government to take land for itself, that the federal government would save land for the benefit of the American people. There were two precedents in the United States, one from the 1830s in Arkansas. Congress passed legislation to save some hot springs as a federal reservation. And then in 1864, right in the middle of the American Civil War, which is sort of peculiar in its own, the Republican Congress in the North decided to take public land away and save it and

give it to the state of California to manage. So that was the most direct precedent, the Yosemite Act of 1864. But this was an entirely new idea. When Ferdinand Hayden came back from his Yellowstone explorations in late October of 1871, he actually received a letter from the PR man for the Northern Pacific Railroad, which was interested in laying track north of Yellowstone and bringing tourists out there. And he suggested that Hayden start to lobby to create this national park. And of course, to Hayden, this was a marvelous idea, because that meant that he could do scientific studies of the region for the foreseeable future, that it would save this land, not only for people to kind of resort and

recreate, but for scientists to actually contribute to greater knowledge of the Earth's geohistory. And so he lobbied for that act, along with Spencer Baird, the head of the Smithsonian Institution, and also a group of Montana boosters. And Congress set about debating and then passing the Yellowstone Act, which created the first national park in the world. So this really was the first moment in which the federal government takes land from territories and gives it to the Department of the Interior to manage. And that's what made it a kind of important moment

in the history of conservation in the United States. a kind of important moment in the history of conservation in the United States. You listen to Dan Snow's History Hits. I'm talking about Yellowstone National Park. Happy birthday, Yellowstone. May there be many more. More coming up after this. How can toilet training cows help save the planet? Should we start renting our clothes? And why on earth is beds from the Happy Mondays now keeping bees? I'm Jimmy Doherty, TV presenter, farmer and conservationist. And these are just a few of the questions we'll be answering on my new podcast on Jimmy's Farm from History Hit.

Join me on the farm to hear from the likes of the founder of the Eden Project, Sir Tim Smith, Professor Dieter Helm on how to stop climate change and my old friend Jamie Oliver. Listen to On Jimmy's Farm now, wherever you get your podcasts. we get into the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes,

who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. And what about the people? I mean, the land was contested when they did that. And so presumably, what's the state of the Great Westward migration at this time?

As you mentioned, it's a territory. What was its legal status and was it contested by its indigenous people? Sure, yes. So most of Yellowstone Basin is contained within Wyoming territory, although there are parts of it that are in Idaho and Montana. And the objections of some Democrats, and I should note that at this moment in American history, Democrats and Republicans were not the Democrats and Republicans we know today. Democrats were conservatives. They were very much opposed to the exertion of federal power. They wanted states to control everything, and they didn't want to spend any federal money on any kind of national projects. Republicans, the Republican Party had been created as an

anti-slavery party. Lincoln was its first major figure. And during this period, it was the president, Ulysses S. Grant, who was really leading the charge here. And Republicans really believed in the power of the federal government, that they could exert that on behalf of the people in a variety of different ways. So Democrats objected to this big land taking for two reasons. One, because they believed it was federal overreach, that the federal government shouldn't get to take lands away from states and territories. States and territories should be able to decide what happens to their own public lands. And then their second objection was that this was interfering with white settler rights, which had been affirmed many times over, but most recently in the 1862 Homestead Act, which took up public lands and made them available for sale to farmers and ranchers for very cheap prices, like really minimum prices.

And particularly in the states and territories of the West, white settler rights were sacrosanct. And they believe that taking Yellowstone, this huge, you know, more than at this point, 1,700 square miles of land that could be developable as farming or ranching land, or perhaps mining land, to take that out of production was really offensive to a lot of Democrats. So there was resistance on that front. Then there were multiple indigenous communities living in and around Yellowstone itself, the Crow, Shoshone, and Bannock in particular, and then also the Lakota people who lived further east on the Yellowstone River and had their homelands there. They were resisting the encroachment of both the scientific surveyors, any kind of federal agents, and then also the Northern Pacific Railroad, because to them,

these were all white Americans who were invading their homelands. That brings us to one of the most famous indigenous leaders, right? Sitting Bull. Yes, indeed. So Sitting Bull became a very prominent war and political leader in the Lakota during this period. And really's my contention in the book, in Saving Yellowstone, that the sort of road to Greasygrass starts here. It starts in 1871-72, while Northern Pacific surveyors are trying to make their way from the Yellowstone region east, and then also from the Missouri River west to try and map out this railroad route. And Sitting Bull was having none of that. And he used a variety of tactics to counteract the Northern Pacific Railroad. They surveilled and followed and tracked the surveyors.

They lit backfires to try and force them out. They engaged in diplomacy. They tried to have some talks and some agreements. But their number one goal was always to prevent the railroad from coming through their land because they knew from experience with the Bozeman Trail in the 1860s, which was a road that left the Oregon Trail and went to the Montana Rockies during the gold rush there, that any kind of transportation infrastructure, a road, a railroad, was going to bring white

settlers, and it was going to bring a further invasion of their homelands, and they were going to end up losing land, and that they would be then forced onto reservations by the federal government. And they were exactly right to suspect that that was going to happen. And so they were working constantly during this period to try and prevent that from happening. And Sitting Bull also launched two major battle campaigns against the Northern Pacific Railroad during this period and was victorious, actually managed to stop this project from happening. And it brought a lot of prominence to Sitting Bull within the Lakota community and really led him and galvanized his fight for his homelands and kind of led him on that road

to Little Bighorn. Okay, so that's oddly one of the reasons that Ilosa survived as a national park. Was it that original congressional delegation? Or do you think it was also the difficulty of developing that area because indigenous opposition just made it so difficult? That's a great question. I mean, I think what's interesting about Yellowstone National Park is that it definitely set the standard. It was this incredibly important first moment, this first move to conserve lands as national parks designated as federal spaces. But nothing else like that happened again for 20 years. And part of that was because of Lakota resistance and because of growing native resistance in that region until 1890, which was an important moment for several reasons. First, it was the

famous federal census that declared that the frontier was closed. There was no more frontier. And so then, of course, people started to panic and think, well, if we've got no other space to expand into, then we have to save these parks so we can go. Also, 1890 was the year of the Wounded Knee Massacre, which was kind of the final U.S. Army action against Native peoples that really, most historians will say, ended what we term the Indian Wars in the United States. And of course, Native peoples have continued from that moment on to assert their own sovereignty

rights and assert their own cultural rights to exist. But that was a pretty spectacular moment as well, which really contained Native peoples and asserted again, the federal government's right and white settler rights to lands that were originally, of course, indigenous homelands. One of the arguments that Republicans made and advocates of the National Park made is that Yellowstone Basin was actually undevelopable. You couldn't actually do anything there, right? It was too mountainous. It was too volatile. While Ferdinand Hayden and his scientific team were there, there was a giant earthquake, which is related to the volcanic aspect of that region. But they said, you know, there's no way that any development is going to happen in this region anyway, because it is what they termed useless for any other kind of activity except for tourism and recreation.

So because that zone, it actually was not, Yellowstone Basin was not claimed in any indigenous treaty before this point. The federal government did not technically have to break any treaty in order to save that land. They would have because they didn't care at all about native land rights. And native dispossession is actually a very strong part of the national park movement that really only recently has been acknowledged. Okay, so let's go back to the philosophy of creating national parks now. We think of them now as essential islands of biodiversity, carbon sinks. Of course, back then they wouldn't have thought those things at all. And indeed, most Americans couldn't ever have hoped to visit those places. So what was the point of national parks? Well, one of the ideas that was propelling this movement to save the park was really this higher ideal of saving

a space for greater knowledge. This was the first time that anyone had really articulated that scientific knowledge was important enough to sustain and to support, and Congress was interested in putting money toward that effort. It was also part of a much longer argument that Americans had been making in debates against scientists in England and in France in particular about the relative age and exceptionalism of the North American continent. So much of this was very cultural. Americans didn't have and still do not have the kind of ancient ruins that we see in Europe of the Roman Empire, this kind of idea that the country is very old and has a storied past.

So what Americans started to look toward instead was nature. So we had Niagara Falls. We had the Natural Bridge in Virginia. And once white explorers began to really find all of these amazing spaces in the Rocky Mountain West, these became part of that rhetoric that the United States was nature's nation, that God had endowed the country with all of these amazing natural wonders, including the Great Geyser Basin of Yellowstone, and also the lower falls of Yellowstone and the canyon of the Yellowstone, which these are two kind of separate spaces

within the park on the west and the east. And they really encapsulate everything that was sublime about American nature. And really, Americans did quite a good job of mobilizing that as a national patriotic rhetoric. Well, speaking of patriotism, as a half-Canadian, it makes me a little bit nervous to hear you talking about Niagara Falls being a great American site when you know the view from Canada is better. Well, you know that the US likes to claim all of that stuff for our own. Yes. And Canada's beautiful, you know, Glacier National Park also, I think, crosses that border too, but that is ours. That is ours. So tell me, what's the legacy of this effort? How soon do we wait before the creation of

more of these national parks, a kind of coherent strategy? Yeah, this is what is really interesting. Yellowstone did not have an immediate effect. It was not until 1890 that Congress passed other legislation creating three new national parks in California. And partly that was due to the fact that Republicans had lost control of the House and the Senate and the presidency until that point. And then also, again, as I noted, the 1890 census really made people very worried that we were losing this nature's nation identification, that everything was going to become urbanized and industrialized and there would no longer be any nature that would make America exceptional. So we needed to save those spaces as national parks. And then also the federal government needed to kind of put the nail in the coffin of U.S. Indian policy and really contain Indigenous peoples firmly and completely on reservations in order to then do more of these land takings from all over the nation, not just

the U.S. West. So there was a little bit of a lag. And in fact, until 1883, when the Northern Pacific finally did complete its railroad line from the Great Lakes to the Pacific coast, it was still quite difficult to get to Yellowstone. And it really only had about 500 to 1,000 visitors a year until the 1880s. And then that number really jumped up to more than 5,000, and it kept increasing as you were more and more able to take railroads from the East Coast all the way to Yellowstone and make your way there with relative ease and comfort. But it really took the presidency of Teddy Roosevelt right at the turn of the 20th century to catapult national parks into the American consciousness. I mean, he was a man who had spent some really formative time in the 1880s in Lakota country, what had been Lakota lands before they had been forced onto reservations in the Dakotas. And it really formed his whole, really, identity. He started wearing his buckskins.

He became known as kind of the first cowboy president. And then he really developed a conservation ethic. And he single-handedly created a huge number of reservations and national monuments. Congress passed something called the Antiquities Act, which allowed him to just create these national forests and historic sites and national sites all on his own by executive order. You didn't have to go through Congress anymore. You still have to go through Congress to create a national park. But for these other kinds of spaces, he could just do it on his own. That is great on the one hand, but actually we saw during the presidency of Trump

that you can take that executive power and turn it in the other direction and take that designation away from a lot of national forest reserves and monument sites in order to give it over to developers. So that was not an ultimate solution, but it was really Teddy Roosevelt, our first and most powerful conservation president, to really take that precedent of Yellowstone National Park and do something more impactful with it. I've got to ask what I've got you. There's this viral video that gets thrown into my feed about twice a week by some excited middle-aged man about the interaction of wolves in Yellowstone. And that's had the unintended consequences reduced grazing on the riverbanks, less erosion. Is that all true? Well, there are

a lot of stories that circulate about all of the herds in Yellowstone and animal groups and wolf packs. And what's important to remember about all of that, I think people tend to think that national parks are inherently natural spaces. And they really are not entirely, right? They are managed spaces. And so wolves were almost extinct in Yellowstone Basin and in other parts of the US until scientists and managers began to reintroduce them and to track them and to try and bring them back into the ecosystem to create more balance. And in fact, they do this with a lot of herds, including elk and buffalo or bison also. And in fact, I think just a few weeks ago, they announced that they had to cull bison herd. There are too many of them now.

And this often happens in conservation. You try to rescue a particular animal and so you reintroduce them and you take care of them and you really try to amp up their numbers and then they get too big. And so they're actually in a really kind of ironic turn of events. They're sending 900 bison east to native reservations to be reintroduced into those lands and herded, which is really, really interesting. But yes, from the beginning, Yellowstone's managers have been trying to manage all of these kinds of populations, including the wolves. Such fascinating stuff. Thank you very much for telling us all about it on this big anniversary. Tell us, what's your book called? The book is called Saving Yellowstone,

Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America. I am going to go and visit Yellowstone as soon as I get a chance, definitely. Thanks to you, Megan. I'm really looking forward to it. Please do, and please post your photographs so we can all see your adventures. Hashtag always be posting. hashtag always be posting that's right that's right thank you megan yes thank you so much for having me thanks folks you've met the end of our country, all were gone. And finished. Thanks, folks. We've met at the end of another episode. Congratulations. Well done, you. I hope you're not fast asleep. If you did fancy supporting everything we do at History Hit, we'd love it if you would go and wherever you get these pods, give a little rating, five stars or its equivalent. A review would be great. Thank you very much indeed. That really

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