Myth and History in the Creation of Yellowstone National Park

Abstract

Myth and History in the Creation of Yellowstone National Park. By Paul Schullery and Lee Whittlesey. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. Pp. xi + 125, acknowledgments, introduction, illustrations, photographs, appendix, notes, index. $22.00 cloth) Everyone who grew up visiting the Yellowstone-Grand Teton National Parks area, as I did, is familiar with the story about the expeditionary party that, in 1870, pitched its tents where the Firehole and Gibbon Rivers come together to form the Madison. (This was an era when the railroad industry was plowing its greed-driven way dirough the American West.) As told to me many times by my parents and around campfires, these men, known historically as the Washburn-Doan Party, saw something special in the place and wanted to make it special for everyone. In their campfire musings, so the story goes, the men of the Washburn-Doan Party were the first to speak aloud the idea that a beautiful spot of terrain ought to be conserved and set aside for the nation. Thus was born the idea of the National Park, heralding-as antidote to the Age of Greed-the dawn of the Age of Conservation. As with other secular creation stories, questions arise about who had this originary thought. The authors of the present volume set themselves the task of finding the "true" story of Yellowstone's creation. Who, really, had been most instrumental in its conception and birth? The Park itself had adopted the Washburn-Doan Party line-though Aubrey L. Haines, Yellowstone's historian of the 1960's and 1970's, does acknowledge that a vision of Yellowstone preserved as a public park could be attested long before the Washburn-Doan Party set foot in the region. "The important questions raised by Haines . . . are whether the Washburn party members actually did talk about the idea of setting Yellowstone aside, and, if so, what effect the conversations had on the subsequent events that led to the creation of the park. What did the participants in the campfire conversation have to say about the night in question?" (5) This largely rhetorical question serves as the starting point for debunking the Campfire Story and for establishing that the federal government played the most significant role in events leading to the formal establishment of Yellowstone, the first of our national parks, in 1872. No rabbits are pulled out of hats-Schullery and Whittlesey use standard documentary sources along with Haines's historical works for their investigation. …