YELLOWSTONE PRIMEVAL
Can the excitement felt by the park’s pioneer tourists—adventurers who arrived in the 1870s—still be experienced today?
© TONY PERROTTET
For aficionados of Americana, the most illicit pleasure in Yellowstone National Park these days is to climb to the highest gable of the Old Faithful Inn, the cathedral-like log hotel in the Upper Geyser Basin that has become a national icon since it opened in 1904. Every dawn and every dusk, two members of the public are permitted to make the trip, in the company of a staff member who raises and lowers the flags—and it’s a privilege that some folks take very seriously. When I completed the ritual one evening last August, my companion guest was a portly ‘historical re-enactor’ from Pennsylvania, who was dressed for the occasion like a frontier scout, in a full-length canvas coat, neck-bandanna, leather boots and felt hat. He also happened to be carrying an antique bugle, which I’d heard him practicing in the Men’s Room earlier, and he now intended to blow a military salute.
“It’s a cult thing,” confided the duty officer Drew, a former college football player from New York, as he furtively unlocked the precious stairway; it has been off-limits to the public since 1959, when an earthquake caused structural damage to the Inn. “We get three million visitors a year to the park, and only four people a day get to come up here. It’s kind of exclusive.”
Exclusive it may be, but the climb is not for those leery of heights. The stairs were more a series of rickety rungs suspended in mid-air, and they swayed underfoot like trapeze ropes. I peered cautiously down: the foyer of America’s most beloved park hotel, which is celebrating its centennial this year, was as busy as an airport terminal. Throngs of excited new arrivals were staring up astonished at the four-level atrium—a Tolkein-esque thatch-work of gnarled and knotted tree trunks evoking the sensation of being inside the primeval Western forest. (The architect Robert Reamer wanted the Inn to look as if it actually grew on the spot. “I built it in keeping with the place where it stands,” he said. “To try to improve upon it would be an impertinence.” The design is indeed a defiant contrast to the other Queen Anne style hotels built in the park at the time). We paused to step into the ‘Crow’s Nest’—a precarious tree-house for adults, where in the early 1900s an elegant musical ensemble would gather after dinner, to serenade the guests dancing below in formal dress—before stepping outside to the rooftop platform.
It was an exhilarating moment: Slapped by the chill dusk air, I took in a bird’s eye view of the Firehole River. Steam was hissing from fissures and vents in the pale earth, mud pots were burping, pools of pale water gleamed like glass beads. To the east, hundreds of visitors, small as ants, were seated on benches in an arc around Old Faithful. As Drew lowered and folded the flags—the banners of Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and the United States—the Pennsylvanian solemnly took his bugle and played the reveille. As if on cue, with this mournful sound drifting across the basin, the world’s most famous geyser began to churn, to the gasps of onlookers. The scene was just as enthralling as when Cornelius Hedges, a member of the first scientific party to report on Old Faithful in September, 1870, had beheld it: “Judge, then, of our great astonishment on entering this basin, to see at no great distance before us an immense body of sparkling water, projected suddenly and with terrific force into the air to the height of over one hundred feet. We had found a real geyser.” They threw up their hats and shouted for sheer joy at the sight.
According to an engaging, if apocryphal, legend, Hedges proposed to his fellow expedition members while sitting around a crackling campfire that this remote volcanic plateau should be saved from development and turned into the world’s first national park. The reality of the process was less romantic, involving lobbying from railway interests and political wrangling, but on 1st March, 1872, Congress did pass the epochal bill. It declared that a staggering two million acres in northwest Wyoming would be “set apart as a Pleasure Park or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.”
Today, observing the Geyser Field from my Olympian aerie, I wasn’t sure which was more fascinating in Yellowstone—the spectacle of Mother Nature, or the man-made paraphernalia of the tourist industry that has sprung up to observe Her wonders. It’s safe to say that the way we utilize this “pleasuring ground” at the beginning of the 21st century would astound the men who protected it 132 years ago.
Yellowstone is now virtually a country to itself, with its own weekly newspaper, a vast staff, a $27 million annual budget, army-sized campgrounds and visitor complexes that teem like miniature cities. (Even the original 1904 log-wood Old Faithful Inn, whose rooms have raw pinewood walls and claw-foot cast-iron baths, is supported by two motel-style wings plus a separate Lodge). Its attractions are surrounded by boardwalks and interpretive trails, and linked by a figure eight shaped highway—the Grand Loop, around which summer traffic is famously slow, since any passing buffalo, bear or moose provokes a jam. In the last decade, the reintroduction of wolves in the Lamar Valley has created a new sightseeing rite: At sunrise every day, hundreds gather with high-powered binoculars along the roads, often under the directions of a druid-like ranger known as “Rick the Wolf Man,” who waves a radar tracking system like a magic wand.
It’s a dizzying pageant—even, at times, a little overwhelming. All that busy, communal worship of nature can leave you yearning for something more… solitary.
My plan on this visit was to recapture the sensation of visiting Yellowstone in the 1870s, when the number of tourists coming to the park was three hundred per year rather than three million. This is not as hopelessly nostalgic as it sounds, since much of Yellowstone truly is still wild and empty. Of the hordes of who make the pilgrimage here today, some 99% do not leave the main trails. Of the park’s two million acres, only 2% are actually developed. Ipso facto, anyone who wants to be as solitary as the campers of the Gilded Age—before roads, before hotels, long before Old Faithful Inn was even conceived—has only to venture into the “backcountry.” In fact, with the reintroduction of wolves and a healthy bear population, the remoter corners of the park may be closer to their original state than they have been in decades.
On that very theme, I had begun preparations for a four-day camping trip with Jim Thompson, program manager of the Yellowstone Institute, the not-for-profit education wing loosely related to the national parks service. And only a couple of days after gazing down at the crowds from Old Faithful Inn, I was standing at a silent trailhead somewhere by Soda Butte Creeke in the park’s northeast, which I hoped would take me forty miles across the heather to the forest-covered Absaroka Mountains in the distance.
“Yellowstone in the 1870s?” mused Lee Whittlesey, the national park’s outspoken and erudite historian, who was one of seven who would be on the hike. “Imagine an intense geography with no white settlement.” We heaved our four-day packs on our backs and stepped onto the trail. Less than fifteen minutes later, as I was replacing my socks after the first icy river crossing, a bull bison the size of an SUV loomed just yards above us. Thick matted hair streamed down his flanks, and a wild goatee curled at his chin. Snorting loudly, the old bachelor stumped his way down the hillside, took a drink, then sauntered defiantly across the river. I could have leaned over and patted him on the back.
Okay, I thought—this was already feeling quite intense.
* * *
In 1872, Yellowstone may have gained fame as the world’s first national park, but it was still a frontier of white America—a remote, mysterious region that was barely mapped and utterly undeveloped (although it was hardly uninhabited: a Native American group of Shoshones known as the Sheep Eaters had survived its bitter winters for centuries, and were still resident). As late as 1869, magazines in the East refused to publish stories on Yellowstone, for fear they were hoaxes. It was not until official exploration began with the Washburn expedition of 1870 that doubt was dispelled. The high plateau, brimming with natural marvels that included 250 active geysers and 10,000 geothermal features, was immediately dubbed ‘Wonderland’ after the popular new Lewis Carroll fairy tale.
At first, Washington’s decision to protect this isolated spot had almost no physical impact. There was no precedent for managing such an enormous ‘park,’ and the first superintendent, Nathaniel Langford, received no salary, had no budget, no staff, and only visited Yellowstone twice in his five-year tenure. It’s hardly surprising that the handful of tourists who made the trip felt like they were venturing into an exotic new world.
These pioneer sightseers—an intriguing collection of wealthy scions from the East, and nature-loving aristocrats from Europe—often had to endure serious privations just to arrive at Yellowstone. The easiest approach was to catch the new transcontinental railroad to Corinne in Utah, where a stagecoach connection ran to the gold rush town of Virginia City in Montana—and this final leg alone was a bone-shaking 330 mile odyssey, lasting four days and nights. (“There was nothing to break the dull monotony,” wrote the intrepid, 34 year old Irish aristocrat, the Earl of Dunraven, in 1874. “Clouds of the salt dust… covered our clothes, and filled our eyes, ears, noses and mouths.” A seventeen year old English adventurer named Sidford Hamp had a more lively take on it in 1872, since his stage was held up by two ruffians, who passed around a bottle of whiskey after robbing the passengers: “I took some (whiskey) just for the joke of it & because I was cold with standing out with my hands up…” he wrote to his mother back home. “Fancy such a thing as highway robbers in England.”) Once in Virginia City, tourists hired grizzled mountain guides with names like ‘Texas Jack’ or ‘Beaver Dick,’ and outfitted their expeditions in the style of African safaris, with cooks, ten or a dozen attendants and mountains of equipment. Most entered the park from the north, traveling via Bozeman and modern-day Gardiner; a few took the rougher route along the Madison River in the west (a road now dominated by the motels and fast food stores of West Yellowstone).
At the time, the only roads within the park consisted of bridle paths and animal trails. As Thomas Sherman, son of the famous Civil War general, wrote in 1877, on arriving at the mouth of the Gardner River: “Here vehicles must be left behind, for there is no highway into Wonderland, and the visitor who dares to trespass on Dame Nature’s fastness, must bear the fatigues of rough riding, and trust his baggage to the mercy of a pack animal.” It could be slow going through the mire of fallen wood in Yellowstone’s endless lodge-pole pine forests. Some tourists over-nighted at the only ‘hotel’ in the park, McCartney’s cabin, which had been set up in 1871 at Mammoth Hot Springs near the park’s northern entrance. It was optimistically promoted as an elegant spa resort in the newspapers of Helena, but Ferdinand Hayden, the government surveyor found it “very primitive, consisting, in lieu of a bedstead, of 12 square feet of floor-room… the fare is simple, and remarkable for quantity rather than for quality or variety.” Dunraven charitably dubbed it the last outpost of civilization, but only because it was the last place that sold whiskey.
Difficult as the journey was, few complained once they glimpsed the marvels of the park. Most were as thrilled as 28 year old Emma Cowan in 1877: “Our first sight of the geysers, with columns of steam rising from innumerable vents and the smells of the Inferno in the air from the numerous sulfur springs, made us simply wild with the eagerness of seeing all things at once…” Victorian tourists had little awareness of nature’s vulnerability. Instead, they treated the Firehole Basin like a natural amusement park, a Coney Island of the West. They dashed between volcanic features that had been given romantic names like the Castle, the Giantess and Minerva Terrace. They poured soap into the mouths of geysers, to hasten eruptions. They did their laundry in the hot pools, watching dirty shirts be sucked down into the earth and spat up clean an hour later. They carved their names on rocks, chipped off delicate silex formations to take home as souvenirs, and soaked metal objects in the mineral waters to give them a white, alabaster-like coating. Those with scientific leanings took the water temperature in prismatic springs, timed eruptions, and compared the results with statistics from Iceland.
The Firehole Basin was perhaps the most famous of the park’s many attractions. In 1876, Hayden marveled at Yellowstone’s dizzying variety: “Here the traveler passes from one unique scene to another, and his vision never wearies and is never sated.” Adventurers descended Yellowstone Canyon with ropes and gaped at the thundering Upper and Lower waterfalls. They scaled mountains—Mount Washburn gave the most sweeping view of the park, while Electric Peak offering the most bizarre scientific experience (“every hair of your head will stand up and hum like an enthusiastic congregation,” marveled conservationist John Muir in a memorable 1885 description). And they savored the outdoor life, camping in the remote forests, trout-fishing in mountain streams and casting rods for salmon by torchlight at night. “Sportsmen” hunted venison and wild game, since Yellowstone’s variety of habitats made it a vast natural zoo stocked with elk, moose, deer, bears, buffalo and antelopes. Many tourists were irresponsibly trigger-happy—“Andy’s rifle was always ready, and he blazed away at everything,” reports one tourist in 1879—and even those who professed to be nature-lovers found their first reaction to seeing, say, an eagle’s nest, was to shoot the mother bird and use her feathers to adorn their hats. But another, more sensitive visitor, enthused: “elk and moose and deer and bear have maintained their rights to this their Eden since the day they were given possession,” while mountain lions and wolves howling in the night created “a most heartrending war song.” Happily exhausted, these pioneer travelers sat around the campfire by night, singing, telling stories and putting on theatrical shows.
The excitement was almost always tinged with unease: Yellowstone’s geothermal activity was often described as “hellish” or Dante-esque. Most Gilded Age visitors would have agreed with Calvin Clawson in 1871, who morbidly noted “a peculiar sensation that takes possession of the visitor that cannot be dispelled; that he feels he is in a land akin to spirit-land.” The Earl of Dunraven was barely joking when he said he heard at the geyser fields “distant grumblings, as of dissatisfied ghosts; faint shrieks, satirical groans, and subterranean laughter; as if the imprisoned devils, though exceedingly uncomfortable, were not beyond being amused at seeing a fresh victim approach.”
Some nineteenth century holidays did turn into genuine nightmares. In 1870, Truman Everts, a 54-year-old gent from Philadelphia who accompanied the Washburn expedition for an “in-between jobs vacation” (as one historian put it), found himself separated from the group near Yellowstone Lake, and became lost in the wilderness for 37 days. He was stalked by a mountain lion, trapped in week-long blizzards, woken at night by forest fires, scalded by hot springs and in constant danger of starvation (“I lost all sense of time. Days and nights came and went, and were numbered only by the growing consciousness that I was gradually starving.”) He survived by gnawing on the roots of thistles, using his spectacle lenses to create fires, and taking directions from the ghost of a long-dead friend, a clergyman, until he was rescued—emaciated, frostbitten and babbling deliriously.
But the most dramatic saga of Yellowstone’s early history occurred in the summer of 1877, when the Nez Perce Indians were pursued through the park by the U.S. Army. Few people are aware that twenty-three tourists were caught in the cinematic chase—and two left dead.
The bloody collision poignantly symbolizes all the changes that were sweeping the West. The Nez Perce band, with an estimated 800 men, women and children led by Chief Joseph, were on their heroic march of nearly two thousand miles from their homeland in Oregon to the Canadian border. For two weeks in late August and early September, the Native Americans detoured through Yellowstone, hunting and recuperating—and as luck would have it, renegade bands came face to face with several hapless sightseers.
The young Emma Cowan, camping with her husband near the Fountain Paint Pots, awoke in her tent on the 24th of August to the sound of unfamiliar, guttural conversation—and was taken captive. After traveling with Chief Joseph for several days, she, her brother and sister were released unharmed, but Emma’s husband George, who had apparently behaved obnoxiously towards the Nez Perce, was shot in the forehead and left for dead. (Emma recalled later: “I leant over my husband, only to be roughly drawn aside. Another Indian stepped up, a pistol shot rang out, my husband’s head fell back, and a red stream trickled down his face from beneath his hat. The warm sunshine, the smell of blood, the horror of it all… my sister’s screams, a sick faint feeling, and all was blank.”) Fortunately George Cowan, a Civil War veteran, had a Rasputin-like constitution. He dragged himself for four days across unforgiving terrain and was rescued by US military patrols. He not only survived but had the bullet surgically removed from his forehead and turned into a decoration for his fob watch as an uncoventional Yellowstone souvenir.
Others were not so lucky in the encounter with the Nez Perce: A young tourist from Montana was shot dead at another camp, while Richard Dietrich, a German-born music teacher, found himself at McCartney’s Hotel at the wrong time. Dietrich was shot in the doorway by a warrior whose family had been killed by the army only two weeks before, in a ruthless surprise attack on the Nez Perce camp in Big Hole Valley, Montana. (A Nez Perce named Yellow Wolf later recalled the wrenching desire for revenge: “Naked-footed Bull said to me, ‘My two young brothers and next younger brother were not warriors. They and a sister were killed at Big Hole. It was just like this man (Dietrich) did that killing of my brothers and sister. We are going to kill him now. I am a man! I am going to shoot him! When I fire, you shoot after me.”) A second bullet rang out after the unlucky Dietrich collapsed, passing the length of his body from head to toe.
And then the Nez Perce headed east—along the same route I was following through the remote Absaroka Mountains, a century and a quarter later.
* * *
“Human history is not associated with Yellowstone,” said Rosemary Sucec, the first official Cultural Anthropologist appointed to the park by the National Park Service. “The park has always been ‘Nature’s shrine.’” On the second day of the hike, we were deep in a serene pine forest, the wind playing through the branches like a lullaby. Thunder rolled in the distance, and sudden gales sent trunks crashing to earth. Sucec paused to pick up a flake of obsidian from the trail—a shard of sharp black glass that may or may not be an arrow head—and pulled out her GPS device to record its location. Then she put the piece back and continued on the trail. “The park was actually one of the great rendezvous points for Native Americans,” she explained. Not only were the Sheep Eaters full-time highland residents, but the park was regularly visited by the Crows from the east, the Bannocks from the west, the Blackfeet from the North and Shoshone from the south.
“Now we do have some history,” Rosemary added, “the park could become more of a shrine.”
As in the 1870s, when tourists were usually educated professionals, my own Yellowstone Association group was something of a think tank. Rosemary was composing the first interpretive literature on Native Americans in the park. Lee Whittlesey, the colorful historian, was the author of twelve books. Tim Hudson, the wiry mountain guide from Wyoming, was also poet with an MA in American Literature, who would muse on Thoreau and Emerson, and how our modern idea of wilderness is a “cultural construct.”
“Native Americans were forcibly removed to create our idea of ‘wilderness,’” Tim stated.
Our amnesia about the Indian presence in Yellowstone is a relic of late nineteenth century “white baloney” (to use one of Lee’s favorite terms), when a myth developed that Native Americans actually avoided the park because they were superstitiously afraid of its geothermal features. It’s a distortion that the park service is now actively trying to redress, in part by encouraging hikes like ours following the Nez Perce’s route.
At this early stage of the trail, there were some actual signs of the historic 1877 chase –
Lee pointed out marks cut into a pine trunk, which were likely made by army scouts—but soon we would enter the realm of speculation. Although Chief Joseph’s flight was doomed to fail (he would be defeated just a few miles short of safety at the Canadian border), he and his people expertly eluded their U.S. Army in the park—so expertly, in fact, that the actual route they took through eastern Yellowstone is still a matter of vigorous debate amongst historians. Almost none of the park backcountry has ever been scoured by archaeologists; it’s just too wild. “The very remoteness of this geography is part of the problem of recreating the Nez Perce’s route,” Lee explained as we went on. “You can’t just drive past here and say, ‘Oh, they must have gone up that mountain.’ You’ve got to get off your butt and climb it.” We dreamed about what evidence we might find—rusted belt buckles, coins or horse shoes? As if to confirm our eerie isolation, a few yards on we found crisp bear tracks in the mud. “Looks like a grizzly,” Tim shrugged. “But he’ll be long gone now. Bears hear us clumsy humans a mile off.”
Every step of the hike was now giving me a vivid insight into how visitors must have felt in the 1870s—and even more so, imbued an admiration for the Nez Perce, crashing along animal trails in the forest with elderly family members, children and two thousand horses. Even the captive Emma Cowan was impressed: “It was a feat few white people could have accomplished without axe or implements of some sort to cut the way,” she reported. When overloaded pack horse became wedged between trees, “an old squaw would pound them on the head until they backed out. And such yelling! Their lungs seemed in excellent condition.”
To my mind, there was an inescapably Victorian feeling to our nights camping beneath the stars (even if we did gather around gas burners for dinner rather than crackling fires, since there was a total summer fire ban). Rather like Cornelius Hedges and his companions in 1870, thoughts turned to the future fate of the park.
“On the surface, Yellowstone is doing very well—even better than it was ten years ago,” Tim opined. “Wolves have been reintroduced, bear populations have doubled in the last ten years. But beneath the surface, there’s a lot of danger. There’s a realization that our parks can’t exist in isolation.” Pine nuts, bear’s prime food, are at risk from blister rust, a disease spreading from Canada; introduced cut-throat trout are threatening indigenous breeds; bears, bison and wolves are wandering out of the park boundaries, where they are no longer so well protected. What’s more, the land surrounding Yellowstone is being subdivided into ranchettes, cutting off the migration routes of pronghorn antelopes and affecting the winter grizzly habitat. Although the park’s most immediate direct threat is from snow-mobiling—the national park service has caved in to pressure from the Bush administration to end the phasing-out program—ecologists are trying to make the public aware that Yellowstone must also be viewed as part of a larger environmental system.
“In a sense, people fetishize the park,” said Jim Thomson, Program Manager at the Yellowstone Association. “It’s sacred turf, with the Roosevelt Arch as the holy gates. But environmentally, there is no practical distinction between park and non-park. Yellowstone is being very well managed—nothing bad is going to happen within the park. It’s what will happen outside the park that will damage it.”
It all seems more complicated than it did back in 1872.
* * *
On my third day, the forest gave way to open alpine meadows—grass, soft as a sprung mattress, mountain streams and wildflowers. It was the sort of scenery that inspires even hardened hikers to burst into Julie Andrews songs (which has the extra benefit of alerting the grizzlies.) The trail wound through the Hoodoo Basin, a valley filled with wind-hewn pillars of stone like the frozen giants of fairy tales. Finally, we stood at the eastern edge of the park, which was not marked not by neon-lit motels but by lonely cairns of rock piled on icy ridges. In every direction, the savage mountains receded to the horizon.
It transpired that ahead lay the hardest stretch of my little re-enactment, a trail that would alternate between sliding down scree, clamoring up cliffs, picking our way across seas of deadwood, and crossing the same river twenty-four times, an experience at times made more vivid by the fact that I was convinced we were lost. By the time I hobbled back to Old Faithful two days later, I could guess why an exasperated US Army scout in 1877 had somewhat incoherently called Yellowstone “the most outdoors country on earth.”
Perhaps I hadn’t seen Yellowstone quite as it was in the 1870s—there have been too many changes over the years for that. But bathing my aching limbs in a clawfoot tub that night, I had to admit: ‘cultural construct’ or not, the park was still seriously wild.
