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Yellowstone National Park
Through The Lens of Time
By Bradly J. Boner University Press of Colorado
Copyright © 2017 University Press of Colorado
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60732-449-2
CHAPTER 1
THE UNEXPLORED YELLOWSTONE
Prior to 1869, the rugged wilderness surrounding the headwaters of the Yellowstone River, in the northwestern corner of the Wyoming Territory, had remained relatively unexplored, save for Native Americans, trappers, and prospectors who ventured into the area in search of game or gold. Mountain men spoke of extraordinary wonders such as spouting geysers, bubbling mud pots, towering waterfalls, and a spectacular mountain lake; but their stories seemed exaggerated and were dismissed as ramblings of those who had spent too much time alone in the wilderness. Even the accounts of Jim Bridger, the legendary scout, trapper, and hunter who served as a guide to US Army and civilian parties alike, were often dismissed as embellished campfire tales.
Stories about the mythical Yellowstone region began to spread among the growing population of the southern Montana Territory drawn to the area by the construction of the Northern Pacific Railroad, and some began hatching plans to venture into the region themselves. In September 1869, Charles W. Cook, David E. Folsom, and William Peterson, three men from Diamond City, Montana — just east of present-day Helena — made the first organized excursion into the heart of what is today Yellowstone National Park, intent on verifying the stories. Following the Yellowstone River and entering the region from the north, the trio visited rumored wonders such as Tower Fall, the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone and its waterfalls, Yellowstone Lake, and the Lower and Midway Geyser Basins on the Firehole River, where they witnessed the eruption of several geysers.
Despite being waylaid by an early season snowstorm during the first week of their trip, the party covered a remarkable distance in a short amount of time, probably due to the group's small size. The trio exited the area via the Madison River at present-day West Yellowstone after less than a month in the region and returned to Diamond City.
Though the Cook-Folsom-Peterson Expedition confirmed many of the stories about Yellowstone, major eastern publications were reluctant to publish their written accounts, dismissing descriptions by the relatively unknown explorers as unreliable. However, their stories gained regional interest and drew the attention of Henry Washburn, surveyor-general of the Montana Territory, and businessman Nathaniel P. Langford, former US collector of internal revenue for the Montana Territory. The pair soon began organizing a larger party to explore the region more extensively in the coming summer.
In mid-August 1870, Washburn and Langford's party departed Helena for the Yellowstone region. Their group included thirteen civilian travelers, mostly fellow businessmen and political associates from the Montana Territory. Jay Cooke, a personal acquaintance of Langford and a major financial backer of the Northern Pacific Railroad, saw an opportunity to publicize Yellowstone as a destination for tourists who would travel to the region by rail. Cooke funded his friend's endeavor and eagerly awaited Langford's findings.
Given the influential status of many of the civilian members, Washburn lobbied for a military escort to accompany the explorers into potentially hostile Indian country. Led by Lt. Gustavus C. Doane, a small contingent of six troops from the US Army's Second Cavalry in Fort Ellis, near Bozeman, was assigned to travel with the group.
The party followed the same general route the Cook-Folsom-Peterson Expedition took the year before. At Tower Fall, the group turned away from the Yellowstone River and headed south, ascending what is today Mount Washburn near Dunraven Pass, and continued to the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River. It was here that Walter Trumbull, a civilian member of the party, and Charles Moore, a US Army private in the military escort, would sketch the first crude representations of the Upper and Lower Falls of the Yellowstone.
Now reunited with the Yellowstone River, the expedition followed the waterway south to Yellowstone Lake. At the river's outlet at the lake's north end, they followed the eastern shoreline in a clockwise circumnavigation, climbing some of the high peaks of the Absaroka Range to the east and near the upper Yellowstone River to the south. At West Thumb, the party turned west, crossed the Continental Divide near present-day Craig Pass, and struck the Firehole River, following it north to the Upper Geyser Basin. Langford would later detail their witness to what is generally known to be the first named geyser in Yellowstone:
Judge, then, what must have been our astonishment, as we entered the basin at mid-afternoon ... to see in the clear sunlight, at no great distance, an immense volume of clear, sparkling water projected into the air to the height of one hundred and twenty-five feet. "Geysers! geysers!" exclaimed one of our company, and, spurring our jaded horses, we soon gathered around this wonderful phenomenon. It was indeed a perfect geyser ... It spouted at regular intervals nine times during our stay, the columns of boiling water being thrown from ninety to one hundred and twenty-five feet at each discharge, which lasted from fifteen to twenty minutes. We gave it the name of "Old Faithful."
After exploring the basin and observing and naming several geysers, the party traveled north along the Firehole to its junction with the Madison River. Like the Cook-Folsom-Peterson group the previous year, they followed the Madison west out of the region. Near Virginia City, Montana, the party disbanded, Doane taking his small military contingent back to Fort Ellis while the rest of the party returned to Helena in late September.
Local interest for a report from the highly publicized trip reached a fever pitch upon the party's return to Helena. The editions of the Helena Daily Herald containing the expedition's early reports sold out, prompting the newspaper to republish the articles only a few days later. Due to the reputable status of many of the influential members of the expedition — and the harrowing account of one member, Truman Everts, who became separated from the party and spent thirty-seven days alone and lost in the Yellowstone wilderness — subsequent reports were widely published in several large newspapers and periodicals, including Scribner's Monthly: An Illustrated Magazine for the People, Denver's Rocky Mountain News, and the New York Times.
The broader American public was becoming increasingly curious about the faraway land known as Yellowstone.
* * *
In November 1870, Langford began giving lectures on his experience from the previous summer. After speaking to eager local audiences in Helena and Virginia City, he took his lecture tour to the East Coast, delivering speeches in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC. Jay Cooke, whose keen business mind knew tourists would become interested in visiting Yellowstone via the Northern Pacific, funded Langford's lecture series, which grew in popularity so quickly that he often spoke to standing-room-only crowds.
On January 19, 1871, Langford was scheduled to speak at Lincoln Hall in Washington, DC. For an admission price of 50 cents, an advertisement in the Washington Star declared, attendants would hear of "a trip during the past season to a hitherto unexplored region at the headwaters of the Yellowstone, including discoveries of cataracts many hundred feet high, active volcanoes, fountains of boiling water 200 feet high, and many other features of scenery, interesting and striking in the highest degree."
Fate proved to be on Yellowstone's side, because a man in the audience that evening possessed the knowledge, experience, and influence that would eventually help create the world's first national park.
THE 1871 HAYDEN SURVEY
The mid- and late 1800s were a time of great exploration in the American West, and the developing industries and increasing population of America's Gilded Age increased demand for coal, lumber, gold, and other natural resources. The US government looked to the frontier lands in the western territories — much of which had remained unexplored since the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 — to catalog the geology and potential resources of the region, in addition to scouting possible routes for a transcontinental railroad.
Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden, a renowned geologist from Pennsylvania who had spent several years in the 1850s exploring regions near the Missouri River west of Fort Pierre in the Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming Territories, was appointed geologist-in-charge of the first task: a survey of the new state of Nebraska during summer 1867. Congress then expanded the surveys to include all unexplored lands in the western territories, particularly those surrounding the Rocky Mountains. Hayden received additional funds to explore the Colorado and Wyoming Territories for the next two years.
In 1869 Hayden led an exploration and survey of the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. The following year he explored the central and southwestern portions of the Wyoming Territory, which extended from the South Pass area, at the southeastern end of the Wind River Mountains, to the Henry's Fork of the Snake River in present-day Idaho. Hayden spent winters at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, examining specimens and compiling his report from the previous year's work while laying plans for the upcoming season's exploration as well as teaching geology at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
On January 19, 1871, Hayden attended a lecture by another explorer of the West that may have set his mind on exploring the Yellowstone in the coming summer. Nathaniel Langford had stopped in Washington, DC, to speak about his journey to the area surrounding the headwaters of the Yellowstone River. Hayden, who had also likely read Lieutenant Doane's report from the same expedition, was undoubtedly interested in Langford's lecture, given his own experience more than ten years earlier.
Though Hayden had never been to the upper Yellowstone, he had come very close. From 1859 to 1860, Hayden was the appointed naturalist for a US Army expedition commanded by Capt. William F. Raynolds to explore and map the area between Fort Pierre and the headwaters of the Missouri River, including the Yellowstone. Raynolds's party had been productive during summer and fall 1859 as they explored the Missouri River and its tributaries north and west of the Black Hills in the Dakota Territory and those surrounding the Wyoming Territory's Bighorn Mountains. The expedition then journeyed south and encamped for the winter in central Wyoming, near present-day Glenrock.
The following spring, Raynolds — who called Yellowstone "the most interesting unexplored district in our widely expanded country" — planned to take his party into the region from the southeast, most likely via the upper Yellowstone River south of Yellowstone Lake, today called the Thorofare. He then intended to traverse the Yellowstone Plateau diagonally, from southeast to northwest, to Three Forks, Montana, near the headwaters of the Missouri River. It was late May by the time Raynolds and his party attempted to enter the area surrounding the headwaters of the Yellowstone, and a deep, lingering snowpack from the previous winter blocked their access near Togwotee Pass. Even their guide, mountain man Jim Bridger, who had more than twenty years of knowledge and experience in the region, could find no feasible entry. Raynolds later wrote that Bridger was adamant from the onset that the rugged Absaroka Mountains, still packed with a winter's worth of snow, would make it virtually impossible to access the Yellowstone's headwaters from the southeast.
Forced to abandon his plans to explore Yellowstone, Raynolds continued west into Jackson Hole, then turned south at the Snake River. After a treacherous crossing of the Snake near present-day Wilson, Wyoming, the party ascended Teton Pass and crossed into Pierre's Hole — today's Teton Valley, Idaho. Now in familiar territory, the party headed more or less directly north, skirting the west slope of the Teton Range and Yellowstone's western edge to a scheduled rendezvous with the rest of Raynolds's command in Three Forks.
The veil of mystery surrounding the upper Yellowstone would not be pulled aside for another decade, as government exploration of the western territories halted during the Civil War. Hayden, however, perhaps guided by fate if not by his own design, was destined to return.
* * *
Listening to Nathaniel Langford speak about the mystique of Yellowstone in January 1871 may have been a catalyst for Hayden's decision to attempt a return to the region, especially after being denied entry eleven years earlier with the Raynolds expedition. As a man of science, Hayden was also likely tempted by the prospect of leading a well-funded, well-equipped survey into a region of seemingly vast scientific potential. Financier Jay Cooke, who funded Washburn and Langford's expedition the summer before, also likely encouraged Hayden to make Yellowstone the subject of his next geographical expedition.
A government survey of the Yellowstone region would inevitably occur, and given the rising public interest and lobbying from the Northern Pacific, Hayden likely decided its exploration should be conducted sooner rather than later. The US Congress, primarily interested in a detailed report of natural resources and a thorough mapping of the territories, felt it was within the scope of the survey's charge and approved Hayden's proposal, appropriating $40,000 for the task, and he immediately began planning for the coming summer's work. As fate would have it, the timing of Hayden's decision to explore Yellowstone in summer 1871 would prove pivotal in preserving at least part of the region from being exploited by those seeking personal gain.
Hayden's planning included a strategy to gather tangible evidence of the fascinating landscapes rumored to be within Yellowstone. While public interest had grown immensely, skepticism remained that published accounts about prior expeditions to the Yellowstone region — and even Langford's lectures — could have been exaggerated or fabricated entirely. Much later in life, Langford wrote that he lamented the absence of photographic documentation of his 1870 excursion into Yellowstone:
It is much to be regretted that our expedition was not accompanied by an expert photographer, but at the time of our departure from Helena, no one skilled in the art could be found with whom the hazards of the journey did not outweigh any seeming advantage or compensation which the undertaking promised.
Hayden, who likely remembered Raynolds's use of a photographer during the expedition of 1859–1860, had begun to use photography as supplemental documentation during his own survey into the southern Wyoming Territory in 1870. The medium had become accepted as a more truthful representation of its subject matter; when sketches and drawings could be embellished, photographs couldn't lie. Now Hayden was preparing to enter one of the most mysterious regions ever explored, and if he was going to put so many resources into exploring and verifying Yellowstone's wonders, he was determined to bring back proof.
WILLIAM HENRY JACKSON
In spring 1866, Civil War veteran and budding photographer William Henry Jackson left Vermont the day his engagement to his fiancée came to an abrupt end. Seeking to leave the past behind, he left New England to search for adventure and a new life in the American West. Jackson paid his way to Salt Lake City by working as a bullwhacker on a wagon train, and in summer 1867 had settled in Omaha, Nebraska. By the following spring, Jackson had taken over a local photography studio and two galleries with his brother, Edward.
In summer 1868, Jackson began photographing the construction of the Union Pacific Railroad for the company's promotional materials. The massive undertaking to connect the East and West Coasts provided Jackson with plenty of subject matter, as tens of thousands of workers in hundreds of crews toiled on the project. Jackson also took an interest in the region's Native American culture, photographing Indians from various tribes in his studio and on nearby reservations.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Yellowstone National Park by Bradly J. Boner. Copyright © 2017 University Press of Colorado. Excerpted by permission of University Press of Colorado.
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