The First National Park

Powell was not the only one rethinking land use. The West’s incorporation into the national marketplace occurred with such speed that some Americans began to fear rampant overdevelopment. Perhaps the federal government should not sell off all its public land, but instead hold and manage some of it. Amid the heady initiatives of Reconstruction, Congress began to preserve sites of unusual natural splendor. As early as 1864, Congress gave 10 square miles of the Yosemite Valley to California for “public use, resort, and recreation.” (In 1890, Yosemite reverted to federal control.) In 1872, it set aside 2 million acres of Wyoming’s Yellowstone Valley as the world’s first national park: preserved as a public holding, it would serve as “a public park or pleasuring ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.”

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The Yo-Hamite Falls, 1855
This is one of the earliest artistic renderings of the Yosemite Valley, drawn, in fact, before the place came to be called Yosemite. The scale of the waterfall, which drops 2,300 feet to the valley below, is dramatized by artist Thomas A. Ayres’s companions in the foreground. In this romantic lithograph, one can already see the grandeur of the West that Yosemite came to represent for Americans. University of California at Berkeley, Bancroft Library.

Railroad tourism, which developed side by side with other western industries, was an important motive for the creation of Yellowstone National Park. The Northern Pacific Railroad lobbied Congress vigorously to get the park established. Soon, luxury Pullman cars ushered visitors to Yellowstone’s hotel, operated by the railroad itself. But creation of the park was fraught with complications. Since no one knew exactly what a “national park” was or how to operate it, the U.S. Army was dispatched to take charge; only in the early 1900s, when Congress established many more parks in the West, did consistent management policies emerge. In the meantime, soldiers spent much of their time arresting native peoples who sought to hunt on Yellowstone lands.

The creation of Yellowstone was an important step toward an ethic of respect for land and wildlife. So was the 1871 creation of a U.S. Fisheries Commission, which made recommendations to stem the decline in wild fish; by the 1930s, it merged with other federal wildlife bureaus to become the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. At the same time, eviction of Indians showed that defining small preserves of “uninhabited wilderness” was part of conquest itself. In 1877, for example, the federal government forcibly removed the Nez Perce tribe from their ancestral land in what is now Idaho, Washington, and Oregon. Under the leadership of young Chief Joseph, the Nez Perces tried to flee to Canada. After a journey of 1,100 miles, they were forced to surrender just short of the border. During their trek, five bands crossed Yellowstone; as a Nez Perce named Yellow Wolf recalled, they “knew that country well.” For thirteen days, Nez Perce men raided the valley for supplies, waylaying several groups of tourists. The conflict made national headlines. Easterners, proud of their new “pleasuring ground,” were startled to find that it remained a site of native resistance. Americans were not settling an empty West. They were unsettling it by taking it from native peoples who already lived there.