2023 Parked at Home | #1: Saving Yellowstone
On Thursday, March 2 at 7:00 p.m., Dr. Megan Kate Nelson kicked off the 2023 season of Parked at Home, a series of Zoom webinars hosted by Blackstone River Valley National Historic Park. Dr. Nelson gave a talk on her new book, Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America, published by Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, in 2022. Park ranger Mark Mello acted as the moderator for the session, reviewing the history of BRVNHP and the motivation behind the parked at home series before sharing a clip from Ken Burns’ documentary National Parks: America’s Best Idea.
Dr. Nelson’s new perspective about the creation of Yellowstone was inspired by her previous book, The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West, which received numerous accolades for its explanations on the effects of the American Civil War and Reconstruction period. She shared a map demonstrating the size of Yellowstone, currently a 2.2 million acres park, or three times the size of Rhode Island, with a visitation of 4 million people between May and September. Visitors from around the globe travel to the region to see Yellowstone Lake, geothermal features like geysers and mud pots, and and the top five “charismatic megafauna”: bison, wolves, elk, moose, and bears.
In the 1870s, when the land was first surveyed, government contractors and artists were similarly impressed. Photographer William Henry Jackson and painter Thomas Moran joined surveyor (and Massachusetts native) Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden in recording the area for the Department of the Interior. Dr. Nelson highlighted Hayden as one of three “main character” in her book. He was the leader of the 1871 expedition to Yellowstone, receiving $40,000 (or $1,000,000 in 2023) to survey the region and create a report with hundreds of pages. The trip was remarkable safe and successful, with forty-five boxes of specimens delivered back to Washington, D.C. and safely stored in the Smithsonian. At the time, neither Hayden nor the government intended to preserve Yellowstone as a National Park but instead development it in a “productive” way.
At the same time, the second main character, financier Jay Cooke, had invested in the Northern Pacific Railway (NP), a line of track intended to do for Minnesota and the North Pacific region what the original Union Pacific Rail Road (UPRR) did for Nebraska through California. Aided by Civil War legislations in the 1860s, Cooke wanted to build a track running just fifty miles north of Yellowstone through Livingston, MT, connecting the Great Lakes to the Pacific Ocean, and finishing construction around 1876. The project was delayed, not finishing until 1883, in part because of protests and attacks from the third main character, Sitting Bull (Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake), a leader of the Hunkpapa Lakota and their allies.
After setting the stage for Yellowstone, Dr. Nelson gave a concise overview of reconstruction. During the late 1860s and early 1870s, Republicans had control of Congress and slowly admitted Confederate states back into the Union, ratifying the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments in the process. The West was seen as a tool for the federal government to further expand its power and military forces. With Ulysses S. Grant in charge of the Army and later elected as president, the government sought to protect equal rights and Black freedom by trying members of the KKK on conspiracy charges. The administration presented the West as a democratic project where the North and South could expand together, combining the ideologies of “Manifest Destiny”, that God had provided land for European settlers to improve, and the “American Dream”, that the United States was a place where European immigrants could join the middle class. This land development came at the cost of Native Americans deemed in the way of White settlement, described in the 14th Amendment as “Indians untaxed” and not considered citizens of the United States, along with Black Americans who still struggled to obtain Civil Rights for another 80 years.
Interestingly, some Native Americans encouraged assimilation, the reservation system, and boarding schools. Seneca military officer, engineer, and diplomat Ely Samuel Parker believed indigenous people should embrace chances for citizenship, including adopting European style clothing, converting to Christianity, and learning English. As the head of Indian Affairs during the Grant Administration, Parker was the highest ranking indigenous person in the federal government until the nomination of Deb Haaland as Secretary of the Interior and Chuck Sams as Director of the National Park Service. Parker believed Native Americans should concentrate into two giant territories and receive representation in Congress, including four senators. Because of his radical ideas, Parker was targeted by other government employees and forced to resign. With Parker gone, Grant reverted to what Dr. Nelson described as “US Army default mode”, where he preferred war and forced relocation to treaties with Native American tribal nations.
Ranger Mello closed the talk with a thoughtful examination of how the park service allows visitors to reflect on the hardships of other Americans who have stood in the same place, reminding viewers about the dispossession of Native Americans in Yellowstone and the work of child laborers in New England factories. He asked that we “learn from the past, and ideally move forward toward a better future together”.