Faithful Travelers by James Dodson

Author:James Dodson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2017-10-24T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

Oh, Yellowstone

THE FIRST WHITE men to set foot in Yellowstone, probably early French trappers searching for a mythical river cutting through towering golden bluffs they’d heard the Mandan Indians of the Dakotas speak of in the late 1700s, were undoubtedly astonished by the wonders they met.

Thermal geysers, hot springs and boiling fumaroles, towering lodgepole pines, a beautiful golden-bluffed river teeming with trout, forests thick with elk—a real American Eden. But it wasn’t until Lewis and Clark passed this way in 1805 that anyone east of the Missouri knew this place of wonders even existed. Passing through the northern fringes of the present-day park, they encountered the river with towering bluffs and named it the Yellowstone, a name that stuck. On the return trip, the party split up and a member of the expedition named John Colter became the first white to cross the heart of the wilderness. His account of seething cauldrons and exploding geysers was widely ridiculed back East, but as more prospectors and trappers moved into the region over the next sixty years, confirming stories of an American Eden, Congress finally dispatched the first survey teams to the region in 1870. Two years later, after a rancorous debate on the Senate floor during which several participants allegedly traded punches, America’s first national park came into creation.

The idea—virtually without precedent in human history—was to set aside an entire region for legal protection from development and business interests, a managed-care system aimed at preserving the pristine quality of the wilderness. But the park’s first years proved a management nightmare. Congress provided lip service but no real funding for preserving Yellowstone and irresponsible tourists soon dumped laundry soap down geysers, ruining their intricate plumbing, and washed their clothes in hot springs. Bandits routinely preyed on stagecoaches bearing wealthy excursionists into the park, and the same peaceful Nez Percé Indians who’d saved the exhausted and disease-riddled Lewis and Clark expedition from certain death in 1805 killed two tourists during the uprising that resulted when the gold fever once again caused the U.S. government to renege on a signed treaty and the army was sent to round up the Nez Percé and move them to a reservation.

Under the leadership of Chief Joseph, a band of 250 warriors, protecting twice as many women, children, and elderly people, outmaneuvered an army many times its size for nearly four months, launching brilliant guerrilla attacks and eluding captors for nearly 1,700 miles before the insurrection ran out of steam and, just thirty miles from relative safety over the Canadian border, Chief Joseph gave his famous speech of surrender: I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever. The Nez Percé had been promised they would be sent to new lands in Idaho. They were shipped instead to a cramped and marshy reservation in Oklahoma, where an outbreak of malaria killed nearly a third of the tribe.

I was telling Maggie these tales, gleaned from a

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