Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America by Megan Kate Nelson

Author:Megan Kate Nelson [Nelson, Megan Kate]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

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A few days after the Senate vote, Ferdinand Hayden’s article describing the 1871 Yellowstone Expedition was published in Scribner’s Monthly. Its contents were widely reported and excerpted in newspapers across the nation. In his final drafts of the piece, Hayden had added a paragraph at the end.

“Why will not Congress at once pass a law setting it apart as a great public park for all time to come,” Hayden asked, “as has been done with that not more remarkable wonder, the Yosemite Valley?”35

Hayden secured hundreds of copies of the magazine from Richard Watson Gilder and sent them to senators and congressmen. In the first few weeks of February, he also worked feverishly at his Smithsonian offices, finalizing his preliminary government report. He sent off letter after letter to the scientists he had contracted to analyze the specimens, checking on their progress and urging them to submit their reports on the Yellowstone region’s paleontology, zoology, botany, and meteorology. Hayden had tasked some of them with writing about the butterflies, reptiles, and fish collected by Chester Dawes and William B. Logan, two of the political boys whose fathers would be voting on the Yellowstone Act in the House of Representatives.36

With Jackson’s help, Hayden also chose photographic negatives to be included in the report as illustrations. He wrapped them carefully and sent them, along with copies of the maps based on Anton Schönborn’s field notebooks, to lithographers in Philadelphia and New York. The lithographers transferred them to plates and mailed these back to Hayden so that illustrations could be printed in every copy of the report, along with several full-page images.37 Ultimately, Hayden’s preliminary report contained sixty-four illustrations and two plates based on Jackson’s photographs, Moran’s watercolors, Henry Elliott’s sketches and cross sections, and specimen illustrations produced by the scientists. It also included five maps, progressing from single features (the White Mountain) to the entirety of what Hayden already called “Yellowstone National Park.”38

On February 20, 1872, Hayden submitted his preliminary report of the 1871 Yellowstone Expedition to the secretary of the interior. The secretary forwarded it to the Government Printing Office, which began producing the first of more than two thousand copies. Three hundred would go to Congress and the rest would be distributed to federal officials across the nation and to any interested parties who might request a copy.39

That same week, the office received the congressional joint select committee’s multivolume report of its investigations of the Ku Klux Klan across the South, with thousands of pages of testimony giving voice to Lucy McMillan and other Black southerners who had suffered the violence of their terrorist acts. These thick volumes, circulated to politicians and members of the public, were evidence of the federal government’s evolving role as a collector of testimony and producer of knowledge.40 They were also proof that the members of Congress could act—if they wanted to—to illuminate the nation’s terrible and the wondrous aspects.

Hayden wrote up a condensed version of his report to give to the House Committee on Public Lands, describing his discoveries and advocating for the Yellowstone Act.

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