YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK

1. Context

2. Key Points

• Located in the northwest corner of Wyoming and extending into Montana and Idaho was established by the 42nd United States Congress with the Yellow Stone National Park Protection Act signed into law by President Ulysses S. Grant on March 1, 1872.
• It spans an area of over 9,000 sq km comprising lakes, canyons, rivers, and iconic geothermal features such as the Old Faithful geyser and mountain ranges.
• Over the years, it has been at the centre of many successful conservation endeavours and today is the most famous megafauna location in the contiguous United States home to grizzly bears, wolves and free-ranging herds of the endangered bison and elk.
• Native Americans were hunting and gathering here for at least 11,000 years. They were pushed out by the government after the park was established.

Image source: Wikipedia

3. Establishing a "National Park"

• The Original legislation stated that Yellowstone would be reserved and withdrawn from settlement, occupancy or sale under the laws of the United States and that it would be set aside as a public park or pleasuring ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.
• In the lead-up to Yellowstone becoming a national park, three major expeditions in 1869, 1870 and 1871 raised public awareness of the area's natural beauty.
• The last of these known as the Hayden expedition was particularly important.

4. Actual motivations

• While there were those like Hayden who were concerned about the desecration of Yellowstone due to those trying to "make merchandise of these beautiful specimens", for US lawmakers, the actual motivation was different.
• Closing off Yellowstone to settlement and making it a tourist destination would be extremely profitable for his rail company, which would become the solely available mode of transportation to and from Yellowstone which lay in the still relatively less developed American West.

5. Ignoring the Native Americans

• Whatever the reason might have been since 1972, Yellowstone has been maintained as a pristine wilderness, with no permanent settlements.
• However, what this ignores is that the area had been home to many Native American tribes before being closed off for settlement.
• From archaeological research and oral history, it can be gleaned that at least 27 current Native American Tribes have connections to Yellowstone.
• However, when the national park status was being debated in Congress, there was next to no mention of the Native American presence.
• Once Yellowstone National Park Came into existence, several different tribal groups who used to camp there were removed by the US Army.

6. Settling in the Wild West 

• Post the Civil War (1861-1865), spurred by the development of railways in the American West, white settlers began moving westwards and settling there in hopes of a prosperous future. The settlers soon transformed the land.
• Huge herds of American bison that once roamed the plains were almost completely wiped out.
• Farmers ploughed the natural grasses to plant wheat and other crops. There was also a mining boom.
• Most importantly, the westward migration ushered in an era of conflict between the settlers and the Native Americans who had lived and ruled over the land for many millennia.
• In 1868, President Grant began Pursuing a "Peace Policy" which included the goal of relocating various tribes from their ancestral lands to missionary-run Indian reservations.
• This was, however, far from peaceful; it led to some of the bloodiest fightings between the United States and the Native Americans, including several massacres of Native Americans at the hands of the US Army.
• The setting up of Yellowstone National Park, the subsequent removal of the land's Native American population and the erasure of their history cannot be extricated from the larger story of the colonisation of the American West.
• The park displaced multiple tribes and denied them their age-old hunting grounds while at the same time erasing their very existence from public consciousness which, over time, remembered the beauty of the western wilderness rather than the blood spilt to effectively create it.
• A 2021 Study in the Science Journal found that "indigenous people in the United States have lost nearly 99 per cent of the land they historically occupied" through "forced migration".
• The Consequences of this mass dispossession can be felt in the socio-economic deprivations of Native Americans to date.
• However, this is seldom spoken out in mainstream US discourse and even when it is, its sheer scale is often underplayed.
• While the history of this dispossession neither begins nor ends with Yellowstone National Park, it no doubt played its part, both in dispossessing and then numbing the public to the brutality of this dispossession by creating and sustaining the myth around the West's "pristine wilderness".

For Prelims