https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-7-2024-sunday
"In August 1870 a U.S. exploring expedition headed out from Montana toward the
Yellowstone River into land the U.S. government had recognized as belonging to
different Indigenous tribes.
By October the men had reached the Yellowstone, where they reported they had
“found abundance of game and trout, hot springs of five or six different
kinds…basaltic columns of enormous size” and a waterfall that must, they wrote,
“be in form, color and surroundings one of the most glorious objects on the
American Continent.” On the strength of their widely reprinted reports, the
secretary of the interior sent out an official surveying team under geologist
Ferdinand V. Hayden. With it went photographer William Henry Jackson and fine
artist Thomas Moran.
Banker and railroad baron Jay Cooke had arranged for Moran to join the
expedition. In 1871 the popular
Scribner’s Monthly published the surveyor’s
report along with Moran’s drawings and a promise that Cooke’s Northern Pacific
Railroad would soon lay tracks to enable tourists to see the great natural
wonders of the West.
But by 1871, Americans had begun to turn against the railroads, seeing them as
big businesses monopolizing American resources at the expense of ordinary
Americans. When Hayden called on Congress to pass a law setting the area around
Yellowstone aside as a public park, two Republicans—Senator Samuel Pomeroy of
Kansas and Delegate William H. Clagett of Montana—introduced bills to protect
Yellowstone in a natural state and provide against “wanton destruction of the
fish and game…or destruction for the purposes of merchandise or profit.”
The House Committee on Public Lands praised Yellowstone Valley’s beauty and
warned that “persons are now waiting for the spring…to enter in and take
possession of these remarkable curiosities, to make merchandise of these
bountiful specimens, to fence in these rare wonders so as to charge visitors a
fee, as is now done at Niagara Falls, for the sight of that which ought to be
as free as the air or water.” It warned that “the vandals who are now waiting
to enter into this wonderland will, in a single season, despoil, beyond
recovery, these remarkable curiosities which have required all the cunning
skill of nature thousands of years to prepare.”
The New York Times got behind the idea that saving Yellowstone for the people
was the responsibility of the federal government, saying that if businesses
“should be strictly shut out, it will remain a place which we can proudly show
to the benighted European as a proof of what nature—under a republican form of
government—can accomplish in the great West.”
On March 1, 1872, President U. S. Grant, a Republican, signed the bill making
Yellowstone a national park."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
