YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK

YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK. Yellowstone National Park encompasses 3,468 square miles (2,219,823 acres) of Rocky Mountain terrain in Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana. Its enabling act, signed 1 March 1872 by President Ulysses S. Grant, withdrew lands from the public domain for use as a "public park or pleasuring ground" for the "preservation, from injury or spoliation, of all timber, mineral deposits, natural curiosities, or wonders…and their retention in their natural condition." The Yellowstone National Park Act established a significant conservationist precedent, leading to the formation of more than twelve hundred parks and preserves in more than one hundred countries. The national park idea represents one of the major, original contributions of the United States to world thought.

Native Americans utilized Yellowstone for hunting and fishing hundreds of years before whites frequented the region. In 1807 the trapper John Colter became the first Euro-American to visit Yellowstone. Information regarding Yellowstone's natural features remained scarce until the late 1860s, when several exploring parties surveyed the area. Cornelius Hedges, a Massachusetts-born Montana judge and member of the Washburn-Langford-Doane expedition in 1870, has often been credited with proposing Yellowstone as a national park, although historians have since questioned the validity of his claim. The Yellowstone National Park Act was drawn up by William H. Clagett, a Montana territorial delegate in Congress; Nathaniel Langford, territorial revenue collector and later first park superintendent; and Ferdinand V. Hayden, a member of the U.S. Geological Survey, whose 1871 expedition showered Congress with illustrations and photographs of Yellowstone's fantastical landscape. Yellowstone

was under military stewardship from 1886 until 1918, when the newly created National Park Service (1916) took responsibility for its operation. California lawyer Horace M. Albright became Yellowstone's first civilian superintendent.

Yellowstone remains the largest national park in the contiguous United States. Its three thousand hot springs and two hundred geysers, including Old Faithful, signify the world's largest concentration of geothermal features. Yellowstone Lake represents the largest high-mountain lake in North America, covering 137 square miles at an elevation of 7,730 feet. There the Yellowstone River starts its 671-mile journey to the Missouri River, bequeathing the park its famous 1,200-foot deep Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River and its Upper Falls and Lower Falls; the latter, almost twice as high as Niagara Falls, drops 308 feet. The park supports an array of wildlife, including grizzly and black bears, elk, bighorn sheep, moose, antelope, coyotes and more than two hundred varieties of bird. Yellowstone's protected wildlands provide vital habitat for threatened species, notably the once endangered trumpeter swan and the country's only continuously wild herd of bison.

Shifting biological theories, increased visitation, and external threats present decisive challenges for Yellow-stone's managers. In the summer of 1988, 45 percent of the park was razed by fire, fueling criticism of official natural regulation policy. Affected areas have since recovered. In January 1995, following two decades of protracted debate and capacious biological studies, federal agencies reintroduced wolves to Yellowstone under the terms of the Endangered Species Act (1973). Wolves had been absent from the park since the 1920s, when they were eradicated as part of an official campaign to remove predatory animals. Yellowstone National Park, which observed its 125th anniversary in 1997, attracts more than 3 million visitors a year.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bartlett, Richard A. Yellowstone: A Wilderness Besieged. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985.

Chase, Alston. Playing God in Yellowstone: The Destruction of America's First National Park. San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt Brace, 1987.

Haines, Aubrey L. The Yellowstone Story: A History of Our First National Park. Rev. ed. Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1996.

Pritchard, James A. Preserving Yellowstone's Natural Conditions: Science and the Perception of Nature. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.

Karen Jones

John Vosburgh

See also National Park System; Wildlife Preservation.