A trail-centric map of Yellowstone

Alice Morris’ 1917 challenge to cartography

Attention map-nerds! Today I want to tell the story of the image above, one of the most extraordinary maps of Yellowstone National Park that I’ve ever seen.

At first glance it appears to be a standard map for the black-and-white era of the late 1910s, with heavier and lighter lines. But the weird thing is: the heavier lines are horse and foot trails. The lighter lines are creeks, while roads are demarcated with nearly invisible double-light-lines.

The map was developed by Alice Parmelee Morris, who logged 1500 miles on horseback in the park during the summer of 1917. That’s a story I tell in the current issue (#13) of the beautiful print-only Trails Magazine. In my research, I came across this map, and I can’t get enough of it.

One reason: it was later reprinted without Morris’ name at the bottom. She probably didn’t mind, as her goal appears to have been making information available, rather than getting credit for doing so. But it’s symbolic of Morris’ fate: she’s been widely forgotten in Yellowstone history. She’s not mentioned in any Yellowstone history books (including my own!). Indeed, for a high-society woman whose Yellowstone exploits were once written up in the New York Times, she seems to have nearly dropped off the face of the earth in the early 1920s.

Another reason: it highlights how we always take cartography for granted. The act of making a map is the act of choosing. Will I include elevations? Swamps? Archaeological sites? Locations of Sasquatch sightings? Each choice affects the way map-readers will experience the world—in this case, the natural world.

Some choices become standardized, such as the inclusion of roads. As a map-nerdy kid in the 1970s, one of my favorite Christmas gifts was a world atlas—but I was baffled that it depicted railroads rather than auto-roads. At first, I found the map useless (a funny response, given that I couldn’t yet drive). Gradually, I came to see that it offered a different view of landscapes—much as Morris’ map does for Yellowstone.

Thus the biggest reason Morris’ map fascinates me is that it highlights her cartographic choices at a particular moment in time. It was 1917, just two years after cars had been allowed into Yellowstone. In all the years prior to 1915, Morris and others had been free to ride their horses on the park’s Grand Loop Road. But in 1915 and 1916, encounters between horses and cars went poorly. Maybe the horses were too easily spooked, maybe the cars had a tendency to go too fast. But regardless of who was to blame, park leaders could tell which way the trends were headed. They banned horses from the roads.

In 1917, Morris’ job was to delineate backcountry routes, blaze trails, describe campsites, and recommend improvements to a parkwide system of nonmotorized trails. If horses couldn’t take to the roads, then horse-people needed support to take to the backcountry. This map of trails—who needs roads?—was one of the central products of her work.

Of course, today most of us find this map useless (a funny response, since we go to Yellowstone to experience nature). But its alternative representation of what’s important in the park offers us an opportunity to ponder what we find important, and why.

End notes:

• There’s much more to the pathbreaking story of Alice Morris. I’m grateful to Ryan, Stasia, and the crew at Trails for asking me to tell some of it.

• Welcome to those of you arriving here from WyoHistory’s reprint of my AI story. (From January 6! AI moves so fast, I hope it’s not already outdated!) I hope you’ll consider supporting me with a free (or, even better, paid) subscription.