Celebrating Yellowstone's 1872 moment

When Congress stumbled into public lands law

Morning fog in Yellowstone’s Hayden Valley (NPS photo courtesy Wikimedia)

Imagine what it must have been like to be in Congress 154 years ago this week. Some corners of the Capitol were abuzz with discussion of the wonders of a fantastical place out West. The way water exploded from the ground was so weird that people were calling it Wonderland, after the recently-published Alice in Wonderland. And there was a sense, in this buzz, that Congress needed to act to protect these wonders.

“A special place, you say,” our Congressman might have mused. “Didn’t we have a case like this a few years ago?” Indeed, for California’s Yosemite in 1864, Congress had decided to set aside an extraordinary tract of land. Its approach was simply to give the land to the state of California for a park. (The feds would not own or run it: When you genuinely believe in states’ rights and small government, you don’t tell a state what to do.)

But for Yellowstone in 1872, our Congressman would realize that Wyoming and Montana were not states, merely territories. There was no entity organized enough to receive a land donation and run a park. To consecrate this Wonderland, our Congressman would need to consider actually owning the land on the federal level.

This would be a radical shift—not because the feds didn’t own land, but because they didn’t want to. Our Congressman was familiar with the vast public domain out West. Indeed, he was giving it away as fast as people could homestead it. He was trading it to railroads in exchange for transcontinental lines. He was doing everything possible to get rid of it—short of actually giving it back to the Indigenous people from whom it had been expropriated.

Our Congressman was thus facing two radical ideas: First, some lands might be better suited as parks than as homesteads. Second, those parks might need to be national rather than local. (A third idea, that perhaps these parks could also be Indigenous, was so radical that, sadly, our Congressman likely couldn’t even see it.)

Did our Congressman realize the full implications of the choice in front of him? It’s hard for me to believe he did. Because although on March 1, 1872, Congress voted to set aside Yellowstone as the national park (since it was the first, at the time it was the national park), it didn’t do much more than that.

For example, Congress didn’t prescribe any goals or strategies or budgets or rules to govern the place. It expected the superintendent to serve as a volunteer. The ensuing years proved pretty chaotic, with tourists, corporations, superintendents, and various Indian tribes vying to shape the place’s future.

Our Congressman had been particularly silent on Indigenous issues. Tukudika (Sheep Eater) Indians continued to live in Yellowstone for many years after 1872. Other tribes continually traveled through. Most alarmingly to a racist national media, bands of Nez Perce in 1877 and Bannock in 1878 used trails in Yellowstone to “flee” from “wars.”

But the 1872 set-aside had said nothing about the park’s status in such a war, about Indigenous people pursuing treaty-guaranteed activities on these lands, about how any law would be enforced, or about who would pay for any of this. The chaos thus involved not only Indigenous people, but also poaching, bribery, and vandalism. Finally the whole enterprise was handed off to the military, which ran the park until the 1916 founding of the National Park Service.

In short, it’s easy in hindsight to criticize those Congressmen (yes, sadly, they were all men) of 1872. There was so much they didn’t see. So much they didn’t plan for. There are so many issues we grapple with today that trace back to their failures.

Yet isn’t that always true? None of us are perfect.

Our Congressman and his successors kept trying. In 1890, they consecrated three other national parks, with more to follow in coming decades. In 1891, they passed a law that allowed the President to set aside vast forest reserves—expanding the idea of parks to other forms public land. In 1894, they passed a law that protected wildlife in Yellowstone, and thus established procedures for federal jurisdiction and management.

It’s almost as if our Congressman perceived that he was doing more than creating the world’s first national park. He was taking the first step toward a new model of land management. He was midwifing the birth of America’s public lands.

Today, public lands are one of the West’s biggest political successes. They bring untold benefits to millions of people. But we often speak of them as if they’re some sort of birthright, rather than the result of historical progress, of brave Congressmen embracing new ideas.

The March 1 anniversary isn’t just about Yellowstone. It’s about public lands throughout the nation. Every time we use public lands to hike, hunt, fish, ski, cycle, snowmobile, four-wheel, climb, camp, or watch wildlife, we are standing on the accomplishments of those Congressmen from 154 years ago.

End notes:

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