How Cars Transformed Yellowstone

The automobile changed the way people experienced national parks—and the parks’ nature

Before 1915, almost all visitors to Yellowstone National Park arrived by train, and took a regimented weeklong stagecoach tour of the important sites. That meant visitors had to be wealthy enough to afford the trip. It also meant that they experienced nature in the way that their tour guides told them to.

Beginning on August 1, 1915, cars democratized Yellowstone. In a car, you could bring your own food and camping gear. More importantly, you could go where you wanted to when you wanted to, spending as much time as you liked. You could decide for yourself what the important sites were. You decided what nature was, and how you wanted to interact with it.

The 1910s and ‘20s saw an explosion of outdoor recreation. It’s sometimes seen as an escape from urban drudgery, an extension of Rooseveltian masculinity, or a democratic expansion of upper-class nature tourism. But the easiest explanation is the automobile. In 1910, 1 in every 265 Americans had owned a car; by 1929 it was 1 in 5. Although press accounts talked about “outdoor recreation” as if everyone was hiking and swimming and playing tennis, surveys showed that the two most popular forms of outdoor recreation in the 1920s were motor touring and “autocamping.” Half of the vehicles on the road in that decade were used for camping. And industry rose up around it: the Coleman stove and Airstream trailer were invented; automaker Henry Ford and tiremaker Harvey Firestone went on highly publicized autocamping trips. On one trip they were accompanied by President Warren Harding, who was happy that progress allowed him to use a car rather than the horses that had supported Teddy Roosevelt’s camps.

Paradoxically, however, in Yellowstone the automobile reduced your intimacy with nature. Under the old regime, there had been a divide between “civilization” (train, stagecoach, hotel) and “nature” (geysers, trees, mountains). To experience nature, you had to get out and walk or ride a horse. But now you scurried through it on motor power. Automobilists were quick to complain about bad roads, and yet good roads turned auto travel into a fast, utilitarian function rather than the outdoor experience that you had come to Yellowstone for.

Yellowstone advocates had fought hard to keep railroads out of the park. Trains represented industry: noise, pollution, big heavy machines. Trains represented commerce: your ticket supported a wealthy industrialist back East. Trains represented scale: crowds, fixed routes, and defined schedules.

At the time, many people perceived a car as more like a horse than a train. It was relatively small, and offered individual freedoms. But it was tied to roads. It kept you separated from the odors and hazards and delights and grizzly bears in your metal-and-glass lozenge. It supported your camping experience, but the swarms of campers forced Yellowstone administrators to restrict that activity to formalized campgrounds that dictated where to park the car and where to build the fire.

Seeing wild animals from the car is a signature experience of Yellowstone. But how did roads affect the park and its ecological processes?

I’ve recently been pondering cars in Yellowstone, because I’ve been writing an article about the implications for Yellowstone of Ben Goldfarb’s wonderful new book Crossings. Goldfarb introduces lay readers to the concept of road ecology—the complicated ways that roads warp ecosystems, and how we might mitigate some of those changes. The article looks at how that plays out in the park and its surroundings.

Road ecology is fascinating science. It also prompts me to wonder: What if Yellowstone’s leaders had made a different decision in 1915? Without the automobile and its roads, how might the park’s history have played out differently—for wildlife, for visitors, for surrounding communities, and for the National Park Service and national wilderness movement?

Roads both brought us closer to nature and altered the nature we were getting close to. Natural stories diverge from there.

Discussion:

• I highly recommend Goldfarb’s Crossings. Again, my essay on it is here.

• One of my favorite works of environmental history is Paul Sutter’s Driven Wild: How the Fight against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement (U. of Washington Press, 2002). For cars in Yellowstone, see pp. 107-110.

• I offer other perspectives on the introduction of cars to Yellowstone in Wonderlandscape: Yellowstone National Park and the Evolution of an American Cultural Icon, especially in Chapters 4 and 6. If you buy it or other books from my page on bookshop.org, a local bookstore and I get a slight bonus from the referral.

• Thanks to all who have answered last week’s survey. I’ll leave it open another week, and report back in the New Year on what I learned.

• In the comments, I’d love to hear your thoughts on cars, crossings, and how we experience nature.