Yellowstone National Park turned 150 years old on March 1, 2022. It is the oldest national park in the U.S., born in 1872 when President Ulysses Grant signed the bill creating it. But how did this legislation come to be, and who played key roles in its success?
In the 19th century, during the great government surveys of the West, artist-explorers were regular participants. So, in 1871, when geologist Ferdinand Hayden led the first scientific expedition into the largely unknown Yellowstone region, his party included artist Thomas Moran and photographer William Henry Jackson. No nineteenth century painters or photographers are more associated with America’s first national park than Moran and Jackson.
During the five weeks that Hayden’s party spent in the future park, the two men worked together to verify the wonders of Yellowstone to a skeptical nation. Moran advised Jackson on viewpoints and posed in some of Jackson’s photos to create a sense of scale. In turn, Jackson lent Moran some of his images for use as he painted. Moran was the consummate “colorist,” one who has never been matched in portraying Yellowstone’s vibrancy. Jackson’s photographs linked art with science through a medium assumed to provide an objective record of Yellowstone’s landscape.
Moran and Jackson were not the only artists on the 1871 survey. Photographer Joshua Crissman of Bozeman, Montana, was a guest, but he lost his camera when it blew over a cliff at the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. Jackson lent him a spare stereo camera. Crissman’s stereo images received only limited distribution in northwest Montana but were the first photographs of Yellowstone seen by the public, a largely forgotten fact.
A third photographer, talented Chicagoan J. T. Hind, was part of a small Army detachment, the Barlow-Heap survey, that coordinated closely with Hayden. But before he could make prints, Hind’s negatives were destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.
Finally, Henry W. Elliott, a topographical draftsman who had been part of one of Hayden’s earlier surveys and who contributed drawings to Hayden’s technical reports to Congress, rounded out the Yellowstone expedition’s artists.
A bill to preserve Yellowstone as a public tourist attraction was being pushed by Jay Cook, the financier of the Northern Pacific Railroad. The railroad planned a line that would run just north of the park. Cook urged geologist Hayden to recommend that “Congress pass a bill reserving the Great Geyser Basin as a public park forever.” Cook also was responsible for Thomas Moran’s participation in the Hayden survey. He realized how important visual imagery would be in promoting Yellowstone’s “wonderland” to potential visitors (and Northern Pacific customers), and he greatly admired Moran’s work.
In 1872, a few months after returning to Washington, Hayden began lobbying for a national park. He knew that no congressman had ever seen an American geyser. Because of this, he needed images to document their existence.
Moran had painted several exquisite watercolors of Yellowstone scenery, including one of Castle Geyser, which he presented to Hayden. A newspaper clipping in the artist’s scrapbook reports that Hayden showed those works to several “leading men” in Washington, including congressmen and the president, and that “all were extremely interested.” According to another news article, key members of Congress “found Moran’s color schemes . . . of great help in clarifying some of the learning in which the scientific members had clothed their findings.”
Hayden also displayed Jackson’s photos at the U.S. Capitol (in some accounts, at the Smithsonian Institution) along with other Yellowstone specimens. Jackson’s son later wrote that an attractively bound portfolio of his father’s photographs was placed on the desk of every member of Congress before the vote. While consistent with Hayden’s lobbying approach, this claim, coming 75 years after the fact, has not been verified. Jackson himself later wrote that he felt Moran’s evocative watercolors did more to persuade Congress than his own black and white photographs.
As time passed and Yellowstone gained in popularity, several other people claimed credit for its creation, including Nathaniel Langford, who had explored Yellowstone a year before Hayden and lectured about it in Washington, D. C., some members of Congress, and General Philip Sheridan, who authorized the Barlow-Heap military survey that coordinated with Hayden’s 1871 expedition.
But in 1872, in no small part due to Hayden’s lobbying and the works of Moran and Jackson, the Yellowstone legislation passed. It was noncontroversial in the Senate, and in the House it carried on a party-line vote, 115 to 65 with 60 abstentions. President Grant signed the bill on March 1.
So, if you photograph or paint a national park and post your work on social media, realize that you are following a track through time that dates back to the very birth of America’s national parks.