Review of SAVING YELLOWSTONE
How Yellowstone National Park Came to Be
I’m a big national park fan, traveling to several each year to camp, hike, and explore “America’s Best Idea”. I’ve even read a book (most of it, anyway) on the full history of our National Parks, but it focused mostly on the government organization and mission of the National Parks Service over time. Not super interesting.
But Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America by Megan Kate Nelson was different – in all the best ways. It was written so well that I couldn’t put it down. History is not my favorite non-fiction genre to be honest. It’s usually so dense and dry that it’s my most common “did not finish” category (including the National Parks history book mentioned above). But if all history was written like Nelson’s, I’d read much more of it.
What made Saving Yellowstone stand out to me was that rather than the non-narrative, dissertation-style approach to most history books, Nelson followed a few key people during a specific span of time in history.
Focusing on the reconstruction era of the 1870s after the American civil war, Saving Yellowstone is centered on the Hayden Survey Expedition through Yellowstone Basin, which was sponsored by the US government. The result of this expedition was increased scientific understanding of the unique geology of Yellowstone and, eventually, the beauty and artifacts of the region were enough to convince congress to form America’s first National Park — a precedent that would lead to our current 62 nationally protected parks and hundreds of other federally protected sites across the US.
But the whitewashed romanticism of our nation’s first National Park is underpinned by racism and unfavorable relations with Native Americans whose homelands were Yellowstone (and all of our other national parks). The reconstruction era was a time when relations with Natives in western territories were souring – treaties being reneged, forced removal, and the selling of their homelands to white settlers.
I learned a lot from this book about not only the years leading up to the establishment of Yellowstone National Park, but also about the reconstruction era of our country’s history, Native American relations, and how many of our beloved national parks came to be. This was a fantastic book. I wish all history was written like this.
Share in the comments if you know of more history authors of this caliber.
Published: March 2022
Format: Hardcover
If you think this sounds interesting, bookmark these other great reads:
Grinnell: America's Environmental Pioneer and His Restless Drive to Save the West by John Taliaferro (2019)
This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West by Christopher Ketcham (2019)
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