“Wonderland:”

Tourism and Yellowstone National Park, 1872-1915

By Jack Zeilenga

Millions of people visit Yellowstone National Park every year. They come to take in its scenic wonders, like Old Faithful and the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone, or to get away from the rush of everyday life and enjoy being back to nature. In the past, countless guidebooks and newspapers promoted visits to the park and informed people about the specifics of how to get there and what to expect. These promotions account for the park’s early visitors, who numbered in the low thousands. Less than a decade into its existence, the park was drawing millions of visitors each year. This increase in visitations resulted in part from the impressive advertising campaigns of the Northern Pacific Railroad. These campaigns created a vision of Yellowstone as a magical place, a mythical realm that embodied individual adventure, shared community, and vigorous health. In the end, however, many visitors were disappointed after their trek into the wilderness. The legends and myth of the park did not reveal themselves as the visitors expected. Despite these shortcomings, the myth of Yellowstone survived individual disenchantment and has actually grown as park visitation has increased.

This paper details the work done by boosters to create a park that would be appealing to visitors. It explores the creation of and reaction to the myth of the “Wonderland” called Yellowstone and focuses on the years between 1872, the date of the park’s founding, and 1915, when automobiles were first allowed into the park, changing forever the structure of travel and tourism. During these years, the Northern Pacific Railroad built its monopolistic hold over the park; this, in turn, helped create its image as a nation builder. In this way, the railroad, the park, and the nation were linked. The park was national in more than its designation as public land held by the federal government. The wonders of Yellowstone represented the American experience: rugged individualism, shared hard work, spiritual renewal, and a new frontier to be explored and settled.

Yellowstone National Park was founded on March 1, 1872, when President Ulysses S. Grant signed the Yellowstone Park Act into law.[i] At the time, Yellowstone was still a rugged wilderness, though it had been explored in detail by a few adventurers. National Park Service historian Richard West Sellars notes that, “Despite its eventual worldwide implications, the Yellowstone Park Act attracted minimal public attention. Congress only briefly debated the bill, giving little indication of what it intended for the park.”[ii]

The Northern Pacific Railroad lobbied for the creation of the park. In the two years prior to the founding of Yellowstone, Northern Pacific manager Jay Cooke and other financiers of the railroad helped to sponsor (through loans) artist Thomas Moran, who painted some of the most famous landscapes of Yellowstone. The group also sponsored a traveling lecture series in 1871 by Nathaniel P. Langford, who joined the Washburn party a year earlier, in an exploration of the Yellowstone area.

Henry D. Washburn, a former Union army general, led an interesting group of explorers in 1870 into what would later become the park. The group included Langford, along with Samuel T. Hauser, the president of the First National Bank of Helena; a correspondent for the Helena Herald; a merchant from the firm King & Gillette; a representative of the mining and freighting firm Plant, Stickney & Ellis, along with several other businessmen. The group followed a route used by the exploration party of David E. Folsom a year earlier.[iii] Writings and maps made on the journey provided important early information on the park, as did Langford’s national lecturing tour. During the first ten years of the park’s existence, tourist numbers stayed low; the annual number of tourists probably never topped 1,000 visitors.[iv] There was no easy way to get to Yellowstone until the railroad arrived. Accordingly, tourists did not begin to converge on the park in larger numbers until 1882. People from all walks of life voyaged to the park. Haines offers an example from the turn of the century:

There were business men vacationing in black coats and top hats, smartly dressed ladies, young men in tennis flannels and others in mail-order suits, several ladies in low-cut dresses with flowers in their hair (they were summering boarders not transient), and a few men in the rough garb of the frontier.[v]

The American West was a land of great mystery for many Americans. The development of the park system, which occurred simultaneously with the opening of western lands for permanent settlement, increased rather than diminished the mystery of the West. People, eager to go west, saw for themselves what great adventures and mysteries awaited them. Offering a chance to experience this great myth created an opportunity not only for patriotic nation building, but also an opportunity to make great profits through tourism. There was a great product to sell; it was just a matter of marketing it to the public.

The first advertising for Yellowstone, in the form of guidebooks, came out shortly after the park’s creation. There was a boom in leisure travel in the post-Civil War United States. Such travel meant that the tourist needed to know where he or she was going and how he or she should do it properly. Guidebooks provided this necessary information.

Two guidebooks of Yellowstone were created by enterprising men in 1872: James Richardson’s Wonders of Yellowstone and William Cullen Bryant’s Picturesque America. Neither of these men had ever been to the park; both used accounts by previous explorers of the park as the texts for their books. Several subsequent guidebook authors simplu made material up about Yellowstone. Anyone who had been to the park and read some of the material would have found it ridiculous.

Wonders was popular enough to be published in London in 1874. Bryant’s book highlighted various scenic locations across the United States, dedicating a chapter to Yellowstone, and incorporating beautiful engravings of landscapes. These books gave the public an early feel for the park, and began an industry that would prove lucrative for a number of authors.

“Writing” guidebooks became a popular way for one to make a living. People wanted to know more about places before they visited them and guidebooks were the best source. These books would contain text, first hand accounts, pictures, and, occasionally, historical or geographical information about an area. A number of guidebooks were published during the first twenty years of the park. Many had at least a chapter devoted to Yellowstone, if not the entire book. Harry J. Norton produced Wonderland Illustrated in 1873. This book differed from the first two because Norton was a local, and thus had some experience in the park and could speak to what he had witnessed. In 1876, The Earl of Dunraven’s guidebook, The Great Divide, detailed his hunting trip to the park in 1874, but also took much of its text from previous material. This book was quite widely read and popular in Europe. W.W. Wylie, who operated some of the tent camps in the park, wrote the 1882 book, Yellowstone National Park.

Some of the books had ties to major railroad corporations. 1879’s To the Rockies and Beyond and 1881’s Our Western Empire were both written for the Union Pacific Railroad and each contained a chapter on Yellowstone. The Yellowstone National Park: A Manual for Tourists (1883) and Official Guide to Yellowstone National Park (1886, published again in 1890) were both affiliated with the Northern Pacific Railroad.[vi]

University of New Mexico M.A. student Raymond W. Rast, in a 1998 Journal of the West article touched on guidebooks, noting:

Their books reached a broad market, supplying information regarding railroad schedules, accommodations, and attractive sites. The information demanded, and provided, indicates who published these guidebooks and why: railroad companies and local business owners from Western cities and towns all would profit from tourism, so these publishers worked to make the West alluring.[vii]

These guidebooks began to turn people’s attention to the park and its natural wonders. The descriptions and pictures, more than the thoughts or works of the authors, pulled people in and painted an image in their minds. In his book, Wylie had promised on the title page that “those who cannot visit the Park will find the book an excellent substitute.”[viii] This planted the first seeds that would continue to grow into the Yellowstone Myth. The advertising work of the railroads, the Northern Pacific in particular, helped to embellish this myth, and drive tourism to the park.

Beginning in the mid-1880’s, the Northern Pacific began to publish a series of “colorfully written and illustrated” pamphlets and guidebooks under the moniker Wonderland, starting with the 1885 compilation, Northern Pacific Railroad: The Wonderland Route to the Pacific Coast.[ix] The term “wonderland” had been used for years by locals to describe the park, referring to Alice in Wonderland; the Northern Pacific took the idea and made it larger. The guidebooks were produced annually until 1906. At the peak of their popularity, annual printings reached 40,000 copies, forwarded along by request for six cents in postage.[x] The railroad commissioned artists, photographers, and authors of the period to accompany advertising campaigns. Some of the paintings hung in ticket offices, railroad stations, hotels, bank lobbies, and the like. Other images and paintings produced became quite famous in their own right, including Thomas Moran’s 1872 painting, Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone.

Eventually park advertisements of all kinds popped up, in various media. Commissioned paintings were reproduced on calendars, souvenir playing cards, postcards, railroad timetables, and dining car menus.[xi] By the turn of the century, there were large-scale, mass-produced, full-color posters showing images of Yellowstone.

Montana’s Historical Society Museum curator of collections Kirby Lambert noted:

Whether through visual images of the printed word, western railroads fashioned one consistent message for Americans – go west and do so by train. Consequently, posters, calendars, brochures, and guidebooks were linked by unifying themes about what made the parks desirable destinations. Foremost among these themes was the scenery.[xii]

The Wonderland series portrayed Yellowstone as an “exotic landscape” that was distinctly American and the covers of the publications were often graced with images of soaring eagles, noble savages, or Lady Liberty.[xiii] The guidebooks not only tried to align themselves with Americans’ patriotic heartstrings, but also with the American vision of expansion and civilizing. Shaffer noted:

¼the Northern Pacific’s production and promotion of Yellowstone as Wonderland was framed in terms of discovery and exploration. In the Wonderland guidebooks, Wheeler [the guidebook author] contextualized the description of Yellowstone with heroic tales of westward expansion and Manifest Destiny: the saga of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Custer’s Last Stand, the building of the railroad. In providing a comfortable view onto this exotic wilderness, in domesticating the sublime, in making this strange landscape accessible to tourists, the railroad positioned itself and the tourist experience as part of the larger civilizing process of westward expansion. By defining Yellowstone as Wonderland, the experience of tourism as discovery and exploration remained a continual process and promise, rather than an accomplished feat or fact. As Wonderland, Yellowstone always remained just on the edge of civilization, waiting to be discovered and explored by the tourist.[xiv]

Newspaper articles of the period reported on various topics related to Yellowstone, giving free advertising of the park as well. Writers, telling of their own visits to the park, visits by others, or reporting on various issues involved with the park, provided the public with further information about Yellowstone. Not only were advertisements and guidebooks creating a visual sense of the park for people, but newspapers were adding to the image and promoting the parks, even for an overseas audience.

An 1883 New York Times article that was taken from the London Daily Telegraph reported:

To those who have had more than enough of the Alps and the Tyrol, of Saxon Switzerland and the Pyrenees, of Baden-Baden and Homburg, and of the cathedrals and picture galleries of Europe, we strongly recommend a trip across the Atlantic and a visit to that marvelously beautiful National Park on the Yellowstone which is commonly spoken of by our enthusiastic kinsmen as “Wonderland.”[xv]

A September article in the Times from that same year urged visitors to the park, both from America and beyond:

Visitors to the Yellowstone region who enter the park from the north are introduced to the Mammoth Hot Springs as the first of the great wonders of the reservation set apart by the Government for the enjoyment and instruction of the whole people not only for this country, but for the people of any other country who may choose to come here.[xvi]

The descriptive writing of the papers helped reemphasize the idea of natural beauty and wilderness at Yellowstone. A New York Times article in July of 1883 spoke to the opportunity for upcoming adventures:

The almost mystical wonderland which Congress set apart for the public enjoyment some 11 years ago, under the name of the Yellowstone National Park, is just now getting itself into the condition when tourists may safely and comfortably enjoy its many beauties of climate and scenery and witness the varied phenomena which nature has here congregated¼The meadows and the mountain-sides are clothed in luxuriant green, while everywhere the verdure is studded with millions upon millions of flowers of the brightest and most varied hues.[xvii]

Reports about the park, including conditions, attendance figures, and general interest stories, appeared often in newspapers such as The New York Times during this period. Numerous advertisements could be found in the classified ads as well, promoting group trips or personal voyages to Yellowstone National Park. Visitors struggled to have their expectations of the park met. The bar had been set so high by the advertising barrage that it was at times impossible for the park to live up to it. Reality, in many cases, could not compete with imagination.

Rast notes that: “Once in the park, a number of these visitors found Yellowstone disappointing.”[xviii] This sort of situation was not only confined to Yellowstone, but numerous other locations saturated by image advertising. Sears gives a general example, which can be easily be applied to Yellowstone. He states:

Tourist attractions often seem less impressive than the descriptions in guidebooks and tourists must also contend with the flatness of their own responses. They must always struggle with the inflated expectations that made some of them describe their visit to Niagara Falls as the greatest thrill of their lives (whether it was or not), while others experienced it as the greatest disappointment.[xix]

Sociologist Colin Campbell touches on these sorts of feelings when addressing consumerism. People who visited Yellowstone were consumers on a grand scale – consumers of the railroad, consumers of park accommodations, and consumers of the park itself. Campbell notes that, “we can say that the basic motivation underlying consumerism is the desire to experience in reality that pleasurable experience the consumer has already enjoyed imaginatively¼the illusion is always better than the reality, the promise more interesting than actuality.”

Most of the groundwork for people making the trip to the park, regardless of the reasons, was laid by advertising. The issue of tourism deserves further scrutiny, though, and will be looked at from the standpoint of what tourists were physically doing while in the park. People visited Yellowstone for a variety of reasons. These reasons can be arranged into a few broad categories – adventure, health benefits, hunting, and public conformity. In its early years, the park could prove dangerous to many of these activities. Most tourists who visited Yellowstone stayed for only four or five days, perhaps just a stop on a longer journey throughout the West.20

People from all over the world came to Yellowstone to find adventure. The park evoked images of the “Wild West” or a strange, unfamiliar landscape in the minds of some that made the trip to experience this ‘wildness’ first hand. The landscape was unlike anything most people had ever seen before, and the park’s unusual and sometimes grotesque features delighted and disgusted travelers. Some who visited the park found its features to be cold and impersonal, and the landscape in some places turned to a barren, crusted wasteland by sulfuric hot springs or mud spitting volcanoes.

For many tourists, this strange landscape provided adventure, like a voyage to another world. They embraced the landscape’s difference and enjoyed the natural beauty of places like Yellowstone Lake, the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, Mammoth Cave, and the park’s many hot springs and geysers – the most famous being Old Faithful. Old Faithful became the principal symbol of Yellowstone mainly because it catered to visitors’ desires – it went off like clockwork.21 Most of the other geysers in the park refused to go off with any regularity, leaving their visitors unhappy and disappointed. For those geysers (and their eager observers), it was hit or miss. Mostly miss.

A visit to Yellowstone for adventure meant “roughing it” for many visitors, a phrase made famous by Mark Twain’s book by the same name, released to the public in the same year as Yellowstone. This idea of “roughing it” may have harked back to an image of the old west, where cowboys spent their days on the open range and nights under the stars of big sky country. By camping out in the park, tourists could live out this adventure and cowboy image. For many, particularly those from the cities in the east, this also provided a getaway from noise and urban congestion and an excursion into the serene. Historian John F. Sears contends that “Roughing it was a form of playacting and reflected a desire to participate in the Wild West show, not just watch it.”22

A number of tourists during this period visited the park for its health benefits. ‘Therapeutic’ hot springs and clean western air became a major draw for many. People with a variety of health problems ventured to the park in search of a cure for their ailments.

In an article exploring the early years of the park, University of Kansas graduate teaching assistant in Geology Langdon Smith and Montana State University professor of earth science William Wyckoff noted:

By the mid 1880’s, the medicinal values of the hot springs were receiving more national scientific attention. In July of 1885, Popular Science Monthly published an article by Edward Frankland, M.D., “setting forth the special advantages of Yellowstone Park as the best winter resort on the American Continent, or in the world, for consumptives, dyspeptics, rheumatics and for the cutaneous [sic] complaints, diseases of the kidney and the genital organs¼Bathing in hot springs, drinking the mineral water, and breathing the vapors was credited with “permanently curing” miner’s poisoning (exposure to arsenic), consumption, vertigo, insomnia, loss of appetite, and “general prostration.”23

In 1886 a well-known German doctor predicted that because of the arsenic content in the spring water, which was effective in treating nervous disorders, the park would become “the great International Nervous Sanatorium.”24 It was envisioned by some that the hotels of the park would become like spas, with healing natural baths and mud-pools. The natural healing effects of Yellowstone would continue to draw visitors throughout this period.

Hunting could also be a draw for tourists to visit the park. Within its boundaries, the park contained a host of wild game including elk, buffalo, and deer. For some, the adventure of the hunt might have been the imagined American image of an African safari. During the early years of the park, hunting and poaching tended to be unregulated, and any rules were not enforced. This led to large numbers of game just as likely being taken illegally as legally. Once more stringent regulations were put into place, poaching became somewhat less prevalent, but still remained a problem (as it does in the park today).

Another reason for a park visitation may well have been the desire to fit in or show oneself to be of an upper class. It took a great deal of money to be able to afford to travel to the park during this period; a trip to Yellowstone could symbolize one’s economic status. As more people visited the park and reported back about it, it became something one needed to do to fit in with American society. Clearly, this was not the main reason that many visited the park, but it may have played a small part in why some people made the long trip west.

Issues of class and consumption have been interwoven into the fabric of America since its inception. These issues played a role in the daily lives of everyone, in all aspects of life, including travel and vacation time. By being able to take part in the same exercise in the consumption of experiences – visiting the park - people of a lower class could feel more on par with those above them. For these people, visiting Yellowstone was less about seeing the park’s wonders or being pulled in by the myth than about trying to conform to public norms and fit in with the upper class of society.

While people visited Yellowstone for a variety of reasons, once there, everyone faced dangers from a variety of sources, both induced by Mother Nature and created by man. In the early years, there were no walkways or railings to protect tourists from hot springs or geysers. In 1882, Walter Watson volunteered to be lowered a short distance into one of the geysers to procure some mementos, but the crust gave away and he fell into the geyser. His three companions lowered a light into the geyser, but were unable to find him and assumed him dead. The next morning Watson was found, albeit quite shaken, with a story of how the geyser was in fact active and its rising water level had eventually pushed him back to the surface.25

An article in the New York Times on July 9, 1901 reported that “Two women fell into one of the boiling ‘paint pots’ at the Thumb of the Lake, and before they could be rescued, sustained injuries which may prove fatal.”26 An article on October 7, 1904 reported: “A man and boy employed in the Yellowstone National Park were recently killed by bears.”27 In 1910, a tourist was killed when the coach in which he was riding sank ten feet into a cave in of the road.28

Dangers of the “Wild West” plagued tourists from time to time. During brief encounters in 1874 and 1877, tourists visiting the park to camp out and ‘rough it’ were attacked by Nez Perce Indians. In both instances, a small number of tourists were killed or taken captive.29 Bandits struck the park on occasion as well. A lone bandit in 1908 robbed seven stagecoaches filled with tourists and took $7,000 in money and jewels.30 In 1914 two men held up 165 tourists for about $3,000, although the robbers “refrained from taking any jewels.”31

In the early years of the park, before the construction of hotels, tent camps often served as accommodations for tourists who did not want to camp on their own. Enterprising businessmen set up tented campsites near various park attractions, where visitors could stay for a fee. The camps of the Wylie Camping Co. were said to consist of:

Large and small tents, with spring beds and stoves, and diningroom, so that tourists [could] have all the pleasures and experiences of tenting – with a blazing campfire every evening – without the necessity of hunting for fuel and water and doing their own foraging and cooking.32

Some of the tent accommodations tended to be relatively rough around the edges. Sears points out that: “Tourists complained that the tent hotels¼lacked chairs, mirrors, and even soap and that the beds sometimes had to be shared.”33

The construction of hotels in the park began early in the 1880’s. The growing concern in America of monopolies kept the Northern Pacific from applying for the direct rights to build hotels under their name and logo. To skirt this concern and regulation, Senator William Windom of Minnesota, Carroll Hobard, section superintendent for the railroad, and other prominent men from the Minnesota-Dakota territory formed an independent syndicate to invest in, and have exclusive privilege to build, hotels in the park. The Northern Pacific heavily invested in this group, thanks in large part to Wall Street tycoon Rufus Hatch, a large investor in the railroad.34 The group came to be named the Yellowstone National Park Improvement Company. A ten-year lease was soon signed giving the group exclusive access to build hotels in the park. The lease consisted of seven tracts of land “aggregating 10 acres, and it is provided that the several parcels of land shall not be within one-quarter of a mile of any of the geysers or the Yellowstone Falls.”35

The lease also specified the following:

The parties of the second part agree to construct one principal hotel at the Mammoth Hot Springs to cost $150,000 and contain not less than 250 rooms. They further agree to construct six smaller hotels, upon plans to be hereafter approved by the Secretary of the Interior, at the following points: one near the geysers, one at Riverside Station, one at Soda Butte Springs, one at Tower Falls, one at Great Falls, and one on the banks of Yellowstone Lake.36

The contract not only gave the group access to build near attractions such as Old Faithful and the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, but also a monopoly on a number of other items. The group now had exclusive rights to transportation in the park, boating on the Yellowstone Lake, rights to operate telegraph lines, run retail stores, and use whatever raw materials (timber and coal) from the park they might need to build and heat the hotels.37 The Northern Pacific Railroad and its partners now held a monopoly on the entire tourist experience, from their transportation to the park right through their vacation time there and transportation back home.

The hotel at Mammoth Hot Springs was the first constructed, in 1882 and 1883. It was partially completed by mid-1883 when visitors started staying there. However, in 1884 the Yellowstone National Park Improvement Company went bankrupt. Fighting over control of the defunct company went on for a few years. After struggles by a couple of different parties over who controlled the lease, government seizure of control, protest and politics, the organization eventually ended up in the hands of Montana businessman Harry Child. Child was helped along in his endeavors quietly by low interest loans from the Northern Pacific.38

Guests were admitted to the Lake Hotel in 1891, but it was far from completed. It reached completion (210 rooms) in 1904. The Old Faithful Inn was also completed in 1904. Canyon Hotel was completed in its present form in 1911.39 Tourists now had a way to get around in the park and somewhere to stay, but what sorts of things did they do in the park?

Visitors to Yellowstone did many of the same things visitors today do, taking in the most popular sites and features. Tourists often took stagecoach tours that traveled a loop through the park, stopping at popular destinations, like Old Faithful. When not seeing the sights, tourists found other forms of entertainment. Bath Lake, above the terraces of Mammoth Hot Springs, was a popular spot for tourists to swim. Bathing suits tended to be scarce in that day, so men swam in the lake, generally in the nude. For a period of time, ladies were not supposed to swim in Bath Lake at all.40

In a 1903 issue of The Century Magazine, Ray Stannard Baker detailed his visit to the park. He found tourism running rampant throughout Yellowstone, changing the definition of “wilderness.” He noted:

We must refuse to be convinced by the unsatisfied one who finds incongruity in the ugly red hotels, the yellow coaches, the galloping tourists, the kodaks. After all, every age is entitled to its own sort of wilderness, and ours seems to include the tourist and the hotel; the traveler to-day as much a part of the Rocky Mountains as the elk or the lodge-pole pine. No picture of the modern wilderness would to-day be complete without the sturdy golf-shirted American girl with her kodak, the white-top wagon, the Eastern youth turned suddenly Western, with oddly worn sombrero and spurs. It was a shock to one traveler’s sensibilities (but it converted him) the day he went poetizing up a faint trail through the deep woods. “This,” he was thinking, “is the forest primeval; this is the far limit of the wilderness. Surely no human foot has ever before trod upon this soft timber grass_” I think he expected momentarily to see a deer of a bear spring from its secure resting place, when, lo and behold, a party of girls_¼But most of the tourists remain pretty snugly in their coach-seats or near the hotels.41

Some visitors found it exciting to spend their free time souvenir hunting. This led to some strange, and ultimately, destructive behavior. Early tourists participated in conduct such as “breaking off mineral specimens, shooting wildlife, leaving campfires burning, and soaping geysers to make them erupt¼”42

Tourists fishing in Yellowstone Lake would sometimes take their catch, still hooked and living, and lower it into a hot spring to cook. Some visitors tried to encourage new geysers by poking sticks through the crust where water was bubbling to the surface. Others threw pieces of clothing into geysers to be washed, although the clothing tended to be destroyed. Other strange behaviors also took place:

Tourists also placed pine cones, ferns, acorns, pieces of wood, shoes, hats, thimbles, knives, forks, scissors, horseshoes, bottles, and picture frames in the hot springs. When they removed them a day or two later, they were encrusted with a hard, white deposit of silica. Such objects soon became a staple of the Yellowstone souvenir sellers. A few tourists tried making tea from the boiling water of a geyser, although William Owen reported that an hour after drinking three cups of the stuff, he experienced an attack of “violent retching and blinding headache, accompanied with vertigo.”43

Advertising of the time, through guidebooks, promotional materials, posters, paintings, and newspaper articles helped to shape the image of Yellowstone as “Wonderland.”

Was this advertising necessarily bad? While in many cases it made the park out to be something that it wasn’t, it clearly drew people there to see for themselves. Visitors brought in money, enabling the park to be improved for further visitors. This visitation is what has kept Yellowstone and parks like it in operation for over a century, just out of the clutches of commercial development. By setting aside areas like Yellowstone, citizens preserve unique natural wonders, protect wildlife, and educate the public about our nation’s history, nature, and conservation. The Northern Pacific’s goal was clearly to make money from the park and use it as a powerful branding symbol, a goal at which they were extremely successful. This success cannot be questioned. However, this ability to draw people to the park in the early years may have helped to preserve it in its entirety, keeping out further development, and setting the stage for generations of tourists from all over the world to enjoy it, including those who visit today.

This paper has looked at the subject of Yellowstone and tourism from 1872-1915 in a general sense. Numerous books, articles, and research papers have been written about various time periods in the park, but there is always room for further research. One could focus on the writing and advertisement for the park found in newspapers of the time, extracting more information on what sorts of materials were covered and why the author(s) may have chosen to report on particular events or from specific angles. The battle between the United States and Europe over who had the best destinations for vacationing travelers was in full tilt during this period as well. Similarly, looking at how the inception of the park affected people already living in the area could prove fruitful to future researchers. As with any historical event in a specific time period, many factors and people played roles in the events, and further research into some of these areas could enrich the field of history.

Whether seen as positive or negative, the advertising of the period 1972 to 1915 created a myth that played a key role in the development of tourism in Yellowstone National Park. The visions created by the barrage of advertisements and pictures painted a romanticized image in the mind of the reader. This image, more myth than reality, has lured people to visit the park and experience “Wonderland” for themselves. Its impact on the American consciousness, both in the 1872-1915 time frame and today, should not be overlooked.

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[i] Aubrey L. Haines, The Yellowstone Story, Volume 1. (Niwoth, CO: University of Colorado Press, 1996), 172.

[ii] Richard West Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks: A History. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997): 7.

[iii] Haines, Vol. 1, 108-130.

[iv] Richard A. Bartlett, “The Concessionaires of Yellowstone National Park,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 74 (1983): 3.

[v] Aubrey L. Haines, The Yellowstone Story, Volume 2. (Niwoth, CO: University of Colorado Press, 1996), 105.

[vi] All information about guidebooks from 1872 to 1886 taken from Judith L. Meyer, The Spirit of Yellowstone: The Cultural Evolution of a National Park. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 1996): 44-45.

[vii] Rast, 82.

[viii] Ibid.

[ix] Alfred Runte, “Burlington Northern and the Legacy of Mount St. Helens,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 74 (1983): 118.

[x] Alfred Runte, “Promoting Wonderland: Western Railroads and the Evolution of National Park Advertising,” Journal of the West 31 (1992): 44.

[xi] Kirby Lambert, “The Lure of the Parks,” Montana 46 (1996): 45-46.

[xii] Lambert, 48.

[xiii] Shaffer, 50.

[xiv] Shaffer, 52.

[xv] “Our National Park,” The New York Times (August 3, 1883): 2.

[xvi] “Among the Hot Springs,” The New York Times (September 11, 1883): 5.

[xvii] “A Western Wonderland,” The New York Times (July 15, 1883): 10.

[xviii] Rast, 88.

[xix] Sears, 172.

53 Colin Campbell, “Consuming Goods and the Good of Consuming.” In Consumer Society in American History: A Reader, edited by Lawrence B. Glickman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999): 26.

20 John F. Sears, Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 172.

21 Sears, 173.

22 Sears, 179.

23 Langdon Smith and William Wyckoff, “Creating Yellowstone: Montanans in the Early Park Years,” Historical Geographic 29 (2001): 102.

24 Sears, 176.

25 Smith and Wyckoff, 102-103.

26 “Buried in Boiling Mud,” The New York Times (July 9, 1901): 2.

27 “Bears Kill Man and Boy,” The New York Times (October 7, 1904): 1.

28 “Killed in National Park,” The New York Times (August 14, 1910): 1.

29 Smith and Wyckoff, 103-104; Sears, 180-181.

30 “One Man Holds Up Seven Park Stages,” The New York Times (August 25, 1908): 1.

31 “Tourists Held Up in the Yellowstone,” The New York Times (July 30, 1914): 1.

32 Raymond W. Rast, “Vistas, Visions, and Visitors: Creating the Myth of Yellowstone National Park, 1872-1915,” Journal of the West 37 (1998): 86.

33 Sears, 178.

34 Bartlett, 4-6.

35 “National Capital Topics,” The New York Times (March 11, 1883): 7.

36 Ibid.

37 Bartlett, 5.

38 Bartlett, 7-10.

39 Haines, Vol. 2, 119, 127-129.

40 Ibid, 107.

41 Ray Stannard Baker, “A Place of Marvels: Yellowstone Park as it Now is,” The Century Magazine 66 (1903): 490-491.

42 Smith and Wyckoff, 104.

43 Sears, 171.