Yellowstone National Park was established as the world's first national park on a day like today in 1872 and The Grandma wants to remember this important event.
Yellowstone National Park is an American national park located in the western United States, largely in the northwest corner of Wyoming and extending into Montana and Idaho.
It was established by the U.S. Congress and signed into law by President Ulysses S. Grant on March 1, 1872.
Yellowstone was the first national park in the U.S. and is also widely held to be the first national park in the world.
The park is known for its wildlife and its many geothermal features, especially the Old Faithful geyser, one of its most popular. While it represents many types of biomes, the subalpine forest is the most abundant. It is part of the South Central Rockies forests ecoregion.
Although Native Americans have lived in the Yellowstone region for at least 11,000 years, aside from visits by mountain men during the early-to-mid-19th century, organized exploration did not begin until the late 1860s.
Management and control of the park originally fell under the jurisdiction of the United States Department of the Interior, the first Secretary of the Interior to supervise the park being Columbus Delano. However, the U.S. Army was eventually commissioned to oversee management of Yellowstone for a 30-year period between 1886 and 1916.
In 1917, administration of the park was transferred to the National Park Service, which had been created the previous year. Hundreds of structures have been built and are protected for their architectural and historical significance, and researchers have examined more than a thousand archaeological sites.
More information: National Park Service-Yellowstone
Yellowstone National Park spans an area of 8,983 km2, comprising lakes, canyons, rivers, and mountain ranges.
Yellowstone Lake is one of the largest high-elevation lakes in North America and is centred over the Yellowstone Caldera, the largest supervolcano on the continent. The caldera is considered a dormant volcano. It has erupted with tremendous force several times in the last two million years. Half of the world's geysers and hydrothermal features are in Yellowstone, fuelled by this ongoing volcanism. Lava flows and rocks from volcanic eruptions cover most of the land area of Yellowstone. The park is the centrepiece of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, the largest remaining nearly-intact ecosystem in the Earth's northern temperate zone.
In 1978, Yellowstone was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Yellowstone Park is the largest and most famous megafauna location in the contiguous United States. Grizzly bears, wolves, and free-ranging herds of bison and elk live in this park.
The Yellowstone Park bison herd is the oldest and largest public bison herd in the United States. Forest fires occur in the park each year; in the large forest fires of 1988, nearly one third of the park was burnt.
Yellowstone has numerous recreational opportunities, including hiking, camping, boating, fishing, and sightseeing. Paved roads provide close access to the major geothermal areas as well as some lakes and waterfalls. During the winter, visitors often access the park by way of guided tours that use either snow coaches or snowmobiles.
The park contains the headwaters of the Yellowstone River, from which it takes its historical name. Near the end of the 18th century, French trappers named the river Roche Jaune, which is probably a translation of the Hidatsa name Mi tsi a-da-zi, Yellow Rock River. Later, American trappers rendered the French name in English as Yellow Stone. Although it is commonly believed that the river was named for the yellow rocks seen in the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, the Native American name source is unclear.
More information: History
The human history of the park began at least 11,000 years ago when Indians began to hunt and fish in the region.
During the construction of the post office in Gardiner, Montana, in the 1950s, an obsidian point of Clovis origin was found that dated from approximately 11,000 years ago. These Paleo-Indians, of the Clovis culture, used the significant amounts of obsidian found in the park to make cutting tools and weapons.
Arrowheads made of Yellowstone obsidian have been found as far away as the Mississippi Valley, indicating that a regular obsidian trade existed between local tribes and tribes farther east. By the time white explorers first entered the region during the Lewis and Clark Expedition in 1805, they encountered the Nez Perce, Crow, and Shoshone tribes. While passing through present day Montana, the expedition members heard of the Yellowstone region to the south, but they did not investigate it.
In 1806, John Colter, a member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, left to join a
group of fur trappers. After splitting up with the other trappers in
1807, Colter passed through a portion of what later became the park,
during the winter of 1807–1808. He observed at least one geothermal area
in the northeastern section of the park, near Tower Fall.
After surviving wounds he suffered in a battle with members of the Crow and Blackfoot tribes in 1809, Colter described a place of fire and brimstone that most people dismissed as delirium; the supposedly mystical place was nicknamed Colter's Hell.
Over the next 40 years, numerous reports from mountain men and trappers told of boiling mud, steaming rivers, and petrified trees, yet most of these reports were believed at the time to be myth.
After an 1856 exploration, mountain man Jim Bridger, also believed to be the first or second European American to have seen the Great Salt Lake, reported observing boiling springs, spouting water, and a mountain of glass and yellow rock. These reports were largely ignored because Bridger was a known spinner of yarns.
In 1859, a U.S. Army Surveyor named Captain William F. Raynolds embarked on a two-year survey of the northern Rockies. After wintering in Wyoming, in May 1860, Raynolds and his party-which included naturalist Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden and guide Jim Bridger-attempted to cross the Continental Divide over Two Ocean Plateau from the Wind River drainage in northwest Wyoming.
Heavy spring snows prevented their passage, but had they been able to traverse the divide, the party would have been the first organized survey to enter the Yellowstone region. The American Civil War hampered further organized explorations until the late 1860s.
More information: Sunset
The first detailed expedition to the Yellowstone area was the Cook-Folsom-Peterson Expedition of 1869, which consisted of three privately funded explorers. The Folsom party followed the Yellowstone River to Yellowstone Lake. The members of the Folsom party kept a journal- based on the information it reported, a party of Montana residents organized the Washburn-Langford-Doane Expedition in 1870.
It was headed by the surveyor-general of Montana Henry Washburn, and included Nathaniel P. Langford, who later became known as National Park Langford, and a U.S. Army detachment commanded by Lt. Gustavus Doane. The expedition spent about a month exploring the region, collecting specimens and naming sites of interest.
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A Montana writer and lawyer named Cornelius Hedges, who had been a member of the Washburn expedition, proposed that the region should be set aside and protected as a national park; he wrote detailed articles about his observations for the Helena Herald newspaper between 1870 and 1871. Hedges essentially restated comments made in October 1865 by acting Montana Territorial Governor Thomas Francis Meagher, who had previously commented that the region should be protected. Others made similar suggestions.
In an 1871 letter from Jay Cooke to Ferdinand V. Hayden, Cooke wrote that his friend, Congressman William D. Kelley had also suggested Congress pass a bill reserving the Great Geyser Basin as a public park forever.
In 1871, eleven years after his failed first effort, Ferdinand V. Hayden was finally able to explore the region. With government sponsorship, he returned to the region with a second, larger expedition, the Hayden Geological Survey of 1871.
He compiled a comprehensive report, including large-format photographs by William Henry Jackson and paintings by Thomas Moran. The report helped to convince the U.S. Congress to withdraw this region from public auction.
On March 1, 1872, President Ulysses S. Grant signed The Act of Dedication law that created Yellowstone National Park.
More information: Smithsonian Magazine
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