A place called Yellowstone The epic history of the world's first national park

Wilson, professor of environmental studies at Gettysburg College, traces Yellowstone's history back some 13,000 years--a period during which some 27 Indigenous tribes called the region home--but he focuses primarily on the period from the first European "discovery" of this fantastical expanse in the early 1800s to the present day. Encompassing a mere 300 years, that history is fraught with high-wire clashes, from battles between Europeans and Indigenous tribes to determine sovereignty over the land to the congressional fight to make Yellowstone the country's first national park; from the development--pushed by the railroads and by human greed--of the tourism industry ("Please don't feed the bears!") to the dawning impact of the environmental movement and the reintroduction of wolves and the keystone bison to the American West; and finally to advances in scientific research that would lead to, among other things, the "gold-standard test" for COVID-19. Tensions will always exist between the tourism industry and the conservation movement over Yellowstone's precious resources, but Wilson's account shows an unfolding awareness and sensitivity on both sides to the treasures that lie within those 2.2 million acres.

History of the exploration of the Yellowstone River country and its establishment as the world's first national park. Yellowstone, writes Gettysburg College environmental studies professor Wilson, "is remarkably distant from just about everywhere and everyone else in the continental United States." For all that, it draws 4 million visitors a year. It was always remote, little settled by Indigenous people until relatively recently. Early on, an American explorer with a background in geology, a junior Army officer named Gustavus Cheyney Doane, recognized that Yellowstone was a vast caldera formed by ancient volcanic action; by Wilson's reckoning, the "largest recorded eruption in human history," that of Indonesia's Mount Tambora, blasted out just 6% of the volcanic debris that Yellowstone's last eruption did--and, as catastrophists are fond of pointing out, Yellowstone is long overdue for another. Wilson's early explorers made for a hardy breed, though strange: The Sioux who encountered one geologist at work must have thought he was crazy for carrying a backpack full of stones, and they left him alone for it--adds Wilson, "In human cultures across the world, mental illness (real or imagined) is often cause for compassion rather than hostility." Although cattle ranchers and miners resisted the effort, Yellowstone finally became a national park, helped along in the end, Wilson reckons, by a strain of 19th-century Romanticism that held that nature "offered humans a path to moral and spiritual well-being and deserved respect for its own sake." Surprisingly, magnate John D. Rockefeller, as Wilson shows, was highly instrumental in protecting the park. Bedeviling park naturalists then and now was how to balance human visitation with protection for wild animals, who today include restored populations of wolves, grizzly bears, bison, and other creatures. A capably drawn portrait of an iconic American place that remains of world significance. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.