Eleven Thousand Years at Obsidian Cliff

The cliff face along the road north of Norris is black. Not the gray of granite, not the brown of sandstone: black, and glassy, catching light in a way rock is not supposed to. This is obsidian, volcanic glass formed when silica-rich lava cooled faster than crystals could grow. It is as sharp as a surgical blade when fractured. For thousands of years, people came here from across the Rocky Mountain West to get it.

The Tukudika, the Sheep Eater band of the Eastern Shoshone, lived year-round in what is now Yellowstone. Not passing through. Living. They built wickiup shelters, hunted bighorn sheep with bows tipped with obsidian points, used the hot springs for cooking and bathing, and left fire rings and stone tools throughout the high country. Archaeological sites across the park document their presence going back eleven thousand years, to the edge of the last glaciation.

The obsidian from this cliff moved. USGS sourcing research has traced tools made from Obsidian Cliff material to sites as far as Ohio, traded through networks that stretched from the Pacific slope to the Mississippi watershed. The Tukudika were not isolated mountain people. They were connected to a continent.

When Yellowstone was declared a national park in eighteen seventy-two, the proclamation described the land as uninhabited wilderness. The Tukudika were still there. When the United States Army took over park management in eighteen eighty-six, the removal of Indigenous people from within park boundaries became explicit policy. The specific Army orders directing that removal are not fully established in the public record; the details of those directives remain a gap in the available documentation. What is documented, in Army records and in the history of the Wind River Reservation, is the outcome: the Tukudika were expelled from land their people had occupied for longer than most civilizations have existed.

The park they were expelled from would market itself for the next century as pristine, untouched wilderness. The obsidian cliff says otherwise. Every flake of worked stone in this landscape is evidence of a human presence that the park's founding myth required to be invisible.