The Campfire That Probably Didn't Happen

Every park brochure tells the same story. In September of eighteen seventy, the men of the Washburn-Langford-Doane expedition gathered around a campfire here at the confluence of the Madison and Firehole Rivers. Moved by what they had seen, they discussed the idea of claiming portions of the landscape for personal profit, and then, in a moment of collective altruism, decided instead to give it to the nation. Two years later, on March first, eighteen seventy-two, President Grant signed Yellowstone into existence as the world's first national park. The campfire became the creation myth.

The problem: historians have spent decades looking for contemporaneous evidence of that conversation and have not found it. No journal entry from the expedition's members, written during or immediately after the trip, describes the campfire discussion in those terms. The version that entered the historical record came primarily from Nathaniel Langford, who wrote about the campfire in his book The Discovery of Yellowstone Park, published in nineteen oh five, thirty-five years after the fact, with no corroboration from the other men who were supposedly there.

What is well-documented is the actual legislative campaign. Jay Cooke, the financier behind the Northern Pacific Railroad, recognized that Yellowstone's thermal wonders would drive tourists onto his rail lines. His company lobbied Congress. Ferdinand Hayden's eighteen seventy-one government survey produced photographs by William Henry Jackson and paintings by Thomas Moran, images that gave Congress a visual argument the words alone could not make. The park was created, in part, because a railroad executive understood that wilderness could be sold.

The campfire story is better than the lobbying story. That is probably why it survived.