The World's First National Park

On March first, eighteen seventy-two, President Ulysses Grant signed the Yellowstone National Park Protection Act into law, setting aside roughly two million acres in the northwestern corner of Wyoming Territory as a public pleasuring ground, to be preserved for the enjoyment of the people. It was the first time in recorded history that any national government had formally protected a large landscape from private development and commerce in perpetuity. The idea was new enough that the English language had not yet produced a settled word for it.

The word would eventually be park. The national park idea did not arrive without controversy or precedent. The Yosemite Valley in California had been granted to the state of California in eighteen sixty-four for public use, but it remained state land.

Yellowstone was a federal preserve from the beginning, administered by the Department of the Interior with no permanent staff and almost no funding for the first decade of its existence. Poachers killed game freely. Tourists chipped souvenirs off geyser cones.

A visitor chiseled his name into the formation known as Old Faithful before anyone thought to post a sign against it. The cavalry eventually came. From eighteen eighty-six to nineteen sixteen, the United States Army administered Yellowstone, enforcing rules against hunting and vandalism and constructing the infrastructure of roads and bridges that allowed wider public access.

The National Park Service was not created until nineteen sixteen. What the designers of the act probably did not fully reckon with was the displacement of Indigenous peoples from the new park boundaries. The Eastern Shoshone, Northern Arapaho, Bannock, and other nations had used Yellowstone's thermal basins, forests, and meadows for generations.

Their continued use was defined as incompatible with the park's purposes. This chapter of Yellowstone's history has been documented by historians including Mark David Spence and is acknowledged today in the park's own interpretive materials.