Thirty-Two Years of Military Park

The National Park Service did not exist when Yellowstone was created. For the park's first fourteen years, civilian management failed repeatedly: poachers killed bison and elk with near-impunity, vandals broke geothermal features, and concession operators ran the park as a personal business venture. Congress finally transferred administration to the United States Army in eighteen eighty-six.

For the next thirty-two years, troops stationed at Fort Yellowstone, the cluster of stone buildings at Mammoth Hot Springs that now houses the Albright Visitor Center, managed the park. They expelled poachers, fought fires, built roads, and established the administrative infrastructure that the Park Service would inherit when it was created in nineteen eighteen. They also enforced the park's boundaries against the Indigenous people who had lived within them, removing Tukudika Shoshone, Bannock, and Crow people who attempted to continue the seasonal movements their nations had practiced for generations.

The Army's role in Yellowstone is one of the defining contradictions of the park's history. The same institution that was suppressing Native nations across the West, confining people to reservations at gunpoint, was simultaneously preserving the 'pristine wilderness' that federal policy had created by expelling those same people. The soldiers who arrested poachers protecting elk herds were the successors of the soldiers who had destroyed the societies of the people for whom those elk had been food.

As for the Buffalo Soldiers, the African American regiments who served throughout the western national parks during the Army era: whether specific regiments served at Fort Yellowstone during this period is not fully established in the documentary record available here. The National Park Service has acknowledged Buffalo Soldier service broadly across the park system. The Yellowstone-specific regimental details remain a gap worth naming.