Review: “Saving Yellowstone” by Megan Kate Nelson

“Much like the United States itself, the story of Yellowstone is one of tragedy and hope, defiance and cut-throat ambition, beauty and terror, charity and callousness.”

Yellowstone is America’s national park. It was the first. It remains the most resplendent. Old Faithful and the Lower Falls are among the most iconic images of America’s naturalistic imagination. When we think of the natural treasures of North America, Yellowstone ranks at the very top. Yet when we also think of our natural wonders, we hardly consider the turbulence, technology, and terror that coincided to create these places which are now considered prized treasures of our inheritance.

Megan Kate Nelson has recently become one of the greatest popular writers and historians of Americana and of the American West in particular. Her magnificent 2021 book The Three-Cornered War was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and I have written elsewhere that the book teems with humanity and readability. In another life, I derided this kind of popular history. Today, I am an ardent champion of it. As an avid hiker and naturalist, I enthusiastically looked forward to her newest work, Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America, bringing forth the unlikely and often forgotten story of how Yellowstone became the “natural wonder” that “proved America’s greatness.” It does not disappoint.

Near the end of their first expedition into the Yellowstone Basin, Ferdinand Hayden and his team of intrepid explorers, adventurers, and scientists experienced an earthquake which startled their horses and manifested the full force of the sublimity of nature. “The earthquake suggested, like most of the Yellowstone Basin’s features, that this was a landscape in tumult.” “Landscape in tumult”—that is an apt description of America in 1871 and how Yellowstone became America’s national park.