Langford publicized Yellowstone far and wide, not just through his widely-read writings, but in touring the country and speaking about the wonders of the Yellowstone on Cooke’s urging and financial backing. The geologist Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden attended one of Langford’s lectures in January of 1871 in Washington, D.C. Four years earlier, Hayden had been appointed head geologist of the United States Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories and had been surveying land in the Rocky
Mountains. After hearing Langford’s lecture, he sought Congressional funds to conduct a survey of the Yellowstone region, beginning in June of 1871. Hayden’s expeditions, as Goetzmann advances, were a turning point in western exploration. The Geological Survey of the Territories became an agency of the Interior Department and the means by which army exploration “was gradually replaced and the civilian scientist assumed full control of Western exploration.”211 Goetzmann argues that the main difference between the civilian-scientist and the soldier-explorer expeditions was that the new scientific
210 In the late twentieth century, in particular, this notion has been severely critiqued in the recognition that the parks were not simply pristine tracts of “nature.” Rather, the ecosystems they encompassed were sustained through complex relationships among species—including humans. Yosemite seemed park-like in part because it was, indeed, maintained and monitored by the native groups in the area.
211 Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire, 489.
127 explorations and surveys went beyond aiding settlement and “conquering” wilderness.
They “had a profound effect upon institutions” in the East, bringing about the “complete institutionalization of natural science in its approach to Western America.”212
Hayden’s survey of the Yellowstone region placed the scientific seal upon the idea for creating Yellowstone National Park. His explorations were also significant because of the two artists who accompanied him: the photographer William Henry Jackson and the painter Thomas Moran, whom Jay Cooke arranged to have join the party.213 In the context of Yellowstone, Hayden’s influence goes beyond the
institutionalization of science. Although he was certainly not the originator of the idea or political movement to found the national park, the language of his survey defined some of the rhetorical framing of Yellowstone that remains a major framework for the National Park Service today.
Hayden’s survey is noteworthy for its unambiguous use of wonder discourse in a context of serious, scientific observation. His writing bears none of Frémont’s efforts to distance himself from hunters and trappers’ wonder tales. Indeed, in his letter to the Secretary that begins his “Preliminary Report of the United States Geological Survey of Montana,” he writes about earlier being guided through the Lower Yellowstone region by the famed Jim Bridger, who is said to have recounted “Wonderful tales that had
sharpened the curiosity of the whole party.”214 Bridger’s stories are wonderful, the ravines and canyons are wonderful, the variety of colors in Yellowstone’s setting is wonderful, the transparency of the Yellowstone River is wonderful, as is the volcanic
212 Ibid., 490.
213 Magoc, Yellowstone, 14-15.
214 F.V. Hayden, Preliminary Report of the United States Geological Survey of Montana (Washington:
Government Printing Office. 1872), PDF e-book, 7.
128 activity. Hayden’s survey is filled with wonder and wonders—including the trope of the indescribability: “No language can do justice to the wonderful beauty and grandeur....”215 Hayden’s main task was to “reveal the wonders of the West to the outside world.”216 In this task, he placed wonder-discourse at the heart of the Department of the Interior’s mapping of the West, which would later inform the institutionalization of the National Park Service.
Hayden’s report is one of the first written texts to refer to Yellowstone as
“wonderland.” Former Yellowstone Park Historian Aubrey Haines claims that a February 28, 1872 article “Our National Park” in the Helena Herald was the origin of the
nickname,217 but Hayden’s report, which was in circulation earlier, uses the term from the beginning: “On the 15th of July we bade farewell... [and set out] toward the wonder-land of the Yellowstone Valley.”218 He generally uses a hyphenated version of the term, at times as a modifier, at others as a nickname for the park. For example, in describing the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone he notes that it is “among the remarkable wonders of this rare wonder-land.”219 The term derives from his claim that he “can conceive of no more wonderful and attractive region for the explorer.”220
Hayden’s survey, like his more popular writings in Scribner’s, went far beyond description. Beyond ascertaining the use value of the land, his survey was the first official
215 Ibid., 83.
216 Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire, 521.
217 The article is an announcement of the passage of the Yellowstone bill in the Senate. It celebrates the
“untold good” the park will bring and notes that the park “will be the means of centering upon Montana the attention of thousands heretofore comparatively uninformed of a Territory abounding in such resources of mines and agriculture and of wonderland as we can boast, spread everywhere about us.” Quoted in Haines, The Yellowstone Story, 172.
218 Hayden, Preliminary Report, 49.
219 Ibid., 74.
220 Ibid., 133.
129 government document to explicitly work in the service of making a landscape into a wonderscape. As Magoc notes, his writing paired “scientific analysis with emotional euphoria, [and] functioned ultimately as a template for the volumes of popular Yellowstone travel literature that followed. Writing variously as a scientist, poet, and politician, Hayden’s first priority was to make an unearthly landscape
comprehensible.”221 The Hayden expedition was also the first to collect samples from the Yellowstone region for the Smithsonian, thus bringing the region into one of the nation’s primary institutions of science.
In many ways, Hayden did not do anything other writers had not done before—
but he did it within a scientific purview and with the government’s stamp of approval. In reading Langford and Hayden, it is clear that Irving’s reticence towards wonder-discourse had all but vanished in the context of Yellowstone and the Far West more broadly.
Counter to the notion that wonder lost currency in the age of science, Hayden’s report exemplifies a cultural moment when wonder was at the very heart of scientific
exploration and institutionalization in the U.S. This fact alone went a long way towards further codifying wonder, and, indeed, writing it into the process of founding the first institutionalized national park.
Hayden’s scientific survey was one of the final steps in creating the nationally managed wilderness. The survey validated the convergence of forces that helped create the cultural environment in which the federal government could set aside such a huge territory for “the benefit and enjoyment of the people.” Although creation myths surrounding Yellowstone have largely followed the legacy of Langford’s 1905
221 Magoc, Yellowstone, 16.
130 reminiscing about a campfire conversation in which he and his fellow travelers devised the idea for a park, it is likely that such a conversation never took place. Rather, as Magoc and others have noted, the formation of Yellowstone lies firmly “within the culture of capitalism” and visions of Manifest Destiny Hayden and the land surveys and Cooke and the railroads espoused and promoted. These commercial forces prompted the surveying and assessment of the land, and, as in Yosemite, Congress’s decision to create the park depended upon the ostensible “worthlessness” of the land for settlement,
agriculture, and mining.222 That proof of worthlessness again served to value and preserve “one of the most wonderful regions...which the globe exhibits anywhere.”223
While Langford disseminated his experiences, spurring on Hayden’s expedition, Cooke’s railroad lobbyists worked to ensure that the area would remain unsettled and ripe for the development of a tourist industry. The formation of a national park in
Yellowstone, however, was somewhat incidental. It became a national park and not a state park (like Yosemite), because neither Montana nor Wyoming was yet a state. The land grant that protected Yosemite created a precedent for setting aside land for
recreational uses rather than settlement, but because neither territory in which the
proposed park rested was a state, Yellowstone remained in federal hands and set a model that was not fully institutionalized until the 1916 creation of the National Park Service.
Without the driving interests of Cooke’s vision for another transcontinental line, it is likely that there would not have been a Yellowstone National Park. Indeed, as national park historian Alfred Runte has noted, the railroads, beginning with Cooke and Northern Pacific, formed the backbone of the drive to found national parks—and Congress would
222 Magoc, Yellowstone, 18.
223 Senate Debate, quoted in Magoc, Yellowstone, 18.
131 not have approved the parks simply on the conviction of preservationists.224 When
Hayden was preparing his report for Congress, he received a letter from a Northern Pacific lobbyist, asking him to write into his report the recommendation that Congress make the Yellowstone region into a public park.225 Hayden agreed with the
recommendation, and his report thus made clear that the primary value of the land would be for scientific and touristic purposes and that this public use would be no loss to the government or the people. As Hayden writes: “In a few years, this region will be a place of resort for all classes of people from all portions of the world. The geysers of Iceland, which have been objects of interest for the scientific men and travelers of the entire world, sink into insignificance in comparison to the hot springs of the Yellowstone and the Fire Hole Basins. As a place for resort for invalids, it will not be excelled by any portion of the world.”226
The bill that created Yellowstone National Park was introduced in Congress in December 1871. Members of Congress were given copies of Langford’s articles, as well as copies of Jackson’s photographs and Moran’s drawings. Congress also subsequently spent $10,000 to acquire Moran’s “The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone.”227 Roughly simultaneously, Hayden’s report was published in early 1872, and it addressed very clearly the cultural fears of those who promoted the park:
Persons are now waiting for the spring to open to enter in and take possession of these remarkable curiosities, to make merchandise of these beautiful specimens, to fence in these rare wonders, so as to charge visitors a fee, as is now done at Niagara Falls, for the sight of that which ought to be, as free as the air or water....
If this bill fails to become a law this session, the vandals who are now waiting to enter into this wonder-land will, in a single season, despoil, beyond recovery,
224 Runte, Trains of Discovery, 1.
225 Duncan, The National Parks, 34.
226 Hayden, Preliminary Report, 165.
227 Duncan, The National Parks 34.
132 these remarkable curiosities, which have required all the calming skill of nature thousands of years to prepare.228
Hayden frames the designation of Yellowstone National Park as a protection against the commercialization of natural wonders. Wonder ought to be free and open to the public.229 It is in part this refusal to do in Yellowstone what had been done in Niagara that allowed for the commodification and subsequent marketing of a much larger experience rather than of roadside curiosities or fenced-in wonders.
Although earlier travelers and writers had already been imagining and writing wonderscapes, Cooke, Langford, and Hayden went beyond imagining to effectively framing a wonderscape—both rhetorically and in lobbying for the foundation of Yellowstone National Park, which marked out the boundaries of wonder-land for preservation and further imagination and narration. Hayden’s aim was to prevent the commercialization of the wonders of Yellowstone, but his very language became a kind of brand name for Yellowstone and later the National Parks on the whole.