In 1879, Yellowstone superintendent Philetus Norris made a fateful call that epitomized the park’s relationship with Indigenous people—and thus with the world
Yellowstone Revealed debuted in Yellowstone National Park and Gardiner, Montana, in August of 2022, the year the park celebrated its 150th anniversary. The project aimed to represent truths and perspectives of Indigenous people in the region. Photo by Alex Newby/Courtesy Mountain Time Arts
by John Clayton
In the fall of 1879, Philetus W. Norris was hunting on the
back side of Bunsen Peak, south of Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone National
Park. Norris, 57, wore a gray beard and fringed buckskin. Alone on his horse,
he gave off an air of self-confidence and prided himself on his frontiersmanship.
He was the kind of self-mythologizer who wore gaudy buckskins even for formal
portraits. He saw himself on par with the men who “discovered” Yellowstone, the
likes of Nathaniel Langford, Truman Everts and Ferdinand Hayden.
Norris was Yellowstone Park’s superintendent, its only
full-time employee, at a time when the position was unpaid. He was lobbying
Congress to provide the park with its first-ever budget, including a
superintendent’s salary. But until that came through, he was willing to serve
the government out of love for Yellowstone, the frontier and the wilderness.
Hunting was a key component of that love and was legal at the time inside the
park’s boundaries.
On this day, Norris shot a bighorn sheep but merely wounded
it. He had to dismount his horse and descend into a valley surrounded by 1,000-foot
basaltic cliffs. With a 200-foot waterfall, it was “scenery second only to that
of the Grand Cañon of the Yellowstone within the park, and seldom rivaled
elsewhere,” as he wrote in his annual report. Below the falls, he found a
half-mile-long grassy valley up to 400 feet wide containing travertine terraces
and active hot springs.
He’d never been in this valley before, never even knew it
existed. It was out of the way and inaccessible by horse, so he was surprised
to discover that, “with the subdued and mingled murmur of the rapids and
cataracts above and below it and laughing ripple of the gliding stream [it] is
truly an enchanting dell.”
Even more astonishing was what Norris found in the canyon: “scattered
fire-brands and decaying lodge-poles.” He had, “unbidden, entered an ancient
and but recently deserted, secluded, unknown haunt of the Sheepeater aborigines
of the park.”
A family of Sheepeater Mountain Shoshone (Tukudika) west of Yellowstone in 1871. This photo was taken by William Henry Jackson at Medicine Lodge Creek in Idaho. In 1879, Yellowstone superintendent Philetus Norris sent the Tukudika to the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. Photo courtesy NPS
Recently deserted! He wasn’t speaking in geological
time—this camp had been used within the year, maybe even within the month. For more
than two years, he’d been saying that no Indians inhabited Yellowstone. And
this whole time, some were at least occasionally living less than six miles
from his headquarters. He’d never suspected it. And he knew he had to act.
Norris’ actions would end up being among the most
consequential in the history of Yellowstone. For centuries, the Sheepeater—now known
as Mountain Shoshone or by their Shoshone name, Tukudika—and other
tribes had occupied Yellowstone and stewarded its natural glory. Norris sent
away the last of them. Worse, he defended his action by inventing or
officializing ridiculous lies about the Tukudika, some of which continue to deceive.
Shoshonean peoples once lived in territory spanning today’s Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, California, and Oregon. Shoshonean bands that found Yellowstone a desirable place to live were among those who ate sheep.
Today, despite increased attention to Indigenous
perspectives, the episode of banishing the Tukudika is little discussed and
poorly known. Was it justified? Legal? Was it a result of racism, either from
Norris or the conservation movement? Did other, wider forces play a role? And
to the extent that the dominant culture now regrets those past actions, where
does that leave us now?
___
Norris, the park’s second superintendent, is one of its most
colorful, controversial figures. Aubrey Haines, the dean of 20th-century
Yellowstone historians, called Norris “a fortunate blend of the pioneer and the
scientist—just the right man to open a wilderness … [Norris had] frontier instincts: boundless
curiosity and impatient energy, coupled with a vast indifference to hardships
and hard work, and with that, a streak of Yankee ingenuity and imagination.”
Norris formalized the rough trails that still today make the
figure-8 outline of the park’s road system. He began the first record-keeping
of weather conditions and geyser eruptions. He made the first suggestions,
sadly long ignored, to license guides and manage concessionaires. And he hired
the park’s first gamekeeper.
But he also had an oversized ego. In addition to his outdated, easy-to-mock
buckskin costumes, he also eagerly recited poems he had written, which most
people
Philetus Norris, second superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, in his trademark fringed buckskins. Photo courtesy NPS
found awful. Indeed, it was hard to shut him up. One visitor, whom he kindly
escorted through the Lake and Canyon country, wrote that “We were lulled to
sleep by the deep, sonorous voice of Colonel Norris who forgot to stop talking
when he went to sleep, and he was still talking right along when we woke up.”
Norris loved to name things after himself. Thus, another
visitor offered the following tongue-in-cheek directions to the "Norris Yellowstone
National Park,” only slightly exaggerated: “Take the Norris wagon road and
follow down the Norris fork of the Firehole River to the Norris Canyon of the
Norris Obsidian Mountain; then go on to Mount Norris, on the summit of which
you will find Monument Park or the Norris Blowout, and at its northerly base
the Norris Basin and Park. Further on you will come to the Norris Geyser
plateau, and must not fail to see Geyser Norris.”
Yet at least some of these criticisms were cynically
political. The national park was newly established, and precarious. There was
no model for how it should operate. Some private interests wanted to make money
off these public investments, and thus schemed to discredit Norris in hopes
that his successor would be more open to corruption.
Furthermore, Norris’ tenure covered particularly difficult
times. The park had been founded in 1872—and then largely ignored. His
predecessor, Nathaniel P. Langford, rarely even visited. In his self-serving
autobiography, Norris wrote that Yellowstone “was for years abandoned to
destructive forest-fires, wanton slaughter of its interesting and valuable
animals, and nearly irreparable vandalism of many of its prominent wonders.” The
park had never been surveyed or even fully explored. Its boundaries were
unclear, especially with an active mining district at its northeast corner. And
the whole region was so remote that when Norris was appointed in 1877, he had
to take a steamboat across the Great Lakes, a train from Duluth to Bismarck,
and then a long journey by horse and boat just to reach his workplace.
Soon after arriving, Norris was thrown by a horse and
injured so badly he needed to retrace that journey home. Waiting for a boat in
Duluth, he was shocked to read a newspaper story. Although he didn’t record the
name of the paper, it could have been the Minneapolis Tribune of August
28, 1877: “Joseph’s Murderous Band: Slaughtering Whites in Montana.” The flight
of the Nez Perce had been making headlines all summer long, as the U.S. Army
pursued a band of 800 Indigenous men, women and children for 1,170 miles across
Idaho, Wyoming and Montana. But information was scant.
Norris formalized the rough trails that still today make the figure-8 outline of the park’s road system, and began the first record-keeping of weather conditions and geyser eruptions. But he also had an oversized ego and loved to name things after himself.
The article suggested that Norris’ park was in chaos. It
claimed that tourists had been taken hostage and killed. It wondered if a
full-scale battle might take place inside the boundaries of the national park—a
park totally lacking in police or military services, or money to pay for them.
Yellowstone had been founded on an unstated assumption that it was a sanctuary
untouched by warfare, a playground idealizing the Eden that the West would
become, after, to quote the words of Norris’ successor Charles Conger, “the whole Indian question [was] solved and
forever disposed of.” Suddenly paradise was at risk.
To salvage his park’s public reputation, Norris’ first
annual report argued that the flight of the Nez Perce had been a
once-in-a-lifetime event. “Owing to the isolation of the park, deep amid snowy
mountains, and the superstitious awe of the roaring cataracts, Sulphur pools,
and spouting geysers over the surrounding pagan Indians, they seldom visit it.”
This was not true: the Nez Perce had roughly followed the Bannock Trail, a several-thousand-year-old
route across the Continental Divide used by many tribes. But Norris continued:
“Only a few Sheepeater hermits, armed with bows and arrows, ever resided there
[in Yellowstone], and even they are now vanished.”
___
Shoshonean peoples once lived in territory spanning today’s
Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, California, and Oregon. Varying
locations dictated varying diets. Some semi-nomadic bands became known as Agaidika,
eaters of salmon, some as Kukundika, eaters of bison, and some as Tukudika,
eaters of sheep. These generalized descriptions of diets can be overrated,
because rigid classification is a European tradition. “Just whatever they ate at that time is what I called them. We could
even call them ‘coffee-drinkers,’” a Shoshone identified as W.G. told anthropologist
Sven Liljeblad in the 1950s. The Shoshonean bands that found Yellowstone
a desirable place to live were among those who ate sheep.
Bighorn sheep were likely far more prevalent in Yellowstone
in the days before European contact. Sheep provided the Tukudika with not only
meat, but also horns and sinew for hunting bows. Tukudika used Yellowstone’s
thermal waters to soften the horns for bowmaking, and Yellowstone’s obsidian
provided sharp arrowtips. The bows were so strong and accurate that the
Tukudika found little need to replace them with that era’s primitive guns.
The sheep-based lifestyle—supplanted by other game, fish, plants,
roots, nuts, and berries—was “remarkably in tune with its environment,” says
anthropologist Larry Loendorf, coauthor of Mountain Spirit: The Sheep Eater
Indians of Yellowstone. For example, he writes that thanks in part to pine
nuts, the Tukudika were well nourished. “[Their] protein to carbohydrate ratio
of the Sheep Eater diet was always high,” Loendorf wrote. Their religion,
music, dance, and medicine were all tied to the landscape.
Indeed, this lifestyle was so sustainably productive that
when horses became available, at least some Tukudika found that they didn’t
need them. They could have acquired horses, trading valuable skins, furs and
obsidian. But in a rugged mountain environment, dogs were more agile beasts of
burden and also warm companions at night.
The map above shows the 27 current tribes that have historic connections to the lands and resources now found within Yellowstone National Park. Map courtesy NPS
Tukudika lived far beyond today’s borders of Yellowstone.
Their culture thrived in high-elevation areas from Wyoming’s Wind River range
through central Idaho. And historically, many other tribes also inhabited
Yellowstone, including Apsáalooke (Crow),
Pend d’Oreille, Flathead, Nez Perce, Kiowa, Bannock, and up to 50 others with
connections to the ecosystem. But as settler-colonialists arrived in the region
and designated a particular area as special—as a national park—the
Tukudika and their unique, horseless culture became especially associated with
Yellowstone. One of their earliest recorded encounters was with trapper Osborne
Russell in the Lamar Valley in 1835. “They were all neatly clothed in dressed deer
and Sheep skins of the best quality,” Russell reported, “and seemed to be
perfectly contented and happy.”
What happened over the next four decades isn’t very clear.
Nobody wrote down Tukudika perspectives, and the few people who did write
anything down were notoriously unreliable. Loendorf believes that diseases transmitted
by domestic sheep decimated bighorn populations, disrupting traditional
lifestyles. Today’s archaeological digs in greater Yellowstone often reveal
plenty of evidence of sheep, and, sometimes, comparatively little evidence of elk.
The Tukudika may have also suffered from smallpox or other
diseases of European origin, as happened to other tribes. Maybe some bands relocated
farther from the newcomers, hoping to avoid such fates but then being labeled
“hermits.” Maybe some became malnourished. Maybe some migrated to lower
elevations, adapting their diets to eat more buffalo, salmon, wild wheat, or
other foods. Some are known to have joined the Mountain Crow at a time when
Montana’s Crow Reservation included the Absaroka and Beartooth mountains east
of today’s Paradise Valley. Some joined the Eastern Shoshone, whose leader
Washakie extended a formal invitation for them to move to the Wind River
Reservation in 1871. Others found alternative ways to make a living; for
example, when President Chester Arthur visited Yellowstone in 1883, some of his
guides were Tukudika—one of them, Togwotee,
later had a mountain pass named after him.
“Norris turned for help to the agent at Fort Washakie, who responded by sending a party of Shoshone to escort the Tukudika to new homes on the Wind River Reservation.” – Mark David Spence, historian, author, Dispossessing the Wilderness
Incursions into their territories caused the Tukudika to suffer.
Waves of trappers, traders, missionaries, miners and tourists swept over the
land, decimated natural resources, and demanded that Indians be “controlled.”
These effects had come first and most devastatingly to the lowlands, and
Shoshone and other families were victimized in atrocities such as Idaho’s 1863
Bear River Massacre. The second Fort Bridger Treaty of 1868 slashed vast
traditional Shoshone and Bannock lands to a pair of reservations, the Wind
River Reservation near today’s Lander, Wyoming, and, after some delay, the Fort
Hall reservation near today’s Pocatello, Idaho.
The point of the treaty was to reserve some lands
from colonial settlement, not to confine the tribes to those lands. Indeed,
the treaty explicitly said that the Shoshone and Bannock—and Crow, in a similarly
worded treaty—“shall have the right to hunt on the unoccupied lands of the
United States so long as game may be found thereon.” Yellowstone and other
mountain regions were clearly then “unoccupied,” a word that was presumably equivalent to “not yet homesteaded.”
Nevertheless, powerful people wanted Native Americans to
stay on reservations. In 1871, according to an annual report, the federal
Indian Affairs office tried to collect the scattered remnants of what it
perceived as three separate tribes: “Bannacks, Shoshones, and Sheepeater Indians.”
It convinced several hundred of them to settle on the Lemhi River near today’s
Salmon, Idaho, on what became a “non-treaty reservation.” In other words, the
100-square-mile Lemhi Valley Indian Reservation was created by a Presidential
Executive Order in 1875, but because it was not part of a formal, binding treaty
with a tribe, it was rescinded in 1905 and its Indigenous residents—by then
commonly referred to as “the Lemhi”—were forcibly moved to Fort Hall.
The Lemhi certainly included Tukudika, some of whom once
inhabited Yellowstone, as opposed to other nearby mountain environments. But these
were vast expanses of land, and some Tukudika likely retained traditional semi-nomadic
lifestyles in traditional locations, some of which were now set off by a park
boundary.
___
When P. W. Norris returned to his headquarters after
exploring the recently abandoned camp, he took action, although the exact form
of that action is unclear. In the well-researched 1999 book Dispossessing
the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks, historian
Mark David Spence wrote that Norris sought assistance to resolve the ‘problem’
of Indians residing in Yellowstone. “Norris turned for help to the agent at
Fort Washakie, who responded by sending a party of Shoshone to escort the
Tukudika to new homes on the Wind River Reservation,” Spence wrote.
The correspondence between Norris and agent James Patten has not survived. But in an
1888 book, a well-known Yellowstone figure named E.S. Topping wrote of the
Tukudika: “In 1879 some Shoshones were sent out by the interior department to
hunt them up. They were found and brought in to the Shoshone Agency at Little
Wind River.” And in the 1950s, anthropologist Âke Hultkrantz reported finding a
1929 letter from then–park naturalist Dorr Yeager saying something similar.
To some today, the
wording of Norris’ letter might make a great deal of difference. Did he suggest that the Eastern Shoshone might help their starving brethren by
offering them a place to live? That might have been excusable, even
compassionate by the standards of his day. (Norris probably didn’t know how bad
were conditions on the reservation in that era: there was no doctor available, no
building for the school, wooden fences being burned for fuel, seed grains and
potatoes rarely arriving in time to plant, and agricultural implements intended
to help the Eastern Shoshone become farmers left for an entire season on the
side of a road atop South Pass, where many of them were stolen by emigrants.)
“I had done some research regarding Norris and standing [at Norris Geyser Basin] that day I was overwhelmed with the immensity of his actions—how they had shaped the histories and even present-day lifeways of my Shoshonean People, as well as other tribes affiliated with this landscape. I cried. It hit me really hard, and I thought: Norris's story needs to be told.” – Dr. Ren Freeman, Indigenous anthropologist and professor, Eastern Shoshone
Or did Norris command the agent to command the Eastern Shoshone to get Indigenous people out
of his national park? That “leadership” might have been welcomed by his contemporaries.
But today, the idea of actively banishing friendly people from their ancestral
home because those lands were somehow needed for a national park—even though it
had taken the superintendent years to even notice they were there—has a
different moral calculus.
Would such a
command have been legally wrong? Surprisingly, in 2024, the answer is still unclear.
If Yellowstone was unoccupied, the Tukudika had a treaty-guaranteed right
to be there, and a command would have violated that treaty. On the other hand,
if Congress’ action to make Yellowstone a national park amounted to occupying that land, then a command would have been legal. But of course a
national park was—and still is—celebrated as wilderness, which is
generally seen as the opposite of occupation, the opposite of homesteading, the
opposite of the development for which settler-colonialists were demanding that
Indigenous people sacrifice their homes. A related legal case, asking if portions
of national forests are “occupied” in the sense of the 1868 treaties, is still
wending its way through the courts.
But given the power
dynamics of the time, there may not have been much difference between suggesting and commanding. Furthermore, the suggestion-or-command was
not Norris’ only action.
___
Nationwide
sentiment in the late 1870s involved a great deal of fear about Indian wars.
Custer’s 1876 defeat at the Little Bighorn implied that the U.S. Army was weak
and vulnerable, and perhaps that its opponents were powerful or bloodthirsty. Press
coverage of the 1877 flight of the Nez Perce accentuated some of the same
themes. In 1878, a party of Bannock attempted a similar maneuver, fleeing eastward
from skirmishes in Oregon and Idaho via Yellowstone’s Bannock Trail. Although the U.S. Army and Crow allies routed the Bannock east of Yellowstone, this episode too
had disrupted tourist experiences inside the park. Then in 1879 some murders in
central Idaho were attributed—almost surely incorrectly—to Tukudika, and even
labeled the “Sheepeater War.” Though this conflict came nowhere near Yellowstone,
it helps explain why Norris might have felt threatened by any Indigenous
presence in the park.
So, with his words,
Norris tried to downplay and even erase that presence. In official
reports, he started referring to the Tukudika as “timid and harmless” or
“feeble and harmless.” He said they were “destitute of horses, fire, and other
arms.” He referred to “the great small-pox visitation some twenty years ago” as
if it had made the Tukudika virtually extinct. He spoke of them vanishing,
calling on a then-popular stereotype that Indians were a “vanishing race.” They
“silently vanished without a contest for possession or a treaty for the cession
of their ancient haunts. [They] were ever a harmless race of cliff-climbers,
dwellers in caves… in secluded parks and glens of the mountains.”
Yellowstone Superintendent P.W. Norris with the first wagon into the Upper Geyser Basin, 1878. Photo courtesy NPS
The Tukudika were, he said the following year, a “pigmy
tribe.” The word was commonly used to suggest both small size and intellectual
inferiority. It implied an other-ness. Picturing Yellowstone as the home of
only pygmies implied that it hadn’t been inhabited by full, complete humans.
Norris also disparaged other tribes. He said that the
“rapacious Blackfeet” had suffered “decimation by war and disease.” The Sioux,
“robbers of their race,” were now cordoned off from Yellowstone by “military
posts and armed ranchmen.” He quoted a Shoshone guide calling the geyser
regions “heap heap bad,” a phrase that made the guide seem ignorant and
superstitious. He asserted there was little evidence that Crow, Shoshone or
Bannock people ever traversed the park, despite the fact that he himself had
contributed ample such evidence to the Smithsonian, artifacts demonstrating
Indigenous habitation in Yellowstone. He then speculated about why Indigenous
people would have behaved the way he claimed they did. They were deterred, he
said, “by a superstitious awe concerning the rumbling and hissing sulphur fumes
of the spouting geysers and other hot springs, which they imagined to be the
wails and groans of departed Indian warriors who were suffering punishment for
their earthly sins.”
The mountain man Jim Bridger had long claimed that Indians
were scared of Yellowstone’s geysers. But Bridger was known for telling tall
tales. Norris had previously referred to “superstitious awe” around geysers, an
emotion that also could have been attributed to Langford, Everts and Hayden.
But now Norris recast this awe as fear. And, unlike Bridger’s tall tales, Norris’
racially toxic ideas were published in official government reports.
When President Chester Arthur visited Yellowstone in 1883, some of his guides were Tukudika—one of them, Togwotee, later had a mountain pass named after him.
Norris backed up his words with actions. In the spring of 1880, he traveled to
Washington, D.C. to meet a Crow delegation, which was being asked to cede 1.6
million acres of reservation land north of the park, around today’s Cooke City,
where miners were flocking in. Norris also suggested-or-commanded that the Crow
not visit Yellowstone. He then went to the Lemhi agency to secure a “solemn
promise” that they do the same, according to an annual report. He elicited
similar promises from residents of the Wind River Reservation. The following
year, he reported that all tribes had observed their pledges.
They probably
hadn’t. Indigenous parties regularly left their reservations to hunt. No
“permission” was needed. Such travel was guaranteed by their treaties. In vast,
unpopulated, thinly patrolled landscapes, they may well have crossed invisible
boundaries to hunt in Yellowstone, as did settlers. In the late 1880s, Yellowstone
rangers recorded occasional encounters with Native hunters. Although it’s
unlikely that Indigenous people by this time were still living full-time inside
the park’s boundaries, they could freely come and go. They could engage with
their ways of interacting with the landscape, and thus feel at home.
“From my perspective, Norris was a mastermind,” says Dr. Ren
Freeman, a four-fielded Indigenous anthropologist and professor, and a
recognized citizen of the Eastern Shoshone People. “He saw the future of
Yellowstone—and his career—if he could make it succeed as a tourism venue.”
But, Freeman says, the second superintendent of Yellowstone
also left behind a tarnished legacy.
“Norris was one of the primary architects of the ‘remove the
Indians’ mentality related to the Yellowstone area,” Freeman adds. “It spread
like wildfire. I don’t think he’s given enough ‘credit,’ if that’s the word. He
began a campaign of fear that led to a specific land-use agenda.” His lies, for
example, influenced the Race Horse decision.
It all traces back to Norris’ encounter with the Tukudika
village. “That scared him—it could foil his plans,” Freeman says, referring to
his vision of a tourism-oriented park strewn with features named after himself.
So he took action. “He ignored the relationships my people and many others had
with those landscapes,” she says. “He ignored them for his benefit.”
Norris Geyser Basin today. Pictured here are the basin's Porcelain Hot Springs. Photo by Jim Peaco/NPS
Furthermore, Freeman points out, his vision was achieved:
“The tourism trade has proven to be a guaranteed successful path to profitable
development, even more so in the last 20 years with ‘cultural tourism.’” But
with Indigenous people excluded from Yellowstone and other parks, the tourism
revenues accrue mostly due to the European-descended settler culture; as does
control of the narratives. The Norris-shaped narrative falsely describes
Yellowstone as pristine, untrammeled, or virgin, thus shaping the way millions of people experience it.
Freeman is the project manager and cultural producer of Yellowstone
Revealed, a cultural and art exhibition sponsored through a partnership between
Mountain Time Arts and the National Park Service. In 2021, Freeman coined the
title “Yellowstone Revealed” in 2021, as well as the project’s concept to
“reveal the continuous presence of Indigenous Peoples in the Greater
Yellowstone Region.” In 2022 and 2023, Yellowstone Revealed installed immersive
exhibitions at Yellowstone’s Madison Junction to “put forward Indigenous truths
and perspectives,” according to its website.
As they planned the 2023 event, Freeman says, they investigated
alternative sites. She was drawn to what’s now known as the Norris Geyser
Basin. “I had done
Dr. Ren Freeman is director, research coordinator, and co-pi of the Indigenous Research Center for Salish Kootenai College.
some research regarding Norris and standing there that day I
was overwhelmed with the immensity of his actions—how they had shaped the
histories and even present-day lifeways of my Shoshonean People, as well as
other tribes affiliated with this landscape. I cried. It hit me really hard,
and I thought: Norris's story needs to be told.”
Freeman graciously agreed to collaborate on this Norris story
that primarily uses settler sources and storytelling formats, but she was also
clear that it would not be enough, because the story needs to be told from Indigenous
perspectives. “I have stated many times: ‘As a Shoshone woman, this land made
me. I belong to this land.’ My cultural worldviews and ways of knowing, being,
and doing are a result of this. More of this truth-telling needs to occur,
especially about the importance of landscape to tribal peoples.”
Such truth-telling, she believes, can not only correct
history but also lead to conversations that are healing for all.
One such truth, Freeman says, is also the central message of
Yellowstone Revealed: Indigenous people never left Yellowstone. Their
presence—in history, culture, and land use; in legacies of their interactions
with wildlife and other elements of the natural world; in a relationship to
landscape that represents the essence of what so many global visitors love
about Yellowstone—is now being revealed.
“Norris
thought he’d removed us,” Freeman says. “And history tends to show him
victorious. But it’s a fallacy: we were kicked out, but we never left.”
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About John Clayton
John Clayton writes the newsletter Natural Stories. His
books includeWonderlandscape: Yellowstone National Park and the Evolution of an American Cultural Icon, The Cowboy Girl, and Natural
Rivals: John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, and the Creation of America’s Public Lands. He has lived in Greater Yellowstone since 1990.
