America’s first national park and its iconic geyser are pictured on today’s #stampoftheday, a 5-cent stamp, issued on July 30, 1934 that pictures Yellowstone National Parks’ Old Faithful geyser and also illustrates the many challenges of managing a major park.

Although it wasn’t the first in the 10-stamp series issued in 1934 highlighting notable National Parks, Yellowstone, which covers 2.2 million acres, was the first national park, having been established by a law signed by President Ulysses S. Grant on March 1, 1872.

While the Lewis and Clark expedition, which was the subject of yesterday’s post, bypassed what is now the park, Native Americans and early trappers were familiar with its unique features, most notably its many geysers and hot springs. But few believed their fantastical accounts of waterfalls that sprouted upwards. However, between 1869 and 1871, three more formal expeditions began documenting the area’s notable features. As Frederick V. Hayden, a government official who led the third of these expeditions noted, “they geysers of Iceland…sink into insignificance in comparison with the hot springs of Yellowstone and the Fire-Hole Basins.”

His expedition, which included two botanists, a meteorologist, a zoologist, an ornithologist, a mineralogist, a topographer, an agricultural statistician/entomologist, an artist, a photographer, and support staff, provided written and visual documentation of the region’s marvels, and aroused national interest in Yellowstone and in preserving the area as a park. Closing a vast expanse of the public domain was a major departure from the nation’s longstanding policy of transferring public lands to private ownership. But the wonders of Yellowstone-shown through photographs, paintings, and sketches made by the recent expeditions-had captured the public’s imagination. The legislation creating Yellowstone drew heavily on the 1864 law that made Yosemite a park. However, while that law turned the park over to the state, this was not feasible for Yellowstone which sprawled across three different territories (Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho). So just six months after Hayden’s expedition, Yellowstone became the first national park, not only in the U.S. but in the world as well.

That story, however, is only the beginning of a long and fascinating saga about how to actually manage the park. Initially, the park’s promoters envisioned it not need any federal funding. But this meant there was no way to really enforce the restrictions that came with the park designation. Moreover, there was considerable local opposition to the park, much of it reminiscent of current disputes about the management of federal lands. Some of the locals feared that the regional economy would be unable to thrive if there remained strict federal prohibitions against resource development or settlement within park boundaries. Some local entrepreneurs advocated reducing the size of the park so that mining, hunting, and logging activities could be developed. To this end, numerous bills were introduced, unsuccessfully, by Montana legislators, who sought, unsuccessfully, to remove the federal land-use restrictions.

Finally, in 1877 Congress provided funding “to protect, preserve, and improve the Park” whichg led allowed the parks superintendent to build Yellowstone’s first roads, a park headquarters at Mammoth Hot Springs, and to hire its first “gamekeeper.” But even when ten assistant superintendents were authorized to act as police, they failed to stop the destruction of wildlife. Consequently, in 1886, after Congress refused to appropriate money for the park, the Secretary of the Interior, under authority given by the Congress, turned control of the park ov erf to the U.S. Army.

The Army constructed permanent structures and established policies and procedures that permitted controlled public access while protecting park wildlife and natural resources. But many challenges remained, particularly from poachers. Despite these challenges, the park’s reputation continued to grow, particularly after the Northern Pacific Railroad built a train station in Livingston, Montana near the park’s northern entrance in the early 1880s. Visitors included naturalist John Muir, who in the late 1890s wrote: “However orderly your excursions or aimless, again and again amid the calmest, stillest scenery you will be brought to a standstill hushed and awe-stricken before phenomena wholly new to you. Boiling springs and huge deep pools of purest green and azure water, thousands of them, are plashing and heaving in these high, cool mountains as if a fierce furnace fire were burning beneath each one of them; and a hundred geysers, white torrents of boiling water and steam, like inverted waterfalls, are ever and anon rushing up out of the hot, black underworld.”

Nevertheless, running a park was not the Army’s usual line of work. Moreover, each of the 14 other national parks established in the late 1800s and early 1900s was separately administered, resulting in uneven management. Growing concern over such problems led to calls to create a federal entity to manage the national parks. Promoters of this idea gathered support from influential journalists, railroads likely to profit from increased park tourism, and members of Congress. And in August 1916, President Woodrow Wilson signed legislation creating the National Park Service. With that, control of Yellowstone passed to the new entity, whose leaders adopted many of the structures and practices the Army had developed in the two decades that it had overseen Yellowstone.

Disputes about the park, of course, have continued to the present. In the 1930s, water users, particularly potato farmers, pressed, unsuccessfully to dam the park’s southwest corner. In 1963, controversy about the forced reduction of the elk population in Yellowstone, led US Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall to create a scientific advisory board, chaired by A. Starker Leopold, a noted zoologist and conservationist, that produced the first unified and concrete plan for managing the park’s visitors and ecosystems. Wildfires in the late 1980s led to a major reexamination of fire management policies that continue to be hotly debated (pun intended). And, due to the pandemic, the park, which drew over 4 million visitors in 2019, had to be closed and has only partially reopened.

All of these efforts underscore the challenges of creating and maintaining a vibrant park. As the Leopold report stated: “Restoring the primitive scene is not done easily nor can it be done completely. Some species are extinct. Given time, an eastern hardwood forest can be regrown to maturity but the chestnut will be missing and so will the roar of pigeon wings. The colorful drapanid finches are not to be heard again in the lowland forests of Hawaii, nor will the jack-hammer of the ivory-bill ring in southern swamps. The wolf and grizzly bear cannot readily be reintroduced into ranching communities, and the factor of human use of the parks is subject only to regulation, not elimination. Exotic plants, animals, and diseases are here to stay. All these limitations we fully realize. Yet, if the goal cannot be fully achieved it can be approached. A reasonable illusion of primitive America could be recreated, using the utmost in skill, judgment, and ecologic sensitivity. This in our opinion should be the objective of every national park and monument.”

Be well, and “using the utmost skill,” stay safe, fight for justice, and work for peace.