The People Who Came Before the Parks

On August 25, 1916, President Woodrow Wilson created the National Park Service by establishing a new bureau in the Department of the Interior: Directly alongside that bureau sat the Bureau of Indian Affairs. This is no coincidence. The two departments were not only closely situated but were related in a “dual island system” of nature preserves and Indian reservations. Today, we tend to think of our national parks as sprawling natural treasures, gifted to our country by the government, starting with Congress’ Yellowstone Act of 1872 and continuing with the legacy of President Theodore Roosevelt. The Yellowstone Act began a global national park movement, for which we are grateful today, as millions of travelers enjoy the majestic wilderness and natural preserves that the act protects.

What is little known is that 11 of those parks were once inhabited by tribes whose claims to ownership the federal government ignored, invalidated or did not recognize. As historian Philip Burnham details in his book Indian Country, God’s Country, many of our most beloved national parks were carved out of land belonging to Native Americans or intended as reservations: Badlands, Death Valley, Glacier, the Grand Canyon and Mesa Verde. These vast areas of land were forcefully taken from Native American communities that lived within them as part of the US government’s larger efforts to relocate and remove them.

Yellowstone is a perfect example. Congress “gifted” this glorious stretch of 2.2 million acres to the American public. The Yellowstone Act passed quickly and without much debate because the land was so far west, and so unknown, that not many people knew anything about it. According to park historian Lee Whittlesey, only a few fur trappers and gold prospectors had begun to explore the area thought of as one of the last bastions of “uninhabited wilderness” to be “discovered” by white settlers. Of course, it wasn’t uninhabited: 26 Indigenous tribes are believed to have been inhabiting what they still consider sacred land.

The park’s conflicted relationship with its Indigenous communities was apparent from the very beginning. President Ulysses S. Grant signed the Yellowstone Act into law in 1872, describing the “natural curiosities” and “wonders” that would be protected as “reserved and withdrawn from settlement, occupancy, or sale… and dedicated and set apart as a public park or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people; and all persons who shall locate or settle upon or occupy the same, or any part thereof, except as hereinafter provided, shall be considered trespassers and removed therefrom.”

Not long after the park was established, Whittlesey describes white superintendents trying to make the area “safe” by removing “primitive savages” from the preserve, claiming that because they were afraid of geysers, they never lived there in the first place. This was false; in fact, the various tribes that made up the Miwok people including the Sheep-eaters and Mountain Shoshone tribes lived on and revered the land, and many others considered the geysers to be sacred. Tribes such as the Crow, Blackfeet, Flatheads, and Kiowa traveled throughout the region year-round to hunt or search for obsidian for arrowheads.

In a “park” now protected and preserved from “the wanton destruction of the fish and game found within said park, and against their capture or destruction for the purposes of merchandise or profit,” the tribes were unable to hunt, gather food, light fires, eat or sleep. Forced off the land now considered a natural preserve by the government, native people were once again removed from their ancestral home.

In Dispossessing the Wilderness, Mark David Spence recounts the ejection of tribes to make way for park tourists. This was far from a smooth process. In 1877, during the infamous Nez Perce War, the US Army pursued several bands of the Nez. Perce tribe in a series of violent battles over the tribe’s relocation from Oregon to Idaho. One of these large battles took place in Yellowstone. Two different groups of tourists, totaling about 15 travelers, fell into encounters with the Nez Perce.

One tourist was killed and two suffered serious wounds; the rest either scattered into the forest or were given the protection of Nez Perce Chief Joseph and taken back to their camps, then given horses and released to find the US cavalry. Chief Joseph ultimately surrendered several months later at the Canadian border. The incident was vividly recounted in the press and only intensified the perceived need to make the area “safe;” rumor had it that the Union Army General William Tecumseh Sherman himself had been a tourist in the park just a few days earlier.

As Robert H. Keller and Michael F. Turek write in American Indians & National Parks, it was actually the painter George Catlin who, in 1832, “conceived the idea of preserving the West in its ‘pristine beauty and wildness’ by creating ‘a Nation’s Park.” Famous for his portraits of Indigenous people and paintings of American wilderness, Catlin had hoped to protect the culture of plains tribes as well as to preserve grasslands, wolves and buffalo … ‘One imagines… by some great protecting policy of government… a magnificent park, where the world would see for ages to come, the native Indian in his classic attire, galloping his wild horse, with sinewy bow, and shield and lance, amid the fleeting herds of elk and buffalo.”

Catlin was not only one of the first voices advocating for national parks what few know is that he believed that Native Americans should be protected as well.