America’s first national park sits on a supervolcano
Yellowstone spans 3,468 square miles across Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho—famous for Old Faithful and wildlife. Signed into law by President Grant on 1 March 1872, it also cradles Yellowstone Caldera, North America’s largest supervolcano, now classed as dormant after two colossal eruptions in the last two million years.
Native peoples lived in the region for at least eleven thousand years before mountain men drifted through and organised non-Native surveys began in the late 1860s. The Interior Department first managed the park; the Army ran it for thirty years from 1886 to 1916 before the National Park Service took over in 1917. Subalpine forest dominates a mosaic of lakes, canyons, rivers, and ranges.
Yellowstone Lake, among North America’s largest high-elevation lakes, covers part of the caldera. Hundreds of mammal, bird, fish, reptile, and amphibian species live here, including threatened ones; grizzlies and other megafauna make it the contiguous United States’ premier large-animal stage.
Native languages describe the area as white mountain country in Assiniboine, land of steam in Crow and boiling earth in Nez Perce, while the English name comes from a Hidatsa term for the river, rendered Yellow Stone in 1797 on David Thompson's expedition. A Clovis obsidian point about 11,000 years old turned up in the 1950s while a post office was being built in Gardiner, Montana. Between roughly 200 BC and AD 400, thousands of pounds of Obsidian Cliff stone travelled by river to Ohio, where the Hopewell culture used it for ceremonial goods, and around 500 to 1000 AD the Shoshone summered at the south end of Yellowstone Lake.
John Colter, a Lewis and Clark veteran, passed near Tower Fall in the winter of 1807 to 1808, and in 1864 Piegan Blackfeet guided the Jesuit Xavier Kuppens around the geysers. The painter George Catlin had floated the idea of a western national park as early as 1833. The private Cook–Folsom–Peterson party of 1869 and the Washburn–Langford–Doane expedition of 1870 were followed in 1871 by Ferdinand Hayden's government survey, whose report, illustrated with William Henry Jackson's photographs and Thomas Moran's paintings, helped persuade Congress to keep the land from public sale.
Source: Yellowstone National Park
