When Yellowstone Became A Place

What do we see when we look upon a landscape, and what does the answer tell us about the nature of place?

Our faculty of sight is a product of our embeddedness in webs of human relations. Long before any of us ever encounter a landscape as such, our experience of the world–and what we take notice of in that world–already has been shaped by bonds of family, friendship, and community. These communal bonds give perspective and add color to what our vision takes in. Sight for us is always sensation imbued with affect and meaning, both of which derive from our formative experiences as members of particular communities. The starting point when answering the question what do we see is in the first instance with whom do we see?

The story of the early days of Yellowstone helps reveal who our companions in seeing truly are. They are members of our community who have bequeathed to us a rich heritage. Our communal bonds extend not only to those immediately around us but also backwards through time, formed as traditions are handed down and customs are observed across generations. When we look upon the marvels of what I have elsewhere defined as iconic nature (namely, aesthetically potent and symbolically resonant images of the physical landscape that have been effectively transmitted across time) what we see is charged and enlivened by images and narratives we have encountered long before we ever set foot in the places themselves.

Paintings in museums, photographs in schoolbooks, and cinematic vistas in television commercials or films both instruct us what to see and serve as characters in our stories about ourselves. These images do not transparently represent the landscape. They help constitute landscape as place by offering the terms or concepts through which to experience it. They become real places constituted for us, through us, and by us and through which we ourselves are constituted. The members of our community who gave us Yellowstone and helped us to see it also gave us a part of ourselves.

In contemplating the process by which Yellowstone (once an untamed nowhere) transformed into a symbolic place, we better appreciate how what we see is rooted in collective experience, in the human relations of which we are a part. When we look upon a landscape that once appeared to some as a hellish wasteland and see, for example, a font of national dignity, we learn much about the nature of place. Place points back to a people, to this people’s feelings, concepts, and character.

In late summer of 1869, three men–David Folsom, Charles Cook, and William Peterson–set out to explore the wild lands of Montana and Wyoming in the territory that later would become Yellowstone National Park. They were not the first Americans to behold these lands. That honor belonged to the mythic frontier hero John Colter, who is believed to have stumbled upon what came to be known as “Colter’s Hell” around 1808 (approximately two years after being discharged from the Corps of Discovery led by Lewis and Clark). Folsom, Cook, and Peterson comprised the first expedition whose central purpose was to explore and document the marvels of nature rumored to exist at the head of the Yellowstone River.

On September 22, 1869, their expedition reached the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. Cook’s account of the sights they saw captures something of the overwhelming quality of their shared encounter:

The country around the head-waters of the Yellowstone River, although frequently visited by prospectors and mountain men, is still to the world of letters a veritable terra incognita … Language is entirely inadequate to convey a just conception of the awful grandeur and sublimity of this masterpiece of nature’s handiwork … Above our camp the river is about one hundred and fifty yards wide, and glides smoothly along between gently sloping banks; but just below, the hills crowd in on either side, forcing the water into a narrow channel, through which it hurries with increasing speed, until, rushing through a chute sixty feet wide, it makes the final fearful leap of three hundred and fifty feet.

The words Cook uses are suggestive, but take note that Cook emphasizes what words cannot do. His experience of the canyon exceeds the capacity of language to convey. These three explorers beheld something that would mark them forever, something they could communicate only imperfectly to those who themselves had not been there. Yet they did share and leave for us an idea of their experience.

Cook’s account was published in the July 1870 edition of The Lakeside Monthly, and it helped introduce the marvels of Yellowstone to the reading public. Cook’s descriptions, however, were not initially met with confidence. His personal diary reveals that Harper’s New Monthly, New York Tribune, and Scribner’s Monthly all refused to publish his account. Harper’s reasoned that they had a reputation they could not risk with such unreliable material. The wonders Cook described seemed too fantastic to be believed!

In August 1870, another expedition set out. This one was led by Henry Washburn, the Surveyor-General of Montana Territory. Nathaniel Langford, a member of this expedition, wrote an account that was accorded credence by the editors of Scribner’s Monthly, and they published it in two parts as the lead articles in the editions of May and June 1871. Those articles were accompanied by imagery of Yellowstone created by the hero of our story–an artist named Thomas Moran.

Here is where the story takes a remarkable turn. Thomas Moran had never laid eyes on the lands he was depicting. His work was infused with imagination. His depictions did have a basis in sketches made by a soldier who had escorted the expedition, yet the visual representation of Yellowstone’s Lower Falls and its Grand or Great Canyon was first and foremost Moran’s own invented perspective.

From the beginning, the account of Yellowstone available to the American public was mediated by a few people printing tales and framing for the world vistas that ought to be seen. What the readers of Scribner’s saw was not (were there such a thing) a perspective-free reproduction of Yellowstone taken in with untrained eyes. Rather, these readers saw an attempt to translate the overwhelming experience of Yellowstone into an image that might convey a fitting conception of being there. Moran’s depiction of Yellowstone in Scribner’s helped create the basic terms, the visual vocabulary, through which Americans would come to understand Yellowstone itself.

Moran’s imagination did not reach its limit there. In the summer of 1871 Moran joined a government survey expedition to Yellowstone funded by the United States Congress. This expedition was led by United States Geologist Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden. Moran’s visit to Yellowstone made Moran one of the few people in the world to see that landscape firsthand. Moran laid eyes on Yellowstone as an artist, as an emissary of the American people, as an explorer, and as a friend to the other men on the expedition. He also was a colleague of Hayden, one of the world’s foremost geologists. Let us recall that geology was still in its infancy in a world that only recently had become older than 6,000 years. The artistic result of that visit introduced a new object for the world to behold: The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, Moran’s masterwork of 1872.

Yellowstone had become a place. By this I mean, first, that its being was concretely established. Yellowstone was no longer a fantastical rumor or mere legend. Indeed, the United States Geologist confirmed its reality, and William Henry Jackson’s photographs further attested to this. This concrete establishment, however, only provided a basic condition for place. Second, and much more importantly, Moran presented to the world a new visible object and a perspective on that object in his masterwork. He presented a way of perceiving the landscape that re-presented (or presented again) the features of the landscape in a manner that communicated something of what Cook referred to as its “awful grandeur,” something of what the human experience of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone was like to one with an American’s pride, a geologist’s interest in time and strata, and an artist’s eye for a picture.

Moran’s masterwork was a new condition for the world, a true primordial event. Here we reach the heart of the matter: Moran expanded the reality of what was visible in a work of his imagination. “I place no value upon literal transcripts from Nature. My general scope is not realistic,” Moran declared. “[A]ll my tendencies are toward idealization … a place, as a place, has no value in itself for the artist only so far as it furnishes the material from which to construct a picture. Topography in art is valueless.” Moran’s picture added visual ideas to the set of narratives that were giving shape to the Yellowstone of the imagination. Indeed, this Yellowstone of the imagination is all it has ever been for us. From the beginning of its own story, the landscape called Yellowstone has been a place. It has been constituted by collective bonds enduring across time, by affect, and by webs of meaning bearing on what is held to be worth seeing.

To understand better what Moran accomplished, one must appreciate his idea of the artist’s proper role. Moran was deeply influenced by the English romantic painter (and major force of landscape art) J.M.W. Turner. Moran visited England in 1861 and 1866 and sketched and copied Turner’s work at the National Gallery. In an interview with the critic George Sheldon, Moran expounded upon what he had learned:

Turner is a great artist, but he is not understood, because both painters and the public look upon his pictures as transcriptions of Nature. He certainly did not so regard them. All that he asked of a scene was simply how good a medium it was for making a picture; he cared nothing for the scene itself. Literally speaking, his landscapes are false; but they contain his impressions of Nature, and so many natural characteristics as were necessary adequately to convey that impression to others.

Turner’s view that the artist’s task is not to transcribe but to interpret, not to copy but to compose, shaped everything Moran painted.

For Moran, the literal details of a landscape were raw materials to be transformed by artistic vision. Moran openly acknowledged that he had taken liberties in depicting Yellowstone’s Grand Canyon. “The motive or incentive of my ‘Grand Cañon of the Yellowstone’ was the gorgeous display of color that impressed itself upon me,” he explained. “While I desired to tell truly of Nature, I did not wish to realize the scene literally, but to preserve and to convey its true impression.” Moran improved upon the vista afforded by Yellowstone by rearranging elements to produce a composition that communicated what the place felt like to him more powerfully than literal transcription could have done. The goal was not scientific accuracy but the communication of an intuition. The aim was to convey what a place feels like and what it means, rather than merely cataloguing its features. Moran sought to evoke in his viewers something of what he himself had experienced. His purpose was not disinterestedly to show them Yellowstone but to invite them into a kind of communion with him and with the place.

Of course, the story of Yellowstone is not only about visual imagery. It is also about compelling narratives and webs of meaning. An acute interest in geological formations characterized American exploration in this era and the Hayden expedition in particular. In addition to this, there was the conception of natural landscapes as sources of American national dignity. The historian Alfred Runte argued that Americans were predisposed to embrace natural wonders as representations of greatness precisely because the young nation lacked the ancient artistic and literary heritage of Europe. American cities had no Notre Dame, no Parthenon, no thousand-year-old cathedrals attesting to the grandeur of their culture. What America did possess was a landscape of staggering scale and beauty. America’s natural cathedrals rivaled anything the Old World could offer.

The issue of American national dignity points toward something more general–the recognition that places charged with feeling and meaning create conditions under which we encounter one another and engage with the world in ways that engender and strengthen bonds. America’s natural cathedrals do not merely compensate for the lack of a deep architectural history; they are sacred places inviting collective encounter and the formation of bonds with those of our past, present, and future. Moran himself understood the connection between landscape art and national dignity. Late in life, visiting the Grand Canyon in Arizona (the subject of another one of his masterworks) he declared: “Before America can pretend to a position in the world of art it will have to prove it through a characteristic nationality in its art; and American artists can only do this by painting their own country.” He added, “There is no phase of landscape in which we are not richer, more varied and interesting than any country in the world.”

Moran completed The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone in early 1872. By June, the painting not only had been viewed by many, but it was also in the process of becoming an object of American collective feeling. At seven feet tall by twelve feet wide, it belonged to the tradition of the “Great Picture,” exceptionally large landscape paintings that were exhibited as public events and often were shown as single-painting exhibitions with careful lighting. The Great Picture was a convention of the mid-nineteenth-century American art world perhaps made most famous by the prolific landscape artist Albert Bierstadt, whose paintings of Yosemite Valley and the Rocky Mountains are legendary. The viewing of a Great Picture was an occasion for collective experience transcending individual viewers.

Moran’s painting was exhibited in Boston, Newark, New York, and Washington, where it was shown at both the Smithsonian and the Capitol’s National Statuary Hall. The response to it was overwhelming. The New-York Tribune reported that viewers were enthralled by the painting’s “intrinsic truth, sublimity, and beauty,” claiming it did not need the “testimony of learned geologists like … Prof. [Ferdinand] Hayden” to convince viewers of its truthful result. The Newark Daily Advertiser called it “a remarkable picture … a faithful likeness of one of the most wonderful … scenes of the famous valley of the Yellowstone River … the finest work of art ever produced in our State.” The Atlantic Monthly was equally effusive, calling it “a lively presentment of one of the most wonderful wonders in a land made by Nature.”

Moran’s sketches also circulated among members of Congress during deliberations over the Yellowstone bill. Moran and the survey photographer William Henry Jackson created almost all of the imagery with which any member of Congress would have been familiar during the debate. Americans gathered in galleries and in the Capitol to encounter together something that had not existed for them before. What occurred there was not merely aesthetic appreciation. It was, rather, the formation of a shared premise, the establishment of a common bond of feeling and meaning upon which future encounters with Yellowstone could build.

Fewer than three years elapsed between the Folsom-Cook-Peterson expedition of 1869 and President Grant’s signing of the Yellowstone Act on March 1, 1872. The Yellowstone Act created America’s first national park. Yellowstone was now a sacred site set aside in law and custom as a “pleasure-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.” In that brief span, virtually unknown land that was initially beyond belief had become a place.

So what do we see when we look upon a landscape? The story of Yellowstone suggests that we see not only what light makes available to the eye but also what has been made affectively and meaningfully visible for us by our forebears. We see the courage of explorers, the inquisitiveness of scientists, the labor of artists, and vistas judged worth framing and preserving, and all of this is viewed within the context of stories deemed worth telling and handing down. What we see when we look upon a landscape is a place received as inheritance.

A place, undoubtedly, is not just the product of sight and affect and meaning. A place is a place because we act with it and integrate it into the realm of human things. A place is constituted by human bonds, which stem from shared encounters. The establishment of a place redirects the tendency and flow of time. The emergence of a place is a primordial event, a moment when something genuinely new enters the domain of human feeling and meaning and becomes a condition of a new timeline, a new condition of human flourishing. When Yellowstone became a place was one such event. It remains, for those who inherit it, tend it, and act with it, an invitation to the collective experience through which places come into being anew in each generation.

Image Credit: Thomas Moran, “The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone” (1872)