Originally published on March 7, 2022 (Episode 254)
Introduction
In 1871, Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden led the first scientific expedition into the extraordinary landscape we now know as Yellowstone National Park. But as Megan Kate Nelson argues in Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America (Scribner, 2022), this was not only a story about geysers, hot springs, and sublime wilderness. It was also about the struggle to define federal power in the years after the Civil War.
Three figures loom over Nelson’s narrative: Hayden, the doctor-turned-geologist determined to preserve Yellowstone; Jay Cooke, the Philadelphia financier raising capital for the Northern Pacific Railroad; and Sitting Bull, the Lakota leader determined to resist the expansion of the railroad across Indigenous lands. Their clash illuminates the entanglement of science, capital, and sovereignty at a crucial moment in American history.
About the Guest
Megan Kate Nelson is a historian and writer living in Massachusetts. She also is the author of Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War (University of Georgia Press, 2012), and The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West (Scribner, 2020). She previously appeared on Historically Thinking in Episode 23.
For Further Investigation
Megan Kate Nelson, Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America (Scribner, 2022)
Episode 23: Ruin Nation — Megan Kate Nelson on destruction and the American Civil War
Episode 77: Brian Leech on environmental history and the modern West
💬 Listen & Discuss
Yellowstone became the nation’s first national park, but its creation was entangled in Reconstruction, railroads, finance, scientific developments, and Native American resistance. Can a story be many things at once? Share your thoughts in the comments—and send this episode to a friend who loves history and national parks.
