What Do We Owe Our National Parks?
Letters From the Archives is a series in which we highlight past Atlantic stories and reactions from readers at the time.
The 2,221,766 acres that make up Yellowstone National Park now receive 4 million to 6 million visitors annually. But in 1872, the land was practically untouched. That year, President Ulysses S. Grant signed “an Act to set apart a certain Tract of Land lying near the Head-waters of the Yellowstone River as a public Park,” which designated Yellowstone “for the benefit and enjoyment of the people” and sought to shield it from “settlement, occupancy, or sale.” The act paved the way for other lands to be protected under the same criteria, overseen by the Department of the Interior. Today, almost 150 years later, the United States has 61 national parks.
According to Nathaniel P. Langford, an explorer and the first appointed park superintendent for Yellowstone, the idea to protect American land germinated around a campfire at Madison Junction, where the Gibbon and Firehole Rivers meet. He and other members of an expedition that had set out to determine the value of the land, Langford claimed, were struck by its natural beauty, and decided instead to advocate for its preservation.
Yet historical accounts
