SUNDAY, MARCH 6 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ BD K B5
MYTH NO. 1Theodore Roosevelt created
Yellowstone National ParkVisitors to Yellowstone might be forgiven
for associating the park with Theodore
Roosevelt. Roosevelt, after all, is the most
well-known conservationist to hold the
nation’s highest office. An entire region of
the park bears his name, encompassing the
bison-rich Lamar Valley, Mount Washburn
and Tower Fall, as well as the Roosevelt
Lodge. The Roosevelt Arch, constructed at
Yellowstone’s northern entrance to give the
boundary a sense of grandeur, was
dedicated by the president during his two-
week trip to the area in 1903.
But Roosevelt did not create Yellowstone.
More than 30 years before his visit,
President Ulysses S. Grant signed the
Yellowstone National Park Protection Act,
establishing the first national park in the
world. He did so at a pivotal moment in the
Reconstruction era, when the federal
government was testing its power and reach
in both the South and the West. The
legislation had a precedent in the 1864
Yosemite Valley Grant Act, which gave lands
to the state of California to manage. That
the federal government could an d would
preserve lands “for the benefit and
enjoyment of the people” was a new idea in
1872, one rooted in post-Civil War beliefs in
unifying national projects and a federal
government striving for higher ideals.MYTH NO. 2National parks were dreamed
up b y patriotic adventurersIn the 1890s, Nathaniel Langford, the first
superintendent of Yellowstone National
Park, told a story that went like this: In the
fall of 1870, Langford and several other civic
leaders from Montana gathered around a
fire near the confluence of the Firehole and
Gibbon rivers, a s pot known as Madison
Junction. They discussed the future of the
region, and at one point, Cornelius Hedges,
the U.S. attorney for the Montana Territory,
suggested that “there ought to be no private
ownership of any portion of that region, but
that the whole of it ought to be set apart as a
great national park.” After Langford
published this account again in 1905, the
campfire story became the official origin
story of Yellowstone. In 1910, a sign was
placed at Madison Junction announcing,
“Here was first suggested the idea of setting
apart this region as a National Park.” The
National Park Service’s first annual report in
1917 embraced the story, lauding the “broad,
unselfish, public-spirited” conversation that
brought the “splendid patriotic national
park plan to the attention of Congress.”
It wasn’t until the 1960s and 1970s that
Yellowstone’s historians decided to
investigate that account. They found no
written references to it before Langford’s
late- 19th-century writings. Instead, they
found an 1871 le tter from A.B. Nettleton, a
public relations man for the Northern
Pacific Railroad, that attributed the idea for
the park to a P ennsylvania congressman
who was a booster for the railroad. The
Northern Pacific ’s tracks would run north of1877, “... and the superstitious awe of the
roaring cataracts, sulphur pools, and
spouting geysers over the surrounding
pagan Indians, they seldom visit it.” The
idea that Indigenous peoples were afraid of
Yellowstone persisted for more than a
century.
But Hayden and his team followed trails
pounded out by native peoples and their
ponies throughout Yellowstone. They found
signs of Shoshone, Bannock, Crow and other
Indigenous camps in every part of the basin.
These native peoples used Yellowstone as a
hunting ground and a t horoughfare that
would bring them to the bison herds of the
Great Plains. They continued to do so after
Congress passed the Yellowstone Act in
1872.
Yellowstone park officials have recently
begun to acknowledge this fact, and thisNow one of the most iconic landscapes in the United States, Yellowstone was long a place of myth
and rumor for most Americans. This changed in the summer of 1871, when the geologist-explorer
Ferdinand Hayden took a team of scientists into the area for the first time, determined to, as he put
it, “strip that region of all romance.” Eight months later, Congress preserved Yellowstone as the
world’s first national park. Despite this, and although 4 million people visit every year, mispercep-
tions about its founding and its features persist.FIVE MYTHSYellowstone
JONATHAN NEWTON/THE WASHINGTON POSTI n the early days of
Yellowstone
National Park,
officials there
wrongly claimed
that Native
Americans were
afraid of its
geothermal
features, such as
the Grand
Prismatic Spring.Yellowstone, and the company stood to gain
cachet and increased ridership if the park
came to pass.MYTH NO. 3Indigenous peoples were
afraid of YellowstoneWhen Hayden and his scientific team
entered Yellowstone in the summer of 1871,
he was relieved that his cohort had no run-
ins with any Indigenous parties. Hayden’s
subsequent accounts of his expedition made
no mention of any Indigenous inhabitants,
which probably led many Americans to
believe that native people had vanished
from Yellowstone. “Owing to the isolation of
the park,” Yellowstone’s second
superintendent, Philetus Norris, wrote inBy Megan Kate Nelson
year they plan to begin integrating
Indigenous histories into their tourist
liter ature and park infrastructure.Myth No. 4The Yellowstone Act was not
contentious
In most histories of Yellowstone and the
West, as well as on National Park Service
websites, the passage of the Yellowstone Act
is relayed with a matter-of-factness that
obscures the debates that swirled around it.
In “West From Appomattox,” historian
Heather Cox Richardson argues that “the
establishment of Yellowstone National Park
reflected the new accord in American
politics,” while journalist George Black, in
“Empire of Shadows,” notes that while the
act required some lobbying, “the speed of its
passage and the idealism that drove it ...
were nothing short of astonishing.”
The passage of the law was bipartisan,
but it was not close to unanimous. In the
early 1870s, most Americans believed in the
sanctity of the preemption and homestead
laws, and the right of White men to take
whatever lands they wanted and put them
into production. “I do not know why settlers
should be excluded from a tract of land,”
Sen. Cornelius Cole (R-Calif.) protested
during debate over the act, “in the Rocky
Mountains or any other place.”
In the end, the Yellowstone Act passed
because the GOP held a l arge majority in
both houses. And back then, Republicans’
belief in the reach and power of the federal
government extended to the preservation of
public lands.MYTH NO. 5Yellowstone’s wildlife is
completely wildMany visitors are drawn to Yellowstone’s
geothermal features, but they also aim to
see the park’s charismatic animals: bison,
elk, moose, bears and wolves. Many assume
that these creatures are “wild,” a term that
suggests an untouched and uncultivated
state. An article on the Yellowstone
National Park Lodges website claims, “Each
season, birds and mammals pulse in and
out of Yellowstone’s critical wildlife habitat
in an annual cycle of movement that is as
old as the land itself.” Yellowstonepark.com
holds that it is “the right national park” to
see “real wildlife ... in their natural
habitat.”
In truth, they are managed p opulations,
tracked and culled and bred to keep
Yellowstone’s ecosystem in balance. White
and Indigenous hunters killed thousands of
bison, elk and moose within the park’s
boundaries. By 1877, these animal
populations had declined so precipitously
that Norris, the park’s second
superintendent, suggested a program of
captive breeding and display that would
render its animals “permanently attractive
and profitable to the park.”
Twitter: @megankatenelsonMegan Kate Nelson is the author of “Saving
Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in
Reconstruction America.”though, the court revisited the free-speech
implications of cross-burning. This time,
Thomas had more to say at oral argument,
chiding one of the advocates for “understat-
ing” the impact of cross-burning. The burn-
ing cross, he recounted, was a well-worn
symbol of white supremacy, designed to
intimidate and terrorize. Thomas’s words,
coming as they did from a Black man raised in
the South, seemed to change the tenor of the
debate. Justices and advocates alike refer-
enced Thomas’s remarks as they acknowl-
edged cross-burning’s associations with ra-
cialized violence and intimidation. While the
court again struck down the challenged law
as impermissibly intruding upon free speech,
it conceded that cross-burning with the
intent to intimidate would not be entitled to
First Amendment protection.
Some may dispute whether Thomas’s in-
tervention shaped the debate in the cross-
burning case, but it is clear that his perspec-
tive as the only Black person in the room was
hard to dismiss.
If Jackson is confirmed, which seems likely,
Thomas’s authority on questions of race at
the high court will be diminished — a healthy
development. Next term, the justices will
hear a critical challenge to affirmative action,
and, depending on what happens in the
Mississippi abortion case currently pending,Americans experienced in the South during
Reconstruction and beyond. Because Black
citizens were routinely denied their Second
Amendment rights, they were uniquely vul-
nerable to “a wave of private violence de-
signed to drive blacks from the voting booth
and force them into peonage, an effective
return to slavery.” To underscore the point,
Thomas detailed the violent lynchings and
deaths of numerous Black men, including
Emmett Till in 1955. His message was clear:
The “use of firearms allowed targets of
[racial] violence to survive.”
As the only Black member of the court,
Thomas’s views on race and racism may carry
particular weight with his colleagues. After
all, he — and he alone — is positioned to
explain, drawing on personal experience, the
impact of racism on the Black community.
And his conservative bona fides make it hard
to dismiss his views as “wokeness” run amok.
Consider the court’s decisions on burning
crosses. In a 1 992 free-speech case involving a
cross-burning, the court struck down the
hate-crime ordinance under which the liti-
gants had been charged, finding it an imper-
missible imposition on free speech. A new
addition to the court at the time, Thomas said
nothing at oral argument and in the opinions.
The decision invalidating the ordinance was
unanimous. A little over a decade later,there may be yet more opportunities to
consider the scope and substance of the right
to abortion. On both of these issues, Thomas
has been incredibly vocal — and his views
have been presented in racialized terms. He is
a stalwart critic of af firmative action, arguing
that such programs “stamp minorities with a
badge of inferiority and may cause them to
develop dependencies or to adopt an attitude
that they are ‘entitled’ to preferences.” He has
dismissed claims about the supposed benefits
of diversity in education as a product of
“faddish social theories” at odds with a
constitutional commitment to equal protec-
tion of the laws. His opposition to reproduc-
tive rights is well known, though recently, his
rhetoric has grown more aggressive: He has
associated abortion with the eugenics move-
ment of the 1920s and has voiced concern
about the eradication through abortion of
minority groups.
As an African American raised in the wake
of the civil rights movement, Jackson — who,
at 51, is 22 years younger than Thomas — may
have a markedly different view of the benefits
and burdens of affirmative action. The
daughter of public school teachers, she was
raised in the post-Jim Crow South and was
educated in public schools that benefited
from Brown v. Board of Education’s integra-
tion mandate. Her experiences in higher
education were shaped by a diversity ideal
that is now under siege at the high court. As
with Thomas, her experiences may inform
her understanding of these issues.
Likewise, as a Black woman and a working
mother, her take on reproductive rights may
stand in stark contrast to that of Thomas. She
has spoken movingly (and humorously) of the
“whiplash” she experienced in her dual roles
as a federal judge and a mother of teenagers.
As conservatives bear down on abortion
rights, Jackson’s experiences navigating the
joys and difficulties of working motherhood
may inform her contributions to the court’s
deliberations.
To be sure, Justice Sonia Sotomayor rou-
tinely has sought to elevate the perspectives
of people of color — and specifically women
of color — in the court’s debates. But the
addition of a Black woman to the court’s
diminished liberal wing could amplify these
efforts. Serving as a counterweight to Thom-
as, Jackson would make clear, through her
presence and her arguments, that the Black
experience is anything but one-dimensional.I
t goes without saying that racial identity is
not monolithic. Even as they share partic-
ular traits, individuals may harbor wildly
different views on various issues. But since
1967, and Thurgood Marshall’s appointment,
there has been only one Black voice at a time
on the U.S. Supreme Court — first that of the
civil rights hero, then that of Clarence
Thomas, the staunch conservative selected in
1991 to replace Marshall.
This is why President Biden’s nomination
of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, a Black
woman, to the high court is so important. A
graduate of Harvard College and Harvard
Law School, Jackson would bring a r ange of
professional experiences that would diversify
the court. If confirmed, she would be the first
justice since Marshall to have worked in
criminal defense, and she also served on the
U.S. Sentencing Commission, where she
spoke out about the disparity in crack and
powder cocaine sentences. She would be the
first justice to have clerked at all three levels
of the federal judiciary. And, to judge from
her written opinions and public statements,
she would serve as a weighty counterpoint to
Thomas, demonstrating to the country the
vast diversity of Black viewpoints.
That she would provide an alternative
perspective is critical. Many in the Black
community are adamant that Thomas does
not speak for them. That may be true, but as
the only African American on the court,
Thomas has frequently surfaced issues of race
in the court’s decision-making that his White
colleagues have glossed over. For example, in
Kelo v. New London, the court in 2005 upheld
a ci ty’s use of eminent domain in conjunction
with an economic revitalization project. The
taking of private property, the court mused,
was a small price to pay for the economic
growth that the project would spur — eco-
nomic growth that would benefit the resi-
dents of the city’s “blighted” urban landscape.
In a l one dissent, Thomas offered a stinging
counterpoint to this rosy narrative of urban
progress. Far from benefiting members of
minority groups, the government’s use of
eminent domain, he contended, resulted in
the destruction of “predominantly minority
communities” and the displacement of Black
people and other marginalized Americans.
Likewise, in a controversial gun rights case
in which gun-control advocates emphasized
the impact of firearms-related violence on
minority communities, Thomas wrote sepa-
rately to provide a racialized account of the
Second Amendment. He drew a straight line
connecting, in his view, weak protections for
gun rights today to the terror that BlackA new kind of diversity on the Supreme Court: Two formidable Black voices
Law professor
Melissa
Murray on the
perspective
Ketanji Brown
Jackson would
bring to the
courtJABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POSTTwitter: @ProfMMurrayMelissa Murray is the Frederick I. and Grace
Stokes professor of law at New York University.Supreme Court
nominee Ketanji
Brown Jackson
meets with Senate
Majority Leader
Charles E. Schumer
(D-N.Y.) on Capitol
Hill on Wednesday.
If confirmed, she
would be a more
liberal
counterweight to
conservative Justice
Clarence Thomas.