Yellowstone Treasures Blog

The first airing on PBS of Ken Burns’s and Dayton Duncan’s twelve-hour series has got us all thinking about the superb idea that blossomed into Yellowstone Park. The idea of preserving areas important to our country evolved later into the National Park Service, and today we have a national network of 391 park units. I’ll post here something I first wrote three years ago about this idea of ours.

The question “Who owns Yellowstone Park” was posted on a Yellowstone chat page. It's a good question. It drew answers ranging from God, to the Indians who were displaced when the U.S. Congress established it as a park, to all American citizens own it, to "I own Yellowstone." Perhaps they are all right.

Yellowstone is under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Department of the Interior's National Park Service, but that service was only established in 1916 and did not exist when the act was passed setting aside those nearly 3500 square miles as a "reservation." That original act (called "The best idea we ever had" by author Wallace Stegner) was passed in 1872. But there was so little protection for the animals and features and so many camper-caused forest fires and so little respect for that wild, remote, and unique place that the Secretary of the Interior had to call in the U.S. Cavalry to protect it. Now the NPS's law enforcement rangers do the work the cavalry used to do.

So, yes, Americans all own it, but we are more than happy to share it with visitors from all over the world, just so all of us respect the rules and do everything we can to be sure it's passed on to our children and grandchildren.