National Parks of the World [antikvár]

Introduction: A History of National ParksJim Bridger was a hunter, trapper, frontier guide, and bizarre and solitary man. He made his living hunting deer, elk, and bear in the area around what are today Wyoming and Montana. One of America's greatest frontiersmen, he was almost certainly the first white man to venture into that region, and he often passed several weeks without sighting any Indians. He began his frontier career in the early 1820s and was still exploring the far frontier in the late 1840s, during the presidential terms of John Tyler, James K. Polk, and Zachary Taylor.Like most frontiersmen, Bridger stayed up in the mountains as long as his supplies and ammunition held out and went down into a town only to buy cans and sacks of gunpowder and lead balls, salt and coffee, beans and tobacco. He paid with the money he got selling furs and spent any remaining dollars on shots of whiskey during a lively night in some saloon. During these rowdy evenings Bridger told stories about what he had seen during his travels: he told of an endless plain surrounded by ice-capped mountains and of an area crossed by rivers of fire, a place where every so often the earth shook and columns of steam shot up into the air one hundred, maybe two hundred, feet and then fell back to the ground to form smoking lakes of boiling water. And he told of immense petrified forests with monstrous stone birds perched on the branches of stone trees: he swore he had once heard these stone birds sing and that the sky had then become black and a hail of stones had fallen from the sky, the smallest of these stones being the size of a child's head.Folks listened to old Jim's tales, but when he'd gone back up into the mountains they all agreed he was crazy. No one had any reason to venture along the banks of the Yellowstone to see if any of those wonders might actually exist, and people were distracted by events elsewhere.The enormous growth of the young Republicled to powerful social and political tensions. In 1860, while the legendary riders of the pony express were making their first Atlantic-Pacific postal deliveries, New England was paralyzed by 20,000 striking workers. A little less than a year later, on April 12, 1861, Confederate troops opened fire on Fort Sumter in South Carolina, beginning the Civil War.No one gave any thought to Jim Bridger's stories until 1869, when three travelers out of Diamond City, David Folsom, Charles Cook, and William Peterson, spent two weeks exploring the Yellowstone River. Their enthusiastic report was printed in installments in Western Monthly during the spring of 1870. Americans suddenly became aware that parts of America had yet to be discovered. Newspapers were swamped with letters from readers asking for more information. Dreaming of new glories and quick promotions, the army's general staff put pressure on the White House, and behind the army came businessmen, adventurers, and missionaries, all eager to get into the new region. In August, an expedition consisting of "twenty gentlemen accompanied by porters, cooks, forty horses and mules, victuals for thirty days, and a dog named Booby" set off from Helena, capital of the Montana Territory.The records of this group, led by Henry D. Washburn and Nathaniel P. Langford and known as the Washburn Expedition, add that "they entered the still unexplored territory of Yellowstone along with a cavalry escort, since the wagon train risked Indian attack." From just which tribe they feared attack isn't clear: some speak of the Crow, others of the Black Feet. But it was equally possible that the area was absolutely uninhabited by humans: Folsom and his group had not spoken of seeing anyone. No reliable maps of the area existed: the basin of the Yellowstone was yet to be discovered. After a nine-day journey, the expedition reached the heart of the territory. "None of