Only to the White Man Was Nature a Wilderness

Native Americans in the national parks

This post is the third in a series on the making of our ideas about the American West. You can check out earlier posts here:

The Making of the Gilded West (and an announcement)

The Best General View of Yosemite

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Few ideas are more central to America’s self-mythology — and especially our mythology around the West — than wilderness. We think of the West as a rugged frontier, full of pristine natural landscapes that must be either preserved or exploited, depending on your ideology.

Our national parks, in particular, are exemplars of the American idea of wilderness. Nothing symbolizes the vastness and wildness of the West like the Grand Canyon or Yosemite. At least in the popular imagination, these are places where the natural treasures of the country are preserved for the enjoyment of the American people.

But wilderness has always been a tricky concept. Colonial settlers like William Bradford were horrified by the wilderness. In 1620, he wrote of the Puritans,

Besides, what could they see but a hideous & desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts & wild men? And what multitudes there might be of them they knew not. Neither could they, as it were, go up to the top of Pisgah, to view from this wilderness a more goodly country to feed their hopes…

For much of American history, the default American attitude toward nature mirrored Bradford’s. It was there to be tamed, not enjoyed or protected. Bradford’s wilderness, it’s important to note, was full of people. Yes, he thought them “wild men” who deserved subjugation, but at least he acknowledged that the American landscape was full of human beings.

The idea of wilderness as something to be used persists (Ronald Reagan famously said, “I mean, if you’ve looked at a hundred thousand acres or so of trees — you know, a tree is a tree, how many more do you need to look at?”), but a new idea arose in the 19th century, of wilderness as valuable in its own right. John Muir, one of the great champions of this idea, wrote that “The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.”

In the 19th-and 20th-century conception, nature was purest and most meaningful when it was completely free of human interference. The Wilderness Act of 1964 exemplifies this attitude in its definition of the word:

A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.

But, as environmental historian Bill Cronon has written, this ideal is ahistorical and unrealistic:

The more one knows of its peculiar history, the more one realizes that wilderness is not quite what it seems. Far from being the one place on earth that stands apart from humanity, it is quite profoundly a human creation—indeed, the creation of very particular human cultures at very particular moments in human history. It is not a pristine sanctuary where the last remnant of an untouched, endangered, but still transcendent nature can for at least a little while longer be encountered without the contaminating taint of civilization. Instead, it’s a product of that civilization, and could hardly be contaminated by the very stuff of which it is made.

The Western national parks, which mostly took shape in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, mirrored the ideas about nature that existed at the time. This means that they were envisioned as exemplars of a wilderness free of people.

Inconveniently for the people who thought this way, most of the parks had people inside their borders when they were founded. So what was it like for the people who lived in these “wildernesses,” what happened to them, and what evidence is left of their lives?

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George Catlin was one of the artists who shaped the mythology of the West. He spent time among several Native American communities and became famous for paintings like this “Buffalo Hunt,” portraying the West and its people as wild and free:

Public domain

Catlin hoped that one day there could be “by some great protecting policy of the government preserved…in a magnificent park… a nation’s park, containing man and beast, in all wildness and freshness of their nature’s beauty!” This is often credited as the origin of the national park idea, and Catlin’s concept of the parks clearly included indigenous people.

Though Catlin wanted to include native people in the parks, he wanted them to serve as an attraction. They’d be there to be gawked at like the bison or elk. By the time Catlin’s idea of the national parks took shape, however, the people in charge of the parks preferred their wilderness free of people, even if that meant making the landscape less “authentic” by removing people who had been there for a long time.

Sometimes, park planners told the public — and themselves — convenient lies. It was said that native people stayed away from Yellowstone, the first national park, because of the noise from its geysers. This idea dates back before the establishment of the park in 1872 — one of the first documents about the area, a note in the journal of William Clark (of Lewis and Clark), says that

the nativs give an account that there is frequently herd a loud noise, like Thunder, which makes the earth Tremble, they State that they seldom go there because their children Cannot sleep—and Conceive it possessed of spirits, who were averse that men Should be near them.

This idea was amplified by the founders of the park, who, like the Northern Pacific Railroad’s marketers, wanted to advertise Yellowstone as a pristine natural area, free of human interference (and, in the early days of the park, perceived danger from violence between white people and Native Americans).

Public domain

But the stories weren’t true. Many native groups, including the Crow, Blackfeet, and Kiowa, had names for the area, myths based on its natural features, and established campsites there. In fact, it was their paths and directions that the first white explorers followed to explore the area. The native presence in Yellowstone was extensive enough that obsidian from Yellowstone was traded all over the continent. It’s been found as far away as Ohio.

Furthermore, these stories ignored visual evidence. Thomas Moran, one of the most influential artists to paint the area, acknowledged the presence of the Crow people in “The Yellowstone Range, Near the Crow Mission:”

Public domain

And photographs existed, too, including this one of the Tukudika, or Sheepeater, branch of the Shoshone people in Yellowstone:

NPS

White people told themselves that the Sheepeaters were “starving and miserable,” so it was a humane act to remove them from Yellowstone. In fact, their plight may have been due to other factors — like the fact that the bighorn sheep they relied on were dying out due to overhunting by white people and diseases from white ranchers’ livestock, and their rivers were polluted by white settlements.

In order to maintain the fiction of a landscape free of humans, the federal government stripped local tribes of the ability to hunt in Yellowstone, in violation of the treaties it had signed with them not long before. The people of Yellowstone had been erased.

Now, all that remains of them in the park is a sign:

Awkwafaba, CC 3.0

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In Yosemite, which was first protected by the government in 1864, the presence of Native Americans had been even more established before the land was designated a park. The Ahwahnechee and other groups had lived there for some time. White tourists did not understand that the stunning meadows of Yosemite Valley were the result of intentional burning by the people who lived there.

Yosemite was “discovered” by the larger United States during the 1851 Mariposa War, an attempt by white settlers to clear Native Americans out of the area so that they could search for gold. Though the Ahwahnechee were forced out of the valley and into a reservation, they were eventually able to make their way back into Yosemite. They tried to accommodate themselves to the new white residents of the area by guiding tourists, working for nearby camps, and selling baskets.

Because Yosemite was partially managed by the state of California until 1906, the federal government could not immediately expel Native Americans. For a while, their presence was considered part of the charm of the area. They featured as part of the landscape in paintings like this one by Thomas Hill:

Public domain

And this painting by Albert Bierstadt:

Public domain

Some of the early photos of the area also featured Native Americans, like this one by Carleton Watkins:

Public domain

Over time, though, the U.S. government restricted the range of the Ahwahnechee people, as champions of the park pushed for it to be a place of “pure” nature. For a while, the park officials tried to use the people who lived in Yosemite as a tourist attraction. Some were western-educated, like this Paiute woman who posed for a photo in 1902:

Public domain

Officials organized “Indian Field Days” in which park officials paid Native Americans for their participation in semi-authentic competitions and displays:

NPS

But, in the end, the National Park Service decided to push people out of the park. To avoid criticism, it did so slowly, evicting them from the “Indian Village” a few at a time for unemployment or “immoral” behavior. Though a few dozen people hung on for a few decades, the Park Service evicted the final families in 1969, burning their empty homes as practice for the park firefighters.

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There are similar stories about other groups of people pushed out of the national parks. The Havasupai people had been in the Grand Canyon for a long time. This photo from the early 1900s shows Havasupai pictographs there:

Public domain

In the late 1800s, the Havasupai were driven by cattle ranchers and miners deeper into the territory that would become Grand Canyon National Park. Ben Wittick took photos of them in the canyonlands:

LOC via Arizona State

LOC via Arizona State

Theodore Roosevelt met with the tribal leader Yavñmi’ Gswedva (who the white people called “Big Jim” and told him he would have to leave so that the new national park could be established:

Grand Canyon NP

Once the park was established, the Havasupai were treated as unwelcome invaders, even though park literature drew on the “Romantic Indian Legend” to entice visitors:

NPShistory

And photos like this were used to illustrate the magic of the Grand Canyon:

LOC

A tiny Havasupai reservation was established — less than a square mile in area — to keep them out of the tourist areas. The final Havasupai resident, who park officials called “Captain Burro” for his ability to move up and down what would become the Bright Angel Trail, was evicted from the park in 1928.

In contrast to the examples above, there were some parks where the native presence was tolerated and even promoted. In Glacier National Park — some of whose lands were obtained from the Blackfeet people, who were reeling in the late 19th century from war, smallpox, famine, and loss of the bison hunt — marketers told white people to come and see the “vanishing Indians.” They used photos like these to sell train tickets:

Public domain

Public domain

Though members of the Blackfeet continued to work in the parks, they were denied the right to access the mountains that had once been their homes.

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In the pursuit of “wilderness” and “pure nature,” white Americans removed the people who lived in the lands that would become the national parks. In recent years, the government has tried to make things right by renaming areas, putting up monuments, and allowing the descendants of evicted people back into the parks.

But that doesn’t really change the way most Americans think of the national parks. Despite the fact that 332 million people visit them each year, they’re held up as examples of the great American wilderness that never was.

Perhaps it’s best to leave you with this quote from Luther Standing Bear, a member of the Oglala Lakota tribe, who was born in the Dakota Agency in 1868, before the establishment of the first national park, and died in California in 1939 while working on one of the many movies (The Santa Fe Trail, Massacre, The Conquering Horde, Fighting Pioneers) in which he was asked to act out a Hollywood version of Native American history.

In between, he authored books about his culture and advocated for an “Indian New Deal.” He wrote in 1933 that

We did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills, and winding streams with tangled growth, as “wild.” Only to the white man was nature a “wilderness” and only to him was the land “infested” with “wild” animals and “savage” people. To us it was tame. Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery. Not until the hairy man from the east came and with brutal frenzy heaped injustices upon us and the families we loved was it “wild” for us. When the very animals of the forest began fleeing from his approach, then it was that for us the “Wild West” began.

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