Yellowstone: Sacred Land of Indigenous Peoples
- John J King II
- 19 hours ago
- 6 min read
Yellowstone has a way of getting under my skin. What began as admiration for its dramatic landscapes—the geysers breathing steam into cold morning air, the wide valleys shifting with light, the sudden appearance of bison or wolves—has slowly grown into something harder to define. Each time I return, I find myself less interested in checking off sights and more drawn to simply being there, watching, listening, and trying to absorb a place that feels both immense and deeply alive. It is not just the beauty that keeps pulling me back, but a sense that Yellowstone holds layers I have only begun to notice.
Over time, I have also become more aware of how incomplete my early understanding was. For years, I saw Yellowstone mostly through the familiar lens of a “first” national park, shaped by the narratives of exploration and preservation that I had absorbed without much question. But this landscape did not begin in 1872, and it certainly was not empty when government expeditions arrived in the 1870s. Long before those surveys, Indigenous peoples lived with this land—moving through it, understanding its rhythms, and weaving it into their cultural and spiritual lives in ways I am only beginning to appreciate.
Recognizing that history does not diminish my sense of wonder; it complicates it, deepens it, and at times unsettles it.
I find myself sitting with that tension more now—the awe I feel in these places alongside an awareness of the processes that displaced those who knew them far more intimately than I ever will. The stories that emerged from the early government expeditions, often presented as discovery, were part of a much larger act of claiming and redefining the land. With that in mind, the following narrative, told from the perspective of Henry Elliott, is not just a historical vignette but a glimpse into a moment when Yellowstone was being reinterpreted for a new audience, with consequences that continue to echo.
The following narrative is constructed from notes by Henry Wood Elliott, a young artist and member of the expedition to survey the territory making up present day Yellowstone NP. One day many years in the future Henry Wood Elliott would become a staunch conservationist advocating almost single handedly for the termination of the annual fur seal slaughter in the Pribilof Islands.
"The horses were tired before we were, which says something about horses, or perhaps about the particular delusion that drives men like Ferdinand Hayden across a country that will not hold still long enough to be measured. I had joined the Survey as an artist and a clerk—a lower designation than I'd hoped for, though I came to understand, somewhere west of Fort Ellis, that rank in such an enterprise is a fiction maintained for the comfort of Washington. Out here, where the Yellowstone bends north and the geysers hiss like the Earth itself confessing, a man's usefulness was determined by whether he could keep his sketchbook dry and his opinions, mostly, to himself.
Dr. Hayden was a geologist of the visible kind. He wanted the country catalogued, photographed, and—this was the part I struggled with—made legible to Congress. The legibility was the point. A landscape that could be understood could be appropriated, and a landscape that could be appropriated could be improved, which in the lexicon of our age meant emptied of whatever it had previously contained. I found myself, on certain evenings, watching William Jackson set up his wet-plate camera with the solemnity of a priest, and wondering whether the photograph was a record or a deed of conveyance.
We were not alone in the territory, of course. No survey ever is, though our reports tended to describe the land as though it had been waiting, vacant and patient, for the arrival of educated men with theodolites. The Crow we encountered along the Yellowstone were generous in ways that embarrassed me, partly because their generosity was offered without the assumption that it would be returned. An older man—Iron Bull, I believe, though my notes from that week were soaked through in a creek crossing and I have been reconstructing names ever since—spent the better part of an afternoon explaining to our interpreter the location of a hot spring that Hayden had been seeking for three days. He drew it in the dirt with a stick. He did not ask for payment. He looked at our wagons, our instruments, our nervous escorts, and I believe he understood more about our expedition in that single afternoon than I would understand in the following decade.
The Sioux were another matter, or rather, we were another matter to them. We avoided their country where we could, and where we could not, we traveled with a tightness in the shoulders that the cavalry escort did little to relieve. There was talk, that summer and the next, of Colonel Custer's columns moving through the Yellowstone basin in support of the railroad surveys—a parallel enterprise, technically, though the distinction between scientific reconnaissance and military reconnaissance was the kind of distinction one made in the field reports and not around the campfire. I met Custer only once, briefly, and what struck me was not his vanity, which has been sufficiently chronicled, but his certainty. He looked at the Powder River country the way Hayden looked at a fossil bed: as a problem already solved, awaiting only the formality of execution. The treaties, to him, were paperwork. The people were terrain.
I record this without claiming I objected at the time with anything like the clarity I would later muster. I was twenty-five, or thereabouts, and the moral architecture of a young man on his first great expedition is mostly scaffolding, hastily erected and apt to come down in a stiff wind. What I felt instead was a kind of nausea—imprecise, persistent—that I attributed for weeks to the alkali water before I admitted to myself that it was something else. It was the recognition that I was a small functioning part of a machine whose ultimate output was dispossession, and that the watercolor sketches I sent back to Washington, with their careful renderings of mineral terraces and obsidian cliffs, would be used as evidence in a case I had not been asked to consider.
There is a particular kind of American innocence that survives only by not looking directly at what it is doing. Hayden possessed it. Most of the men in our party possessed it. I have spent a life, since, trying to determine whether I myself ever shed it or merely traded one variety for another. Because what came next, for me, was the seal islands.
The Pribilofs were not Yellowstone. There were no geysers, no painted canyons, no Crow elders drawing maps in the dust. There were only the seals, and the clubs, and the Treasury Department's lessees, and the annual harvest sanctioned by the Department of the Interior under arrangements that everyone in Washington agreed were both lucrative and humane and that turned out, on inspection, to be neither. I went there as an agent of the government and I left, eventually, as an antagonist of it, which is a transition that costs a man more than he expects. The seals were being slaughtered toward extinction with the same bureaucratic confidence that had inventoried the Yellowstone. The same legibility. The same paperwork. The same certainty.
I think often of Iron Bull's stick in the dirt. He was offering, I believe, a different theory of knowledge—one in which a place is known by being inhabited, and inhabitation entails obligation. We did not adopt his theory. We adopted Hayden's, and Custer's, and in due course the lessees', and the consequences are still being tallied in ledgers that will not balance.
I am an old man now, or old enough, and the country still will not hold still. But I have learned, slowly, to distinguish between measuring a thing and possessing it, and between possession and care. It is not much, as moral progress goes. It is what I have." Henry Wood Elliott.
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