In the winter of 1996-97, state and federal authorities shot or
shipped to slaughter more than 1,100 Yellowstone National Park
bison. Since that time, thousands more have been killed or hazed
back into the park, as wildlife managers struggle to accommodate an
animal that does not recognize man-made borders. Tensions over the
hunting and preservation of the bison, an animal sacred to many
Native Americans and an icon of the American West, are at least as
old as the nation's first national park. Established in 1872, in
part "to protect against the wanton destruction of the fish and
game," Yellowstone has from the first been dedicated to preserving
wildlife along with the park's other natural wonders. The
Smithsonian Institution, itself founded in 1848, viewed the park's
resources as critical to its own mission, looking to Yellowstone
for specimens to augment its natural history collections, and later
to stock the National Zoo. How this relationship developed around
the conservation and display of American wildlife, with these two
distinct organizations coming to mirror one another, is the
little-known story Diane Smith tells in Yellowstone and the
Smithsonian. Even before its founding as a national park, and well
before the creation of the National Park Service in 1916, the
Yellowstone region served as a source of specimens for scientists
centered in Washington, D.C. Tracing the Yellowstone-Washington
reciprocity to the earliest government-sponsored exploration of the
region, Smith provides background and context for many of the
practices, such as animal transfers and captive breeding, pursued a
century later by a new generation of conservation biologists. She
shows how Yellowstone, through its relationship with the
Smithsonian, the National Museum, and ultimately the National Zoo,
helped elevate the iconic nature of representative wildlife of the
American West, particularly bison. Her book helps all of us, not
least of all historians and biologists, to better understand the
wildlife management and conservation policies that followed.
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