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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