For over a century, Yellowstone National Park has been a monument
to wildness in America. But long before flames swept through
Yellowstone in 1988, that wildness had come under fire from
encroachments that were making the park one of our nation's most
commodified pieces of real estate.
For as long as they've existed, parks like Yellowstone have been
the scene of some of the most intensive commercial activity in the
American West. Selling Yellowstone recounts the story of such
activities in our oldest park from the 1870s through the 1960s. It
is the first book to examine critically the place of business in
the development of America's national parks, demonstrating the
prominent role played by profit-driven entrepreneurs in shaping the
physical landscape of what is generally perceived as unaltered
wilderness.
Challenging popular perceptions that our national parks are
protected from commercialism, Mark Barringer reveals how
businessmen, with the support of the National Park Service,
marketed Yellowstone as a museum of mythology: a landscape created
to look like what Americans wanted to believe the Old West once
was. Together, the NPS and the concessionaires--particularly Harry
W. Child's Yellowstone Park Company--altered the park repeatedly to
fit a desired image and then creatively promoted it for mass
consumption. As a result, the concessionaires virtually owned
Yellowstone, selling it piecemeal to receptive customers as if it
were an inexhaustible commodity.
First marketed as a nature museum to be viewed from the comfort
of stagecoach seats or hotel room windows, the park was transformed
from a wilderness preserve to a series of roadside attractions.
Roads were built to geysers and waterfalls; wolves were eliminated
and bison were bred; visitors were given a choice between
comfortable hotels and more rustic lodges and camps. The
Yellowstone Park Company sought to meet all of the public's
expectations, reaping the profits from satisfying American
idealizations.
Contemporary environmental attitudes eventually forced
significant policy changes in the parks, but shifting political
winds continue to determine such matters as snowmobile access to
Yellowstone. Barringer's book contributes to the ongoing debate
over the character and limits of the social construction of nature
as it raises important questions about what our national parks
represent, why so many people continue to feel so strongly about
them, and what must be done to protect them.
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