Yellowstone National Park is one of the earthas most famous places. Established in 1872 as the worldas first national park, it has preserved remarkable natural wonders like Old Faithful Geyser and cultural icons such as Old Faithful Inn. For centuries, it was home to the Shoshone, Crow, Bannock, Blackfeet, and other Indian tribes, but these groups were banished in the 1870s by park
promoters who feared that tourists would not visit if American Indians lived there. Almost immediately after its establishment, Yellowstone became the primary destination for tourist travel to the American West following the Civil War. By 1900, it was a vast tourist success, and today it is both a world biosphere preserve and a world heritage site.

The chilling tome that launched an entire genre of books about the sometimes gruesome but always tragic ways people have died in our national parks, this updated edition of a classic includes calamities in Yellowstone from the past sixteen years, including the infamous grizzly bear attacks in the summer of 2011, as well as a fatal hot springs accident in 2000 in which the Park Service was sued for negligence.

Since it became the world's first national park in 1872, Yellowstone has welcomed tourists from all corners of the globe who returned to their hometowns and countries with reports of this American wonderland. Stories from the park's earliest visitors began to spread so rapidly that by 1897 Yellowstone became solidly established as a successful tourist destination with more than ten thousand tourists passing through its entrances. Travellers in the park's first years faced long, dusty, and tediously slow stagecoach trips and could choose only between rather primitive hotels and tent camps for their overnight accommodations. Devoured by nineteenth-century readers, many of the narratives from this era are long forgotten today and are only gradually being recovered from historical archives. Park historians Lee Whittlesey and Elizabeth Watry have combed thousands of firsthand accounts, selecting nineteen tales that offer unique and engaging perspectives of visitors during Yellowstone's stagecoach era. From an 1873 newspaper serial that represents one of the earliest park's recorded trips to the 1914 "Little Journey" that popular writer Elbert Hubbard took with his wife Alice, the chronicles included here reveal the enduring captivation that Yellowstone held in the popular imagination, as it does today.

In 1870, Truman Everts visited what would two years later become Yellowstone National Park, traveling with an exploration party intent on mapping and investigating that mysterious region. Scattered reports of a mostly unexplored wilderness filled with natural wonders had caught the public's attention and the fifty-four-year-old Everts, nearsighted and an inexperienced woodsman, had determined to join the expedition. He was soon separated from the rest of the party and from his horse, setting him on a grueling quest for survival. For over a month he wandered Yellowstone alone and injured, with little food, clothing, or other equipment. In "Thirty-seven Days of Peril" he recounted his experiences for the readers of Scribner's Monthly. In June 1996, Everts's granddaughter arrived at Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone National Park to meet with park archivist Lee Whittlesey. She brought two documents that her father had kept hidden and both were handwritten by Everts. One was a brief auto-biography that gave new insight into his early life. The other was a never-published alternative account of his confused 1870 journey through Yellowstone. Both have been added to this volume, further enhancing Everts's unlikely tale of survival.