The 1872 Act of Congress which created Yellowstone National Park set aside two million acres in Wyoming Territory as a public “pleasuring-ground” whose natural beauties and wonders were to be preserved for posterity and protected from exploitation or private gain. Thus was born the nation’s first national park, destined to become the model for others all over the world. Yellowstone had been the home of Native Americans for centuries before the first white explorer, John Colter, passed through the region in 1807. Colter’s stories of boiling geysers and other natural wonders were simply not believed, and the accounts of most other explorers in the next half century were similarly discredited. but after the Civil War, successive government expeditions made systematic explorations of the area and brought back information whose authenticity could not be doubted. The Folsom-Cook expedition (1869) and the Washburn-Langford-Doane expedition (1870) yielded detailed descriptions of Yellowstone’s geysers’, hot springs, waterfalls, mountains and forests, while the photographs of William H. Jackson and the paintings of Thomas Moran, both of whom accompanied the Hayden expedition in 1871, provided a compelling visual record. Railroads had now made the region more accessible and by the 1880s it had become a mecca for tourists.

The first American whites to make close contact with the Indians of the Far West were explorers like Lewis and Clark and fur traders like Jim Bridger and William H. Ashley. Their accounts provided Easterners with information about the physiognomy, dress, language and customs of the different tribes. But it was artists who, based on their first-hand contacts with western Indians beginning in the 1830s, created the most vivid record. Foremost among them was George Catlin (1796-1872) who devoted his art to rescuing from oblivion “the looks and customs of the vanishing races of native man in America.” During a eight-year journey into the trans-Mississippi wilderness he covered the thousands of miles, came to know 48 Indian tribes and executed hundreds of portraits, landscapes, and religious, hunting and domestic scenes. A fundamental aspect of Plains Indian life was the horse. Introduced by the Spaniards in the 17th century, the horse enabled the Plains Indians to follow the migrating buffalo herds. In time, the Indians became not only expert horsemen and hunters, but as competition for the buffalo brought tribes into conflict, fierce and skillful warriors. Catlin’s artworks, like those of his contemporary Karl Bodmer, capture a sense of Indian life as it existed before the white invasion.