Latest / Wildlands Podcast — National Parks, Public Lands & Survival / #009 - Yellowstone, Part 1: The History | The Supervolcano, the Nez Perce & the Wolves

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#009 - Yellowstone, Part 1: The History | The Supervolcano, the Nez Perce & the Wolves · Wildlands Podcast — National Parks, Public Lands & Survival

0:10
Underneath Yellowstone National Park right now
0:12
sits one of the largest volcanic systems on Earth,
0:15
a magma chamber roughly 30 miles wide and 45
0:18
miles long, four to five miles below the surface,
0:22
holding enough partially molten rock to fill
0:24
the Grand Canyon more than 11 times over. The
0:27
ground above it rises and falls, sometimes inches
0:30
in a year, as that magma shifts and breathes
0:32
below. And on top of all of that, somehow, there
0:36
are geysers and bison and bears and two and a
0:40
half million acres of the most extraordinary
0:41
landscape in North America. If you drove through
0:44
it without knowing any of this, you might just
0:47
think, what a beautiful park. And it is. But
0:51
it is also something much stranger and much older
0:54
than that. This is Wildlands. I'm Sean. Know
0:59
the land before you reach it. Yellowstone Part
1:02
1. The History. This is the longest history episode
1:06
we have done, and it earns that. Yellowstone
1:09
is the world's first national park. It sits on
1:12
top of a supervolcano. It was the site of one
1:15
of the most dramatic indigenous military campaigns
1:17
in American history. The U .S. Army ran it for
1:20
30 years. The American bison nearly went extinct
1:23
here and was pulled back from the edge. And in
1:26
1995, scientists reintroduced wolves and watched
1:30
the entire ecosystem reorganize itself in ways
1:33
that still have researchers writing papers. That
1:37
is a lot of history for one park. Let's build
1:40
it right. Start where everything at Yellowstone
1:44
starts, underground. About 17 million years ago,
1:48
the North American tectonic plate was drifting
1:51
slowly southwest over a fixed point of intense
1:53
heat deep in the Earth's mantle. Geologists call
1:57
this a hotspot, a plume of superheated material
2:00
rising from deep in the planet, possibly from
2:03
the boundary between the mantle and the core.
2:06
Where that plume hit the underside of the continent,
2:09
it melted rock, generated enormous volumes of
2:12
magma, and eventually erupted in some of the
2:14
largest volcanic events in the planet's history.
2:18
Here is the thing to understand about hotspots.
2:21
The plume stays fixed. The plate moves over it.
2:25
So the track of eruptions left behind the burn
2:27
scar essentially runs in a line across the landscape,
2:30
getting progressively older as you go southwest.
2:33
That line stretches across southern Idaho in
2:36
the form of the Snake River Plain, a flat, ash
2:39
-filled valley that marks where Yellowstone used
2:42
to be millions of years ago. The volcanic centers
2:45
along that path are now buried and quiet. But
2:49
the hotspot kept burning, and the plate kept
2:51
moving, and eventually the heat wound up where
2:54
it is today under northwest Wyoming. The result
2:58
has been three catastrophic eruptions over the
3:01
past 2 .1 million years. Not regular eruptions,
3:06
supervolcano eruptions. The kind that change
3:09
the climate of the entire planet. The first,
3:13
2 .1 million years ago, produced the Huckleberry
3:16
Ridge eruption, the largest of the three. It
3:19
ejected enough material to bury the state of
3:22
Texas five feet deep. The ash from that event
3:25
has been found in rock layers across the western
3:27
half of the continent. The second eruption, 1
3:30
.3 million years ago, formed the Island Park
3:33
caldera just west of the current park boundary.
3:36
The third and the most recent was the Lava Creek
3:38
eruption, 640 ,000 years ago. That one deposited
3:43
ash across more than half of North America, reaching
3:47
as far as Louisiana. When that volume of material
3:50
is ejected into the atmosphere, it does not just
3:54
make a local mess. It changes global temperatures.
3:57
Sulfur aerosols and fine ash particles in the
4:00
upper atmosphere reflect sunlight, cooling the
4:02
planet. The Lava Creek eruption would have caused
4:05
a volcanic winter affecting climate worldwide.
4:08
These are not hypothetical scenarios from science
4:10
fiction. They are documented events in the geological
4:14
record, each one leaving a distinctive chemical
4:16
fingerprint in rock layers from coast to coast.
4:19
It collapsed the ground above it into the emptied
4:22
magma chamber and created the caldera that defines
4:25
the park today. 30 miles wide, 45 miles long,
4:30
a hole in the earth so large that most visitors
4:32
drive across it for an hour before they realize
4:35
they are inside it. Let me try to give you a
4:37
sense of that scale. The entire island of Manhattan
4:40
is about 13 miles long. The Yellowstone Caldera
4:44
is 45. If you put the city of Chicago inside
4:47
it, the caldera walls would rise on the far horizon
4:50
in every direction. This is not a dramatic geological
4:53
feature you look at from an overlook. You are
4:55
inside it. The park is the volcano. The caldera
4:59
rim is visible in several places along. Curved
5:03
escarpment of ancient collapsed rock, rising
5:05
several hundred feet above the valley floor,
5:07
but most visitors have no idea they are looking
5:10
at the edge of a supervolcano caldera when they
5:12
see it. Now you will. Since that last eruption,
5:17
640 ,000 years ago, Yellowstone has not been
5:20
idle. About 80 smaller eruptions have occurred,
5:24
the most recent around 70 ,000 years ago lava
5:27
flows that built up the Pitchstone Plateau in
5:30
the park's southwest corner. The geothermal system
5:33
running today, the geysers, the hot springs,
5:36
the mud pots, the fumaroles, is the surface expression
5:40
of that same heat engine still running. Water
5:44
seeps down through cracks, gets superheated near
5:47
the magma, and is forced back up under pressure.
5:50
Old Faithful works because of a constriction
5:53
in its plumbing that builds pressure to a predictable
5:55
threshold. It erupts roughly every 60 to 90 minutes
5:59
and has done so for as long as anyone has been
6:02
watching. But it is not the most remarkable thermal
6:05
feature in the park. The Grand Prismatic Spring
6:08
is. At 370 feet across and around 160 feet deep,
6:13
it is the largest hot spring in the United States
6:16
and the third largest in the world. The colors
6:19
that make it look like something from another
6:21
planet, deep blue at the center, Rings of green
6:24
and yellow and orange and red toward the edges
6:26
are produced by communities of heat -loving microorganisms,
6:29
archaea and bacteria, living in water temperatures
6:33
ranging from near -boiling at the center to the
6:36
90s and 80s toward the cooler margins. Different
6:39
temperatures support different microbial communities,
6:42
and different communities produce different pigments.
6:45
Yellowstone also holds half of the world's geothermal
6:48
features. Not half of the United States. Half.
6:52
of the entire worlds more than 10 000 thermal
6:55
features in a single park geysers hot springs
6:58
mud pots fumaroles the park sits at the intersection
7:03
of extraordinary geothermal energy and a climate
7:06
wet enough to put significant water into the
7:09
ground where those two things meet you get a
7:11
system of almost endless variety each feature
7:14
shaped by its particular geology water chemistry
7:17
temperature and the unique communities of microorganisms
7:21
that colonize it. The biology of these thermal
7:24
features has actually changed how scientists
7:27
think about the origins of life on Earth. The
7:29
conditions in Yellowstone's hot springs resemble
7:32
what scientists believe early Earth looked like,
7:34
and the organisms thriving there have expanded
7:37
our understanding of what life requires to exist.
7:40
They have also changed how we think about where
7:42
life might exist elsewhere in the solar system.
7:46
When the Cassini probe found evidence of hydrothermal
7:48
activity in the subsurface ocean of Saturn's
7:51
moon Enceladus, scientists immediately reached
7:54
for the Yellowstone research to understand what
7:56
that might mean. And the system is still moving.
8:01
The ground inside the caldera has risen and fallen
8:04
repeatedly since monitoring began. Between 2004
8:09
and 2008, The caldera floor rose nearly 8 inches
8:14
more than three times the previously recorded
8:16
maximum rate. Scientists monitor it constantly.
8:20
The Yellowstone Volcano Observatory runs 24 -hour
8:23
surveillance on earthquakes, ground deformation,
8:25
temperature, and geothermal discharge. They are
8:28
not watching for nothing. They are watching because
8:31
this thing is alive. And understanding it is
8:34
one of the most important geophysical research
8:36
projects on the planet. Is it going to erupt
8:39
catastrophically in our lifetimes? Almost certainly
8:43
not. The USGS is direct about this. Yellowstone
8:47
is not overdue. The phrase overdue does not actually
8:51
apply to volcanic systems, and there are no signs
8:54
of an imminent eruption. But it will erupt again
8:57
someday. On geological time, it always does.
9:02
People have lived in the Yellowstone region for
9:05
at least 11 ,000 years. That is not a warm -up
9:09
paragraph. That is the main story. The first
9:12
people arrived in the aftermath of the last ice
9:14
age, when the glaciers that had covered much
9:17
of the continent were retreating and the land
9:19
was opening up. They came into a landscape of
9:22
extraordinary resources. Bison, elk, deer, bighorn,
9:26
sheep, bear, fish, obsidian for tools. The volcanic
9:31
glass at Obsidian Cliff in the northern part
9:33
of the park is among the finest tool -making
9:35
material on the continent. Archaeologists have
9:38
documented more than 50 obsidian quarry sites
9:41
inside the park, and obsidian from Yellowstone
9:45
has been found at sites as far away as Ohio and
9:48
Canada, evidence of trade networks stretching
9:51
across the continent for thousands of years.
9:54
Think about what that means. A hunter in Ohio
9:57
3 ,000 years ago carried a knife made from volcanic
10:01
glass that had been quarried at a specific cliff
10:04
in northwest Wyoming. Someone made a journey,
10:07
or a series of journeys, goods passing hand -to
10:11
-hand across the entire breadth of the continent
10:13
to move that material. Yellowstone Obsidian was
10:16
valuable enough, and distinctive enough by its
10:19
chemical signature, to have traveled that far
10:21
and that long ago. This was not wilderness. This
10:26
was a hub, a resource site, a sacred landscape,
10:30
a trade center. a place people came to and returned
10:34
from for thousands of years before the concept
10:37
of a national park existed. At least 26 indigenous
10:41
nations have connections to the Yellowstone region.
10:44
The Crow, the Blackfeet, the Nez Perce, the Bannock,
10:48
the Flathead, the Shoshone Bannock, the Kiowa,
10:52
all of them traveled through, traded at, and
10:55
held ceremonies in this country. The Crow called
10:58
the area Alpawishe, meaning land of steam. The
11:03
Shoshone and Bannock knew exactly what the geysers
11:05
were. Not supernatural threats, not mysteries,
11:09
but features of a landscape they understood intimately
11:11
and used accordingly. The Tukadeka, the sheep
11:15
eaters, were the only people who lived in the
11:17
Yellowstone High Country year -round. A band
11:20
of eastern Shoshone, they had developed an extraordinary
11:23
adaptation to the harsh winters of the high plateau.
11:26
They did not use horses, unlike most of the surrounding
11:29
tribes. Instead, they hunted bighorn sheep on
11:32
foot through the deep snow, using dogs to help
11:35
track and drive the animals. Their bows, made
11:38
from mountain sheep horn, were prized across
11:40
the region for their power and accuracy, worth
11:43
more in trade than almost anything else on the
11:45
plains. They built wickiups, dome -shaped dwellings
11:49
of pine poles covered with bark and hide that
11:51
they moved seasonally through the high country
11:54
following the game. They used the thermal hot
11:56
springs for warmth and cooking. They managed
11:59
the forest with low -intensity fire to create
12:01
the green grass corridors that attracted the
12:04
animals they hunted. The Yellowstone landscape
12:06
that Euro -American explorers described as pristine
12:09
and untouched wilderness had in fact been actively
12:12
managed by human hands for thousands of years.
12:16
They knew this mountain country at the resolution
12:19
of people who had no choice but to know it, which
12:23
is to say, they knew it completely. When Yellowstone
12:27
was designated a national park in 1872, the Tukadeka
12:31
were still there. The United States negotiated
12:34
a treaty with them in 1868 under which they ceded
12:37
their lands but retained the right to hunt in
12:40
Yellowstone. Then the government simply never
12:43
ratified it, never honored it. After the park
12:46
was created, federal officials began removing
12:49
indigenous people from the land, the same land
12:52
these families had lived on for generations.
12:55
on the grounds that a national park should be
12:57
a pristine wilderness, free of human activity.
13:01
The very idea of wilderness being uninhabited
13:04
was, of course, only possible by making it uninhabited.
13:08
The Tukadeka were removed to reservations, the
13:11
hunting rights promised in the treaty were ignored,
13:14
and the official history of Yellowstone for most
13:16
of the 20th century began with John Coulter rather
13:19
than with 11 ,000 years of people who were already
13:22
there. The most dramatic single event in Yellowstone's
13:26
human history happened in the summer of 1877,
13:30
and it did not involve explorers or tourists
13:33
or government surveyors. It involved a fighting
13:36
retreat. In the spring of 1877, the U .S. government
13:42
ordered the non -treating Nez Perce bands, those
13:45
who had refused to give up their homelands in
13:47
Oregon, Idaho, and Washington, onto a reservation.
13:50
The bands, led by figures including Chief Joseph,
13:53
Looking Glass, and White Bird, resisted. A violent
13:57
confrontation followed, and the Nez Perce found
14:00
themselves at war with the United States Army.
14:02
About 750 people, men, women, elders, children,
14:06
began a fighting retreat toward Canada, covering
14:09
more than a thousand miles across some of the
14:11
most demanding terrain in the West. In August
14:17
of 1877, That retreat led them through Yellowstone.
14:21
They entered the park near the west entrance
14:23
on August 23rd and spent 17 days crossing the
14:27
plateau. The Nez Perce knew this country well.
14:31
As Yellow Wolf, one of the warriors, later recalled,
14:34
the hot springs and the high shooting water were
14:37
nothing new to us. They had traveled through
14:39
Yellowstone before on seasonal journeys and trade
14:43
routes. It was not foreign territory. It was
14:46
familiar ground that happened. now to be enclosed
14:49
by invisible park boundaries. Inside the park,
14:52
they encountered tourists, one of the stranger
14:54
details of this story, that two things so far
14:57
apart in American experience could occupy the
14:59
same ground in the same week. Some tourists were
15:03
taken captive briefly. Two were killed in skirmishes.
15:06
The Nez Perce moved through quickly, navigating
15:08
the roughest terrain they could find to stay
15:10
ahead of the army. ascending mountain passes
15:13
near 10 ,000 feet through terrain their pursuers
15:15
described as the roughest country I ever undertook
15:17
to pass through. They exited the park's northeast
15:21
corner in early September 1877 and continued
15:25
north through Montana. The army caught them just
15:28
40 miles from the Canadian border at the Battle
15:31
of Bear Paw. Chief Joseph's surrender speech
15:34
is one of the most quoted in American history.
15:37
He said, Hear me! My chiefs, I am tired. My heart
15:42
is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands,
15:45
I will fight no more forever, 40 miles from Canada.
15:49
After more than a thousand miles and four months
15:52
of fighting, around 60, Nez Perce escaped into
15:55
Canada during the battle and eventually joined
15:58
Sitting Bull's camp. The rest were sent first
16:01
to Kansas, then to Indian Territory in Oklahoma,
16:04
far from the Pacific Northwest homeland they
16:06
had been fighting to return to. Many died of
16:09
disease in that unfamiliar climate. Chief Joseph
16:12
spent the rest of his life petitioning for his
16:14
people's right to return home. He died in 1904,
16:18
still in exile, according to his doctor of a
16:20
broken heart. The Nez Perce Trail through Yellowstone
16:24
is a National Historic Trail today. You can walk
16:28
parts of the route the retreat took. Knowing
16:30
what happened there makes the landscape mean
16:32
something different than it does on a trail map.
16:36
While the Tucudeca and the Nez Perce were living
16:38
this history, the Euro -American world was just
16:41
beginning to pay attention to Yellowstone. And
16:44
the story of how it became a park is more complicated
16:47
than the campfire legend suggests. Mountain men
16:50
and trappers had known about the geothermal features
16:52
since at least the early 1800s. John Coulter.
16:57
A member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, who
16:59
stayed in the mountains after the main party
17:01
returned east, is credited as the first Euro
17:05
-American to see the Yellowstone thermal features
17:07
around 1807 and 1808. When he came back with
17:14
stories of boiling mud and shooting water and
17:17
hellish sulfur smells, people assumed he was
17:19
lying or delusional. The place was called Coulter's
17:23
Hell for years, mostly as a joke. The first organized
17:28
expedition to actually document the area was
17:31
the Cook -Folsom -Peterson Expedition in 1869.
17:34
Three privately funded explorers who followed
17:38
the Yellowstone River and produced a detailed
17:40
journal. Based on their report, a larger party
17:43
organized the following year, the Washburn -Langford
17:47
-Done Expedition of 1870. This was the group
17:51
that named Old Faithful. documented the Grand
17:54
Canyon of the Yellowstone, and produced the maps
17:56
and accounts that generated real attention back
17:58
east. A popular story holds that the idea of
18:02
making Yellowstone a national park arose around
18:05
a campfire on this expedition, a spontaneous
18:08
act of American idealism. Historians have largely
18:12
dismantled this story. The campfire conversation
18:15
was likely embellished considerably in the retelling,
18:18
and the real push for protection was more pragmatic
18:21
and more complicated. The decisive expedition
18:24
was Ferdinand Hayden's geological survey of 1
18:27
,871, funded by Congress. Hayden brought 34 people,
18:33
including photographer William Henry Jackson
18:35
and painter Thomas Moran. What Jackson and Moran
18:38
brought back changed everything. Black and white
18:41
photographs of erupting geysers and boiling springs,
18:44
verified by a government scientist with official
18:47
standing. and Moran's paintings' enormous, vivid
18:50
canvases capturing the scale and color of the
18:53
Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone in a way that
18:56
photographs could not yet achieve. Those images
18:59
were hung in the halls of Congress. Senators
19:01
who had never been within a thousand miles of
19:03
Wyoming looked at them and believed, for the
19:05
first time, that the stories were true. Nathaniel
19:09
Langford, a member of the Washburn Party, had
19:12
been approached by Jay Cook, CEO of the Northern
19:14
Pacific Railroad, who saw the potential for Yellowstone
19:17
as a tourist destination that would drive traffic
19:20
on a new rail line. Cook funded lectures Langford
19:23
gave about Yellowstone after the expedition,
19:26
and those lectures reached Ferdinand Hayden,
19:28
who then organized his 1 ,871 survey. The park's
19:34
creation was not purely altruistic. There was
19:37
railroad money behind it, and railroad interests
19:40
shaped how it was promoted from the beginning.
19:42
The Northern Pacific built a station at Livingston,
19:45
Montana, as a gateway to the park in 1883, and
19:49
visitation jumped from 300 in 1872 to 5 ,000
19:54
that same year. The railroad needed somewhere
19:57
for its passengers to go, and the park needed
20:00
tourists to justify its existence to Congress.
20:03
Those interests aligned conveniently. Yellowstone's
20:06
mountainous terrain was poorly suited for farming
20:09
or logging, which made it easier to argue it
20:11
should be preserved. since there was no powerful
20:14
commercial interest demanding it be opened for
20:16
development. As one historian put it bluntly,
20:19
no one could think of anything useful to do with
20:22
it. The genius of the national park idea and
20:25
its complication is that it preserved places
20:28
partly because they seemed economically useless,
20:31
which meant it was easy to dismiss the claims
20:34
of the people who had been living there and finding
20:36
them enormously useful for thousands of years.
20:40
On the 1st of March 1872, President Ulysses S.
20:44
Grant signed the Yellowstone National Park Protection
20:47
Act. It was the first national park in the United
20:51
States and is widely understood to be the first
20:54
national park in the world. The language of the
20:57
act set a precedent that would echo through the
21:00
entire history of conservation. The land was
21:02
to be set aside as a public park or pleasuring
21:05
ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.
21:08
Not for profit, not for development for the people.
21:11
That idea, radical in 1872, eventually gave the
21:15
world over 150 countries with national park systems.
21:20
There was one immediate problem with the world's
21:23
first national park. Congress created it and
21:26
then did not fund it. Nathaniel Langford was
21:28
named the first superintendent. He received no
21:31
salary and no budget. He had essentially no ability
21:34
to enforce any rules or protect the park from
21:37
the poachers, squatters, and commercial hunters
21:40
who moved in almost immediately. For the first
21:44
14 years of its existence, Yellowstone was a
21:47
park in name only. Tourists were robbed. Geysers
21:51
were vandalized people, threw debris into the
21:54
cones to watch it shoot out, damaging formations
21:56
that had taken thousands of years to build. Commercial
22:00
hunters slaughtered wildlife inside park boundaries
22:03
with impunity. In 1886, the Department of the
22:08
Interior gave up and turned Yellowstone over
22:10
to the U .S. Army. Captain Moses Harris arrived
22:14
with a detachment of cavalry from Fort Custer,
22:16
and for the next 32 years until 1918, soldiers
22:20
were the law in Yellowstone. They built the road
22:23
system. They constructed the Fort Yellowstone
22:25
complex at Mammoth Hot Springs. which still stands
22:28
today and now houses park administration. They
22:31
established the patrol system that for the first
22:34
time gave rangers, or in this case troopers,
22:36
a real presence across the two million acres
22:39
of the park. The soldiers also dealt with an
22:41
ongoing problem that illustrated exactly why
22:44
the park had no effective protection before them,
22:46
tourism itself. Early visitors treated Yellowstone
22:50
as a curiosity cabinet to be pried apart and
22:53
taken home. People chipped formations off the
22:55
geyser cones. They threw objects into the hot
22:58
springs and geysers to watch them erupt. They
23:01
carved their names into the formations. One early
23:03
visitor cut down a small geyser cone and shipped
23:06
it east. The army put an end to this, with the
23:09
kind of authority that civilian rangers had never
23:11
had soldiers were not asking politely. They also
23:15
expelled the commercial hunters and poachers
23:17
who had been working the park almost since it
23:19
was created. The Army also enforced anti -poaching
23:22
rules in a way the civilian superintendents never
23:25
could. Poaching had devastated the bison particularly.
23:29
By the time the Army arrived, the park's bison
23:32
herd was already critically reduced. By 1902,
23:36
a count found just 23 bison remaining in Yellowstone.
23:41
The Army's legacy at Yellowstone is complicated
23:43
in the way all American frontier history is complicated.
23:47
They enforced the removal of indigenous people
23:49
from the park. They ran predator extermination
23:52
programs that would take a century to undo. And
23:55
they also saved the bison and built the infrastructure
23:58
that made the park functional. Fort Yellowstone
24:01
at Mammoth Hot Springs was the Army's headquarters.
24:04
The buildings are still there, largely unchanged,
24:07
and house park administration today. When you
24:10
drive into Mammoth, you are driving into a functioning
24:13
Army post from the 1890s, still in use. That
24:17
is a remarkable piece of continuity. The National
24:20
Park Service took over from the Army in 1918,
24:22
just three years after Congress created it with
24:25
the Organic Act of 1916. The NPS was born here.
24:31
In a sense, the management challenges of the
24:33
world's first national park shaped what the Park
24:36
Service would become. 23. From a population that
24:40
before European settlement had numbered somewhere
24:42
between 30 and 60 million animals across the
24:45
continent, The Army began an active protection
24:48
and supplementation program. They brought in
24:50
additional bison from private ranches. They prosecuted
24:54
poachers. Slowly, painfully slowly, the herd
24:57
began to recover. The story of the American bison
25:02
is one of the most dramatic near extinctions
25:04
and recoveries in natural history, and Yellowstone
25:06
is the center of it. Before the great slaughter
25:09
of the 19th century, bison were the dominant
25:12
large mammal on the North American continent,
25:14
possibly the most numerous large animal on Earth.
25:17
30 to 60 million animals, moving in herds that
25:21
took days to pass, that turned the plains dark,
25:24
that the Lakota and Comanche and dozens of other
25:27
plains nations built entire civilizations around.
25:31
The mass slaughter that followed Euro -American
25:33
expansion was driven by the hide trade, by the
25:36
railroad, and deliberately, by the U .S. government
25:39
as a military strategy to remove the material
25:43
foundation of Plains Indian life. Army generals
25:46
explicitly encouraged the killing as a way to
25:49
defeat the Plains nations by eliminating what
25:52
they depended on. A single skilled hunter could
25:55
kill a hundred bison in a day. The hides were
25:58
worth money, the tongues were a delicacy, and
26:01
the rest of the animal tons of meat was left
26:03
to rot on the prairie. By 1872, The southern
26:07
herd was functionally gone. By 1883, the northern
26:10
herd had collapsed. The slaughter reduced those
26:13
tens of millions to fewer than a thousand animals
26:16
by 1889. In less than 20 years, one of the largest
26:20
animal populations on Earth had been reduced
26:23
to a remnant. The ecological, cultural, and human
26:26
cost of that is almost incomprehensible. Yellowstone
26:31
held the last wild, free -roaming bison in the
26:34
United States. Those 23 animals the Army counted
26:37
in 1902 were not just a remnant population, they
26:41
were the genetic survivors of a continent -scale
26:44
massacre. The Yellowstone herd today numbers
26:46
around 5 ,000 animals and is the largest wild
26:50
bison herd in the country. It is not fully recovered.
26:53
The historical range was the entire continent,
26:55
not 2 million acres of Wyoming, but what happened
26:58
here was a genuine rescue. Without Yellowstone,
27:02
the American bison would very likely be extinct
27:04
today. That is not an exaggeration. That is the
27:08
arithmetic of 23 animals. Before we get to the
27:12
wolves, one more thing about what Yellowstone
27:14
is ecologically, because it matters to understanding
27:17
why the wolf story played out the way it did.
27:19
Yellowstone is one of the last nearly intact
27:21
large mammal ecosystems in the temperate world.
27:25
Grizzly bears, black bears, wolves, mountain
27:28
lions, bison, elk, pronghorn, bighorn sheep,
27:32
moose. The full suite of large animals that would
27:36
have been here before Euro -American settlement
27:38
is still here or has been restored. That is extraordinarily
27:42
rare. In most of North America, the megafauna,
27:46
the large predators, and the large grazers have
27:48
been reduced or eliminated across the vast majority
27:51
of their range. What that means ecologically
27:54
is that most landscapes are running without all
27:56
their parts. Yellowstone is one of the few places
27:59
big enough, protected long enough, and wild enough
28:02
that the whole system is still running. Scientists
28:05
study it partly for that reason it is a baseline,
28:08
a reference point for what a functioning temperate
28:10
ecosystem actually looks like. For most of the
28:15
20th century, Yellowstone managed its wildlife
28:17
the way most of America managed wildlife, by
28:20
removing the things that seemed dangerous or
28:22
inconvenient. Wolves were killed systematically
28:25
inside the park from the time the army arrived.
28:29
Rangers were under explicit orders to eliminate
28:31
wolves, mountain lions, coyotes, and bears predators
28:34
of all kinds as threats to the elk and deer that
28:37
tourists wanted to see. Park records document
28:40
at least 136 wolves killed inside Yellowstone
28:43
between 1914 and 1926. The last two wolf pups
28:50
confirmed inside the park were shot near Soda
28:53
Butte Creek in October 1926. By 1930, Wolves
28:57
were gone from Yellowstone and from every contiguous
29:00
state except a remnant population in northern
29:03
Minnesota. What followed was a four -decade ecological
29:07
experiment nobody had planned. Without wolves,
29:11
elk populations in the northern range exploded.
29:14
Elk, with no predator to fear, do not just increase
29:17
in number, they change their behavior. They stop
29:19
moving. They stand in river valleys and streamside
29:23
meadows and eat everything in reach, continuously,
29:25
because nothing is telling them to leave. Willow
29:29
and aspen and cottonwood along the rivers were
29:31
browsed down to stubs. Without those plants,
29:35
beavers disappeared no material to build dams.
29:38
Without beaver dams, streams ran faster and cut
29:42
deeper, eroding banks. The riparian zones that
29:45
had once been rich, complex habitats became stripped
29:48
and simplified. This took decades, and it happened
29:53
so gradually that it was easy to miss. In 1995,
29:57
the U .S. Fish and Wildlife Service reintroduced
30:00
14 gray wolves to Yellowstone from Canada. It
30:04
was one of the most controversial wildlife management
30:06
decisions in American history. Ranchers near
30:10
the park were furious. Wolves do not respect
30:12
park boundaries, and a wolf that kills a sheep
30:15
outside the park is a wolf that costs someone
30:17
their livelihood. Environmental groups were ecstatic.
30:21
Scientists were watching with intense interest.
30:24
Lawsuits were filed on both sides before the
30:26
first wolves were even released. The political
30:28
fight had been going on for years before the
30:30
actual reintroduction, and it did not end when
30:33
the wolves arrived. But the ecology moved faster
30:36
than the politics. What happened in the park
30:40
exceeded almost everyone's expectations. The
30:44
elk did not just decline in number, though they
30:46
did. They changed where they went. Elk that had
30:49
been standing in river valleys for decades suddenly
30:52
had reason to keep moving. The willows came back,
30:55
then the aspen, then the cottonwoods. Beavers
30:59
returned and built dams, and the dams slowed
31:01
the water and the banks stabilized and the streams
31:04
recovered their complexity. Songbird species
31:06
that nest in willow and aspen reappeared. Fish
31:09
populations increased as the streams improved.
31:12
Bear populations increased, partly because wolves
31:15
kill elk and bears eat the carcasses' free food
31:18
in winter. Even the physical shape of the rivers
31:20
changed as the bank vegetation stabilized the
31:23
soil. Scientists have a name for this chain of
31:27
effects. A trophic cascade, a top predator reintroduced
31:32
after 70 years of absence, rippled through every
31:35
level of the food web, and in doing so, changed
31:38
the physical landscape itself. The wolves did
31:41
not just change what lived here. They changed
31:44
the rivers. That is not a metaphor. The stabilization
31:47
of stream banks through recovered vegetation
31:49
actually altered the course and character of
31:52
waterways. This phenomenon, a predator changing
31:55
the physical geography of a place through its
31:57
effect on prey behavior, has a name, too. Scientists
32:01
call it a landscape of fear. The prey animals,
32:05
living with the threat of predation, do not just
32:07
decline in number. They change where they go,
32:10
when they go there, and how long they stay. And
32:13
those behavioral changes multiplied across a
32:16
population over years and decades reshaped the
32:19
land. It is worth being honest that the science
32:23
here is nuanced and still evolving. Some researchers
32:27
question the scale of the trophic cascade claims
32:29
the beavers came back. Yes, but the full picture
32:32
is more complicated than the simplified version
32:35
of the story sometimes suggests. The elk decline
32:38
had multiple causes, including hunting outside
32:40
the park. The willow recovery is patchy and not
32:43
uniform across the northern range. These are
32:46
real scientific debates. But the core finding
32:49
that the return of wolves measurably changed
32:53
elk behavior, and that change had cascading effects
32:56
on vegetation and other species is well established.
33:00
What Yellowstone demonstrated is that an ecosystem
33:03
is not a collection of independent parts. Everything
33:06
is connected, and the things at the top of the
33:08
food chain shape everything below them. Step
33:13
back and look at what Yellowstone actually is.
33:16
A supervolcano sitting on a hotspot that has
33:19
been burning for 17 million years, producing
33:22
three of the largest eruptions in the history
33:25
of the planet. A landscape still actively rising
33:28
and falling above a magma chamber the size of
33:30
a small state. 11 ,000 years of continuous human
33:34
presence hunters who quarried volcanic glass
33:37
for trade goods that wound up 2 ,000 miles away.
33:40
A people who lived through Yellowstone winters
33:42
without horses, reading the country at a resolution
33:45
most of us cannot imagine. The Nez Perce, fighting
33:49
a war, crossing this plateau on their way toward
33:52
a border they never reached. The world's first
33:55
national park born partly from genuine wonder,
33:58
partly from railroad money, partly from the fact
34:00
that nobody could figure out how to farm it.
34:02
An army that built the roads and saved the bison.
34:06
23 animals pulled back from the edge of extinction
34:08
and 24 wolves that changed the shape of the rivers.
34:13
Every layer of this place connects to the one
34:16
below it. The magma drives the thermal features.
34:19
The thermal features shaped what could live here
34:21
and what could not. The resources drew people
34:24
for thousands of years. The people shaped the
34:27
land with fire and hunting and knowledge. The
34:30
removal of those people, and then the removal
34:33
of the wolves, unraveled things that took decades
34:35
to understand. And the recovery of the bison,
34:38
of the wolves, of the willows is still happening
34:41
right now while you are listening to this. Yellowstone
34:46
is not a finished thing. It is an ongoing experiment
34:49
in what happens when you protect a large enough
34:52
piece of land for long enough that the processes
34:54
driving it can actually run. The world now has
34:57
over 150 countries with national park systems.
35:01
Every one of them traces its conceptual lineage
35:04
back to the 1st of March 1872 and that signature
35:07
by Ulysses S. Grant. The idea that land could
35:10
be held in trust for everyone, not owned, not
35:13
extracted, not developed, was genuinely new.
35:17
It has shaped how the world thinks about conservation
35:19
ever since. That started here, on top of a supervolcano,
35:24
in a place that people had understood and valued
35:27
for 11 ,000 years before anyone in Washington
35:30
thought to protect it. Next episode, part two,
35:33
The Visit. How to actually move through two and
35:35
a half million acres without spending your whole
35:37
trip sitting in the old faithful parking lot
35:40
waiting for a geyser. The Lamar Valley at dawn.
35:43
The backcountry. The thermal basins. and the
35:45
real logistics of getting around a park that
35:48
is bigger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined.
35:52
I'm Sean Spanauer. This has been Wildlands. Know
35:56
the land before you reach it. See you Thursday.