Annual Report Vol. 42 (2019) Compliments of Hamilton and Sargent: a story of mystery and tragedy and the closing of the American frontier Maura Jane Farrelly American Studies Program, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA
[email protected] In December of 1882, the great American naturalist “I have been credibly informed...that 4,000 elk were George Grinnell published an editorial in his maga- killed by skin hunters in one winter,” Sheridan wrote zine, Forest and Stream, that called for federal offi- to Interior Secretary Henry Moore Teller in the ex- cials to move Yellowstone National Park’s boundary cerpt featured in Forest and Stream, “and that even south by about ten miles. Grinnell wanted the border last winter, in and around the edges of the park, there to go all the way to the 44th parallel, an area that today were as many as two thousand of these grand an- includes the John D. Rockefeller Memorial Parkway, imals killed.” The decorated Civil War veteran and connecting Yellowstone to its much smaller neighbor, famed Indian-killer wanted Yellowstone to be a pro- Grand Teton National Park. The geyser-riddled land- tective “reservation” for the wildlife found in the Amer- scape that Americans once called “The New Won- ican West. The creatures’ migration patterns, how- derland” had been designated a national park a little ever, made it such that the park would have to be more than a decade earlier by an act of Congress. bigger in order for it to serve that function. “This year Yellowstone was America’s first national park, and its I noticed.