Private empire, public land: the rise and fall of the Yellowstone Park Company

Abstract

When in 1872 President Ulysses S. Grant signed legislation creating Yellowstone National Park, frontier entrepreneurs flocked to the reservation seeking to profit from future tourism. By early in the twentieth century one man, Harry W. Child, had emerged as the most successful and creative of these park concessioners; his firm, the Yellowstone Park Company, would dominate park business for the next three decades. The story of the Yellowstone Park Company is, in large measure, the story of the relationship between the United States National Park Service (NPS) and the private corporations that it is charged with regulating. By constantly adapting their strategies to maximize profit, company managers reshaped the physical landscape of the park and dictated patterns of tourism. From a wilderness encompassing over two million acres, they thus reduced Yellowstone to a series of roadside attractions, cultural as well as natural. Government stewards, most notably the United States National Park Service (NPS), facilitated this commercial expansion and allowed the company relatively free rein in its endeavor. But when an emerging environmental movement weakened the ties between the two, both suffered a loss of public confidence that led to the ruin of the Yellowstone Park Company and the reshaping of federal parks policy.