Writer and historian living in lincoln, massachusetts. She has written about civil war us western history and American Culture for the New York Times the Washington PostSmithsonian Magazine preservation magazine and civil war monitor nelson earned her va in history and literature from the Harvard University from Harvard University and her phd in american studies from the university of iowa, and she has taught at Texas Tech University cal state Fullerton Harvard and brown nelson is the author of saving yellowstone three cornered war ruin nation and Trembling Earth and were so excited to have her with us today. So before i turn it over to her just a quick note we have sent out an email to everyone this morning that had just a great list of resources like a bibliography that megan had put together so you all should have received that by now. If not that link is posted in the chat. So that please join me in welcoming megan kate nelson. Hi everyone. Thank you so much. Thank you nicole for that lovely introduction and to the Smithsonian Associates for the invitation to be with you tonight. I would also like to thank harmony and ellen and steve and anna and liz for running this show and to helping me get all the the tech straight. I cannot think of a better place for me to talk about saving yellowstone then at the smithsonian as you will learn tonight, the institution played a really Important Role in both the exploration and the preservation of this Iconic National landscape. So, thank you all for being with me tonight as nicole noted. There will be a q a after the talk, so please. I feel free to ask questions along the way and well get to as many of those questions as we can by the end. So in mid july. 1871 a 22 Year Old University of pennsylvania graduate student named robert adams scrambled down from the rim of the grand canyon of the yellowstone to the precipice of the lower falls. Creeping to the edge of an overhanging cliff adams wrote later to the philadelphia inquirer. We gazed below till dizziness made us withdraw. Oh it was grand sublime a site. Never to be forgotten. On his climb back up to the rim adams pulled a handful of drummonds rush out of the ground a common site along river banks in alpine areas of the Mountain West this flowering plant grew in large clusters. Its a brown yellow and purple red flowers waving in the breeze. Adams was the botanist on the yellowstone expedition of 1871 and he had been collecting plants and flowers throughout the teams trip from omaha, nebraska to the middle of the yellowstone basin. When he got back to camp from the lower falls adams pressed the stems of the drummonds rush between sheets of paper and pulled a label out of his satchel on it. He wrote out of he wrote out the name of the specimen the date he collected it and the location and then he signed it. He placed the sheets with the label attached in a box with hundreds of other botanical specimens to be sent first by wagon then by train to the Smithsonian Institution in washington, dc. The samples of drummonds rush, which you see here on the slide now sit in a folder stacked in a cabinet at the National Museum of Natural History. They are fragments of the us western flora that are archived in the east they are also material evidence of Ferdinand Haydens expedition of 1871 the first scientific exploration of yellowstone, which led to the passage of the yellowstone act in 1872 creating the First National park in the world 150 years ago. In my new book saving yellowstone. I tell the story of haydens expedition and i interweave this story with two other narratives the narrative of Capital Investment in the White Settlement of the west and the story of indigenous resistance to those efforts of government officials us soldiers businessmen and scientists to take their homelands from them. So in this moment in 1871 72 yellowstone really became an iconic landsc. In america, it also became a metaphor for the nation itself a place. That was both beautiful and terrible. So the question that i always get are always want to ask of people in the audience is when did you go first to yellowstone or have you been there . So we have a quiz for you an audience poll. Im interested to see how many of you have have actually been there and if you have visited the park, when was your trip, did you go as a child . Did you go as an adult with your own children . Was it recently or was it really really long ago as you can see from these slides my first trip was long ago in july of 1982 almost 40 years ago. Now these are pictures from our family trip when i started to write the book. I i had my father go into the garage and dig out the slides from that trip and i sent them off to be converted to jpegs and it was great fun to look at them when they arrived so, you know this family vac. In was pretty incredible. Yellowstone was really our first stop. We went there from glacier and then to calgary and came all the way back around over the course of two weeks and you know, these family trips we started taking these twoweek summer vacations and they really shaped me as a historian of american landscapes. So here we have the results of the poll. So 96 of you have been there thats amazing. That is a really large number because even today yellowstone is quite hard to get to and so you really have to try you you cant just be wandering by on the way to somewhere else. So thats really great and it looks like an even share of people who went as children went as adults and looks like about a third of you have been in the past five years. So thats great. Thats great. This was my first trip and actually my second trip was just this past september i was supposed to go in may of 20. A for my First Research trip for the book. And of course the pandemic scuttled those plans, unfortunately, and and this was really a bummer for me because i like to go to the places that i study and that i research id like to be in the landscape not necessarily to kind of feel a sense of history or anything like that but to actually see the landscape and experience it as people in the past may have experienced it even though of course there has been natural change over time. It is not exactly the same but i like to be there so that i can understand what the people im writing about kind of saw and what they experienced and and these family trips. Were really important to me too. They i learned to love history by moving through space finding us finding us on maps bound into the rand mcnally road atlas if those are people in the audience who remember that i love a good road atlas and tracking us as as we drove along. So it really isnt a surprise that when i became a historian, i was really drawn to environmental history and to landscape studies. So when i really started thinking about yellowstone when i was writing the three corner war. Um, which was my previous book there is a protagonist in that book who is a surveyor general of new mexico. Territory guy named john clark whos a friend of lincolns the republican appointee in the 1860s, and this led me to some Background Research in the history of surveying in america and i ran across the hayden expedition of 1871 and i remembered it because id actually studied it and graduate school in a class in art history and well see why a little bit later in the talk why that would have been something that i would have studied in that context. I realized and this was about 2018. I realized we were coming up on the 150th anniversary of both the expedition and the passage of the yellowstone act which was a direct result of that expedition and you know for historians and i think for a lot of us anniversaries are really important moments for us to really take stock events and a places. Why events occurred why places became important in the way that they did in the past and then how theyre important today and really kind of reckon with that and with the place that these places hold in our society, so so that was an important element and so i started to kind of look around and see what had been written on haydens expedition and you know, a lot of great books have been written about it and written about that survey written about the other great surveys that were out at the time which ill talk about in a second a lot of great books have also been published about the long history of yellowstone. Particularly aubrey hayness magisterial two volume history, and if i know i sent out a list of sources for you to look at but theres also a full bibliography in the book itself. So if you pick up the book, theres a whole list of sources that you can look at both primary documents and also secondary sources that can give you a better sense of this per said but it really surprised me that no one had really looked indepth at the effort to explore and preserve yellowstone in its Historical Context because what i also realized is that this survey and the passage of the yellowstone actor happening in 1871 and 72 which are right in the middle of reconstruction. Which is not a period that we think of as you know taking place in the west or having anything to do with the west so that became really interesting to me. And so i just you know, i had just written a book that. Looked at the the civil war from a really unexpected place the far west and so i began to think well what if i looked at reconstruction from yellowstone, would i come to know reconstruction differently, would i learn something new about it by looking at it from the geyser basins and the lower falls or from the grand prismatic spring as in this slide, which will be familiar to almost all of you as you have been there and would i learned something new about yellowstone itself, but thinking about it in the context of reconstruction. So first before i get to the the kind of nittygritty of hayden and his expedition i wanted to give you just a little bit of background and reconstruction history because this is a period its getting a little more attention today. But really, i mean i know when i was in school we kind of went through it really quickly on the way from the civil war to the gilded age and didnt really study it a lot in depth and it really is an important informative moment in our nations history and it deserves more attention. So after the civil war you know there were many challenges facing the Us Government and all americans. You know, how does a nation recover from four years of violent conflict of just incalculable loss of life of farms and cities and railroads how to form Million People transition from a life of enslavement to a life of freedom. So there were so many challenges that were economic challenges political challenges and of course cultural challenges in this moment one of the challenges of course was stabilizing the National Economy in the south many of the factories and the Railroad Railroad lines have been destroyed and had to be rebuilt this required really northern Capital Investment because most of the base of southern capital from before the war which constituted which was constituted by enslaved human beings did not exist anymore emancipation created an entirely new system of free labor and agriculture. And there was a whole turn in that context to sharecropping to debt p h a whole system of indebtedness that really sustained cycles of poverty for black southerners and some white southerners in the years after the war and for the years to come. The north was in a little better shape as was the west manufacturing and agriculture had really boomed during the war but still did not regain really prewar pace of output until the mid 1870s. So there was that big challenge of how do we get the economy back on track . How do we get people into professions and earning money and supporting their families again after this destructive civil war . Another challenge was how to bring the former Confederate States back into the union. The Reconstruction Congress had passed a series of laws requiring revamped state constitutions for reentry. The states had to pass depending on when they were applying to return the 13th the 14th and ultimately the 15th amendments each state had to hold free and Fair Elections to bring their new representatives to washington dc to be seated in congress and by 1870. This process was mostly complete all the former Confederate States were back in the union. They had seeded members in congress on the majority of them were republicans because former confederates who are often democrats, were not allowed to hold office during this period all of these programs faced resistance from a lot of different areas from Andrew Johnson who had taken over the presidency after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He expressed his objections pretty early on and his desire to implement a kind of kinder and gentler reconstruction in the south. He used his veto power to try to derail radical reconstruction projects, and he did not succeed and his resistance led to his impeachment trial in the spring of 1868. There was also a widespread resistance from many white southerners who almost immediately upon their return from the battlefields and the return to peace tried to reassert their power over black americans through the passage of black codes, which restricted behavior and labor and other repressive measures as well as vigilante violence through organizations, like the ku klux klan which really emerged in a strong way in 1868 and the years afterward. Theres also a great a great deal of resistance from democrats from across the nation. Its important to remember that in this period democrats and republicans have the sort of opposite ideologies as they have today democrats were opposed to the republican parties use of federal power to secure black rights, although they were more amenable to using this power to expand White Settlement into the west and well get into to more of that later. So things began to change a little bit when Ulysses S Grant was elected in 1868. Grant had been a career military man who quit the army in the years before the civil war floundered around a bit trying to find his way before rejoining the military during the civil war and here he found his real talent, which was planning military campaigns and leading men into battle after the war. He served as the general of the armies for johnson profoundly disagreed with johnson on most matters involving reconstruction and really wanted to honor Abraham Lincoln who is a friend of his and whose vision for the future of the south for black equality and black voting. He did support. He also wanted to honor the sacrifice of so many of the us soldiers who had fought for the union, you know, who he had led into battle and who had died under his watch. He was having none of it from the white southerners. He was had very little tolerance for them. Very little sympathy for them. He saw their resistance to federal measures and to the 14th and 15th amendments as a renewed rebellion against the federal government and that shaped really his response, but he was elected with this campaign slogan, which you can see on this commemorative handkerchief here. Let us have peace and he really did want to bring the south back into the nation, but he did want to ensure that all the citizens of the south were equal in that effort. He also uh meant let us have peace to apply to the west. So this was an interesting sort of twopronged approach that he and his administration took supported by congress during this period, you know one big question for grant was how to provide and protect civil rights for more than four million freed people across the south how to make sure that states were protecting their citizens and protecting their their 14th and 15th amendment rights, particularly the 14th amendment which was passed in june of 1866 ratified in 1868 and affirming the citizenship citizen citizenship status and civil rights of all people born or naturalized in the United States. There was a qualifier to that though, that becomes really important during this period we have a parenthetical there that says accept indians on taxed. Thats the quote and that is an important omission because most white americans including ulysses s. Grant did not believe that native people were citizens or really could be citizens if they continue to live in their traditional ways, so in this moment there is interest in both the south and the west and to this end grant made two, very interesting and progressive appointments in his first term. The first was the appointment of ely parker as commissioner of indian affairs. Some of you may be familiar with parker if you know a fair bit about the civil war he was on grants staff. He is hes a seneca man of great education and experience had come to know grant in galena before the war and grant really appreciated his intelligence and also his penmanship. He was the one who wrote out the surrender documents for grant and lee at appomattox. So grant really wanted to bring elie parker in to the bureau of indian affairs, and he did so in 1869. He also appointed Amos Ackerman as his attorney general. Ackerman was a really interesting figure. He was a georgian. He was a former confederate officer, but he was a man who having returned from the war actually embraced radical reconstruction believed that the south needed to kind of move into the future and provide equality for all citizens, and he came into the Grant Administration in 1870. So both grant and congress made decisions