Adventures in Yellowstone: Early Travelers Tell Their Tales - Paperback

by M. Mark Miller (Author)

After its establishment in 1872, Yellowstone National Park was sufficiently famous that numerous people risked bear maulings, Indian attacks, and geyser burns just to glimpse its wonders. A surprising number of those who survived wrote about their adventures. The best of these stories are collected in Adventures in Yellowstone. Presenting a dozen narratives--journal entries, letters, and diaries--with an introduction to each, and with historic photographs, postcards, and woodcuts, this book is the essential compilation of the most gripping first-person accounts of the early years of America's most cherished national park.

Back Jacket

Gripping first-person accounts of the early years of America's most cherished national park After its establishment in 1872, Yellowstone National Park was sufficiently famous that a surprising number of people risked bear maulings, Indian attacks, and geyser burns just to glimpse its wonders. Many of those who survived wrote about their adventures. The best of those stories are collected here, in Adventures in Yellowstone. This compilation includes a dozen narratives--journal entries, letters, and diaries--with individual introductions as well as historic photographs, postcards, and woodcuts. From Osborne Russell's colorful early accounts of the daily lives of mountain men in the 1840s to a story by Eleanor Corthell, who in 1903 took her seven children on a two-month, 1,200-mile tour of the park by wagon, each story opens a new window on a long-overlooked aspect of our nation's history.

Author Biography

M. Mark Miller is a fifth-generation Montanan who grew up on a ranch in southwest Montana 90 miles from Yellowstone Park. His interest in early park travel began when he was a small boy listening to his grandmother's tales of baking bread in geysers and tossing red flannels into Old Faithful so it's next eruption would be tinted pink.

Miller has been researching early travel to Yellowstone since 2003. His expertise on the history and literature of Yellowstone has won him a position on the Speakers Bureau of Humanities Montana, an affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. His articles on Yellowstone Park and Montana history have appeared in the Big Sky Journal and the Pioneer Museum Quarterly. He is working on a novel for young adults about a 14-year-old boy's adventures in Yellowstone Park in 1871 and a history of Yellowstone travel.