Can dogs hike in Yellowstone National Park?

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In eighteen seventy-two, Congress drew a line around this high country of geysers and hot springs and set it apart as a public park, for the benefit and enjoyment of the people. It was the first national park in the world. It covers more than two point two million acres, nearly all of it in Wyoming, with thin edges in Montana and Idaho. This is Yellowstone National Park.

Before the park

People have lived and traveled here for more than eleven thousand years. For all that time they came to a black wall of volcanic glass, Obsidian Cliff, and chipped it into arrowheads and spear tips. Some tribes traveled roughly two thousand miles to reach it, and points made from its glass have turned up as far east as Ohio and Ontario.

The Crow held the country east of the park, and the Blackfeet the country to the north. The Crow's own name for themselves means children of the large-beaked bird. Shoshone, Bannock and Nez Perce people used this land as well.

A band of Mountain Shoshone called the Sheep Eaters lived inside what became the park for thousands of years. They hunted on foot with dogs that looked like both wolves and huskies, and the dogs hauled travois, two-pole sleds loaded with game. An early superintendent spread the false story that the tribes feared the geysers, part of the push to move them out. By the late eighteen hundreds the Sheep Eaters had been forced onto reservations.

Today the Eastern Shoshone Tribe governs itself on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. The Shoshone-Bannock Tribes hold the Fort Hall Reservation in Idaho, cut by a survey error from one point eight million acres to one point two million. The Nez Perce Tribe calls its people the Nimiipuu. The park counts twenty-seven tribes with ties to this land.

Making the park

A small party of explorers came in eighteen sixty-nine, and a larger one in eighteen seventy named Old Faithful. One of its leaders, Nathaniel Langford, then lectured across the country on a publicity tour for the Northern Pacific Railroad. His talk in Washington moved Ferdinand Hayden to survey the region in eighteen seventy-one. Hayden brought back photographs by William Henry Jackson and paintings by Thomas Moran, and they caught the imagination of Congress.

On March first, eighteen seventy-two, President Ulysses Grant signed the law. It withdrew the land from settlement and sale and dedicated it as a pleasuring-ground for the people.

The law had no teeth. In eighteen eighty-six the Army arrived to run the park, and it stayed more than thirty years. In eighteen ninety-four, soldiers caught a man slaughtering bison, and there was no law to punish him. A journalist wired the story to Forest and Stream, and within two months Congress passed one. The stone buildings of Fort Yellowstone, the old Army post, have been the park's headquarters since nineteen eighteen.

One story

For decades, the bears of Yellowstone worked the roads. Visitors fed them along the roadsides. Beginning in nineteen thirty-one, the park counted an average of forty-eight people hurt by bears every year.

In nineteen sixty, the park started a bear program that banned the feeding. That October, the writer John Steinbeck drove in at the north entrance with his dog, Charley, on the trip that became the book Travels with Charley. Charley, normally gentle, went wild at every roadside bear, so Steinbeck turned around and left the park.

The feeding ended, and the dumps went next. In nineteen seventy the park began closing its open garbage dumps. Injuries fell from forty-five a year in the nineteen sixties to about one a year in the two thousands. Forty-eight a year, down to one.

Today

Nearly four point eight million visits came in twenty twenty-five. In June of twenty twenty-two, a five-hundred-year flood tore out the north entrance road in several places, and traffic now runs on the park's original entrance road, from eighteen seventy-nine.

The bison came back from the edge. By the late eighteen eighties about two dozen were left in the wild here, and the latest count is nearly fifty-three hundred. How many the land should carry is still argued: Montana sued over the park's bison plan, arguing for fewer bison, then moved to drop its suit in September of twenty twenty-six, and one other case is pending.

At the north entrance, look for the stone arch whose cornerstone Theodore Roosevelt laid in nineteen oh three. It carries the words of the law: For the benefit and enjoyment of the people. This is Yellowstone National Park.