A fresh, provocative study ... Departing from well-trodden narratives about conservation and public recreation, she views the park’s formation as an opportunistic land grab, desired or opposed by various private interests but ultimately pursued by a federal government eager to assuage Reconstruction-era political tensions by seizing territory from Indigenous people.
Megan Kate Nelson's great gift as a historian and as a writer is finding the connected threads of the sprawling story of the place we call the United States ... In her latest, Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America, released in the year of the park’s sesquicentennial, she narrows the aperture, examining the 1871 expedition that mapped the region and prepared the designation of the country’s first national park.
Intriguing if disjointed ... Nelson makes excellent use of the diaries and letters of expedition members to convey Yellowstone’s natural wonders ... Nelson takes long detours into the politics and racial tensions of the Reconstruction-era South ... Despite its fascinating elements and eloquent evocations of the Western landscape, this kaleidoscopic history doesn’t quite coalesce.
