Magazine, presentation magazine, and civil war monitor. Nelson her and her b. A. In history literature from the harvard university, and our ph. D. American studies from the university of iowa. She has taught at texas tech university, cal state, fullerton, harvard, brown. Nelson is the author of saving yellowstone, ruin nation, trembling earth. Were so excited to have her with us today. 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 meghan had put together. You all shouldve received that by now. If not, that link is posted in the chat. With that, please join me in welcoming meghan 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 think harmony, ellen, steve, anna, liz for running this show and to help me get all the tech straight. I cannot think 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. Thank you all for being with me tonight. As nikole noted, there will be a q a after the talk. Please feel free to ask questions along the way. Well get to as many of those questions as we can by the end. In mid july, 1871, a 22yearold 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 gaze below until 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 drumans rushed out of the ground. A common sight along river banks in alpine areas of the mountain west, this flowering plant grew in large clusters. It is brown, yellow, purple red flowers waiting in the breeze. Adams was the botanist on the yellowstone expedition of 1871. 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 into 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 the name of the specimen, the day he collected, it 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 d. C. 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 u. S. Western flora that are archived in the east. They are also material evidence of fernand haydens expodition of 1871. The first scientific exploration of yellowstone with led to the passage of the yellowstone act in 1872 getting the First National park in the world, 150 years ago. In my new book, saving yellowstone, i tell the story of haydens expedition. I interviewed the story with two other narratives. The narrative of Capital Investment and the White Settlement of the west. And the story of indigenous resistance to those efforts of government officials, u. S. Soldiers, businessman and scientists to take their homelands from them. In this moment, in 18711872, yellowstone really became an iconic landscape in america. It also became a metaphor for the nation itself. A place that was both beautiful and terrible. The question that i always get, always want to ask of people in the audience, when did you go first to yellowstone . Have youve been there . We have a quiz for you, in the audience, a pole just to see how many of you have actually been there. 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 . Was it really, really long ago . As you can see, from the 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 had my father go into the garage, dig out the slides from that trip. I sent them off to be converted to jpegs. It was great fun to look at them when they arrived. This Family Vacation was pretty incredible. Yellowstone is really our first stop we went there from glacier, calgary, came all the way back around. Over the course of two weeks. These family trips, we started taking these twoweek summer vacations. They really shaped me as a historian of american landscapes. So, here we have the results of the poll. 96 of you have been there. That is amazing. That is a really large number. Even today, yellowstone is quite hard to get to. You really have to try. You cant just be wandering by on the way to somewhere else. That is really great. It looks like an even share of people who went as children, went as adults, it looks like about a third of you have been in the past five years. Thats great, thats great. This is my first trip, my second trip was just this past september. I was supposed to go in may of 2020 for my First Research trip for the book. Of course, the pandemic skuddled those planned. This was really a bummer for me, i like to go to the places that i study and that i research, i like to be in the landscape, not necessarily for sense of history, 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. I like to be there so i can understand what the people saw and experienced. These family trips were really important to me too. I learn to love history. Finding us on maps bound into the road atlas, if there are people who remember that. I love a good road atlas. Tracking us as we drove along. It really isnt a surprise that when i became a historian, i was really drawn to environmental history, to landscape studies. When i really started thinking about yellowstone, when i was writing the three cornered war. That was my previous book. There is a protagonist in that book who is a surveyor general of new mexico territory, a guy named john clark, a friend of lincolns, a republican appointee in the 1860s. This led me to some Background Research in the history of surveying in america. I ran across that hayden expedition of 1871. I had actually studied it in graduate school, in a class in our history. Well see why in a little bit in the talk, why that would have been something that i would have studied in that context. I realized, this was about 2018, i realize 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. For historians, i think for a lot of us, anniversaries are really important moments for us to really take stock of events, of places, why events occur, why places became important and the way that they did. How theyre important today. Really, reckon with that. The place that these places hold in our society. That was an important element. I started to look around and see what had been written on haydens expedition. A lot of great books have been written about it. Written about that survey, written about the other great surveys that were out at the time. Which i will talk about in a second. A lot of great books have also been published about the long history of yellowstone. Marjorie hands magisterial two volume history. I i know i said the sources for you to look at, there is a full bibliography in the book itself. Theres a whole list of sources that you can look at, primary documents, and also secondary sources that can give you a better sense of this period. It really surprise me that nobody had looked indepth at the effort to explore and preserve yellowstone in its historical context. I also realized, this survey, the passage of the yellowstone act are happening in 1871 and 72. Which are right in the middle of reconstruction. Which is not a period that we think of as taking place in the west, having anything to do with the west. That became really interesting to me. So, i just written a book that looked at the civil war from a really unexpected place, the far west. I began to think, well, when i look at reconstruction from yellowstone . When i come to know reconstruction differently . When i learned something new about it by looking at it from the geyser basin, the lower falls, the grand prismadic spring, as in the slide. As you have been there. When i learned something new about yellowstone itself by thinking about it in the context of reconstruction . First, before i get to the nittygritty of hayden and his expedition, i wanted to give you a background in reconstruction history. This is a period thats getting a little more attention today. Really, 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. We didnt really study it a lot indepth. It really is an important, and formative moment in our nations history. It deserves more attention. After the civil war, there are many challenges facing the u. S. Government, all americans. How does a nation recover from four years of violent conflict . Just incalculable loss of life, of farms, of cities, of railroads. How do four Million People transition from a life of enslavement to a life of freedom . There were so many challenges, there was economic challenges, political challenges, 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, the railroads had been destroyed. They had to be rebuilt. This required really northern Capital Investment. 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 ended free labor in agriculture. There was a whole turn in that context to share cropping, a whole system of indebtedness that really sustained cycles of poverty for black southerners, from might southerners in the years after the war. And for the years to come. That 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 the prewar case of out put until the mid 18 70s so there was that big challenge of how do we get the economy back on track and how do we get people into professions and earning money and supporting their families again after the 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. Theres a states had to pass depending on where 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 d. C. To be seated in congress. And by 1870, this process was mostly complete. All the former Confederate States where back in the union, they had seated members in congress, majority of them were republicans. Because former confederates who were 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. In his resistance, led to his impeachment trial in the spring of 1868. There was also 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 a 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 deal of resistance from democrats from across the nation. Its important to remember that in this period democrats and republicans had to sort of opposite ideologies as they have today. Democrats were opposed to the republican partys 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 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 fighting 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 was a friend of his, and whos 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 u. S. Soldiers who had fought for the union, you know, who he had led to battle and who had died under his watch. He was having none of it from the white southerners. He 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 ear, 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 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 4 million freed people across the south, how to make sure that states where protecting their citizens and protecting their 14th and 15th amendment rights. Particularly the 14th amendment, which was passed in june of 1866, ratified in 1868, and affirming the citizenship status and civil rights of all people born or naturalized in the United States. There was a qualifier to it though that becomes important during this period. We have a parenthetical to it that says, except indians untaxed. And 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 continued to live in their traditional ways. So, in this moment, there is interest in both the south and the west, and to this and, grant made two very interesting and progressive appointments in his first term in. 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 a seneca man of great education and experience, had come to know grant in galina 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 he really wanted to bring ely parker into the bureau of Indian Affairs and he did so in 1869. He also appointed amos akerman as his attorney general. Akerman 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 congresswoman decisions during this period to exert federal power in the south and the west, helped by the ely parker and amos akerman. In the south, akerman directed a newly created a department of justice effort to prosecute the ku klux klan in South Carolina in the fall of 1871. And he really encouraged grant toward taking various strong action, particularly in South Carolina, where kkk violence was very bad, the worst of the nation. So in october of 1871, with the power given to him by the kkk act, passed by the congress in the spring, grant suspended the rite of habeas corpus in multiple counties in South Carolina so that officials could arrest clan members immediately and keep them in jail until they were prosecuted. And from november 1871 to april 1872, u. S. Attorneys tried hundreds of clan members, charging them with conspiracy to violate the 14th and 15th amendment rights of black southerners, most of these cases were successful, and many clan members were sent to jail. Now, i should note that most of these members where the rank and file. The leadership of the kkk, the minute that grant started making noise about potential arrests, fled the country or fled the state, and they could not be found and arrested. So, the kkk trials were really a High Water Mark for republicans and for the federal government. During reconstruction, and during the 19th century, in asserting federal supremacy to really protect the rights of the nations most vulnerable citizens. Black americans would not receive this kind of protection from the federal government again until the 1960s. In the west, ely parker and sort of an interesting vision for the n