Signed into law exactly 150 years ago, the 1872 Yellowstone Act proposed a massive government acquisition of more than 1,760 square miles in Wyoming Territory (an area larger than the state of Rhode Island). Now Yellowstone National Park, the tract of land included the Yellowstone Basin’s astounding geysers and other geothermal features, as well as its canyons, valleys, waterfalls and lakes. Legislators introduced the bill after geologist Ferdinand Hayden returned from a congressionally funded expedition to this “land of wonders” in the fall of 1871, bringing back 45 boxes of specimens, along with photographs and illustrations of the basin’s unique features.
As members of the House of Representatives debated the act in late February 1872, they focused on the threat it might pose to white settlers’ land rights. Then, John Taffe, a Republican from Nebraska and the chairman of the Committee on Territories, announced that he had a question: “It is whether this measure does not interfere with the Sioux [Očéthi Šakówiŋ] reservation.”
The propulsive and vividly told story of how Yellowstone became the world’s first national park amid the nationwide turmoil and racial violence of the Reconstruction era.
Taffe’s query surprised his colleagues, most of whom did not consider Indigenous land rights an obstacle to federal projects in the West. The congressman, however, had the Očéthi Šakówiŋ at the forefront of his mind. Lakotas—one of the seven “council fires,” or nations, of the Očéthi Šakówiŋ—had been resisting white encroachment on their territory between the Upper Missouri River and Yellowstone since the early 1860s; the Húŋkpapȟa, a group of Lakotas under the leadership of Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake (Sitting Bull), were at the forefront of these efforts. Tensions had escalated in recent months as military forts and towns proliferated and railroad surveyors began entering Lakota territory. Taffe’s question acknowledged the growing power of Lakotas in the Northwest—and the extent to which they would continue to shape American exploration and preservation of Yellowstone.