ke Majesty, and Hole in the Ground. A party
from Jacksonville named it Crater Lake on August 4, 1869.

X

YELLOWSTONE, A VOLCANIC INTERLUDE

THE YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, WYOMING, NORTHWESTERN WYOMING. AREA,
3,348 SQUARE MILES

I

John Coulter's story of hot springs at the upper waters of the
Yellowstone River was laughed at by the public of 1810. Jim Bridger's
account of the geysers in the thirties made his national reputation as a
liar. Warren Angus Ferris's description of the Upper Geyser Basin was
received in 1842 in unbelieving silence. Later explorers who sought the
Yellowstone to test the truth of these tales thought it wholesome to
keep their findings to themselves, as magazines and newspapers refused
to publish their accounts and lecturers were stoned in the streets as
impostors. It required the authority of the semiofficial
Washburn-Langford expedition of 1869 to establish credence.

The original appeal of the Yellowstone, that to wonder, remains its most
popular appeal to-day, though science has dissipated mystery these many
years. Many visitors, I am persuaded, enjoy the wonder of it more even
than the spectacle. I have heard people refuse to listen to the
explanation of geyser action lest it lessen their pleasure in Old
Faithful. I confess to moods in which I want to see the blue flames and
smell the brimstone which Jim Bridger described so eloquently. There are
places where it is not hard to imagine both.

For many years the uncanny wonders of a dying volcanic region absorbed
the public mind to the exclusion of all else in the Yellowstone
neighborhood, which Congress, principally in consequence of these
wonders, made a national park in 1872. Yet all the time it possessed two
other elements of distinction which a later period regards as equal to
the volcanic phenomena; elements, in fact, of such distinction that
either one alone, without the geysers, would have warranted the
reservation of so striking a region for a national park. One of these is
the valley of the Yellowstone River with its spectacular waterfalls and
its colorful canyon. The other is its population of wild animals which,
in 1872, probably was as large and may have been larger than to-day's.
Yet little was heard of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone in those
days, although Moran's celebrated painting, now in the Capitol at
Washington, helped influence Congress to make it a national park; and so
little did the wild animals