SNIPPET: In the 1870s, adventurers would explore the magnificent wilderness that would become America's first national park. In 1870, the Washburn Expedition - dignitaries led by the surveyor-general of the Montana Territory, Gen. Henry WASHBURN - first beheld the dramatic geysers. Cornelius HEDGES, a member of the group, reported "our great astonishment on entering this basin, to see at no great distance before us an immense body of sparkling water, projected suddenly and with terrific force into the air to the height of over one hundred feet. We had found a real geyser." On March 1, 1872, Congress passed a bill declaring some two million Rocky Mountain acres to be "set apart as a public park or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people." Yellowstone, in 1872, was still a remote, mysterious region largely unmapped, although scarcely uninhabited: a Native American group known as the Sheepeaters (because they hunted the local bighorn) had survived its bitter winters for centuries and were still resident. As late as 1869, eastern magazines refused to print stories about Yellowstone, for fear tht travelers' claims of natural geysers, hot springs and steam vents amounted to little more than wild exaggerations. The hardy explorers of the Washburn expedition, and the subsequent Hayden Survey of 1871, began to catalog some 250 active geysers and an estimated 10,000 hot springs, mud pots (a bubbling mixture of sulfuric acid, clay and water), hot pools and steam vents. At first, the federal government's decision to protect this isolated wilderness had little effect on Yellowstone itself. There was no precedent for managing such an enormous "park." The first superintendent, Nathanial LANGFORD, received no salary, ! had no budget or staff, and visited Yellowstone only twice in his five-year tenure. The pioneering sightseers who did make their way here - wealthy Easterners like conservationist George Bird GRINNELL; socially prominent citizens of MT; Army officers on hunting junkets; nature-loving aristocrats from Europe - often endured severe privations just to reach Yellowstone. Form the east, the easiest approach was via the new transcontinental railroad, passing through Omaha, NE, to the sleepy settlement of Corinne, UT. From there, a stagecoach ran to the gold-rush town of Virginia City, MT. That dusty, bone-shaking 430-mile journey lasted four grueling days and nights. "Ther is nothing to break the dull monotomy," reported a 35-year-old Irish aristocrat, the EARL of DUNRAVEN in 1876. "Clouds of the salt dust .... covered our clothes, and filled our eyes, ears, noses and mouths." (Several years earlier, a stagecoach carrying a 17-year-old English adventurer, Sidford HAMP, had been held up by two ruffians, who passed around a bottle of whiskey after robbing the ! passengers: "I took some (whiskey) just for the joke of it and because I was cold with standing out with my hands up," HAMP wrote his mother back home. Arriving in Virginia City, weary travelers hired guides (frontiersmen) and outifitted their expeditions in the style of African safaris, with cooks, attendants and mounds of equipment. Most entered the park from the north, traveling via Bozeman and Gardiner, MT; a few took a more rugged route along the Madison River. At the time, the only byways within the park itself were bridle paths and animal trails. In 1877 Thomas SHERMAN, son of the famous Civil War general, wrote from the northern edge of the park: "Here vehicles must be left behind, for there is no highway into Wonderland, and the visitor who dares to trespass on Dame Nature's secret fastnesses, must bear the fatigues of rough riding, and trust his baggage to the mercy of a pack animal." Most travelers, crossing over a a nearly impassable stretch of fallen pine trees, headed straight to Upper Geyser Basin. Some overnighted at the only accommodation available, McCARTNEY's Hotel, built in 1871 at Mammoth Hot Springs, near the park's northern entrance. Although the lodgings were promoted in local newspapers as an elegant spa, government surveyor Ferdinand HAYDEN found McCARTNEY's, "very promitive... the fare simple and remarkable for quantity rather than for quality or variety." For his part, the EARL of DUNRAVEN called it the! "last outpost of civilization," a distinction apparently earned in his eyes by the sale of whiskey." But the hardships of the journey were soon forgotten. "Our first sight of the geysers, with columns of steam rising from innumerable ventes and the smell of the Inferno in the air from the numerous sulfur springs, made us simply wild with eagerness of seeing all things at once...," wrote 28-year-old Emma COWAN, a resident of Radersburg in the MT territory, in 1877. They wandered among such wonders as the Castle and Giantes geysers and Minerva Terrance, a massive travertine formation. They poured soap in the mouths of geysers, to hasten eruptions (the detergent added a viscous film that decreased the surface tension of the water). They washed clothes in the hot pools, marveling as soiled shirts were sucked into the earth by down-draft currents, only to be spat up clean an hour later. Little thought was given to environmental damage. Many visitors carved their names on rock walls, littered, chopped off delicate geological formations for souvenirs. Those of a more scie! ntific bent timed geyer eruptions and recorded the temperatures of hot pools. Visitors descended Yellowstone Canyon's rock walls with ropes to gape at the thundering Upper and Lower falls and scaled Mount Washburn. Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, forced to abandon ancestral homelands, led his people across the park in late August, early September in 1877 in a doomed attempt to reach Canada. In August of that year, Emma COWAN and her husband George and seven others were attacked by a splinter groups of Nez Perce renegades; while all escaped or were released unharmed, George COWAN was left for dead. For four days he dragged himself across brutal terrain until found by an Army patrol. In later years, fully recovered after removal of the bullet, he wore it as a watch fob. As for Chief Joseph, he and his followers surrended to U. S. Army forces within 40 miles of the Canadian border on October 5. -- Excerpts, six-page photo-article by Tony PERROTTET, NYC, in "Smithsonian" magazine/May 2004. --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.725 / Virus Database: 480 - Release Date: 7/19/2004