The Real Story of Yellowstone
Electric Peak, Yellowstone National Park. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
While millions around the world tuned in to watch Kevin Costner’s sensationalized depiction of western history in the mini-series ‘Yellowstone,’ the real story of Yellowstone goes way beyond the dramatized miniseries.
The story of Yellowstone isn’t about cowboys or ranchers. Yellowstone National Park was founded in 1872 through an act of Congress, signed into law by President Ulysses S Grant, a former general of Civil War fame. But there were no cowboys involved – the West was still controlled by its original inhabitants. Four years later the Seventh Cavalry, led by General George Armstrong Custer, went down in a decisive defeat when the Lakota and Cheyenne peoples avenged Custer’s incursion into their sacred Paha Sapa – the Black Hills. Custer’s actions had opened the region to gold mining, culminating in the massive Homestake Mine that built the fortune of magnate George Hearst, forming the backstory for another popular miniseries, ‘Deadwood.’
While there were a handful of ranches in Montana back then, there were no cattle and no ranches in Yellowstone– it was too high and cold. Indigenous tribes lived there – Shoshones known as the Sheepeaters inhabited the high peaks, pursuing a subsistence lifestyle of hunting and gathering that stretched back not just five or six generations, but a thousand at least.
It was a place where humans lived in balance with the natural world. There were elk and bison, wolves and grizzly bears, lakes teeming with native cutthroat trout and birds beyond number. It was high and cold in the winter, and most inhabitants – wild and human alike – migrated downvalley to milder climes, or did their best to hibernate through it. The Park held only summer range and wild herbivores grazed in the lush subalpine meadows. The ecologically critical winter habitats were left out of the Park, unprotected in the surrounding low country. Pronghorns traced a dozen migration routes down from the high country. All but one of these migrations was wiped out by ranching development and overhunting in the valleys surrounding the Park.
When Yellowstone was established as the world’s first National Park, there was no Park Service to manage it. The tourists of that day drove down in buckboards from the train depot in Bozeman, Montana to see the steaming fumaroles and geysers that erupted periodically, marking thin spots in the Earth’s crust above a massive plume of magma marking what would eventually come to be understood as a supervolcano hidden underground. The tourists back then weren’t any brighter than the visitors of today who heedlessly approach wild bison – they threw chairs and barrels and other debris into the geysers to watch them get blown into the sky. They hacked off hunks of travertine from the thermal features to carry home as souvenirs. The chronic vandalism compelled Congress to step in, to rein in the worst of the stupidity and destruction. They put the U.S. Army in charge of Yellowstone, chiefly to regulate the tourists.
As the original locals were wiped out by foreign diseases and chronic warfare, and the survivors were swindled of their lands by a disingenuous federal government doing the bidding of greedy locals, the native wildlife was wiped out, too. Bison were killed off first to deprive the Tribes of the sustenance they needed to keep resisting the expansion of EuroAmerican empire. The elk and mule deer were overhunted to the point of extirpation by market gunners to keep the mining camps fed. Pronghorns, once numbering in the millions, were shot for target practice and left to rot out on the plains. At one point, an elk migration thirty thousand strong once coursed down from the Yellowstone high country to winter ranges in the Red Desert. In 1897, the League of American Sportsmen proposed to expand Yellowstone National Park to protect the migration, but Congress unwisely ignored the campaign. Instead, the elk migration was severed by the development of cattle and sheep ranches, and 30,000 wintering elk were bottled up in Jackson Hole to starve. The ecological crisis precipitated the formation of the National Elk Refuge in 1911, and the elk deprived of their winter ranges had to be fed with hay hauled in at taxpayer expense to keep them alive.
Wolves, mountain lions, and grizzly bears found a price on their heads, bounties that the bloodthirsty newcomers justified as the price of what they called “progress.” Driven by the livestock industry’s ambition not only to take over every inch of land that could be grazed by a cow or a sheep, but also to wipe out any wildlife that competed for grass, inconvenienced ranching operations, or had the temerity to dine occasionally on beef or lamb. That privilege was to be reserved for paying customers.
Wolves, grizzly bears, and mountain lions fared little better within the “protected” confines of Yellowstone National Park, where Army detachments hunted and trapped wolves to extinction and depleted grizzlies and mountain lions to a scattered remnant. All of this in a misguided effort to prop up remaining populations of elk and bison inside the Park. The founding of Wildlife Management as a topic of study was still fifty years in the future.
The surrounding landowners – and Yellowstone was besieged by them – were often the adventure-seeking second or third sons of royalty with no hope of inheriting landed estates in Europe. They built sprawling cattle empires through swindles, using the 1872 Mining Law to patent public land into private ownership, fraudulent Homestead Act claims, and through bullying smallholder immigrants out of their lands (hiring mercenaries to do their dirty work when necessary). They used their influence to set up territorial governments – and later state legislatures and agencies and county commissions – to do their bidding. They thought of themselves as landed royalty and expected to be treated that way. It’s a social phenomenon that continues to this day, dramatized by the series ‘Yellowstone.’
Eventually, the federal government formalized the war against native wildlife by establishing Animal Damage Control (which today is cynically-named USDA Wildlife Services), a taxpayer-funded death squad founded to kill off wolves, bears, coyotes, and mountain lions at the livestock industry’s request. The government agents set traps and hunted down the last of the wolves in every western state. Over time, technology allowed ever-more-deadly methods of killing, from aerial gunning using airplanes and helicopters to dumping gasoline into wolf dens to burn the pups alive, and using cyanide-deploying land mines that could be scattered across the West and left unattended to kill coyotes, pet dogs, and rockhounds. Even Aldo Leopold, the founder of wildlife management and an early proponent of ecology, was a government trapper. He came to realize how senseless and destructive this approach really was, and canonized his condemnation in the famous essay, ‘Thinking Like a Mountain.’
Animal Damage Control was one of the first in a long line of taxpayer subsidies for wealthy ranch owners that continue to this day. The overgrazing that fueled the Dust Bowl spawned the Soil Conservation Service (today’s Conservation Districts), founded to maximize the livestock industry’s long-term survival and profitability. There were federal research branches specially dedicated to promoting agriculture. There were taxpayer subsidies for landowners when it rained too much (“disaster relief”) or rained too little (“drought payments”). The West was divided up like spoils and fenced off with ‘No Trespassing’ signs and overgrazed with abandon on public and private lands alike.
Having subjected the West to ethnic cleansing and wildlife decimation, the cattle and sheep ranchers in the states surrounding Yellowstone fell to warring with each other. Herds of domestic sheep tended by “tramp herders” wintered in the sagebrush basins and were pushed into fragile alpine meadows for the summer, eating everything in their path in annual migrations spanning hundreds of miles. Ranch-based cattlemen were outraged when the sheep herds trailed through, decimating the forage, but they had no legal recourse because most of the land they claimed as part of their ranches was public land that by law could be grazed for free without limit or management by anyone. The cattlemen tried to control the public lands by homesteading all the streams and the watercourses to prevent others from watering their livestock, but the strategy broke down because the massive herds of sheep, unlike cattle, could travel vast distances between watering stops. So, the cattlemen lobbied Congress to pass the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934, which set a nominal grazing fee and required stockmen to own a “base property” to gain permission to graze their livestock on public lands. This put an end to the tramp herders, who owned no land of their own, and cemented the cattlemen’s stranglehold on grazing on western public lands.
In Yellowstone, the U.S. Army’s management gave way to Park Rangers with the formation of the National Park Service in 1916. But the wildlife-killing continued, with the last pack of wolves in Yellowstone killed in 1926. It wasn’t until 1933 that the Park Service finally put an end to the practice of killing native wildlife, fostering the eventual recovery of mountain lions and grizzly bears within Park boundaries. But wolves remained extirpated.
South of Yellowstone, a different story of conservation unfolded in Jackson Hole. Congress established Grand Teton National Park in 1929. It was only a postage-stamp of protection applying to the peaks themselves, but not the forelands of the valley. John D. Rockefeller, an oil magnate who built his fortune on the Standard Oil Company empire, founded the Snake River Land and Cattle Company to quietly buy up almost 36,000 acres of private ranches in Jackson Hole for eventual preservation as part of the Park. In 1943, President Roosevelt established Grand Teton National Monument to bring National Forest lands at the base of the Tetons into Park Service management. As the locals began to realize that ranches were being bought out to be shut down and shifted instead to conservation, the expansion of Grand Teton National Park was decried as marking the end of Jackson’s economy. A Wyoming Senator rose on the floor of Congress to condemn it as “a foul, sneaking Pearl Harbor blow” in the midst of World War II. Eventually, and after Rockefeller threatened to sell the land for development, a compromise was struck. Congress approved an expansion of Grand Teton incorporating the Rockefeller ranch lands, but in exchange the Wyoming delegation extracted a special exemption that prevents any President from establishing a National Monument in Wyoming. Meanwhile, Wyoming politicians’ fears that preserving public lands would decimate the local economy were fulfilled by the reality that today, Teton County Wyoming has more wealth per capita than any other county in the United States. That’s what you get when you trade ranching for preservation and tourism.
As time marched forward, the elk population in Yellowstone and Grand Teton recovered, enough so that elk could be exported to lands throughout Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado where elk had been driven extinct by excessive hunting. The eradication of wolves, grizzly bears, and mountain lions had no effect on plummeting big game populations. Instead, strict limits on trophy hunting – coupled with a ban on the game-meat trade – had to be put in place to allow elk transplants to take root. In Yellowstone and in the absence of wolves, elk populations expanded to the point where elk died by the thousands each March, starving to death on inadequate winter ranges stripped bare of edible forage. I remember cross-country skiing from carcass to carcass during my freshman year in college in 1985, guided by a wildlife biology professor warning us all against upsetting the natural balance.
In 1993, the Park Service embarked on a bold plan to restore the natural balance of Yellowstone by reintroducing wolves. The fiercest opposition came from local ranchers, the same families that had driven wolves extinct in the first place. They protested, complained bitterly, and did everything they could to block the return of “giant Canadian wolves,” even filing lawsuits. But the wolves were released before a court order could halt it and as wolf populations grew, they helped bring down the excessive elk numbers. Wolf activity pushed elk out of the bottomlands and into steeper, more forested terrain. This allowed a regrowth of streamside vegetation and aspen groves, some of the most important wildlife habitat, fostering a resurgence of wildlife from beavers to songbirds and even changing the course of streams and rivers. Scientists studying the phenomenon labeled it a “trophic cascade,” underscoring the importance of apex predators to the health of native ecosystems.
The livestock industry and its allies have been trying to discredit the success of wolf reintroduction ever since, even though the establishment of wolves in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming has had no detectable effect on the extent or profitability of ranching in the region. Elk populations and hunter success in the states surrounding Yellowstone also remain at pre-wolf levels.
Even so, wolf populations inside Yellowstone remain vulnerable to depredations by ranchers, hunters, and trappers, as the miniseries highlighted. The bloodthirsty anti-wolf management policies in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming keep wolves on the brink of disappearing, which is exactly what these state governments always intended, having failed to block their return.
The livestock industry’s entanglements with Yellowstone wildlife didn’t just involve wolves and other predators. During the early years, livestock allowed into Yellowstone transmitted a cattle disease called brucellosis to the Yellowstone bison herd. Fearing a return of brucellosis to Montana’s commercial livestock (which might trigger a ban on exporting cattle to out-of-state feedlots and slaughterhouses), the cattlemen raised the alarm and state governments pushed the Park Service to block the natural migrations of bison from summer ranges inside the Park to winter ranges outside its boundaries. Today, instead of treating bison like other native wildlife with the freedom to migrate to their appropriate native habitats, the cattle industry has bullied state and federal agencies into bottling them up inside the Park using a controversial system of captures, killings, and carefully choreographed hunts along the boundary to block the bison from leaving the Park and re-establishing their habitat use in surrounding states.
In one of those ironies you can’t script, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine completed a study on bison and brucellosis around Yellowstone in 2017. The scientists found not one single case of bison transmitting brucellosis to cattle in the states surrounding Yellowstone, at any time in history. Instead, each case of brucellosis contracted by cattle came from elk. While the Academies suggested the possibility of a program to test and slaughter infected elk, elk inhabit steep and heavily-timbered terrain, making eradication of brucellosis functionally impossible. Wolves and other predators are known to selectively prey on diseased elk and deer, representing the best chance of cleansing the wild herds of diseases. But only if wolves, mountain lions, bears, and other predators are allowed to recover to natural population levels, and the ranchers won’t have it.
Today, the largest private landowner around Yellowstone these days doesn’t raise cattle – he raises bison and wolves. Ted Turner’s ranch near Gallatin Gateway, the Flying D, was founded on the principle that ranching could be regenerative, by getting rid of the non-native, invasive cattle in favor of ecologically appropriate (and native) bison, allowing a thriving assemblage of native wildlife from elk to wolves to prairie dogs, and marketing the food for fine dining at Ted’s Montana Grill locations. It’s a version of ranching that works for the land, instead of against it.
The cattle industry is dwindling nationwide, and as real estate prices increase (perhaps fueled in part by Hollywood promotion of the region), more ranchers are cashing out. The Paradise Valley, where the miniseries is set, has few large ranches anymore. Like many resort areas, these ranches were carved up into ranchettes during real estate booms in decades past, and the ranchers that sold out were able to profit handsomely. Today, the American people are actually the biggest landowner in the region, thanks to federally-owned public lands managed by the Park Service, the Forest Service, and the Bureau of Land Management.
Yet, the livestock industry continues to have a warped influence on the management of public lands outside the National Parks and federal agencies are still renting public lands for commercial livestock grazing – typically at levels that promote overgrazing and land health problems. As a result, grizzly bears that should be protected by the Endangered Species Act are struggling to recover and are routinely killed by federal agents in response to conflicts with livestock that ranchers leave unattended in grizzly habitats – often in the backcountry – on public lands.
In the series ‘Yellowstone,’ the ranchers are the protagonists, and the story is told from their perspective. The miniseries, lauded by some and vilified by others, portrays them as heroes and antiheroes by turns, touching on some important issues along the way. In the real West, the ranchers are the root of a great many problems, arguably the single most widespread bringer of negative impacts across one of the last best places in the world. This tiny, insular good old boys’ club insists that every state and federal policy reflect their interests and advance their agendas. Just like in the show. The real environmentalists are the conservation professionals, who work for the public interest, and speak for the best interest of the lands and their native species. With deep knowledge of lands and wildlife, they know the West as well or better than anyone. Where ranching has ended for good – inside Yellowstone National Park for example – the land recovers, and nature flourishes. And the locals reap massive economic rewards, generating jobs and wealth far outstripping those from mineral booms and busts and economically trivial cattle operations. And still some ranchers rail against the “evils” of preservation.
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