to the state of California. It was the first time in the history of the nation that Congress had acted explicitly to protect lands for recreation and aesthetic enjoyment—and to prevent their sale and development.
As Hayden met with Congressmen to lobby for Yellowstone National Park, he was joined by a number of interested parties. Jay Cooke, an investment banker who was selling bonds for the Northern Pacific Railroad, sent his brother Henry, who knew everyone worth knowing in Washington. He was a particular friend of Ulysses S. Grant, and he visited the president and several congressmen, talking up Yellowstone’s preservation and what it could mean for prospective white settlers of the Great Northwest.
Others objected to the fact that the park would take land away from honest settlers, undermining preemption rights which many white Westerners viewed as sacred. The 1862 Homestead Act had affirmed these rights of white Americans to claim and develop public lands. “The policy of setting apart so large an area of the public domain for the exclusive delights of the rich, shutting out actual settlers and cultivators is un-American,” one California newspaper argued.
An 1871stereograph of the hot springs on the Gardner River in the lower basins in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming.As a national park, the committee insisted, Yellowstone would become a “resort for all classes of people from all portions of the world,” a democratic landscape of tourism that would prove the superiority of its features to any other site of sublimity across the globe.