I am (a) a huge nerd and (b) attempting to be more intentional with my reading. Rather than grabbing whatever looks most appealing on any given day, I’m picking through my shelves and library loans to select the volumes that fit in with what’s going on in my life: travel, author talks in Ann Arbor, current events, and so forth. Reading in clusters has become a helpful way for me to pick up books that have, for no good reason, lingered in my possession, unread, for too long.
Prior to spending 10 days in Montana and Yellowstone National Park last month, therefore, I pulled together three books that looked to form a nice trio of titles on the park and the West more broadly. In the week before my departure, I watched a 12-hour Ken Burns documentary, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, which turned out to be extremely helpful in familiarizing me with the big names and major events that make up the history of Yellowstone. Thus, I set off with suitable reading material in my suitcase and a head full of National Parks trivia that needed additional context.
I started with a book I’d read before, Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America, by historian and writer Megan Kate Nelson. In just under 200 pages, Nelson provides an invaluable introduction to the creation of Yellowstone National Park in 1872.
Nelson skillfully intertwines the stories of three men intimately involved in the creation of the park. Researcher Ferdinand Hayden conducted expeditions in Yellowstone to procure scientific samples and map the landscape; financier Jay Cooke sought to build a railway that would travel through the region en route to the Pacific Northwest; and Lakota leader Sitting Bull wanted to protect his people and their land. In a clear, well-plotted narrative, Nelson recounts the triumphs and failures experienced by this trio of main characters.
I found the most interesting element in Nelson’s story to be the link between Yellowstone National Park and post-Civil War Reconstruction in the South. I knew about their chronological overlap, but hadn’t considered that there might be an actual connection between the two. This, of course, is because they’re often treated as two separate stories: Yellowstone belongs to lessons on cowboys, the growth of railroads, and the Wild West, while Reconstruction takes place in lectures on Jim Crow, the Ku Klux Klan, and the South. Nelson, however, makes a persuasive argument that the creation of Yellowstone as a national park was one piece of the larger Reconstruction effort—an attempt to bind people together in support of the sublime and restore the greatness of the United States.
Nelson’s vivid descriptions of the Yellowstone landscape and its beauty could easily persuade potential visitors to book a trip. While her three human main characters ultimately succumbed to failure, disappointment, and death, their idea of Yellowstone as a special—even sacred—space endures.
There are two reasons I’m glad I didn’t get to start reading Engineering Eden: The True Story of a Violent Death, a Trial, and the Fight Over Controlling Nature, by former park ranger turned writer Jordan Fisher Smith, until several days after I’d left Yellowstone. The first reason is that it was immensely helpful to have a mental map of the locations in which the book’s action took place and to know where they stand in relation to each other. The second reason is that Smith’s descriptions of human-bear encounters, and the violence that bears can inflict on said humans, are flat-out terrifying.
Despite seeing plenty of warning signs, I luckily didn’t even come close to spotting any bears during my days in Yellowstone. This stands in marked difference from the experience of earlier visitors. During the park’s first century, travelers delighted in watching grizzlies and black bears; people fed the animals from their cars, and hotels discarded their food scraps in open sites that facilitated “bear shows” for the entertainment of viewers. By the 1950s, Yellowstone’s bears had been conditioned to rely on these food sources.
As Smith explains, Park Service officials and bear scientists were not unaware of the dangers that such dependence carried, and throughout the 1950s and ’60s they made attempts to break the bonds between Yellowstone’s bears and human-provided food. But mismanagement, egos, professional disputes, and tourism dollars all got in the way of a concerted effort to tackle the bear problem. Park visitors ignored warnings to keep their distance and secure their food, and the numbers of injuries inflicted by hungry bears ticked upward. On the night of June 24, 1972, a grizzly bear attacked and killed Harry Walker, who had come to Yellowstone for a break from the daily grind of working on his family’s Alabama dairy farm.
Walker’s family—guided by an environmental activist who took an interest in the case—sued the Department of the Interior, alleging that the Park Service was culpable for Harry’s death due to its mismanagement of the bear population. Smith winds the story of the 1975 civil trial throughout Engineering Eden, explaining how each witness played a role in the debate over management of bears and other animals in Yellowstone.
The trial brought to the fore a basic question: to what extent should the Park Service intervene in nature? Park officials wanted to provide visitors with the experience of encountering an untouched preserve of timeless wilderness, but that experience never existed: Yellowstone had been shaped and curated for the safety of both travelers and the landscape. Shouldn’t the same have been done with respect to the park’s wildlife?
Walker’s family prevailed at trial, though the verdict was later overturned, and Yellowstone today features warnings aplenty about how to avoid a dangerous animal encounter. (Bison now pose the greatest threat to people; “Don’t pet the fluffy cows” is a frequent reminder on t-shirts and social media.) As Smith’s compelling narrative makes clear, national parks cannot be regarded as static enclosures where nature is preserved and observed. Rather, they are dynamic environments in which vegetation, wildlife, and visitors must all be managed to ensure that the best, and safest, balance can be achieved.
The most surprising fact I learned while reading The Last Ride of the Pony Express: My 2,000-Mile Horseback Journey Into the Old West is that the famed Pony Express mail route only lasted 18 months. Begun in the spring of 1860, the route employed between 150 and 200 relay stations of horses and riders to cover the 1,900 miles between St. Joseph, Missouri and Sacramento, California in only 10 days. Such a feat was impressive, but expensive—and soon rendered less necessary by the transcontinental telegraph. By October 1861 the Pony Express had gone bankrupt, leaving behind a legendary brand that has far outlived its origin.
Author Will Grant blends work in journalism and work with horses, so the prospect of re-tracing the Pony Express route didn’t intimidate him. Rather than cover the distance in 10 days, however, he decided to take his time. Grant and his horses, Chicken Fry and Badger, spent 142 days ambling across the western two-thirds of the United States. The Last Ride of the Pony Express is his account of their journey.
What was his objective in undertaking this trip? One aspect was simply the personal challenge of tackling the Pony Express route itself; Grant describes it as “a pinnacle of horsemanship that was high and dangerous.” Learning firsthand what remains of Pony Express history was another element. The third, and the one that The Last Ride of the Pony Express satisfies most fully, is Grant’s realization that “the Pony Express trail was my avenue to understanding the American West”:
I wanted to know who lived in southern Nebraska and western Nevada and all the places between that I’d never been to. I wanted to see the old Pony Express stations and camp along the trail and judge for myself the desolation of the deserts, but I also wanted to fill in my own demographic map of the West. I wanted to meet the farmers and ranchers and whoever else lived out there. I believe that the best way to interpret a landscape is through the lives of the people subject to that landscape, and so I wanted to be a traveler in my own country.
Step by step, day by day, Grant meets the people along the way. Countless strangers permit Grant, Chicken Fry, and Badger to spend a night or more camping on their property, often offering him a shower or a meal as well. Grant spends time with small farm owners and employees of ranches owned by investment groups; he speaks with amateur historians of the Pony Express and reenactors staging a Living History weekend at a stop along the Oregon Trail. Ever solicitous of his interlocutors and hosts, Grant steers clear of talk about politics or religion—The Last Ride of the Pony Express takes place during the Trump Administration, but you’d never know it. Grant is interested in deeper time currents, not the surface ripples of present-day events.
I added The Last Ride of the Pony Express to my trip reading because it seemed like a good entry point for understanding the West today (even though Grant doesn’t venture up to Montana, where I spent much of my time). The book prompted me to think about not just the places I went, but the land I traveled through while moving between them.
Featured photo: Castle Geyser erupting at Yellowstone National Park, September 4, 2024.
Maura Elizabeth Cunningham 
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