Park backers . . . persisted in describing the Yellowstone region as existing in "primeval solitude," filled with countless locations that "have never been trodden by human footsteps." The native peoples of the area, supporters maintained, seldom visited the lands bounded by the newly created park, for they were afraid of its spouting geysers and boiling hot springs. "The larger [Indian] tribes never enter the basin, restrained by superstitious ideas in connection with the thermal springs," proclaimed Gustavus Doane, an army officer who accompanied an 1870 expedition to the region. "The unscientific savage finds little to interest him in such places," agreed Doane's fellow "explorer," Walter Trumbull. "I should rather suppose he would give them a wide berth, believing them sacred to Satan." Ironically, such pronouncements had persuaded Carpenter and his companions that they had nothing to fear from the Nez Perce during their tour of Yellowstone. Army officers, recalled one of Carpenter's sisters, "assured us we would be perfectly safe if we would remain in the [Geyser] Basin, as the Indians would never come into the park." [1]

As the Carpenter party soon discovered, however, the Nez Perce exhibited little superstitious awe of Yellowstone's geothermal formations. Shortly after his capture, Carpenter ended up chatting with one curious Nez Perce about the source of the geysers' energy ("Heap fire down under the ground," explained Carpenter in what he considered to be the appropriate Indian terminology.) Carpenter's companions noted that female members of the tribe used the region's hot springs to cook and clean their meager supplies of food. Other Indian peoples seem to have a similarly nonchalant response to Yellowstone's geysers. In fact, Yellowstone's volcanism may actually have drawn Native Americans into the region: the warmth given off by its ten-thousand-odd hot springs and other geothermal oddities ancouraged snowfree winter grazing zones and extensive meadows, both of which made the area unusually rich in elk, deer, bison, and other game animals. [2]

Ultimately, the effort by park backers to disavow any Indian connection to Yellowstone National Park reveals far more about Euro-American conceptions of Indian land tenure than it does about the realities of Indian life. Drawing upon a familiar vocabulary of discovery and exploration, the authors of the early accounts of the Yellowstone region literally wrote Indians out of the landscape, erasing Indian claims by reclassifying inhabited territory as empty wilderness. Those "explorers" who, during the course of their travels, encountered Indian peoples within the confines of the park simply dismissed these natives as transitory nomads. Neither the Bannock, the Shoshone, the Crow, nor the Blackfeet practiced agriculture, and seeing no landscapes in the Yellowstone region that had been "improved" through farming, many Euro-Americans conveniently concluded that the area's Indians were rootless beings, with no ties to the lands they roamed across. [3]

What this ideology of dispossession overlooked was that Indian migratory patterns were not a series of random wanderings but rather a complex set of annual cycles, closely tied to seasonal variations in game and other wild foodstuffs. Moreover, while they were not farmers, local Indian peoples nonetheless "improved" the landscape around them through the setting of fires. Native Americans used fire for multiple purposes: to keep down underbrush, facilitating travel; to rid camping areas of insect pests; and to aid in hunting. Among many Indian peoples, including the Bannock, Shoshone, and Crow, it was customary for experienced tribe members to kindle fires in order to drive game animals toward locations where they might be killed by waiting hunters. By burning underbrush and dead wood, low-level fires of this sort also helped to recycle nutrients into the soil and create a mosaic of plant communities at varying levels of succession, raising the level of vegetational diversity and opening up a variety of ecological niches for wildlife. The benefits of fire were therefore not only short-term (facilitating travel and the taking of game) but long-term as well (maintaining a higher population of wildlife than would have occurred otherwise). [4]

Following their adoption of the horse in the early 1700s, the region's Native Americans expanded their use of fire, setting periodic blazes to improve the grazing lands available for their growing herds of ponies. This heightened proscriptive burning may explain the large blazes that, according to the archaeological record, swept through Yellowstone's upland forests in the 1700s as well as the repeated fires that took place in the lower lying grasslands during this same period. Eyewitness accounts suggest a link between Indian peoples and several fires that took place within the park during the 1870s and 1880s. During his 1870 survey of the park, for example, Doane observed that "the great plateau had been recently burned off to drive away the game, and the woods were still on fire in every direction." In 1881, another army officer, the Civil War hero Philip Sheridan, similarly discovered "the forests on fire for miles, at five or six different places." [5]

Not understanding the role that it played in an increasing plant diversity or forest reproduction, nineteenth-century conservationists considered fire a uniquely dangerous and unpredictable force. Sheridan, for instance, considered the fires he witnessed in Yellowstone evidence of the "indifference shown by the government" toward the park, while John Wesley Powell, in his famous Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States, released in 1878, asserted that Indian burning represented the largest single threat to forests throughout the American West. "The protection of the forests of the entire Arid Region of the United States," wrote Powell, "is reduced to a single problem. Can these forests be saved from fire?" For Powell, the answer was clear: since "in the main these fires are set by the Indians[,] . . . the fires can, then, be very greatly curtailed by the removal of the Indians." [6]