Yellowstone Treasures Blog

As a guidebook author inclined to nit-pick, I watched the Ken Burns/Dayton Duncan twelve-hour series last week with all my antennas working, in case they should be transmitting any of the falsehoods about Yellowstone that I’ve found so often in popular media.

I certainly thought the first four hours of their documentary were riveting, both visually and text-wise, and I liked their emphasis throughout the series on the Americans who have been so important to the parks—perhaps a little too much fawning over John Muir, but that was a matter of personal taste.

So, did I find them giving us anything about Yellowstone that wasn’t factual? Well, only in one instance, when they were lumping together all the names that incorporate “Devil” or “Hell” as having been given to park features by the 1870 exploring party of Washburn and Langford. Into their list they threw the name Hellroaring Creek. Well no, that one was named already in 1867 by A. H. Hubble, when he returned to camp from hunting and proclaimed to his buddies, “It’s a hell roarer.” This bit of historic trivia comes from Park Historian Lee Whittlesey’s Yellowstone Place Names. The panorama you can see, including where Hellroaring Creek enters the Yellowstone River, is one of my favorites, by the way (see pages 295-297 in Yellowstone Treasures).