History | Yellowstone Treasures

Jul

Trip report: Heart Mountain

Categories: History, News, Park environs, Trip Reports

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I’ve had good excuses to go to Yellowstone Park and environs at least once every year since 1995. That was the year I began researching and writing Yellowstone Treasures. I often try to do something new to me as well as catching my favorite geysers, hot springs, terraces and scenes (like Lower Falls and the Canyon of the Yellowstone River from Artist Point) that never fail to give me goose bumps.

People have recommended the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center to me since it opened in 2011, but this was the first time I got to visit [June 2013]. I made it this summer’s new attraction.

The exterior of the center itself is built to echo the construction of the barracks that housed 14,000 people between winter 1942, when a government order displaced all West Coast Japanese from their homes, and the end of that relocation in November 1945.

A movie about the camp explains to visitors why the camp was built and how the internees made the best of their confinement there. You can see mementos and sample family quarters. A knowledgeable docent is available to answer questions as you wander about the center’s displays.

Most impressive to me, in addition to how well these unfortunate people coped with their unreasonable confinement, were two facts. First, about 600 men from Heart Mountain enlisted or were drafted into the armed forces during the war, including the highly decorated 442nd Combat Team. Then, among the interned Japanese were people who understood how to use the barren land around them. They repaired and lined the irrigation ditch from the nearby Buffalo Bill Reservoir, turned it onto fertile fields, and eventually grew 45 different crops—enough to feed the camp, preserve some for winter use, and even send food to other internment camps.

Updated January 26, 2021. See the second part of this trip report with photos: https://www.yellowstonetreasures.com/2013/07/15/trip-report-back-to-the-park-from-heart-mountain/.

May

Join us at Mammoth or Old Faithful for Yellowstone, Land of Wonders

Categories: History, Janet Chapple's Other Writing, Thermal features, Yellowstone, Land of Wonders

Tags: events, Jules Leclercq, Suzanne Cane

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Coming up next month are two events centered around the newly published translation of a really old and fascinating travelog about Yellowstone Park.

Belgian travel writer and judge Jules Leclercq visited the park when it was only eleven years old, arriving by train and horse-drawn carriage, and riding horseback in a loop around the park for ten days with a guide. In those early days, that was the only way to see these wonders that had just been set aside by an 1872 act of Congress, establishing Yellowstone as the first national park in the world.

Leclercq’s book, La Terre des Merveilles, although published in French in 1886, has never before been fully translated and published in English. He was already an accomplished travel writer at age 35. As one reviewer wrote, he was “enthusiastic, energetic, observant, curious, and companionable.” In addition, he studied the existing literature about Yellowstone and included a great deal of the knowledge he gained in his book.

Leclercq describes camping near geysers, washing clothes in a bubbling hot spring, and meeting such diverse characters as local guides and tourists from the United States and Europe. He is aghast at the vandalism he sees around him and advocates for military protection of the incomparable features he describes so aptly.

With Suzanne Cane from Rhode Island, I spent about five years translating and annotating the book, which we call Yellowstone, Land of Wonders in English. Now it is available from the University of Nebraska Press and all online and brick-and-mortar bookstores.

Suzanne and I will be giving presentations, including showing some of the book’s engravings and related contemporary photos of Yellowstone. We’ll also read a number of our favorite excerpts from the book. Join us at Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel Map Room on Thursday, June 27, 8:30 pm or at the Old Faithful Inn third floor mezzanine on Saturday, June 29, at 8:00 pm. We’ll also be signing books in the Old Faithful Inn lobby on June 29 and 30 from 11:00 am to 6:00 pm. See you there!

2013

Sep

Jules Leclercq’s Land of Wonders

Categories: History, Yellowstone, Land of Wonders

Tags: horses, Jules Leclercq

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Have you ever wondered what it was like to travel through the U.S. when railroad trains had newly opened up the whole country? Do you enjoy travelogues by fluent observers in the graceful cadences of the nineteenth century? Would you be curious as to what you could see and do when you rode horseback along crude trails before smooth asphalt roads opened the park to automobiles?

The intrepid Belgian travel writer Jules Leclercq wrote a book about his 1883 trip that answered those questions and many more: La Terre des Merveilles: Promenade au parc national de l’Amérique du Nord. Unfortunately, this delightful travel account was never published in English until now. The University of Nebraska Press is bringing out the annotated translation that my colleague Suzanne Cane and I have made of Leclercq’s book, calling it Yellowstone, Land of Wonders. We have just learned that the publication date will be May 1, 2013, and, of course, we’re excited to be able to see our work of six or seven years come to fruition.

Here’s a passage that’s a favorite of mine, about the first camping spot Leclercq’s party made after glimpsing Norris Geyser Basin:

Upon our return to the camp, night was falling. As we had eaten nothing since eight o’clock in the morning, I will let you wonder whether we did justice to the elk roast we were served in the tent, by the light of a candle stuck in the neck of a bottle. If, in Clarke’s opinion, the coffee was not as good as that which we had so often happily savored in Iceland, to compensate, the icy water drawn from the nearby river was excellent.
After this copious repast we fraternized with a caravan of American travelers who had just arrived from the south; among them was an intrepid horsewoman. We made a circle in the open air around a large campfire fed by whole pine trees.
While we were conversing around the merry flames, our friend Alexander sent us distant echoes of Mendelssohn’s Wedding March from deep in the woods, played on a perfectly portable little concertina that is the companion of all his travels. It was doubtless the first time that these lonely wilds had resounded with such harmonious chords.
This music in the bosom of the wilderness plunged me into a delicious reverie. No other evening has engraved itself more profoundly on my memory. Never had stars seemed to me to shine with such vivid brilliance: one might have said countless golden lamps dispersed in infinity.
I have always been vividly impressed by the beauty of the nights in these high northern regions of the Rocky Mountains. The brilliance of the stars is due to the great clarity of the air at these elevations; the atmosphere is so dry that all you need do is pass your hand rapidly over a bison pelt to make electric sparks fly. Nights are cold, and in the month of August, frosty nights regularly follow blazingly hot days. . .
2012

Dec

Working on Yellowstone, Land of Wonders

Categories: History, Janet Chapple's Other Writing, Thermal features, Yellowstone, Land of Wonders

Tags: Jules Leclercq

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My best excuse for neglecting my blog this late fall [2011] is that I’ve been working non-stop with my colleague Suzanne Cane to send off our new Yellowstone manuscript to a publisher. We’ve translated into English a French book called La Terre des Merveilles. We’ve made the title into Yellowstone, Land of Wonders and brought it up to date with lots of explanatory notes.

Our author, Jules Leclercq, was a Belgian attorney and judge, who spent his time away from the bench in traveling and writing excellent books about far-flung places. He went all over the world between the 1870s and the early 1900s: China, South Africa, Mexico, Iceland, remote islands, etc. Of course, his twenty-four travel books were all in French, although he clearly knew a lot of English. As far as we can determine, none of his travel books has ever before been fully translated in English.

Suzanne and I loved his style: well-informed but often humorous, observant of details but never bogged down in them, respectful of his surroundings and his companions if sometimes gently mocking of himself or his situation. His Yellowstone visit was in 1883, but he showed great sensitivity to his environment and was appalled at the vandalism to park features he sometimes observed. We’ve tried to make the English version reflect Leclercq’s typical late-19th-century way of writing: using lots of similes and adjectives, flowery but always sticking to the subject.

I found the book while researching for my Yellowstone anthology of early writings, working title “Magnificent Playground,” which as of now remains unpublished—but that’s another subject. Yellowstone, Land of Wonders will be published by the University of Nebraska Press. Although our work on it is done except for the proofing, it is scheduled for publication in spring of 2013. We’ll just have to wait, but I think everyone with an interest in Yellowstone and western U.S. history will want to read it.

Here’s a sample of Leclercq’s genius for description that will make anyone who has ever seen this spring sigh with longing to go back:

Mute with amazement and astonishment, we gazed upon Grand Prismatic Spring, nature’s most gigantic hot spring. This expanse of steaming, sapphire-colored water is so surpassingly transparent that the thousand fantastical forms on the festooned walls could be distinguished under the crystal liquid. The aqueous layers take on a more and more intense blue color as the eye penetrates deeper into the abyss. Several meters from the edge one loses sight of the bottom of the basin, and the dark color of the water indicates unfathomable depths that are concealed from view. Toward the center of the basin, the water rises several inches high as it boils; agitated by an undulating motion, it regularly spills over from all sides above the reddish and curiously festooned siliceous ring that slightly protrudes around the basin.
An extensive mist of hot vapors rises continually from the bosom of this marvelous expanse of water. Nary a bird glides above it; no tree grows on its banks. Words fail to describe the country surrounding it, sublime in its desolation and nakedness. And yet I need only close my eyes to see it again, for it is unforgettable.

Sep

In Yellowstone Park 94 years ago

Categories: History, On the Web

Tags: horses, Lee Whittlesey, ranches, trails

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I’ve been neglecting my blog lately, writing about once a month instead of meeting the once a week goal I had set for myself. It’s not as if I weren’t thinking about Yellowstone most of every day. But most of that thinking, reading, and writing are related to my book projects rather than to my online presence.

I just came across an interesting article by Brett French, the outdoor editor at the Billings Gazette, whose writings I’ve admired for several years. It’s about the Howard Eaton Trail in Yellowstone. Brett interviewed two of the best current authorities on old trails and roads, Leslie Quinn of the Xanterra concessionaire, and M.A. Bellingham, who volunteers at least one day a week, working for Park Historian Lee Whittlesey.
Howard Eaton was a rancher from near Sheridan, Wyoming, who led horseback parties though Yellowstone from the mid 1880s for something like forty years. 1883 was when one could first send horses to the park’s northern edge by railroad.

Brett’s article did not mention that this trail was laid out by a New York horsewoman named Mrs. Robert C. Morris (in the days when married women did not use their given names in public media). In June of 1917—the year after the park was opened to automobiles—Mrs. Morris, who had a ranch near Yellowstone, began to “map out an elaborate system of trails through the park, which will make it possible for visitors to ride through the most beautiful and picturesque portions of the great ‘reservation,’ journeying in an unhurried and enjoyable fashion, seeing much that cannot be seen from the motor roads alone, and never once traveling on the motor highways.” This quote comes from the New York Times Magazine for February 10, 1918.

Mrs. Morris used existing trails, but most of the work of her pack train, which covered 1,500 miles in the park, was in finding connections and marking the suggested new trail routes. She made general recommendations to the National Park Service for constructing the trails. But most of all she emphasized the enjoyment both of blazing the trails and in the use of them by others.

The work of this dedicated woman resulted in the opening in 1923 of the Howard Eaton Trail, used for decades by horseback parties. Parts of the trail are still in use, both by riders and pedestrians. In Yellowstone Treasures I recommend the part of this trail that goes from Swan Lake Flat toward Mammoth Hot Springs, and I mention several other segments of the trail.

Brett’s article can be accessed at:
http://trib.com/news/state-and-regional/article_f1892b48-71d9-5409-bb82-34156ecf05f7.html#ixzz1YQ9z3GHA.

2011

Aug

Visitor Center at Old Faithful Village

Categories: Bio, History

Tags: education, Old Faithful, visitor centers

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When I first heard they were putting up a new visitor center and planning to call it a Visitor Education Center, I confess to wondering if that name would put people off. Do people really want to come to Yellowstone to be educated? Don’t the kids who have escaped school for their all-too-short summer vacations want to just enjoy the park and all it has to offer?

Well, they didn’t listen to my (unvoiced) objections, and the new center will be officially opened on August 25th [2010]. I admit I can hardly wait to see it and have planned my own time in the park this year around that date. I would love to tell the NPS officials in charge of the ceremony how I fondly remember the combination ranger station, museum, and amphitheater where I got to spend happy times two visitor centers ago, when my family lived at Old Faithful for four great summers.

I particularly remember the model geyser in the little museum and the samples of the rocks to be found—which, I later learned, are actually created in Yellowstone. The museum also had some labeled plant samples, so I began to learn the differences between lodgepole pines and the other evergreen trees in the park. I believe there were also some sample mounted animals, but I was never a big animal person (live or stuffed), unlike most of the children who come to the park.

The amphitheater was where my family spent many pleasant evenings listening to ranger talks and singing western songs that many people knew in those days. I’ve wondered since that time why they did not have an amphitheater when the visitor center was replaced about forty years ago, but there will be a state-of-the-art indoor theater in the new building.

All posts in History

Trip report: Heart Mountain

Join us at Mammoth or Old Faithful for Yellowstone, Land of Wonders

Jules Leclercq’s Land of Wonders

Working on Yellowstone, Land of Wonders

In Yellowstone Park 94 years ago

Visitor Center at Old Faithful Village