Yellowstone celebrates its 150th anniversary as a national park this year. That is big news indeed, and worthy of big celebration. It is, after all, the country’s first national park and one of the crown jewels of the entire system.
But the human history of this geologically stunning and beautiful landscape in the heart of North America’s West is but a blip in a story that reaches back millennia. Yellowstone has seen human habitation for more than 11,000 years — not that human habitation defines the place. The very geology of the place seems to point a primordial finger into deep prehistory.
It is a region of remarkable geothermic activity, replete with hot springs, geysers, bubbling mud pots, and fumaroles. Penetrated by four mountain ranges—Gallatin, Washburn, Red, and Absaroka—it has an abundance of deep glacier-carved valleys, tumbling rivers, deep lakes, eroded basaltic lava flows, fossilized forests, and black obsidian. It is a cornucopia of strange and beautiful features of Mother Nature.
Nearby one will find the headwaters of the Yellowstone River. Called (Yellow Rock River) by the Hidatsa, it was likely this river that brought the first humans here. In addition to the Hidatsa, this otherworldly place has played host to the Crow, Shoshone, Kiowa, Blackfeet, Bannock, Nez Perce, and nearly two dozen other tribes. All were drawn to the area by its natural abundance: bison, grizzly bears, elk, bighorn sheep, deer, rabbits, and edible vegetation all set in a location of splendor with cascades of fresh, flowing water and cliffs of obsidian that could be knapped into spearpoints and arrowheads. Some
