Yellowstone National Park

I'd like to tell you a Western story that began in 1806 as a tale so tall that nobody in the east believed it and that came not – we must hope – to an end in 1988, but to a climax almost equally unbelievable.

Without going back to the Creation, I ought to sketch in the background of the hero or villain of this story by reminding you that the third President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, had among many grand ideas the heroic one of an expedition of young men, the first overland trek across this country to the Pacific Ocean and back. Now in 1801 when Jefferson had the idea, the village of St Louis, Missouri, only 800 miles inland from Washington DC was just about the farthest reach of the settled, very primitively settled, west.

The following 2,000 miles on to the Pacific were, to all but a handful of trappers, hunters, unknown land. There was this yawning, blank prairie, many rivers running north and south, then the uncharted barrier of the Rocky Mountains, an expanse of high plains, then, they said, the Sierra, then a long, flat valley and, eventually, the Coast Range of mountains and the Spanish settlements.

More than three-quarters of what came to be called the Far West was Mexican, including – it's always a shock to recall – a part of the country as far north as the present state of Utah. Jefferson, being an eighteenth-century man with an inquisitive embrace of all sorts of knowledge – six languages, botany, architecture, anthropology, mathematics, natural sciences, fossils, scientific gadgets from balloons to phosphorus matches, an exciting discovery of his time – Jefferson was not the sort of man who was going to choose a team of merely brawny hikers and campers. He chose two soldiers, Captain Lewis and Lieutenant Clark, one was his secretary, to spend two years preparing for the trip. He instructed them to study and report along the way on the geology, the soils, the birds, the plants, the course of the rivers, the climates, the habits and languages of the Indians they would encounter.

The two leaders, Lewis and Clark, then recruited their team of men whose first qualification was that they should be healthy, unmarried young men, accustomed to the woods. After that, they had to have some expertise in carpentry, gun repair, boat handling and to bone up on zoology, botany and celestial navigation. So you can imagine that by the time the small band of 40 men had spent a winter training in military discipline and gathering their supplies, they were an expeditionary force about as unlike as possible the bearded young hearties you'd expect – and got – from a Hollywood version of the Lewis and Clark expedition.

Well, to move at a bound into our story, let me say that they did it. Leaving St Louis in three boats, two pirogues and 55-foot keel boat on a May day in 1804, they proceeded under a gentle breeze up the Missouri River. They followed the Missouri the whole wriggling 1800 miles of it to its source in what is now the truly Far Western state of Montana. They then picked up horses and guides from the Shoshone Indians – another fiction that dogs much Western history is that Indian tribes were always hostile – they climbed over the continental divide of the Bitterroot Mountains, stopped to make canoes, slipped them into another river, the Snake, and paddled their way down into the wide Columbia River and so floated into the Pacific.

The whole outward journey had taken them 17 months. After they rested and wrote up their reports for five months, they split into two camps and started the homeward journey. I ought to have said that they split up into two teams and one loner. Enter our man. One John Colter, totally unknown to fame at that time, or in our time. He wanted to go off on his own into the mountain wilderness of the Rockies to the south and east of their route, in what is now the north-west corner of Wyoming. He wanted to trap and explore among the hundred peaks higher than ten thousand feet and, at one place, he was agog at what he saw.

Of course, by that time, he was quite used to the roaming legions of bison and the leaping moose and deer and antelopes, and pelicans on the lakes and eagles and hawks swooping between the crags, but what he'd never seen before was what has since been called a huge museum of volcanic phenomena.

Here, he noted, more than 300 hot springs and geysers steam and spout. Pots of mud bubble and boil. Caverns growl and snort and hiss. A whole mountainside murmurs with steam vents. A waterfall nearly twice as high as Niagara, deep, rocky canyons, hillsides tinted through the hues of the rainbow.

This was pretty colourful writing and when John Colter's account of it was published in the east, it merely confirmed the growing prejudice of easterners that the west was a wasteland where travellers went slowly mad, concocting wild fantasies. In fact, Colter's account of The Yellowstone, as it became known, was called Colter's Hell. Nobody we've heard of visited this volcanic hell for another 20 years. By then, the Yankees, the Canadians and the British were in full pursuit of the Rocky Mountain fur trade and a Philadelphian, a fur trader, wrote up his account in the town newspaper. It was a good deal cooler, less delirious with purple prose and so almost believable.

The whole region, 3,400 square miles, which had come to be called The Yellowstone was described as having a large, freshwater lake about 100 by 40 miles, as clear as crystal. On the south border are boiling springs. There are places where pure sulphur gushes forth in abundance. At one instant, the earth began a tremendous trembling and an explosion of water took place, resembling that of thunder. Interesting, but this man evidently couldn't explain precisely what the fountain and the thunder signified. The Yellowstone was still left to roving fur trappers and traders.

About three years later – we are now in 1830 – a famous scout and guide, one Jim Bridger, went in there. At least, he said he did, and he came back with stories gaudier than anything Colter had to tell. A typical experience he recalled was that of stealthily approaching an elk within easy rifle range. He aimed, he fired. The elk paid absolutely no attention. He was a famous shot and he fired again three times. The elk didn't even hear him. Could it be that the elk, like Rasputin, 90 years later, was bulletproof? Bridger moved closer still and came bang up against a huge, endless wall of glass which he cleverly figured had served as a magnifying lens. The elk, he calculated, was 25 miles away. So, Bridger, too, did nothing to help along the popular acceptance of Colter's Hell.

On the contrary, what Bridger's stories did was to convince the public that Yellowstone country was a large region of the Rockies and the gateway to what the Victorian humorists called 'the infernal regions'. So another 30 years go by until the leader of a military force, building wagon roads through stretches of the west, mentioned in his report to the federal government the new, the curious word, the geysers. A word signifying, in cold print, an intermittent hot spring spouting its contents of water and steam into the air from inches to hundreds of feet.

I don't know how much the general public knew in those days about geysers as a natural phenomenon. I assume geologists knew then that they exist, always had existed, in regions of fairly recent volcanic activity and sooner or later every schoolboy, as Groucho said, if nobody else, came to know that they flourish, spout, most actively in New Zealand, Iceland and also in Tibet, Japan, Alaska, Malaya and so on. But we now know that whereas in Iceland, where the word came from, there are 30 active geysers – by the way 'gee-zers' are what used to heat your bathwater in English boarding houses – the Yellowstone has over 200, the most spectacular of which is known as Old Faithful. It lets off a 150-foot jet or plume of hot air every hour for about five minutes at a time. That is what the military road builder was talking about.

Well, the turning point in our story, when Colter's fantasies were proved as fact came in 1870 when two prospectors published in a Chicago monthly a careful, cool but equally astonishing account of the whole region. An official government expedition went out there and, within two years, in 1872, President Ulysses S. Grant dedicated the region as The Yellowstone National Park for the pleasuring and benefit of the people of the United States and, thus, he created the National Park system.

The word park is unfortunate in meaning many different things in different countries, from Hyde to Yellowstone, it can cover anything from a hundred acres to, in Alaska, eight million. Before Alaska joined the Union, Yellowstone was the largest – two and a half million acres – and once the railroad crossed the continent, tourists began to flock to Yellowstone and ever since to the more than 30 other American National Parks.

Well, of those two and a half million acres, today, over one million have gone up in smoke after a very long drought and the hottest summer on this continent in 56 years. Fire is always the threatening curse of the vast, dry forests of the western chain of mountains. By last Wednesday night, two towns in the park were doomed and the enormous flames were roaring down beyond the control of 10,000 fire-fighters towards the great Log Hotel and Old Faithful itself.

And then on Thursday, we heard that the enormous car park that surrounds the hotel and the plain from which Old Faithful spouts had not foiled the fires, but caused them to bypass the precious prime attraction. So now the hope is that however many more thousand acres are still to burn, that the centre will be saved.

And next year, once again, a couple of million tourists will go and goggle at what Jim Colter, speaking nothing but the truth, said he saw – 300 hot springs and geysers steam and spout, pots of mud bubble and boil, caverns growl and snort and hiss, a waterfall nearly twice as high as Niagara, deep, rocky canyons and hillsides tinted through the hues of the rainbow.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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