Watching over Yellowstone: The US Army’s Experience in America’s First National Park, 1886–1918

Abstract

Watching over Yellowstone is a social history of the U.S. Army’s occupation of the national park during its formative years, beginning in 1886 and ending in 1918 with the establishment of the National Park Service (1916) and the development of the National Park Service ranger program. Prior accounts of the U.S. Army’s stay in Yellowstone National Park have used a top-down approach, focusing on its administrative success. Rust enriches this body of literature by specifically addressing the experiences of the soldiers on the ground in Yellowstone. To provide this side of the story, he poured through inspection reports, court-martial cases, the written accounts of civilians and tourists within and around the park, and other overlooked sources. Thus, he effectively adds to a body of scholarship that reveals national parks as highly regulated and policed zones, in which only specific behaviors are acceptable. The military, like the Park Rangers who succeeded them, were there to ensure that the park’s visitors, peripheral communities, and the very environment itself behaved in an orderly way.Watching Over Yellowstone’s labor theme helps it to stand out against a large body of literature about Yellowstone that primarily describes how people tend to experience or imagine the space. Watching over Yellowstone is also a book about place. When the two elements of labor and place collide, Rust’s narrative truly shines. Rust’s analysis of Yellowstone as a place of work elicits powerful examples of class tension between working-class soldiers and upper-class tourists within and along the park boundary. The soldiers, Rust writes, “encountered strains of a social class system that marginalized them while they were legally put into the contradictory position of enforcing…regulations upon their perceived social superiors” (132). Rust shows how class was at the core of many of the soldiers’ experiences at the park. He employs Karl Jacoby’s concept of “moral ecology” to show why soldiers felt justified in poaching animals within the park boundaries despite defying the very laws that they were employed to enforce.1Another valuable contribution to the social history of national parks is Rust’s careful consideration and acknowledgment of soldiers’ mental and emotional health. Rust emphasizes that many of the soldiers struggled with being assigned a role that they did not join the army to do. Many resented that they were not on the frontlines somewhere. Rust also describes the strain that isolation and the extremes of winter had on soldiers’ mental health, in addition to their persistent need to negotiate complicated class dynamics. Yet Rust’s analysis of the soldiers’ predicament would have benefited from a more direct consideration of gender, specifically masculinity. Many of the mental health and social challenges faced by these soldiers were colored by perceived expectations surrounding masculinity. Furthermore, Rust does not adequately grapple with how the soldiers’ role supported settler colonialism. The U.S. Army was responsible for policing not only wealthy visitors but also displaced Indigenous peoples living on the margins of the park. Rust’s account, however, provides a good base on which future scholars can build upon these topics.The ultimate strength of Watching over Yellowstone is its grittiness. It does not present the Yellowstone of idyllic, pristine wilderness and American exceptionalism. Rust’s Yellowstone is a playground for the elite that encourages class division. It is a place of work and struggle and a place of mental anguish and violence. By adopting a “bottom-down” approach, Rust unveils some of the seedy underbelly of Yellowstone’s history. Park historiography needs more social history of this sort. Rust’s book has answered the call.