Yellowstone National Park is one of the earthas most famous places. Established in 1872 as the worldas first national park, it has preserved remarkable natural wonders like Old Faithful Geyser and cultural icons such as Old Faithful Inn. For centuries, it was home to the Shoshone, Crow, Bannock, Blackfeet, and other Indian tribes, but these groups were banished in the 1870s by park
promoters who feared that tourists would not visit if American Indians lived there. Almost immediately after its establishment, Yellowstone became the primary destination for tourist travel to the American West following the Civil War. By 1900, it was a vast tourist success, and today it is both a world biosphere preserve and a world heritage site.

Lee H. Whittlesey and Elizabeth A. Watry are longtime Yellowstone residents and trained historians. Whittlesey serves as park historian for the National Park Service at Yellowstone, and Watry is finishing her master's degree at Montana State University and writing another book on Yellowstone history. In this volume, they have gathered more than 200 photographs--most of which have never before been published--from a variety of repositories, including the Yellowstone National Park photograph archives, the Library of Congress, Yale University's Beinecke Library, the Utah Historical Society, and several private collections.