Yellowstone and the Smithsonian: Centers of Wildlife Conservation by Diane Smith (review)

This compact history focuses on the synergistic relationship between the National Museum of Natural History (of the Smithsonian Institution) and the Yellowstone National Park in their shared attention to vanishing wildlife in the American West at the end of the nineteenth century. Environmental historians have noted the role of both institutions, particularly the efforts of taxidermist William Hornaday, who created a small zoo at the Smithsonian, and the founders of Yellowstone, but without pursuing in detail how their dynamic relationship led to a greater awareness of issues pertaining to extinction and conservation.

Smith traces the early collaboration of Spencer F. Baird, the museum’s first director, with western explorers, both civilian and military, from the 1850s into the 1870s. With their materials and those of state and other exhibitors at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in 1876, Baird helped to persuade Congress to support a new National Museum on the mall in Washington, D.C. Seeking to build attractive public exhibits, he hired Hornaday, who proved to be both a capable collector in the field and an imaginative taxidermist. Sent to Yellowstone to acquire specimens, Hornaday brought bison skins back to Washington, but shortly thereafter, he became interested in creating a facility where bison and other increasingly rare specimens, like pronghorns and bighorn sheep, might be bred and thus saved from extinction.

The concern for Yellowstone’s wildlife meant that the park’s military and appointed directors needed to keep hunters and trappers in check, even as they met requests from the Smithsonian and a growing number of other natural history museums for both skins and living animals. Before long, Yellowstone had an on-site “zoo” of pens, cages, and corrals to protect the species that these institutions wanted. Smith’s most significant contribution is her discussion of how this activity functioned from the 1880s into the 1910s. Based on her research in the park’s archives and the records of the Smithsonian, she persuasively argues that Yellowstone became a “game preserve” with significant holdings of pronghorns, bighorn sheep, bears, and, bison. In fact, these species became a commodity that served the park and the Smithsonian in exchanges with—and, in some cases, sales to—zoos and other game preserves.

Smith makes it clear that conservation practices were the result of experience rather than pre-planning, as the various park administrators worked to find an appropriate balance among competing parties—including Native Americans, local land owners, Congressional overseers, the military assigned to maintain the site, and the National Museum staff. Hunters, trappers, and even homesteaders posed different threats; some of them were interested only in particular body parts, such as trophy heads of bison, whereas others resented the protection of animals that competed with livestock outside the boundaries of the park.

Experience led to the National Park Protective Act in 1894, which served in a minimal way to limit human predation. Smith also comments on the commercial dynamics around the animals and the landscape as public and private interests collided, complicating the abstract notion of Yellowstone as a genuine wilderness and making the representation of dead and living specimens in Washington a sometimes-ironic commentary on humans’ preservation intentions.