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Traffic in paradise. We were inching along at two miles an hour in a line of cars, vans, and campers that seemed endless. Ahead a park ranger was directing traffic in the midst of pandemonium. Cars were veering off to the side of the road, skidding to a stop, and people were jumping out and running across the street with kids and cameras trailing wildly behind. The experience was unsettling. This was a mob scene—something you might expect to see in Hollywood or New York City. I couldn’t help but wonder if I was really in the middle of Yellowstone National Park—one of America’s premier wilderness destinations—it felt more like a Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie sighting. But no, this was a“bear jam,”National Park Service slang for what happens when tourists spot a bear in Yellowstone. The spectacle of bears in Yellowstone is not a new one. As Alice Biel chronicles in her recent book Do (Not) Feed the Bears, the bear has long been a celebrity in Yellowstone National Park. And Biel is quick to point out the contradictions of idealizing a “human fed, garbage eating animal” as a wilderness icon.1 Staged bear feeding originated in the 1890s at the Fountain Hotel, a high-end hotel financed by the Northern Pacific Railway, located near the Old Faithful Geyser.Yellowstone administrators quickly institutionalized the idea by transforming garbage dumps into amphitheaters at other major hotels in the park. At the Old Faithful Inn, Park Service employees built an elevated feeding platform for the bears, known as the “Lunch Counter,” which was surrounded by log benches arranged in a semicircle. An even more elaborate feeding station was constructed at Otter Creek featuring seating for 250 people and a reinforced concrete feeding platform with running water for cleaning. By the 1920s when more and more tourists began to drive through the park, bears begging for food by the roadside became a common sight. Performing Bears and Packaged Wilderness Reframing the History of National Parks M a r G u e r i T e s . s h a f f e r [ 137 ] [ 138 ] c i T i e s a n d n aT u r e Park Service employees nicknamed one bear Jesse James for his routine of “holding up” automobiles near West Thumb. Horace M.Albright,Yellowstone’s first National Park Service superintendent, formally sanctioned these kinds of wildlife shows; he established a “buffalo show coral” and a menagerie for wildlife viewing during his tenure as park superintendent. He also frequently posed for publicity photos feeding the bears while escorting celebrities and high-ranking government officials through the park. Albright argued that the nps had a “duty to present wildlife as a spectacle” for the pleasure of park visitors.2 Environmental and administrative histories of Yellowstone National Park have tended to disregard the performing bears. Rather the national parks, Yellowstone first and foremost, have served as the premiere examples in the larger history of environmental preservation. Beginning with Roderick Nash’s Wilderness and the American Mind, the history of the national parks has been used to document the story of wilderness and wildlife protection. Tracing the value of wilderness as it evolved from a cultural affinity for scenic monumentalism to a more scientific understanding of ecological systems and natural habitat, the major milestones in this historical narrative include: the establishment of Yellowstone as the first national park set aside “for the benefit and enjoyment of the people;”3 the split between conservationists and preservationists in the unsuccessful battle to preserve the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite; the successful fight to prevent the damming of Echo Park in Dinosaur National Park; and the articulation of Aldo Leopold ’s land ethic, culminating in the passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964, which provided for“outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation.”4 And although historians have been quick to point out the flaws and limitations of these early preservation attempts, Yellowstone National Park and the other national parks that followed are still lionized as the harbingers of what would become the baseline of modern-day environmentalism.5 The result of this history is that the national parks, despite a complicated past, have emerged in the public imagination as icons of wilderness and the poster children of the environmental movement. The story of performing bears in Yellowstone, however, suggests a different history. Although bear feeding has long since fallen...

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