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Chronicling America is a searchable digital collection of historic newspaper pages through 1963 sponsored jointly by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress.
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Also, see the Directory of U.S. Newspapers in American Libraries, a searchable index to newspapers published in the United States since 1690, which helps researchers identify what titles exist for a specific place and time, and how to access them.
The legends coming out of America’s west can’t be true: mud volcanoes, boiling water shooting like a fountain from the earth, acidic baths and steamy steppes. Surely anyone reporting of such activity must be a liar. And yet, stories from a strange land called Yellowstone, this terra incognita, in the northwest corner of Wyoming, are gaining more and more traction, and it just so happens that these supernatural phenomena really do exist! This lauded landscape becomes the world’s first national park. Read more about it!
The information in this guide focuses on primary source materials found in the digitized historic newspapers from the digital collection Chronicling America.
The timeline below highlights important dates related to this topic and a section of this guide provides some suggested search strategies for further research in the collection.
| 1807 - 1810 | John Colter, a private soldier who joined the Lewis & Clark Expedition, was discharged from service and explored lands between St. Louis and Montana. He is the first white man to see what would become Yellowstone National Park. |
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| 1827 | Mountaineer, map maker and trail guide Jim Bridger visits Yellowstone, exclaiming the wonders of the region, to others’ disbelief. |
| September 18, 1870 | Cornelius Hedges, a member of the Folsom Cook Expedition, proposes that Yellowstone should become a public park. |
| March 1, 1872 | Yellowstone National Park Act sets aside land in Wyoming and Montana to be protected from development and to be used as a public park. |
| August 25, 1916 | Congress passes the National Park Service Act, establishing an agency to oversee and administer the nation’s parks. |
