Adventures in Yellowstone: Early Travelers Tell Their Tales

After its establishment in 1872, Yellowstone National Park was sufficiently famous that numerous people risked bear maulings, Indian attacks, and geyser burns just to glimpse its wonders. A surprising number of those who survived wrote about their adventures. The best of these stories are collected in Adventures in Yellowstone. Presenting a dozen narratives--journal entries, letters, and diaries--with an introduction to each, and with historic photographs, postcards, and woodcuts, this book is the essential compilation of the most gripping first-person accounts of the early years of America’s most cherished national park.

M. Mark Miller is a fifth-generation Montanan who grew up on a ranch in southwest Montana 90 miles from Yellowstone Park. His interest in early park travel began when he was a small boy listening to his grandmother’s tales of baking bread in geysers and tossing red flannels into Old Faithful so it’s next eruption would be tinted pink. Miller has been researching early travel to Yellowstone since 2003. His expertise on the history and literature of Yellowstone has won him a position on the Speakers Bureau of Humanities Montana, an affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. His articles on Yellowstone Park and Montana history have appeared in the Big Sky Journal and the Pioneer Museum Quarterly. He is working on a novel for young adults about a 14-year-old boy’s adventures in Yellowstone Park in 1871 and a history of Yellowstone travel.