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Site Features:
Recreational Vehicles: a comprehensive index of the
websites of recreational vehicle manufacturers, mainly in North America,
including current models, where applicable.
Haw Creek Out n'
About: a blog – web log –
intended as a companion to the Haw Creek Outdoors web
site.
Photo Galleries: outdoor and travel related photos
Places: useful and/or interesting information for a
few selected places
Mini-Reviews: short reviews related to camping, mostly
RVs so far, but more coming
Reviews: reviews of campgrounds, websites and more,
linked to the blog post of the review initially
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October 25, 2007
The Washburn Yellowstone Expedition, No.1 by Walter Trumball
(May 1871)
October 24, 2007
The
Yellowstone (December 1871)
The Yellowstone National Park by John Muir (April
1898)
October 23, 2007
The Wonders of the Yellowstone - Second Article
October 20, 2007
class B motorhomes and vans: completely updated
October 19, 2007
Updates:
motorcoaches and class A motorhomes:
completely updated.
New Images:
I've also added a new page called
Site News Archive
where older material from this column will be moved.
The page will serve as a record of changes to the
site.
October 17, 2007 10:32 P.M
October 17, 2007 8:30 A.M.
New Yellowstone National Park material.
article:
Images:
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Site
News Archive |
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Scribners Monthly, An Illustrated Magazine for the
People; Scribner & Co.; May 1872; New York
Culture and Progress
The Yellowstone National Park.
THE hungry patrons of cheap
restaurants down town must occasionally have been edified by the
notice posted conspicuously over the counter, that "all pastry
consumed in this establishment is made on the premises." Without
committing ourselves to the general principle of protection for
home manufactures, we may afford to rejoice at any measure
tending to encourage the practice of doing our own pleasuring
within our own borders. The recent Act of Congress concerning a
singularly picturesque tract of land known as the Yellowstone
region, will call attention to the unexampled richness of
Montana and Wyoming Territories as a field for the artist or the
pleasure tourist, while it aims to ensure that the region in
question shall be kept in the most favorable condition to
attract travel and gratify a cultivated and intelligent
curiosity. By the Act, some 2,500 square miles of territory at
the head-waters of the Yellowstone river are set apart as a
National Park (!) with a Superintendent (the Secretary of the
Interior) authorized to take all measures to keep the region in
such condition as most fully to answer its purpose of a gigantic
pleasure-ground. Verily a colossal sort of junketing-place! The
Yankee in the story-book claimed that America could boast of
bigger lakes, larger rivers, louder thunder, and forkeder
lightning than any other country. If any one doubt this
hereafter, we shall refer him to the Yellowstone Park.
Everything in it seems on a scale out of all proportion to
ordinary experience and conventional habits of thought. While
European potentates spend millions on millions of francs to dig
out little rills or lakes, or painfully heap up little nuggets
of rock-work in their artificial pleasure-grounds, Nature has
given us one here, ready made, which dwarfs every other, natural
or manufactured. As little children of a holiday afternoon amuse
themselves with building dams, cutting canals, and raising mud
hillocks in the cabbage garden or the gutter, so here the Titans
and Æons of the elder world seem to have refreshed themselves,
in some leisure cycle of geologic growth, with playing at
scenery. They did it lustily and con amore. Why should we
waste ourselves in unpatriotic wonderment over the gorge of the
Tamina or the Via Mala, when Nature has furnished us with the
Grand Cañon of the Yellowstone, in which the famed Swiss ravines
would be but as a crevice or a wrinkle? Why run across the sea
to stifle and sneeze over the ill odors of Solfaterra, when we
can spoil our lungs or our trowsers to better effect, and on an
incomparably larger scale, with the gigantic boiling springs and
geysers of Montana? And why strain and stiffen our backs in
staring up at Terni or the Schmadribach, which are but as
side-jets and spray-flakes to the Titanic majesty of Wyoming
Lower Falls?
Of the detailed wonders which
we here only hint at, no reader of our Magazine for the last
year or two will need to be reminded. It will not be forgotten
that along with our descriptions and illustrations of this
curious tract, the suggestion was made which has been carried
out in the recent action of Congress. A contemporary publication
has lately discussed with some gravity the question whether the
tide of mountain travel can ever be expected to set
westward,—whether Americans or Europeans, turning away from the
familiar terrors of the Alps, may be drawn to whet their
appetite for adventure on the peaks and ravines of the Sierras,
and Shasta or Mount Tyndall come to be as fascinating to the
all-conquering crags-man as the Lyskamm or the Matterhorn. The
present disclosures certainly tend to render it probable. When
the North Pacific road, as we are led to hope will be the case,
drops us in Montana in three days' journey, we may be sure that
the tide of summer touring will be perceptibly diverted from
European fields. Yankee enterprise will dot the new Park with
hostelries and furrow it with lines of travel. That the life
will for some time to come be frightfully rough, the
inconveniences plentiful, and the dangers many and appalling, is
likely enough. But that is just the spice which will most tickle
the palate of our adventurous tourists and men of science. |
