Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Environmental Studies
Episode: Megan Kate Nelson, "Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America" (Scribner, 2022)
Description: In 1871 an expedition entered the territory now encompassed by Yellowstone National Park. Led by doctor and self-taught geologist Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden, it was to be the first scientific expedition into that mysterious place.But it was also, says my guest Megan Kate Nelson, part of a larger struggle over the expansion of federal power during Reconstruction. Hayden would be one of the three men who would strive for control of Yellowstone, and the surrounding territory. The others were Jay Cooke, a Philadelphia investment banker raising capital for the Northern Pacific Railroad; and a Lakota leader known to Engl...