Lee H. Whittlesey – författare

In the early years of Yellowstone National Park, many companies offered buggy and stage rides through the park, their drivers telling stories to the passengers. Some had no basis in fact, especially those attributed to ""Indian legends,"" but others came from the early trappers and fur traders and were informational as well as entertaining.Lee H. Whittlesey, former Yellowstone National Park historian, devoted years of research to these pre-1920 stories told by the Park's ""tour guides,"" or interpreters. He includes the campfire stories of the traders and trappers, Yellowstone as it was portrayed in early photos and movies, the first Yellowstone guidebooks, and the ""fool tenderfoot questions"" posed by late nineteenth-century tourists. Whittlesey devotes chapters to the first two National Park interpreters, Philetus ""Windy"" Norris and G. L. Henderson. Each had his own delivery style and each awed his respective tour groups. Finally, there are the stagecoach drivers who chauffeured the public over Yellowstone's dirt roads and regaled their passengers with tales of the great Geyserland.Today, National Park Service, private, and concessioner tour guides have taken over the duties of these early guides, sharing Yellowstone National Park's many stories.All author proceeds from this book are being donated to the National Park Service.

Since it became the world's first national park in 1872, Yellowstone has welcomed tourists from all corners of the globe who returned to their hometowns and countries with reports of this American wonderland. Stories from the park's earliest visitors began to spread so rapidly that by 1897 Yellowstone became solidly established as a successful tourist destination with more than ten thousand tourists passing through its entrances.Travellers in the park's first years faced long, dusty, and tediously slow stagecoach trips and could choose only between rather primitive hotels and tent camps for their overnight accommodations. Devoured by nineteenth-century readers, many of the narratives from this era are long forgotten today and are only gradually being recovered from historical archives. Park historians Lee Whittlesey and Elizabeth Watry have combed thousands of firsthand accounts, selecting nineteen tales that offer unique and engaging perspectives of visitors during Yellowstone's stagecoach era. From an 1873 newspaper serial that represents one of the earliest park's recorded trips to the 1914 "Little Journey" that popular writer Elbert Hubbard took with his wife Alice, the chronicles included here reveal the enduring captivation that Yellowstone held in the popular imagination, as it does today.

By 1883 when the rail lines of the Northern Pacific reached the tiny town of Cinnabar, Montana Territory, newspaper and magazine stories of the wonders to be found in Yellowstone National Park had been firing the imaginations of eager potential visitors around the world for a decade. Once the railroad completed that critical bit of their route, the world was poised to actually see the magic of Yellowstone, and the prospect of a trip was no longer just exciting—it was a possibility. It seemed like everyone who could afford the ticket—from middle class residents of New York City to Army Generals William Tecumseh Sherman and Philip Sheridan to President Chester A. Arthur—wanted to ride the train to see Yellowstone . Their jumping off point for their journey into “Wonderland” was the town envisioned by Hugo Hoppe, a raucous Wild West town poised for greatness as the Gateway to all of Yellowstone’s offerings. The town of Cinnabar, Montana, no longer exists, but when it did, it served as the immediate railroad gateway for a generation of visitors to Yellowstone National Park. Visitors passed through its streets from September 1, 1883, through June 15, 1903 This book tells the story of its place in the West, and the legend of the town and its promoters. Its story is one of aspiration and dreams in the American West and its place in the legend and lore of Yellowstone has kept the spirit of Cinnabar alive for more than a hundred years since the town itself faded away.

In 1870, Truman Everts visited what would two years later become Yellowstone National Park, traveling with an exploration party intent on mapping and investigating that mysterious region. Scattered reports of a mostly unexplored wilderness filled with natural wonders had caught the public’s attention and the fifty-four-year-old Everts, nearsighted and an inexperienced woodsman, had determined to join the expedition. He was soon separated from the rest of the party and from his horse, setting him on a grueling quest for survival. For over a month he wandered Yellowstone alone and injured, with little food, clothing, or other equipment. In “Thirty-seven Days of Peril” he recounted his experiences for the readers of Scribner’s Monthly.In June 1996, Everts’s granddaughter arrived at Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone National Park to meet with park archivist Lee Whittlesey. She brought two documents that her father had kept hidden and both were handwritten by Everts. One was a brief auto-biography that gave new insight into his early life. The other was a never-published alternative account of his confused 1870 journey through Yellowstone. Both have been added to this volume, further enhancing Everts’s unlikely tale of survival.