The Campfire That Never Was

The campfire I've got for you went out in eighteen seventy, and it was still burning people a hundred years later. Aubrey Haines found that out the hard way. He was the park's first historian, and his job was to write the great history of Yellowstone in time for its hundredth birthday, in nineteen seventy two. All he had to do was tell how the place began. Everybody knew how it began. September nineteenth, eighteen seventy. The Washburn party's in camp up this road, where the Firehole and the Gibbon come together, at the end of a long ride through the wonders. Around the fire somebody says, boys, let's file on this country. Take up the falls. Take up the geysers. Pool it and split the money. Then Cornelius Hedges, a Helena lawyer, shakes his head. No man ought to own any of it, he says. It ought to be a great national park. And every man but one comes around, and an idea that goes clear around the world is born in the firelight, out of plain American decency. Nathaniel Langford put that in print in nineteen oh five, thirty five years on, and rangers told it at campfire programs for decades, all over the country. So Haines went to the papers. The lawyer kept a diary, and his entry for that day reads like this. No fish in river, grub getting very thin. The money was a good deal closer than any speech. That same fall, as one man remembered it, two Deer Lodge printers cut a big pile of poles on the Firehole, meaning to fence in the best geysers for themselves. And the railroad was watching. When word of the place reached New York, the Northern Pacific's secretary wrote to Jay Cooke, the banker behind the line. The villains in Helena, he wrote, were uncovering the nakedness of our sleeping Yellowstone Beauty. It breaks my heart, he said. A year on, a letter reached the government's geologist on the stationery of Jay Cooke and Company. Let Congress pass a bill, it said, reserving the Great Geyser Basin as a public park forever. Nobody ever told that one around a fire. Haines wrote it all down. The old guard was very angry. Officials tried to sit on his work. The manuscript traveled around the Service so long it missed the birthday altogether, and he retired sooner than he'd meant to. And he hadn't even been hard on the lawyer. He saw no reason to doubt the man said something of the kind, and the man himself never once claimed the idea was his. The Park Service has since gone further than Haines did. It is a wonderful story, it says, but it isn't true. Years later Haines talked about what it cost him. It all balances out, he said, and no regrets. You can keep the speech. Give me the fire in the diary, a tired lawyer by the coals and his one line about the grub.