Ho! For Wonderland: Travelers' Accounts of Yellowstone, 1872-1914

Yellowstone National Park has been a popular tourist destination since 1872, attracting visitors from all over the world. In its early years, travelers had to endure long, dusty, and slow stagecoach trips and had limited accommodation options. Nineteen tales from this era have been selected by park historians to offer unique and engaging perspectives of visitors during Yellowstone's stagecoach era. These accounts reveal the enduring captivation that Yellowstone held in the popular imagination, as it does today.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 352 pages
Publication date: 30 September 2020
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press

Since Yellowstone became the world's first national park in 1872, it 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.

Weight: 530g
Dimension: 152 x 229 x 25 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780826346179