The founding impulses of the US national parks reflected Romantic notions of self-making, as almost a century after the American Revolution, post-revolution nationalism still gripped the country. In 1872, with the establishment of Yellowstone National Park, the US is widely thought to be the first nation to create a national park system,1 a move that environmental historian and writer Wallace Stegner has referred to as “America’s Best Idea.” At a time when the young American nation sought distinction from Europe, the parks promised to showcase breathtaking landscapes whose vistas rivaled any of Europe’s grand, human-built palaces, castles, or cathedrals. The parks thus provided US citizens with a much-needed rejoinder to persistent claims of European cultural superiority. Although set apart from Europe, certain Americans—the “white, property-owning men who served as the nation’s prototypical citizens” (Klein 2020, 2)—imported, seemingly wholesale, from Europe a view of taste that was freighted with social and political significance. “At the same time, those excluded from this narrow conception of citizenship recognized in eating an accessible means of demonstrating their own sense of national belonging, as well as additional and, at times, explicitly oppositional aesthetic theories” (Klein 2020, 2). These conflicting taste aesthetics would come to find themselves played out in national park eating experiences for well over 100 years.
Informed by Romantic and Transcendental sensibilities popular among the wealthy Eastern Seaboard liberal elite, many well-resourced Americans believed that the individual imagination, properly inspired by nature, would propel individual rights and liberties. The country’s glorious natural spaces, particularly in the West, reassured Americans of their status despite their lack of the palaces, cathedrals, museums, and castles of their European forebears. Taking succor in majestic American landscapes not only soothed cultural anxieties but also provided a space for citizens to resolve their conflicted feelings about the rapid industrialization taking place in the East. They sought in the parks less pure wilderness itself, and more the vision of the sublime that had become well represented on postcards, in advertising, and in fine art and associated with status and sophistication (Schmitt 1969). Said landscape painter Thomas Cole,
there are those who regret that with the improvements of cultivation the sublimity of the wilderness should pass away: for those scenes of solitude from which the hand of nature has never been lifted, affect the mind with a more deep toned emotion than aught which the hand of man has touched. Amid them the consequent associations are of God the creator—they are his undefiled works, and the mind is cast into the contemplation of eternal things.
(Cole 1836)
Of course, the very “wilderness” so venerated by the Romantics and Transcendentalists in the early to mid-nineteenth century was itself a man-made invention, even if it was broadly understood as quite the opposite. In 1849, Thomas Carlyle, in a letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson, imagined settlers “steering over the Western Mountains to annihilate the jungle, and bring bacon and corn out of it for the Posterity of Adam!” (cited in Root and de Rochemont 1976, 189). Although wilderness was first imagined as in need of taming to make way for agriculture, the ecologically catastrophic Civil War challenged national identity; alongside the Industrial Revolution’s rapacious appetite for natural resources and transformative notions of masculinity, the combination posed a stark threat to the Romantic wilderness concept. Industrialization changed how white, property-owning men conceived of themselves and was seen as a threat to white masculinity: “American men began to link their sense of themselves as men to their position in the volatile marketplace, to their economic success … Now manhood had to be proved” (Kimmel 2008, 6). Witnessing the disastrous environmental impact of both the Civil War and the rapidly industrializing East, with the threat to masculinity a shadow issue simmering on the back burner and influenced by the 1864 publication of George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature, a seminal work of US environmentalism, many turned from thoughts of how to conquer the wilderness, and instead began considering how to save it from the threat of industrialization.
The national parks created precisely for this purpose—to conserve and enshrine such wilderness—were in fact invented after centuries of American Indian wars invested in removing Indigenous peoples from the landscapes they had actively shaped for thousands of years (Solnit 2000; Williams 2000; Williams 2002; Baylor University 2011; Roos 2020). Wilderness, the idea of untamed, uninhabited lands, was a dream cultivated by the white and the wealthy. As William Cronon points out:
The dream of an unworked natural landscape is very much the fantasy of people who have never themselves had to work the land to make a living – urban folk for whom food comes from a supermarket or a restaurant instead of a field, and for whom the wooden houses in which they live and work apparently have no meaningful connection to the forests in which trees grow and die. Only people whose relation to the land was already alienated could hold up wilderness as a model for human life in nature, for the romantic ideology of wilderness leaves no place in which human beings can actually make their living from the land.
(1995, 42)
In the mid-nineteenth century, as conversations about conservation were intensify-ing, would-be park concessioners began to recognize the profits to be made from the sale of this romantic wilderness-infatuated flight from history. “The owners of the great machines of monopoly capital—the so-called means of production— were, with excellent reason, at the forefront of nature work because it was one of the means of production of race, gender and class” (Haraway 1984, 52). With the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869 came much speculation about the likely return on investment that the railroad companies could produce by providing tourists with the concessions that would allow them to commune with nature in newly conserved spaces. Railroads and independent entrepreneurs alike began to set up concessions—a railroad spur here, a tent camp, a primitive hotel, a bathhouse, or a saloon there—to ease the arduous journey through spaces of natural splendor, thereby producing the classed conditions of eventual cosmopolitanism.