AN APPETITE FOR ASTONISHMENT

Romantic artists and writers whetted an appetite for encounters with overwhelming natural power, portraying nature as a formidable protagonist in stories of sweeping journeys into the wild. Honeymooners traveled to Niagara Falls to sail on The Maid of the Mist, willingly seeking out a sense of temporary soul-suspension, a mingling of awe and fear that philosopher Edmund Burke had described in 1757 as the "sublime." Chasing this aesthetic of astonishment, where humanity felt tiny and humbled before terrifying forces, settlers began to view the West as a spiritual destination.

The mythologized wilderness became an invaluable asset to a country longing for transcendent experiences. In the decades following the Civil War, the desire for natural spectacle converged with the ambitions of the federal government and railroad companies, who sponsored major scientific and geographical explorations to assess the land for settlement—spurring a synthesis of the aesthetic sublime with a sense of patriotism, destiny, and technological progress.

One of these was the 1871 expedition led by geologist Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden. The party included scientists, geologists, topographers, frontiersmen, and two artists who were to bring the wonders of Yellowstone before people thousands of miles away: the painter Thomas Moran and the photographer William Henry Jackson. That summer, the men explored Tower Fall, the mud volcano, and mountains bordered with great cliffs and peaks of limestone, moving gallons of flammable ether, crates of fragile sheet glass, and a darkroom box with pack mules and human muscle. Jackson’s photographic equipment weighed around 300 pounds, and transporting it through dense timber could turn a narrow passage into a dangerous ordeal, as Moran recorded in his diary:

“Clouds began to gather & a rain set in in the Mts all around us but did not fall heavily on us,” reads an undated entry. “Jackson's pack mule & traps got pretty well shaken up in the return by having to force a passage between trees not wide enough apart to allow free passage of the pack. When about half way back Dixon's horse got his foot fast between two fallen trees & in his frantic efforts to extricate himself he struck Dixon [Jackson’s photographic assistant] who had dismounted to help him square on the top of the head with his fore foot, peeling his scalp & hurting him considerably.”

Moran returned from the expedition with a portfolio of watercolor field studies depicting the falls, ranges, and hot springs with a powerful blend of romantic grandeur and scientific accuracy. At congressional committee hearings that winter, Hayden presented the watercolors alongside Jackson’s photographs as visible evidence of Yellowstone’s wonders, arguing that the land should be withdrawn from settlement and sale before private interests could slice it up and claim its extraordinary features. And on March 1, 1872, President Ulysses Grant signed the Yellowstone National Park Protection Act into law. 

Moran’s vision of Yellowstone had been largely shaped by Romantic landscape painting, particularly the work of William Turner. In his monumental The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone (1872), he transformed his expedition studies into a sweeping view of a glowing, river-carved canyon, bookended by incandescent cliffs rendered in rich golds and ochre yellows. On a rocky outcrop, two tiny figures seem to meditate on the natural spectacle. While Turner had relied on visual obscurity to depict swirling, disorientating vortexes of rain, wind, and fire, with humanity at the mercy of nature’s wrath, Moran rendered Yellowstone with magnificent clarity, inducing in viewers an elevation of the soul, or a spiritual "American Sublime.” 

The prospect of encountering such wonders drew travelers west, and the railroad companies were keen to encourage them. In 1881, the photographer Frank Jay Haynes arrived in Yellowstone to document the park for the Northern Pacific Railroad, returning from two months of exploration with more than 200 images. He soon built a business that allowed visitors to carry something of Yellowstone home, opening a studio and gallery at Mammoth Hot Springs where they could buy prints of the landscapes they had traveled so far to take in. His photographs reached audiences aboard Atlantic steamships, in European resorts, and in living rooms around the world. Later, hand-tinted ‘penny postals’ carried the Yellowstone vista through the mail for a penny.

Haynes also took the first photographs of Yellowstone in winter, though the expedition almost killed him. In January 1887, he set out on a 29-day, 200-mile journey through the park on skis and snowshoes, hauling his cameras and glass plates on sleds in extreme sub-zero conditions. On the slopes of Mount Washburn, the photographer and three companions became stranded for three days in a near-fatal blizzard. They eventually made it to shelter, and Haynes returned with 42 photographs. Among them was the Lower Falls sheathed in ice, a winter companion to the waterfall at the heart of Moran’s great canvas.

Haynes’ winter records capture a Yellowstone drastically different from the landscape most summer visitors encountered. Some of them would never see the dramatic cascades of the falls framed by ice, or the snow-dusted travertine terraces of the hot springs—Yellowstone didn’t officially designate a winter season until 1971, 100 years after the Hayden expedition. 

As the wonders once dismissed as the ravings of travelers were made visible in watercolor and on glass, Yellowstone was swept into the public imagination. Millions of people could now view the sublime landscapes from their Boston living rooms, or the U.S. Capitol—where Moran’s Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone was displayed, after Congress bought the massive oil painting for $10,000—transforming the west from a mythical frontier into a tourist destination. The images gave prospective visitors both a destination and a perspective, inviting them to imagine themselves small before the cataract, suspended at the canyon’s edge. Yellowstone became a place to seek the overwhelming encounter that Romantic art had promised, and its long human history receded behind the spectacle. As white tourism grew, federal authorities treated Indigenous presence as a threat to the burgeoning industry, forcibly excluding tribes and restricting access to hunting grounds, gathering places, seasonal camps, and ceremonial sites.

The instinct that drew travelers toward Yellowstone in the 1800s endures, but the landscape is no longer thought of as an unmapped, mythologized frontier. Alongside the artistic legacy of Moran, Jackson, and Haynes, a much older relationship to the land is remembered, with Yellowstone’s geysers and stone valleys increasingly illuminated by the oral histories of the tribes who have always called it home. Today, a solitary aesthetic experience is also a shared historical one. To stand before the Lower Falls today is to witness both the terrifying scale of the water and the deep human history layered within the stone.