In 1872, the Yellowstone Act created the world’s first national park. This act has been celebrated as a great stepping stone to conserving the natural beauty of the US. When considering the act, Congress discussed the impact such a large federal acquisition would have on white settlers in the area. John Taffe of Nebraska brought up the question of how it would impact the Sioux reservation. The other legislators just shrugged the question off. They didn’t consider Native Americans to be any impediment to taking the land. Henry Dawes of Massachusetts replied,
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“The Indians can no more live [in Yellowstone],” he told Taffe, “than they can upon the precipitous sides of the Yosemite valley.” To Dawes and almost all of his fellow legislators, potential Lakota land claims and the long-standing use of Yellowstone as a thoroughfare by Shoshone, Bannock, Crow, Flathead and Nez Perce peoples did not matter.
That didn’t sit right with Sitting Bull (Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake), the prominent leader of the Lakota and advocate for their allied nations who lived in the Western states. They were already concerned with the building of the Northern Pacific railroad through their land, bringing a rush of gold miners and settlers and endangering the buffalo herds they depended on. The tensions between the US and the Lakota over rights to the land sparked a five-year war which included the Battle of Little Big Horn.
The Native American objections to Yellowstone National Park have been mostly excluded from American history, but 150 years later, the National Park Service plans to include exhibits at the park to explain how the birth of the park shaped Lakota history. Read the story at Smithsonian.
Source: neatorama