While many consider Yellowstone National Park as iconic for its nature, 30 years’ experience of this “wonderlandscape” has led John Clayton to conclude that “Ultimately Yellowstone was [is] a cultural place.” How is this so?

While not denying the significance of the natural wonders and beauty of the park, Clayton makes the case that over its 145-year history Yellowstone has achieved status greater than other national parks “by the accumulation of our experiences and values and social interactions – by our culture.”

The elevation of this park above all others has been a process of cultural evolution, of changing ideas about nature in Yellowstone that has reflected changes in American culture generally.

Wonderlandscape is structured around ten chronological “stories.” First, Yellowstone was “special, full of unique wonder and power, just like the American self-image.” Second, as bison and other species were depleted or disappeared, it was seen as a “refuge from industrialization.” Third, as the park developed, the architecture of Old Faithful Inn expressed “a desire for an informal, classless society that arises from and complements the surrounding bounty of nature.” Fourth, it was “a sample of the mystique of the romantic frontier” and with its founding myth, an uplifting example of democracy and patriotism. The automobile then transformed it from an “upper-class leisure destination to a middle-class learning expedition.”  The park was a place of spirituality as captured in Ansel Adams photographs, then a “gigantic natural laboratory” and even the “mythical home of a famous cartoon bear,” Yogi Bear inserting the park into pop culture. The wildfires of 1988 and wolf reintroduction in 1993 made the park the center of controversy most recently involving management governed by science, particularly ecology.

Clayton treats these stages in Yellowstone’s cultural evolution with stories about key figures in them. For instance, in the first chapter, titled “Special,” he writes of how Thomas Moran, artist on Ferdinand Hayden’s 1871 expedition to Yellowstone, stayed behind as expedition scientists moved on from the falls of the Yellowstone River. The falls were big and beautiful but they already knew about waterfalls and were more interested in phenomena new to them. Moran, however, was captivated by “a scene worth of being depicted in a masterpiece.” Depict it he did in a twelve-by-seven-foot canvas titled The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, which became the visual centerpiece in the successful campaign to create the world’s first national park.

Ernest Thompson Seton, a popular nature writer of the late 19th and early 20th century, is the main character of the chapter “Half Tame.” Seton sought “wild” animals, found them in Yellowstone, particularly bears in the Fountain Hotel garbage dump, and wrote “In this Reservation and nowhere else at present in the northwest, the wild things are not only abundant but they have resumed their traditional Garden-of-Eden attitude toward man.” Seton publicized the wildlife of Yellowstone, especially the bears, and visitors have ever since considered its bears a prime attraction of the park.

Businessman Harry Child, concessionaire in Yellowstone in the early 20th century, and Robert Reamer, an architect, conceived and built the Old Faithful Inn in a style Child called rustic that became a defining quality of “parkitecture.” The inn’s designers tapped into an architectural movement that highlighted rusticity, a “uniquely American character” and the Inn “caught the zeitgeist, and expressed it in rare form.” Clayton contends that the country “responded to that form, because what people saw as great and special and American they particularly appreciated in Yellowstone.” He argues that the Inn with its informality and intimacy and inclusion of women “imposed a sort of frontier egalitarianism” on an “upper-class space.” With Yellowstone’s example national parks became places all Americans could go and experience shared social and cultural values whether they be found in the architecture or the nature.

Other chapters feature Theodore Roosevelt, dude ranch pioneer Howard Eaton, National Park Service leader Horace Albright, educator Hermon Bumpus, Ansel Adams, grizzly researchers Frank and John Craighead, and Yogi Bear, this last character not usually in such distinguished company. Of Yogi, Clayton observes that “the primary genius of Yogi Bear was the way he captured timeless childhood desires” and “secured it for the masses, even in a period when its appeal to the elites was waning.” Yogi “made Yellowstone a park again.”

He told the world that it was a place full of activities that kids would enjoy.

“For me, and every kid I knew, Yellowstone was an awesome, giant park. It was full of picknicking, woods, and bears, way up north where nobody lived,” Mike Keys says. Indeed in the 2010 movie Yogi Bear, Jellystone’s main attraction is a lake where people go swimming and waterskiing – city-park-type recreations, in contrast to the churchlike reverence favored by Ansel Adams.

The cartoon Yogi, of course, was not about the wildfires of 1988 or the wolf reintroduction controversies of the '90s. But to a generation of cartoon watchers, “the park was unchanging, unchangeable.”

Clayton’s extensive notes and bibliography testify to the research that went into this book. He blends this effectively with analysis and his long personal experience of the park. The writing is clear, relaxed, and accessible. His storytelling makes a credible case for why Yellowstone has long occupied the top of the national park pyramid. While the nature there is unquestionably unique and wonderful, culture is central to its perception as “wonderlandscape.” Clayton concludes: “The culture develops a new fascination. People seek to apply it in the nation’s signature landscape. And miraculously, Yellowstone reveals itself to contain previously underappreciated wonders that fulfill and expand upon that cultural need.”

In his prologue, Clayton dismisses wilderness as just another cultural construction, but not one worthy of singling out as important enough to be one of the key ideas that have shaped America’s views of Yellowstone. After all, “other cultures have seen people and nature as inseparable.” Clayton seems to buy into the anthropocentric idea that wilderness is only a cultural construct, but is this so? He writes, “Today we often define nature as wilderness, separate from humans, unspoiled by people’s activities.” His stories illustrate that Yellowstone National Park is not nature “unspoiled” but as he surely knows, parts of its two million acres are as unspoiled as nature can be these days. Excluding the wild from his catalogue of what nature has meant and might mean in the future in Yellowstone seems a serious oversight.

Wonderlandscape was published in the summer of 2017 as the federal government reviewed national monuments proclaimed by the last three presidents under The Antiquities Act of 1906. Yellowstone is a national park not a national monument, and as the first such park seems safe from those who would turn public lands in the West over to oil and gas, timber, grazing, and mining interests. But if “nature” has been “subordinate to our conception of its [Yellowstone’s] culture,” and our cultural constructions of nature even in such a place as this are constantly changing, then its future as a wild, beautiful, and natural place might not be so secure after all. This is a sobering prospect.