Author-editor C. M. Skinner wrote: “The Yellowstone country is a reversal of common experience. Water flows up into the air, springs are hot instead of cold, rocks so slenderly balance on their pedestals that you half expect to see the long dead buffalo hanging in the air about them,
exemplifying the truth of the old frontiersman’s remark that here ‘the laws of nature are petrified.’” Visiting the strange Wonder land of northwest Wyoming has long promoted communion between visitor and vista; such experiences are often unique and personal. Since the park’s
founding in 1872, photography has petrified some of the earliest personal experiences in Yellow stone. These visual journals continue even now to document the spirit of America’s Wonderland.
—Alex Turner
Quotes of travelers from Ho! For Wonderland: Travelers’ Accounts of Yellowstone, 1872-1914, edited and annotated by Lee H. Whittlesey. Photographs from: MSS 9076; Collection of tourist photographs of Yellowstone Park via Wylie Permanent Camping Company; 20th Century Western Manuscripts and Americana; L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University. MSS 9063; Collection of Yellowstone Park photographs while camping with Shaw and Powell Camping Company; 20th Century Western and Mormon Manuscripts; L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University.
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