Journey Through the Yellowstone National Park and Northwestern Wyoming

This collection of six images comes from a book documenting the voyage of then-President of the United States, Chester Arthur, to Yellowstone in 1883. Arthur’s travels were both a means of publicizing the new national park system – press and other people accompanying the president occupied the tents pictured in the top left image – and of rejuvenating his health, which had suffered since assuming the presidency. Only 11 years after the designation of the first national park, the trope of wilderness imbued with healing powers as a foil to the toxicity of cities was in full effect.

The bottom left and center images depict the Wind River Canyon, in Wyoming, in what is today the Wind River Reservation of Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes. It is the homeland of the people depicted in the top right image, people who had meaningful relationships with the Wind River bioregion passed on through generations. However, the adjacency of these seemingly incongruent images--of tents, Native people, and vacated landscapes--suggest that, indigenous people are somehow an artifact of the natural environment, simultaneously place-based and removable. Just four year after the Shoshone and Arapaho encountered Arthur on their lands, the United States government passed the Dawes Act, which allotted a specific amount of territory per nuclear (cisheternormative) Native family and sold the remaining treaty lands to white settlers. These photographs are evidence of the ideology that promoted the destruction of indigenous kinship systems and communal relationships to land through allotment policies, pushed by Arthur.