Customer Reviews

Selling Yellowstone: Capitalism and the Construction of Nature

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Like many academic tomes, this book's subtitles imply a grandeur and generality that isn't to be found in the book. In this case, even the title overreaches. Barringer is really telling the story of the Yellowstone Park Company (YPC), the major concessioner for 75 years. The YPC had to fend off competitors, or buy them out, and then work with the National Park Service (NPS) to enforce its monopoly. Eventually it was unable to keep up with changes in tourism, and the book effectively ends in 1966 when the NPS terminated the YPC contract.

Barringer views both the YPC and NPS as partners sharing a vision and similar weaknesses. Both saw Yellowstone primarily as a resort tourist destination, the experience of which had to be constructed and delivered to tourists in a particular way. This led to the massive construction project of Mission 66, which sparked a public reaction against the park service and threatened YPC's financial health. Neither park service nor concessionaire was well equipped to handle changes in the public view of national parks, as tourism became a possible threat to Yellowstone's natural resources.

This is a nice hook for the story but it overstates the case. The NPS has continued to push a tourist-based vision, built around concessions and automobiles, that represents a continuation of the story. The particular construction of nature in Yellowstone wasn't much different than the construction of nature in other parks - - which makes one wonder whether the outcome in Yellowstone was essentially inevitable and not the result of what YP Company did. Barringer might try to imagine alternatives in order to show where agents had choices to take other paths, and whether structure largely forced the outcome we see.

The meat of the book is a conventional, if short, history of the YP Company against the background of other concessioners, other parks, and NPS history. The introduction has a great overview of the transition from the myths of the Old West to the myths of the New West, and the conclusion has a very useful summary of the central argument. Those framing chapters are worth the price of admission.

Many Americans think a visit to a National Park might allow them to escape the world of capitalism. However Selling Yellowstone: Capitalism and the Construction of Nature explains that it is not possible. Mark Barringer, an assistant professor of history at Stephen F. Austin State University, details how the forces of capitalism have been shaping the national parks since Yellowstone's designation in 1872. The book chronicles the history of concessions and park policy in from the park's beginning, focusing on a concessionaire monopoly built by Harry W. Child near the turn of the 20th century and carried on by his family after his death. Early on, Child built lavish hotels that catered to wealthy Easterners arriving by rail. His stagecoaches transported guests to each major point of interest with a hotel nearby, including Old Faithful and the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. These stately edifices became just as much an attraction as the park's natural phenomena.
The advent of automobiles ushered in a more egalitarian era of National Park tourism. The middle class took advantage of its new found mobility and started visiting the national parks, symbols of national pride and a way to get "back to nature." This group of tourists largely shunned the park hotels, viewing them as snobbish, and instead camped. With the coming of motorization, National Parks became places of expected recreation instead of just scenery (58).
Selling Yellowstone illustrates that during its first 40 years the NPS and concessionaires were partners in park management and that public opinion largely determined park policies. However, in the 1950s and 1960s attitudes about what national parks should be began to change. During that period, wilderness advocates became more influential, arguing that parks were "pristine wilderness whose inherent value was threatened by alteration" (147). By the early 1960s public opinion was divided between what national park policy was better - accommodation or preservation. At this time, Barringer explains, the NPS and its concessionaires were faced with "molding a landscape with expectations impossible to fulfill" (162).
Barringer's thesis is clearly that the NPS and its concessionaires presented their product to fit the perceptions of the natural setting prominent at the time. Early Yellowstone concessionaires created an idyllic form of nature that would appeal to tourists. Throughout the volume Barringer illustrates the key role advertisements and presentations, either by the concessionaires or the NPS, had in shaping public opinion.
The volume, however, suffers from poor word choice throughout. For instance, Barringer overuses the word mythology. The word means anything to him. He definitely stretches too far when stating that campfire programs give a "mythological connection to nature." Campfire programs actually can give the audience a connection with nature. Such presentations educate on key environmental and policy issues, which inspire their listeners to take better care of national parks. Alternate word choices instead of mythology could have been "imagined," "perceived," "idealistic" or "preconceived." Adding to the word choice problem, Barringer redundantly emphasizes his thesis, even using some of the same words. Reading such statements over again becomes tiresome.
Despite its weaknesses, the volume presents an excellent history of National Park policy with Yellowstone's concessionaires as the focal point. Readers get an idea of what was happening in other major national parks like Yosemite, Mount Ranier and Glacier during the same time period. The book demonstrates thoroughly that no policy or idea in history is static. Each generation reinterprets what is ideal and seeks to obtain gratification through that ideal.