Empire of shadows : the epic story of Yellowstone
(Book)

Includes bibliographical references (pages 505-526) and index.

In a radical reinterpretation of the 19th-century West, George Black casts Yellowstone's creation as the culmination of three interwoven strands of history: the passion for exploration, the violence of the Indian Wars, and the "civilizing" of the frontier. Yellowstone, Wyoming, was landscape uninhabited, inaccessible, and shrouded in myth in the aftermath of the Civil War. Black charts its course through the lives of those who sought to lay bare its mysteries: Lt. Gustavus Cheyney Doane, a gifted but tormented cavalryman known as "the man who invented Wonderland"; the ambitious former vigilante leader Nathaniel Langford; scientist Ferdinand Hayden, who brought photographer William Henry Jackson and painter Thomas Moran to Yellowstone; and Gen. Phil Sheridan, Civil War hero and architect of the Indian Wars, who finally succeeded in having the new National Park placed under the protection of the U.S. Cavalry. The exploration of Yellowstone is a quintessentially American story of terrible things done in the name of high ideals and of high ideals realized by dubious means.