Dispossessing the wilderness: The preservationist ideal, Indian removal, and national parks
Spence MD. 1996. Dispossessing the wilderness: The preservationist ideal, Indian removal, and national parks. University of California, Los Angeles
This work examines nineteenth and early twentieth-century ideas about wilderness and American Indians. It looks at how an earlier conception of wilderness as the place where Indians lived gave way to the idealization of uninhabited wilderness in the late nineteenth century. This transformation derived from several historical developments, including the powerful sense of national destiny that accompanied both the Mexican War and the Civil War, the growth of western tourism, changes in federal Indian policy, and turn-of-the-century sentimentalism for an idealized frontier past. Large historical forces did not make Indians disappear, however, and this work focuses on the specific policies of Indian removal developed at Yosemite, Yellowstone, and Glacier National Parks between the 1870s and 1910s. This work also examines the historical and cultural importance of certain national park areas to the Yosemite, Blackfeet, Crow, Shoshone and Bannock Indians from nineteenth century to the present.