Featured on PDR in the collection Mudpots and Fumaroles: Lithographs of Yellowstone’s Thermal Springs (1883)

The geologist Ferdinand V. Hayden (1829–1887), famed Yellowstone surveyor, understood the power of the image in protecting one of America’s most iconic landscapes. Hayden clearly had an eye for the sensational. When his first expedition set out in 1871, it featured several artists including the painter Thomas Moran (1837–1926) and the photographer William Henry Jackson (1843–1942). Convincing Congress to protect Yellowstone as the world’s first national park, which Hayden succeeded in doing in 1872, required more than just the maps, desiccated specimens, and precipitation measurements his team brought back. Instead, it was Moran’s and Jackson’s large-format, light-drenched landscapes — of canyons, cliff overhangs, and waterfalls — that are credited with swaying president Ulysses S. Grant’s pen.