Diorama: "Camping at Yellowstone: Birth of the National Park Idea, 1870"

This original museum diorama created for the U.S. Department of the Interior Museum in the mid 1930s is elaborately forested and depicts what is supposed to be a campfire scene at what is now Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. Twelve male figures surround a campfire in a clearing covered in leaf litter and scrub brush; a tent is visible in the right background. Four men are standing and directing their attention to a fifth standing man who is holding a walking stick in his left hand and gesturing with his right, as if speaking. A sixth standing man is prodding the campfire with a sharpened log. Six more men are either seated on logs or reclining on the ground around the fire. Two horse saddles are in the foreground.

The diorama is significant for its pictorial representation of a key story in National Park Service lore, namely, a September 19, 1870, discussion by members of the Washburn-Langford-Doane Expedition around a campfire near Madison Junction. It is said that the group discussed the sights they had seen and collectively agreed that the Yellowstone landscape should be preserved as a public park. This proposal was among a groundswell of increasing support for creating national parks, and ultimately Yellowstone was established by the U.S. Congress and signed into law by President Ulysses S. Grant as the country's first national park a year and a half later, on March 1, 1872. Expedition member Nathaniel Pitt Langford (1832-1911) would go on to serve as the park's first superintendent from 1872-1877.