Friday, September 13, 2013

History Book Review: A President in Yellowstone

For three weeks in August of 1883 the first sitting president to visit Yellowstone National Park, Chester Arthur, made an ambitious 330-mile overland trip from Green River, Wyoming, north to Mammoth Hot Springs with a 75-man military escort led by General Philip Sheridan.

It was the longest and most unusual vacation ever taken by a sitting President. The traveling party included Secretary of War Robert Todd Lincoln, the only surviving son of Abraham Lincoln, who commemorate the trip with a leather-bound album of photographs taken on the journey by a young photographer, F. Jay Haynes, along with the dispatches describing the President’s activities which were sent to the Associated Press.

This volume reprints much of that album, of which only six copies were ever made, and publishes more of Haynes' 130-year-old photographs of Yellowstone National Park and the President's party.

A President in Yellowstone
The F. Jay Haynes Photographic Album of Chester Arthur's 1883 Expedition
by Frank H. Goodyear III

Continued in Out of the Past

1872: Yellowstone National Park Established
History and American West Titles
Artwork: Great Falls of the Yellowstone by F. Jay Haynes