Storytelling in Yellowstone: Horse and Buggy Tour Guides

In the early years of Yellowstone National Park, many companies offered buggy and stage rides through the park, their drivers telling stories to the passengers. Some had no basis in fact, especially those attributed to "Indian legends," but others came from the early trappers and fur traders and were informational as well as entertaining.

Lee H. Whittlesey, former Yellowstone National Park historian, devoted years of research to these pre-1920 stories told by the Park's "tour guides," or interpreters. He includes the campfire stories of the traders and trappers, Yellowstone as it was portrayed in early photos and movies, the first Yellowstone guidebooks, and the "fool tenderfoot questions" posed by late nineteenth-century tourists. Whittlesey devotes chapters to the first two National Park interpreters, Philetus "Windy" Norris and G. L. Henderson. Each had his own delivery style and each awed his respective tour groups. Finally, there are the stagecoach drivers who chauffeured the public over Yellowstone's dirt roads and regaled their passengers with tales of the great Geyserland.

Today, National Park Service, private, and concessioner tour guides have taken over the duties of these early guides, sharing Yellowstone National Park's many stories.

All author proceeds from this book are being donated to the National Park Service.