Lost in My Own Backyard: A Walk in Yellowstone National Park by Tim Cahill Read Free Book Online Page A

forests grew up on top of the buried forests, sometimes in as little as 200 years. And then these forests were buried themselves in yet another eruption. Geologists suggest that volcanism created as many as 27 separate fossil forests on or around Specimen Ridge.
    “Yellowstone contains so many wonders, the fact that is has the largest petrified forest in the world goes almost unnoticed,” say Roger and Carol Anderson in
A Ranger’s Guide to Yellowstone Day Hikes.
I, on the other hand, have been consumed by the concept of fossil forests since I first heard about them. I can’t really wrap my mind around the concept: 50-million-year-old trees, some still standing, sculpted in stone. Folk tales, told by old-time explorers and trappers, are colorful and perfectly unilluminating, at least in the scientific sense.
    Yarn-spinning mountain man Jim Bridger poked around in what is now the park in the early 1830s and many decades later had occasion to speak with General Nelson Miles. This was in 1897. As recounted by Aubrey Haines in
The Yellowstone Story,
the General asked Bridger if he’d ever been as far south as Zuni, New Mexico.
    “No, thar ain’t any beaver down thar.”
    “But Jim, there are some things in this world besides beaver. I was down there last winter and saw great trees with limbs and bark all turned into stone.”
    “O,” returned Jim, “that’s peetrification. Come with me to the Yellowstone and I’ll show you peetrified trees a-growing with peetrified birds on ’em a-singing peetrified songs.”
    Another Bridger tale, this time recounted by Hiram Chittenden in
The Yellowstone National Park
(1895), notes that petrifications in the northeast corner of the park, on Specimen Ridge, probably provided the “base material” out of which Bridger “contrived” what Chittenden calls a “picturesque yarn.” In this tale, a “great medicine man of the Crow nation” cursed a certain mountain. Neither Chittenden nor Bridger say what the shaman had against the mountain. He just cursed it. That’s all. And “everything upon the mountain at the time of this dire event became instantly petrified and has remained so ever since. All forms of life are standing about in stone where they were suddenly caught by the petrifying influences.” At this point, Bridger’s tale veers off on a flight of almost shivery fancy: “Sage brush, grass, prairie fowl, antelope, elk and bears may be seen as perfect as in actual life. Even flowers are blooming in colors of crystal, and birds soar with wings spread in motionless flight, while the air floats with music and perfumes siliceous, and the sun and moon shine with petrified light.”
    I think that’s the best petrification story. Bridger was justly famous for his tall tales, and Captain W. F. Raynolds, who had Bridger for a guide in 1859 and 1860, suggested that men like Jim Bridger who lacked the comforts and culture of civilization would, of necessity, make a theater out of campfire storytelling and “beguile the monotony of camp life by ‘spinning yarns’ in which each tried to excel all others.”
    Bridger won. Historian Haines goes to great lengths to dig up all the tall tales of woodsmen describing petrified forests previous to Bridger’s accounts. There were many over the years, often retold by educated writers who rendered the backwoodsman’s account in what I suspect was meant to be hilarious dialect. (Is “peetrification” funny? What about a mountain man so unacquainted with proper English that fossil forests are described as “putrifications,” a word that caused listeners to inquire if the stone trees “smelled badly”?)
    In any case, Aubrey Haines reliably gets to the bottom of the various putrifacations and comes to the conclusion that “if lying was one of Bridger’s sins—as some have hinted—it was seldom
original
sin; he has had willing collaborators.” What Haines means, I think, is that, over the past 150 years or so, certain writers