Where I work--more

More on the HRC, where I am volunteering.  It is an affiliate of the National Archives and Record Center, which is very prestigious, and a recognition of the valuable and unique materials available here.  So, what’s available here?  I’ll break it into two:  the archives and the library, though the distinction isn’t as clear cut as one might ordinarily think.  Archives are generally those materials which are unique to the holding institution and are held in a secure, non-public, non-lending status.  And Yellowstone’s HRC has a rich collection of these.  I can’t go beyond the surface, the surface being what I’ve been working on for the archives area.  My first task was to go through two or three boxes of miscellaneous documents, the kind of documents that in our 2011 world of e-mail, e-documents, and e-publishing one would expect to be e-lek-tron-ick.  These, however, were assorted papers from the 1980s and 1990s:  memos, conference proceedings, reports of avalanche prevention operations (usually, detonating explosives at Sylvan Pass as a preventative for severe, unpredictable avalanches would could bury people and cars alive), procurements and requisitions, personnel disciplinary communication (for example:  Adam Baker, said NPS rank 55-1-A-b: DE, was found to be negligent in the operation of government property, namely a 1987 Ford Econoline serial no. (blah, blah, blah) and similar sundry colorless pounds of paperwork.  Said similar such communications would today be in emails, PDFs, and websites.  But, it is the job of the archives to inventory donations from Yellowstone NPS offices of any said such [sic] paraphernalia.  And so that task was saved for volunteer Paul, who happily dived into the piles of paper and listed said such stuff into official NPS Excel files.  It was fun, and thankfully didn’t go on for days and days. 

From that task I moved into the dreaded “black albums.”  Not that I found them dreaded.  The task was (and is, and will be) to list the data contained in each album, in a Word-based template system.  I am enjoying this (as many of the old photos are fascinating), but the job would become dreaded if it were to last an entire eight hour day, followed by several more eight hour days of it. Fortunately, the staff are very kind and they allow me to switch back and forth between projects every couple of hours.  I do have another project besides the black alums (see below…).

So, what are the black albums?  Reasonable question.  They are numerous, perhaps forty to fifty of them, and they contain black and white reproduction photos of Park fauna (and probably flora) from the 1920’s through the early 1950’s.  Who put them together and why is an unknown to me.  Whenever, why-ever, and whom-ever did it did a loving, painstaking piece of work.  Are you old enough to remember the soft, thick, (almost furry) black construction paper-like pages that were used in photo scrapbooks in the 1940’s and 1950’s?  Yes?  Then you can begin to visualize these albums. 

Wait—there is more, much much more.  Each album might have upwards of one hundred twenty pages in it.  And each page might hold between six and twelve photos, most of them 3”x5” or so.  Most of the photos were pasted (ouch!) onto the furry black paper (rather than the old-fashioned black photo corners being used), and beneath each photo was a description that had been typed (yep, you can just see those flying letters, overstrikes, etc) onto a piece of paper which was then cut down to size and pasted below the photo.  Each description consists of a photo I.D. number, description of the photo, name of photographer, location in the park where taken, and date or year it was taken.  Simple, eh?  Maybe not so….

§           Each photographer (most often a ranger) used his own I.D. system, totally separate from that of any other photographer

§           Usually the last name of the photographer was given:  Oberhansley, for example, but occasionally the photographer was designed by initials only, as in F.R.O.  for Frank R. Oberhansley.  How to determine for my inventory who exactly FRO is……?

§           The place described might be Mammoth, Grebe Lake, etc.  Pretty clearcut.  But then, I know a little bit about Yellowstone place names and once in a while a strange one appeared.  For example, Madison Junction Lake.  Well, certainly there’s a Madison Junction here in Yellowstone, and in my history books of the Park I found that there is a Madison Lake, which is nowhere close to Madison Junction.  But… there’s no Madison Junction Lake.  So, how to determine for my inventory what exactly MJL is…..?

§           The wonderous news in my work is that Yellowstone National Park has an official historian, and said official historian resides (8 to 4 or so) in the same HRC building in which I volunteer.  Said historian is Lee Whittlesey.  Said historian has a fascinating memory for facts, names, places, people, and events which have been associated with Yellowstone.  So, whenever I have a question about spelling, initials, place names, etc etc, I walk over to Lee’s office, pop my head in, and try to stump him.  Haven’t succeeded yet….  This man is amazing, and is fun to talk with, and… he has the greatest collection of wildlife cartoons ever taped to the inside of his office door.  More about that later….

§           In addition to the photographer’s I.D. number, the National Park Service assigns a modern inventory number to each object owned by it.  This number is merely a randomly generated number; in other words, it signifies nothing about the subject, date, etc—only the Park which owns it.  For all of the items owned within Yellowstone begin with YELL.  Everything gets a YELL number, including the refrigerators and ranges in the kitchen of the Utah Dormitory where I’m living.  In my work through each black album, if a photo does not already have a YELL numbe assigned, I have to assign one.  It is exciting.  I am a little cog in the wheel of bureaucratic accessioning and record-keeping.  And I truly am grateful for the opportunity to be here, in this Park, in this moment, assigning YELL numbers to historic photographs.

The black albums tend to be organized by animal/theme.  I have done deer, elk, mountain lion, Bighorn sheep, beaver, Trumpeter swan, etc etc.  Some of the photos in these black albums are totally shockingly outrageous.  Case in point:  mountain lion.  Most of those photos are of mountain lions, within the Park, being treed by dogs and shot, or photos of their bodies.  Shot!  Within the sacred boundaries of the national park.  Shot!  And other photos show a stuffed mountain lion from the museum which has been taken out into its natural environment, set up, and photographed.  A stuffed mountain lion photographed in its native environment.!!!  Do you see a problem here?  The painful truth is that perspectives and practices in wildlife management-preservation have changed.  As you know, before they were re-introduced to Yellowstone in 1995-96, wolves were eliminated from Yellowstone in the early 1920’s.  Eliminated with the cooperation and efforts of NPS staff. 

And here are three painfully sad photos I saw and catalogued in one of the black albums:



Wolf pups captured in Yellowstone National Park 1923



Chief Ranger Sam Woodring with wolf puppies captured in 1923



Chief Ranger Sam Woodring with wolf puppies captured in 1923

Here you are casting eyes upon undoubtedly the last live wolves in Yellowstone National Park, until their re-introduction in 1995.  It is a known fact that shortly after these three photos were taken, these wolf puppies were put to death.

Practices change.  Perspectives change.  At one time, it was the government's view that it was doing a good service to people, plants, animals, and our future as a planet to eliminate the wolf from Yellowstone. 

Just as practices change with wolves, so they change with everything:  American Indians, gay/lesbian people, blacks, infidels....  It's sobering to realize that what government and public opinion supports today may be and likely will be considered horrific and unthinkable fifty or one hundred years from now.  There's an entire book to be written about this....  but not here, today, in On Mountain Trails.