Yellowstone National Park

Declared on 1 March 1872 by President Ulysses S. Grant, Yellowstone is reckoned the first national park in the world (though Mongolia had already protected the sacred mountain of Bogd Khan Uul in 1783, on rather different terms). Its creation owed much to the Hayden expedition of 1871, whose photographs by William Henry Jackson and paintings by Thomas Moran convinced Congress that its geysers and hot springs were not trappers' tall tales but real. Indigenous peoples, among them the Tukudika or Sheep Eaters, had lived and hunted in the region for at least 11,000 years before being driven out once the park was declared. Today Yellowstone is the only place in the 48 contiguous states where the American bison has survived in the wild without interruption since prehistoric times, and it was central in 1995 to the historic reintroduction of the grey wolf, absent for 70 years.