BEFORE THERE WERE PARK RANGERS
It is difficult to fathom General Phil Sheridan. Hard and grizzled, he set the Shenandoah Valley ablaze in 1864 to deny the Confederacy food, bringing starvation to families from Harrisonburg to Staunton, Va. They called it “the Burning.” During the Indian wars he used similar scorched-earth tactics to crush the Western tribes and force them onto reservations. Sheridan believed noncombatant casualties were inevitable. “If a village is attacked, and women and children are killed,” he wrote General William Tecumseh Sherman from the field in 1870, “the responsibility is not with the soldier, but with the people whose crimes necessitate the attack.” Like his longtime superior Sherman, Sheridan suggested the best way to control the Plains Indians was to kill the buffalo that supported their way of life—though that was never official Army policy.
He supposedly said, though he denied it, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” Whether Sheridan said it or not, Cheyennes, Kiowas, Comanches and Sioux alike had reason to detest him, though most government officials and settlers of the era considered his ruthless pursuit of the “savages” both necessary and justified.
Yet, in addition to his Civil War heroics—at least in the eyes of the North—Sheridan also deserves acclaim for helping safeguard the U.S. national park system, Yellowstone in particular, by forcefully standing against the corruption of his times.
It may surprise some that a man like Sheridan came to appreciate the grandeur of the West. But it was the field reports from two survey parties he had the Army escort through Yellowstone country (the 1870 Washburn Expedition and 1871 Hayden Geological Survey) that prompted the 1872 creation of our first national park.
A decade later,
