As I was walking,

that Ribbino Highway,

I saw above me,

Endless Skyway I saw below me in the Golden Valley.

This land was made for you and me.

There's nothing so American as our national parks.

The fundamental idea behind the parks is that the country belongs to the people.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. You're going to do. Throughout the early history of America, wild lands were seen as wastelands, waiting to be conquered.

Natural resources that were the raw materials with which we would build a country.

But by the end of the 19th century,

artists both of the written word and the canvas would spark a movement to

counter the rapidly industrializing society. A movement that would view the

American landscape as God on earth, a treasure to be protected at all costs. The Clarion that is credited with the creation of a holy American idea.

On a trip to the Dakota region in 1832, he fretted about the consequences of America's westward expansion on the vast wilderness

and on Native American civilization.

Those lands must be preserved, he wrote, by some great protecting policy of government in a magnificent

park, a nation's park containing man and beast in all the wild and freshness of their nature's beauty.

Four decades later, Catlin's idea would come to fruition in the northwest corner of Wyoming.

A Wonderland Called Yellowstone Yellowstone.

God has cared for these trees. God has cared for these trees. saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests

and floods.

But he cannot save them from fools.

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