#721 Volunteering in Yellowstone

We actually came to Yellowstone to work.

You wouldn't know - based on our previous blog posts - that we spend four days each week volunteering at the Heritage and Research Center.  We walk in these doors about 8:00 each morning...

and spend our morning hours working with the museum collection.

The museum collection includes more than 720,000 items including many cool arrowheads, i.e. late prehistoric points, biface, obsidian.

In the afternoons, we work upstairs with the library and archives collections.

The archives house several million records (manuscripts, photos, maps, oral histories) including the U.S. Army-era records.  The U.S. Army played an early critical role in Yellowstone.  In the 1880s, the Secretary of the Interior called on the Secretary of War to help protect the park and in 1886, Captain Moses Harris and his company of Montana men came to Yellowstone.  My work in the library has been to scan the US Army correspondence from the 1880s and 1890s including letters to/from Captain Moses Harris.

In this letter of 1889, Captain Harris is granted permission by W. F. Vilas, Secretary, Department of the Interior, to allow for the sale of articles that have been coated with minerals from the hot springs. 

The Army would maintain a presence here in Yellowstone until the National Park Service was formed 30 years later in 1916.

In his library work, Kelly is documenting the history of Yellowstone's more than 150 backcountry cabins built beginning in the 19th century.  All were intended to provide shelter to those brave souls patrolling and protecting the park's animals and humans.  Along the way, most of these cabins have been refurbished, rebuilt, renamed, moved, burned, or abandoned to nature several times over. So it's fair to say such documentation becomes a challenge. In fact, Kelly's work is building on a massive effort from previous volunteers and he assures me he will leave plenty of work for future contributors. 

Yours in having fun at work,
Mary Jo