4/24/96 BOZEMAN -- Oh, the ectasy of boarding a westbound train, leaving behind a life of dreary predictability and hurtling toward the mysterious possibilities of Yellowstone National Park.
What unspeakable pleasures await? What romantic encounters lie beyond the Gardiner arch? What will become of a silent rendezvous at the edge of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone or a moonlit cruise across Lake Yellowstone?
Yellowstone National Park was the setting for numerous romances in promotional literature and romance novels during the late 1800s and early 1900s, according to Susan Rhoades Neel, associate professor of history at Montana State University-Bozeman.
Trying to understand the impact the park has had on tourists, Neel found about a dozen romance novels and countless travel brochures that linked romance and Yellowstone National Park between about 1880 and 1930.
"Promotional literature from this period was filled with the language of love, narratives of love lost and rediscovered, and bonds of husband and wives solemnified," Neel said.
"The romance works are especially interesting because the love story unfolds as the fictional tourists visited the park's sights," she said. Each stop on the tour evoked specific emotions, and the act of touring moved the plot along.
The railroad stations and Roosevelt Arch signified the passage from an ordinary life into an extraordinary one. "When we passed through the Great Arch today and into the park, I dropped all chains and shackles on conventionality and so did all the rest of our party," Aunt Anabella said in "Chaperoning Adrienne: A Tale of the Yellowstone National Park."
"The geyser basins really serve as a place to demonstrate the male authority," Neel explained. "Here's where the right suitor took the woman on a tour, literally guiding her through the geyser basins and explaining them to her."
The moonlight over Lake Yellowstone was another key feature in the Yellowstone romance novels, Neel continued. But the central encounter occurred at the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, which served as the climax of Yellowstone tours during that time.
"It's at the Grand Canyon that couples reach their most solemn and profound sense of love, where they realize they are made for each other, where their love is spiritual and they are destined to become one," Neel said.
Couples in these romance novels were commonly kept apart by misunderstandings and mishaps, and the right suitor was often in disguise, Neel noted. But when they reached the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, their misunderstandings were over. Their new life could begin.
Writers used the scenery and wildlife in Yellowstone National Park as metaphors for marriage, Neel said. Wildlife, for example, was portrayed as being curiously tranquil. Animals lived together in harmony. In the same way, men and women who visited Yellowstone Park could magically overcome their differences and live together in a tamed state of marital bliss.
"Certainly, I think one of the conclusions we can draw from the theme of romance in tourist literature is that people in the late 19th, early 20th centuries perceived and valued nature very differently than they do today," Need said.
Romance is just one part of Neel's ongoing research into the cultural history of Yellowstone National Park, she said. In the future, she wants to examine diaries and other documents to see if she can discover any connection between what the park promoters tried to accomplish and what the tourists actually experienced at the park. She wants to determine the proportion of men and women, married and single people who visited the park.
Some of the Yellowstone romance novels are available at the Renne Library at MSU-Bozeman, but Neel first discovered them during a year-long fellowship at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library in Los Angeles. A Research and Creativity grant from the College of Letters and Science at MSU enabled her to assemble a collection of historic slides that she uses with a lecture on romance in yellowstone. The lecture is part of the Montana Committee for the Humanities speakers program.
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