Yellowstone National Park

The signature, and what the act said

President Ulysses S. Grant signed the act establishing Yellowstone National Park on 1 March 1872.

It withdrew the described tract in the Montana and Wyoming territories from settlement, occupancy and sale, dedicating it as a public park or "pleasuring-ground" for the benefit and enjoyment of the people. Anyone who tried to settle inside the boundary became, in the statute's words, a trespasser subject to removal.

A park with no park service

The tract passed to the exclusive control of the secretary of the interior, who was directed to retain its timber, mineral deposits, natural curiosities and wonders in their natural condition.

The act authorised limited leases for visitor accommodations, each capped at ten years, and required protection of fish and game from commercial destruction.

What it did not supply was an operating staff or a congressional appropriation; Nathaniel Langford's superintendency was unpaid.

Not empty, and "first" needs a definition

The land was not untouched wilderness. Indigenous peoples had lived, hunted, gathered plants, quarried obsidian and used the thermal waters there for millennia.

The Park Service calls Yellowstone the world's first national park, but the claim rests on an institutional definition: Hot Springs had been a federal reservation since 1832, and Yosemite was granted to California as a state-administered park in 1864.

"Colter's Hell," the nickname in the listing, properly belonged to a thermal area on the Shoshone River near present-day Cody — not to Yellowstone's geyser basins.