‘Women in Yellowstone’ exhibit highlights female contributions to park

Park rangers don’t get much more Yellowstone than Marguerite “Peg” Lindsley.

In 1901 she was born at Mammoth Hot Springs, Wyoming, the headquarters for Yellowstone National Park, where her father would become an assistant superintendent.

Home-schooled until the eighth grade, she entered Montana State College preparatory school at age 13. In the summers, she was an avid explorer of the park and guided tourists, gaining knowledge that led to her being hired in 1921 as a ranger-naturalist, the third woman in the National Park Service to serve as a temporary park ranger.

A year earlier, in 1920, Isabel Wasson was hired as the first Yellowstone ranger. She was a Brooklyn native with a master’s degree in geology.

Tribute

This summer the Yellowstone Heritage and Research Center in Gardiner is paying tribute to women in Yellowstone like Wasson and Lindsley, with exhibits highlighting female contributions to the park.

“As a team, we look at what collections we have and what we are excited about discussing,” said curator Miriam Watson. “Recently we wanted to delve into women living and working in the national park here in Yellowstone. We’re trying to look at underrepresented people and tell their stories.”

Part of the exhibit focuses on the center’s collection of national park uniforms.

“People love seeing the women’s uniforms, so we wanted to get those out on exhibit as a highlight for visitors,” Watson added.

Pistol packing

The uniforms on display include the one worn by female Ranger Frances “Jim” Pound.

In 1926, Pound arrested three employees suspected of transporting liquor into the park. Pound was no desk jockey, she carried a sidearm, and in a 1981 oral history interview recalled arresting a pair of robbers with her father, who also worked as a ranger.

Women like Pound and Lindsley were used to working outdoors.

In 1921, the Twin Bridges Independent newspaper wrote of Lindsley: “Friends say the new park ranger is an honest-to-goodness ‘outdoor’ girl, an expert horsewoman and a master of the ‘technique’ of camp life.”

In 1924, according to the book “Women in Wonderland,” Lindsley rode her Harley-Davidson motorcycle from Philadelphia, where she was attending college, to Yellowstone on a 17-day cross-country trip.

By 1926, Yellowstone boasted five women rangers.

Culture shift

Although Yellowstone Superintendent Horace Albright praised Pound’s arrests, work was already underway in the National Park Service to remove women from ranger positions.

Inspectors who visited the park wrote in a report that women were not physically suited to “the arduous duties of a ranger and that the service, which is already under-manned, suffers by the loss of what a qualified man in her place could perform,” according to an NPS history.

In response to the report, Albright said there were no women rangers in Yellowstone doing ranger work, a direct contradiction of his earlier praise of Pound. It was also Albright who hired Lindsley and Wasson.

Albright wasn’t alone in his convictions. George C. Ruhle, park naturalist at Glacier National Park, claimed that “public attitude seems to register against female guides,” according to the NPS article, “Did You Know We Never Hire Women?”

‘Pansy pickers’

In 1927, the secretary of the Interior stated the agency did not want to hire more women until a designation other than “ranger” could be found because that title “has been, for many years, a term associated with vigorous and courageous men of the West, particularly in the field of strenuous police service,” according to the NPS article titled “Protecting the Ranger Image.”

In a 1977 interview, Ruhle said of the 11 naturalists hired at Glacier in the 1930s, seven were football players who were deliberately hired to counter the “effeminate stigma attached to naturalists,” the article noted. That stigma came with nicknames like “pansy pickers and butterfly chasers.”

As the Park Service debated female hires, two magazine profiles and numerous newspaper articles featuring Lindsley were printed. The articles prompted letters to the female park ranger from other women interested in the position. Sensitive to what was going on in the agency, she discouraged them from seeking NPS jobs, the article noted, instead suggesting they work in hotels or camps.

Then in 1928, the Park Service created the ranger-naturalist position as a compromise.

Businesswomen

Watson noted that in addition to the Park Service, women also sought jobs in Yellowstone’s hotels and some even owned early park businesses.

Sisters Anna Pryor and Elizabeth Trischman operated the Pryor Stores, Inc., in Yellowstone from 1932 to 1953 at Mammoth and Canyon. In addition to the store, they also ran a cafeteria and auto camp.

“It was surprising that women actually were pioneers within the concessions area,” Watson said. “The first women in leadership positions were the owners and managers of private concession businesses. They were really the ones who were industrious and helped build up the park and surrounding communities.”

Like Lindsley, Pryor and Trischman grew up in Yellowstone, coming to the park with their parents as youngsters.

Another example of women involved in park businesses was Willie Frances Bronner. She was a single mother who brought her 8-year-old daughter with her for 10 summers starting in 1908, according to the book “National Parks and the Woman’s Voice: A History.”

“Bronner’s day began with kneading a dozen loaves of bread and ended with organizing singing and storytelling for guests around a campfire,” the book noted.

For 20 summers, Beulah Brown Sanford also took part in entertaining guests. While working as manager at Mammoth Camp she was heavily involved in the nighttime entertainment and campfire performances.

In 1925 Sanford compiled a 40-page book of employee-written tunes in “Songs of the Yellowstone Park Camps.” It included the ditty “Camping with the Y.P.C., sang to the tune of Jingle Bells: “Dashing through the Park, in a Ford or motor car, you hurry through the freaks so fast, you can’t tell what they are.”

Female leadership

Although Yellowstone and the Park Service may have struggled in the 1920s with hiring women into positions of authority, that’s not the case now. Of the 13-member leadership team, nine are women, including Morgan Warthin, chief of Public Affairs.

Likewise, at the Heritage Center, 10 of the 12 employees are female.

“We’re within the Resource Management Division,” Watson said, “and there are a lot of female scientists in our division. Our park archaeologist is female. Our park historian is female as well. So the culture is kind of evening out.”

The Yellowstone Heritage and Resource Center protects and conserves a wide variety of museum collections, archives and houses a library. Artifacts include geological specimens, artwork, plants and animal remains.

Public tours are provided in the summer on Wednesdays from 4 to 5 p.m. The information is in the park’s handouts, along with the phone number to call (307-344-2264) to reserve a spot. The tours are limited to small groups.