For readers of Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Signature of All Things, and Hope Jahren’s Lab Girl, Diane Smith’s warmhearted and award-winning epistolary novel about a spunky young woman who joins a makeshift field study in Yellowstone National Park at the end of the nineteenth century “I loved this book in a way that I haven’t loved a book in some time.” —James Welch, author of Fools Crow In the spring of 1898, A. E. (Alexandria) Bartram—a spirited young woman with a love for botany—is invited to join a field study in Yellowstone National Park. The study’s leader, a mild-mannered professor from Montana, assumes she is a man, and is less than pleased to discover the truth. Once the scientists overcome the shock of having a woman on their team, they forge ahead on a summer of adventure, forming an enlightening web of relationships as they move from Mammoth Hot Springs to a camp high in the backcountry. But as they make their way collecting amid Yellowstone’s beauty, the group is splintered by differing views on science, nature, and economics. Brimming with humor, excitement, and the romance of the Yellowstone landscape, Letters from Yellowstone is a love letter to the joys of scientific discovery and America’s majestic natural beauty, as well as a thoughtful reflection on environmentalism, Native American displacement, and feminism at the dawn of a new century.

Letters from Yellowstone: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

Smith, Diane

United States

Penguin??Books

A group of people who still carry wounds from the Civil War heads West in 1876, after the Battle of Little Bighorn, on an expedition to a dinosaur fossil dig, in a story narrated through the reminiscences of scientific illustrator Eleanor Peterson. By the author of Letters from Yellowstone. Reprint. 25,000 first printing.

Pictures from an Expedition

In 1898, a young Cornell medical student joins a field study in Yellowstone National Park and describes in a series of letters her relationships with fellow naturalists who had expected a male colleague, her experiences, and her encounters with a colorful assortment of characters.

Letters from Yellowstone

Contemporary

Demco Media

A group of people who still carry wounds from the Civil War head West in 1876, after the Battle of Little Bighorn, on an expedition to a dinosaur fossil dig, in a story narrated through the reminiscences of scientific illustrator Eleanor Peterson. 22,500 first printing.

Viking Adult

In 1898, a young Cornell medical student joins a Smithsonian-sponsored field study in Yellowstone National Park and describes in a series of letters her relationships with fellow naturalists who had expected a male colleague, her experiences, and her encounters with a colorful assortment of characters. A first novel.

In the winter of 1996–97, state and federal authorities shot or shipped to slaughter more than 1,100 Yellowstone National Park bison. Since that time, thousands more have been killed or hazed back into the park, as wildlife managers struggle to accommodate an animal that does not recognize man-made borders.Tensions over the hunting and preservation of the bison, an animal sacred to many Native Americans and an icon of the American West, are at least as old as the nation's first national park. Established in 1872, in part “to protect against the wanton destruction of the fish and game,” Yellowstone has from the first been dedicated to preserving wildlife along with the park’s other natural wonders. The Smithsonian Institution, itself founded in 1848, viewed the park’s resources as critical to its own mission, looking to Yellowstone for specimens to augment its natural history collections, and later to stock the National Zoo. How this relationship developed around the conservation and display of American wildlife, with these two distinct organizations coming to mirror one another, is the little-known story Diane Smith tells in Yellowstone and the Smithsonian.Even before its founding as a national park, and well before the creation of the National Park Service in 1916, the Yellowstone region served as a source of specimens for scientists centered in Washington, D.C. Tracing the Yellowstone-Washington reciprocity to the earliest government-sponsored exploration of the region, Smith provides background and context for many of the practices, such as animal transfers and captive breeding, pursued a century later by a new generation of conservation biologists. She shows how Yellowstone, through its relationship with the Smithsonian, the National Museum, and ultimately the National Zoo, helped elevate the iconic nature of representative wildlife of the American West, particularly bison. Her book helps all of us, not least of all historians and biologists, to better understand the wildlife management and conservation policies that followed.

Yellowstone and the Smithsonian: Centers of Wildlife Conservation

History

Americas

University Press of Kansas

The Naturalists

Womens Press

Positively Connecticut

Seventy stories of people living in Connecticut taken from the weekly news segment "Positively Connecticut" on WTNH-TV

UNKNO

Travel

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Smith, Diane. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Smith, Diane

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Smith, Diane. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Letters from Yellowstone: A Novel

Pictures from an Expedition

Letters from Yellowstone

Pictures from an Expedition

Letters from Yellowstone

Yellowstone and the Smithsonian: Centers of Wildlife Conservation

Yellowstone and the Smithsonian: Centers of Wildlife Conservation

The Naturalists

Positively Connecticut

Positively Connecticut