Yellowstone National Park is located in Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana. It is a special place, which preserves the natural beauty of the Rocky Mountains and serves as a shelter for all kinds of wildlife. It also has unusual features like geysers — natural fountains of water coming up from deep in the earth — and it sits on top of a gigantic volcano.
President U.S. Grant created the park in 1872 after an explorer named Ferdinand Hayden surveyed the region and reported on its great beauty and the many geysers there. He urged the President that this land was special and should be set aside for all future generations of Americans to enjoy. This was the first time ever in history, anywhere in the world, that a country set aside a part of its land to be a national park, open to everyone, and kept preserved in a way that would let people appreciate nature. Today there are over 400 parts of the country set aside as national parks in the United States, and almost every country in the rest of the world has copied Mr. Hayden’s idea and created their own national parks.
The Sixty-Second Patriot series of posts is intended to provide teachers who are required to engage in patriotic exercises with truthful, age-appropriate, meaningful, educationally-rich, non-controversial, secular alternatives to rote recital of the Pledge of Allegiance, as well as brief meditations on American history, civics, and values accessible to all people. Suggestions and contributions to this series from Readers are welcome.
