ABSTRACT
The Campfire Pageant, an important ritual in America's public religion, 1 was first celebrated in 1922, fifty years after Yellowstone was established as the first national park and it continued to be celebrated into the 1960s. An elaborate pageant reenacted the 1870 Washburn-Doan expedition's exploration of the Yellowstone area. In one version these leading citizens of Wyoming and the Montana territory sat around the campfire one evening, thinking of all the wonders they had seen and the experiences of the sublime that had overwhelmed them. And then their conversation turned, as one might expect of enterprising nineteenth-century community leaders, to considering the profit that might be made by making this land of wonders a tourist attraction. One of them asserted that a region of this grandeur should be set aside for all the people and managed by their government. Although one fellow protested that this sounded like socialism, the others all agreed, and thus was born, according to the story, the idea of the national parks. The play ended, “There is nothing more American than the term ‘Our National Parks.’” 2
