Kbudz

Kbudz t1_iz28vcl wrote

"The Origins of the Yellowstone River" is one of the only verified and authentic native stories of the region. A Northern Shoshone man named Ralph Dixey told a version of it, and it was collected in 1953 by folklorist Ella E. Clark. Other than this story, there is little reliable info or documentation on legends, myths, or other native folklore about Yellowstone.

I highly recommend "Tales from America's National Parks: Campfire Stories" edited by Dave and Ilyssa Kyu. It touches on 6 national parks and has a section on Yellowstone but mentions native folklore and stories from each park which the editors said were hard to come by as someone else mentioned here that a lot of native stories were told by word and not recorded.

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Kbudz t1_iz27fds wrote

In "Tales from America's National Parks: Campfire Stories" it is mentioned that historians agree that the fear story was a myth. They suggest that natives may have deliberately stayed quiet about Yellowstone.

Although there are 26 native tribes associated with Yellowstone, their stories are absent from the records of European explorers. William Clark, of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, surmised that the natives were afraid of the geysers- an assumption now widely believed to be absurdly false. More likely is that the natives were intentionally not telling the Europeans about their sacred lands.

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