Carly's Reviews > A Place Called Yellowstone: The Epic History of the World’s First National Park

My thoughts:

-absolutely insane depth of knowledge on history of Yellowstone, federal land politics/policies, firsthand accounts

-doesn’t always read as a ‘history’ book; you can hear some characters’ inner thoughts and feelings as they go through certain scenes/scenarios

-there are SO MANY NAMES/PEOPLE (could be overwhelming at times)

-cool to learn how so many modern western cities/towns got their names

-I thought the role of indigenous people could have been addressed ~a bit~ more, although it still definitely was addressed. Some of the “mountain men” were married several times to indigenous women or were fluent in native languages and that was kind of swiftly mentioned and could’ve been explained further BUT I get that this wasn’t necessarily the intent of this book. The Nez Perce war had a whole chapter and it did go into some depth. I think it’s just my own curiosity

-it wasn’t always super riveting to me as a whole. I found the first half of the book to be more interesting than the second (the first half is more history/founding/Westward-Ho and the second half is very politics-heavy federal land jargon with animal habitats thrown in)

-would love this author to have teamed up with a map nerd and made some insanely detailed maps. The few black and white ones were fine, but I did enjoy the pictures in the middle

I want to give this 4 or 5 stars for how good this author is and the content itself but for me personally as a read I’ll say 3.