Thomas Moran was an English-born American landscape painter. He was born in Bolton, England, on February 12, 1837, and died in Santa Barbara, California, on August 25, 1926.
In 1871 he went to Yellowstone with a government survey, and the watercolors he brought back helped persuade Congress to create the first national park.
Congress then bought his giant canvas The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone for 10,000 dollars and hung it in the Capitol, the building in Washington where it meets.
He is often called the painter who saved Yellowstone. The story holds in outline, but the order of events is not the one most people repeat.
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It begins with pictures of a place Moran had never visited. In 1870 he was drawing for Scribner's Monthly in New York, which was preparing an article on the Yellowstone country by Nathaniel Langford, a member of the expedition that had just explored it.
He made fourteen illustrations for that article, and none of them showed a place he had seen with his own eyes.
The next year he went to see the region for himself. The financier Jay Cooke, whose Northern Pacific Railroad hoped to carry tourists west, paid half of his way, and Scribner's paid the rest.
Cooke's influence also won him a last-minute place on the government survey led by Ferdinand Hayden, alongside the photographer William Henry Jackson. In the field he sketched and painted in watercolor at more than thirty sites.
Back in Washington, Hayden showed those sketches and Jackson's photographs to members of Congress and to President Ulysses S. Grant, who signed the bill creating the park on March 1, 1872.
The large oil of the canyon came later. Moran finished it only after the bill was signed, and the view on that canvas was not quite the one he had stood in front of.
From Bolton to Philadelphia
Moran's road to Yellowstone had started far from any wilderness, in Bolton, a Lancashire mill town where both his parents were handloom weavers. What finally carried him west was not a brush but a trade he learned as a boy.
What You'll Discover
Where a mill-town boy learned his trade.
Who shared his camp.
What he said of the Grand Canyon.
What he changed on a holy mountain.
Who the second artist in the house was.