Thomas Moran was an English-born American landscape painter, born in Bolton in 1837, who died in 1926. In 1871 he went to Yellowstone with a government survey as its artist, and the watercolors he brought back helped persuade Congress to create the first national park. His giant canvas The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone was then bought by Congress for 10,000 dollars and hung in the Capitol.
He is often called the painter who saved Yellowstone. The story is true in outline, but the order of events is not the one most people repeat.
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In 1870 Moran was drawing for Scribner's Monthly in New York. The magazine was preparing an article on the Yellowstone country by Nathaniel Langford, and Moran made fourteen illustrations for it. He had never seen a single place he drew.
The next year he went. The financier Jay Cooke, whose Northern Pacific Railroad hoped to carry tourists west, and Scribner's each paid half of his way, and he won a last-minute place on Ferdinand Hayden's government survey beside the photographer William Henry Jackson. In the field he sketched and painted in watercolor at more than thirty sites.
Those sketches and Jackson's photographs went to Washington, where Hayden showed them to members of Congress and to President Grant. Grant signed the bill creating the park on 1 March 1872. Moran's great oil painting was not finished until weeks later. Congress did not buy a picture that had persuaded it. It bought a picture of a place it had just protected.
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