If this is Thursday it must be postcards, 677

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tower Fall, Yellowstone National Park

 

This unused postcard features a photograph of Tower Fall by Steve Hinch and is a Yellowstone Forever product.  The number 45 appears on the center line on the reverse.  At the upper left is a blurb:  “Yellowstone National Park  The mist from the waters of 132 foot Tower Fall gives birth to a rainbow.  A member of the Washburn Party of 1870 described the fall in his diary:  ‘Campt near the most beautiful falls—I ever saw—I named them ‘Tower falls’ from the towers and pinnacles that surround them’.” 

 

When we visited Yellowstone National Park earlier this summer we were in the western part of the park and did not see these falls which are located in the northeastern section.  However, the card shows some of the beauty and wild nature of the region. 

 

There were two expeditions to Yellowstone prior to its being designated as a national park.  The first was the Cook-Folsom-Peterson Expedition that took place in September 1869.  This was a privately financed expedition carried out by David E. Folsom, Charles W. Cook, and William Peterson of Diamond City, Montana.  They spent one day, 15 September, in the Tower Fall area before crossing the river and traveling up the Lamar River, an eastern tributary fork of the Yellowstone River the next day. The second expedition was almost a year later, in August of 1870, led by Henry D. Washburn and Nathaniel P. Langford, with a U.S. Army escort headed by Lt. Gustavus C. Doane for a total of 18 members in the group.  They followed the general route that Cook-Folsom-Peterson had taken the year before.  Both groups kept journals and made maps during the expeditions. 

 

Following the first expedition, Folsom went to work for Washburn as a surveyor.  One of the members of the second group was Judge Cornelius Hedges who was a Montana writer and lawyer who wrote articles for a Helena, Montana newspaper describing where they went and what they saw.  Hedges was a vocal supporter of preserving the Yellowstone region as a National Park. 

 

For more information, including photos and a journal excerpt, see:

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_Fall

https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/lamar-river.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamar_River

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cook%E2%80%93Folsom%E2%80%93Peterson_Expedition

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washburn%E2%80%93Langford%E2%80%93Doane_Expedition