The lake was variously named by its early visitors. The Hillman party which discovered it named it Deep Blue Lake on the spot. Later it was known as Lake Mystery, Lake Majesty, and Hole in the Ground. A party from Jacksonville named it Crater Lake on August 4, 1869.
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YELLOWSTONE, A VOLCANIC INTERLUDE
The Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, Northwestern Wyoming. Area, 3,348 Square Miles
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John Coulter's story of hot springs at the upper waters of the Yellowstone River was laughed at by the public of 1810. Jim Bridger's account of the geysers in the thirties made his national reputation as a liar. Warren Angus Ferris's description of the Upper Geyser Basin was received in 1842 in unbelieving silence. Later explorers who sought the Yellowstone to test the truth of these tales thought it wholesome to keep their findings to themselves, as magazines and newspapers refused to publish their accounts and lecturers were stoned in the streets as impostors. It required the authority of the semiofficial Washburn-Langford expedition of 1869 to establish credence.
The original appeal of the Yellowstone, that to wonder, remains its most popular appeal to-day, though science has dissipated mystery these many years. Many visitors, I am persuaded, enjoy the wonder of it more even than the spectacle. I have heard people refuse to listen to the explanation of geyser action lest it lessen their pleasure in Old Faithful. I confess to moods in which I want to see the blue flames and smell the brimstone which Jim Bridger described so eloquently. There are places where it is not hard to imagine both.
For many years the uncanny wonders of a dying volcanic region absorbed the public mind to the exclusion of all else in the Yellowstone neighborhood, which Congress, principally in consequence of these wonders, made a national park in 1872. Yet all the time it possessed two other elements of distinction which a later period regards as equal to the volcanic phenomena; elements, in fact, of such distinction that either one alone, without the geysers, would have warranted the reservation of so striking a region for a national park. One of these is the valley of the Yellowstone River with its spectacular waterfalls and its colorful canyon. The other is its population of wild animals which, in 1872, probably was as large and may have been larger than to-day's. Yet little was heard of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone in those days, although Moran's celebrated painting, now in the Capitol at Washington, helped influence Congress to make it a national park; and so little did the wild animals figure in the calculations of the period that they were not even protected in the national park until 1894, when hunting had reduced the buffalo to twenty-five animals.