William Henry Jackson

The Yellowstone survey photographs, 1871 Few photographs have a clearer route to a law. William Henry Jackson travelled with Ferdinand Hayden's federal survey of the Yellowstone region in 1871, and Hayden then lobbied members of Congress with an album of Jackson's pictures. The act creating Yellowstone National Park was signed on 1 March 1872. Jackson's photographs worked alongside Thomas Moran's paintings, and historians differ on how much weight the pictures carried, so the fair claim is that they helped persuade lawmakers that the place was real and worth keeping, not that they did it alone.