1. Harry S Yount was an American Civil War soldier, mountain man, professional hunter and trapper, prospector, wilderness guide and packer, seasonal employee of the United States Department of the Interior, and the first game warden in Yellowstone National Park.
Harry Yount first enlisted for a six-month term in November 1861.
Harry Yount was wounded and taken prisoner by the Confederate States Army in an opening skirmish of the Battle of Pea Ridge in Arkansas in March 1862, and held as a prisoner of war for nearly a month until released in a prisoner exchange.
Harry Yount re-enlisted in August 1862 and served until the end of the war.
Harry Yount was promoted three times and was a company quartermaster sergeant when he was discharged in July 1865.
Harry Yount worked as a hunter and a prospector, and as a bullwhacker for the US Army, in the years following the Civil War.
In 1880, Harry Yount was hired by the United States Secretary of the Interior, Carl Schurz, to be the first gamekeeper in Yellowstone National Park, and during his 14 months in that job wrote two annual reports for Schurz, which were then submitted to Congress.
Harry Yount's reports described the challenges of protecting the wildlife in the first US national park and influenced the culture of the National Park Service, which was founded 35 years later in 1916.
Harry Yount was a prospector during much of the last four decades of his life.
Harry Yount's uncle, George C Yount, was a trapper and explorer who moved on from Missouri to Santa Fe and then to California before Harry's birth.
Ernest Ingersoll wrote that he was born in Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania, and different birth years have been mentioned by various writers, such as the anonymous author of a published biographical sketch who wrote that Yount was born in 1847, and Thomas J Bryant, who interviewed Yount in the latter years of his life and who speculated that 1837 was his birth date in an article published in the Annals of Wyoming, journal of the Wyoming State Historical Society.
However, research undertaken by William R Supernaugh, an employee of the National Park Service, found military enlistment papers, Yount's Army pension file, and the 1840 United States census records, all of which indicate that Yount was born on March 18,1839.
Harry Yount enlisted in the Union Army for a six-month term on November 9,1861, and served in Company F of Phelps' Regiment of the Missouri Infantry.
Harry Yount was wounded in the leg in a skirmish just before the Battle of Pea Ridge began on March 6,1862, and taken prisoner by the Confederates.
Harry Yount was discharged from the Union Army in May 1862.
Harry Yount re-enlisted in Lebanon, Missouri, on August 9,1862, and served as a private in Company H of the 8th Regiment Missouri Volunteer Cavalry, a unit involved in 11 combat engagements during his service.
Harry Yount was discharged in Little Rock, Arkansas, on July 20,1865, after the war had ended.
Harry Yount was later an active member of the Grand Army of the Republic, the post-war organization of veterans of the Union Army.
Harry Yount was killed in a train wreck before their wedding could take place, and he never married.
Harry Yount traveled to Fort Kearny, along the Oregon Trail in Nebraska.
Harry Yount sold buffalo tongues for $1 each to tourists in Cheyenne.
In 1877, Harry Yount was the subject of a magazine profile written by Ernest Ingersoll and published in Appleton's Journal in New York.
Harry Yount would fill a wagon full of freshly killed game, and then sell the meat in towns such as Laramie and Cheyenne.
Harry Yount's eye is open to every beautiful feature of the grand world in which he lives; his heart is alive to all the gentle influences of the original wilderness.
In 1872 or 1873, Harry Yount was hired as a seasonal guide, wrangler and packer for geological survey expeditions with the aim of mapping broad swaths of the Rocky Mountains.
Harry Yount worked for Hayden's expeditions each summer for seven years during the 1870s, in what are now the states of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Wyoming and Colorado.
In 1874, Harry Yount was assigned to hunt for a party led by the geologist Archibald Marvine.
Harry Yount served as the guide in a four-man party that included Eccles, Payot and Wilson.
Wilson was quoted as saying that Harry Yount was clinging to the rock like "a starfish hanging to a breakwater," and that he himself lowered a rope to assist Harry Yount.
Harry Yount was hired as the first gamekeeper for Yellowstone National Park in 1880, at a salary of $1,000 per year, when the park's entire budget was just $15,000 per year.
Harry Yount was appointed by Carl Schurz, the Secretary of the Interior and a former Union Army general, on June 21,1880, and reported for duty at Yellowstone on July 6.
Harry Yount's supervisor was Philetus Norris, the second park superintendent.
Shortly after Harry Yount reported for duty, Harry Yount escorted Schurz and his party on a tour of the park, and then conducted a survey of the park's wildlife.
Harry Yount began constructing a winter camp at the junction of the East Fork of the Yellowstone River and Soda Butte Valley, a location he chose because it allowed for the protection of herds of buffalo and elk against poachers.
Harry Yount submitted his first Report of Gamekeeper on November 25,1880, which was included as Appendix A to the annual report of the Secretary of the Interior.
Harry Yount reported that snow had fallen on 66 of 90 days between December 1880 and February 1881.
Harry Yount described the range and habits of Yellowstone's large mammals and expressed regret for "the unfortunate breakage of my thermometer when it could not be replaced," along with a submitted synopsis of the weather the previous winter.
Harry Yount is "securely positioned in the legend and culture" of the National Park Service, and is considered a figure of "historic proportion".
Harry Yount homesteaded in the area in 1887 but his claim was sold in a sheriff's sale in 1892.
Harry Yount spent nearly 40 years prospecting in the Laramie Mountains, and developed copper and graphite mining claims.
Harry Yount settled in Wheatland, Wyoming, and worked on developing a marble mining claim west of there.
Harry Yount was actively involved in prospecting until the day before his death, when he had been looking for a ride to inspect a possible gold deposit.
Harry Yount was buried in the Lakeview Cemetery in Cheyenne.