Imagine “wilderness”. Does it evoke tropical jungles? Arid deserts? Thick deciduous forests? The concreteness of these images contradicts the fact that, historically and culturally, resists stable category and definition. Turning to environmental historians Roderick Nash and William Cronon, this project begins by profiling wilderness within a Western context as an entry point into a dialogue about the American national park system mythology, a sanitized and romantic wilderness. Using the writings of John Muir, one of the earliest and most prominent writers of the national parks, this thesis investigates how he suggests a new iteration of wilderness within the national parks. Through varying rhetorical techniques, Muir reimagines wilderness as Edenic and sublime, transforming these places into ones resembling fiction. But how did we get here? This project posits the work of Frank Jay Haynes as an overlooked cause behind this cultural shift in the late 19th century. Evident from the ephemera within the Special Collections library and other archives, Haynes’s expansion of the transportation and tourism infrastructure within Yellowstone and his position as the first official photographer of Yellowstone provided the necessary trappings that would turn these American wildernesses into American playgrounds. Land that used to represent the “last frontier” was now domesticated; framed through the camera lens and train car windows, paying the way for further “domestication” through the writings of Muir. Lastly, this project incorporates creative work through a travelogue essay inspired by Teju Cole’s essay on his travels in the Swiss Alps, “Far Away From Here”.