That evening by the campfire, Doane made the following entry in his journal:
The view from the summit is beyond all adequate description…Filling the whole field of vision, and with its boundaries in the verge of the horizon, lies the great volcanic basin of the Yellowstone. Nearly circular in form, from 50 to 75 miles in diameter…a single glance at the Interior slopes of the ranges shows that…the great basin has been formerly one vast crater of a now extinct volcano.
Doane was not the first to notice this. In 1805, the first American governor of the Louisiana Territory sent a roughly drawn map on animal skin to President Thomas Jefferson that identified the presence of a “volcano” near the vicinity of the modern-day park. But Doane’s report was the first published and credible account describing Yellowstone as a caldera: the colossal crater left behind after a massive volcanic eruption. His observations were confirmed a year later by Dr. Ferdinand Hayden, the leader and namesake of the 1871 Yellowstone Expedition:
The basin has been called by some travelers the vast crater of an ancient volcano…Indeed the geysers and hot springs of this region, at the present time, are nothing more than…the escape-pipes or vents for those internal forces which once were so active, but are now continually dying out.
Though both men were generally correct, they each made one glaring error. The volcanic and other geologic forces lying beneath Yellowstone were anything but “extinct” or “dying out.” On the contrary, they were—and continue to be—very much alive.
Back at the Old Faithful Recreation Hall, the audience applauded the newly announced Miss Yellowstone 1959. At 11:37 p.m., a sudden violent rumbling shuddered through the building. The beauty pageant came to an abrupt halt as the ground began to shake, timbers creaked, and wall hangings fell and shattered on the floor.
Some 500 panicked tourists rushed for the doors. Outside, Old Faithful and other geysers throughout the Lower Geyser Basin— some of them dormant for decades—began erupting all at once. At the Old Faithful Inn, water pipes broke and spurted. People in bathrobes climbed out of windows, and the stone chimney in the dining room collapsed to the floor. Visitors piled into cars and frantically tried to escape. But with rockslides closing the road to West Yellowstone, cars soon clogged the roads in all other directions, snaking toward the north and south park exits.