In one of the first moves of his second term, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” A few months later, in May 2025, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum signed his own order to implement Trump’s vision in the country’s national parks and monuments.
That summer, the park service posted feedback forms around visitor centers, including at Grand Teton and Yellowstone national parks. The forms asked visitors to report areas that needed repair and improvements. They also asked the public to report content on signs that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.”
The public responded with mostly satire or support for the park service. Of the over 35,000 comments submitted from last June to January, less than 1% focus on negative signs, according to analysis by the Center for Western Priorities. That trend was also apparent in Grand Teton and Yellowstone.
Instead, people advocated for better pay for park rangers and called for more federal resources. Visitors also overwhelmingly supported more comprehensive history at park exhibits.
During the winter closure of Craig Thomas Discovery and Visitor’s Center, the National Park Service removed a sign. It had added context to an exhibit on Gustavus Cheyney Doane, an early surveyor in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Now, visitors lack information on his involvement in a massacre of the Blackfeet in Montana.
The Interior Department denied any connection to Burgum’s order, telling the Jackson Hole News & Guide that signs are regularly removed for maintenance or updates. As of June 1, the sign was still gone.
KHOL’s Jenna McMurtry dove into the sign changes plus the 500 comments submitted between Grand Teton and Yellowstone national parks. She sat down with KHOL’s Sophia Boyd-Fliegel to talk about the silly and the serious.
Sophia Boyd-Fliegel: Why did the feds release the comments? And why now?
Jenna McMurtry: It all stems from a May 2025 order from Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum to align with an earlier order from the president called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” Visitors were encouraged to report repairs, needs for improvement and anything negative about past or present Americans.
So, I filed a records request in the fall to get the responses to the feedback forms for both Yellowstone and Grand Teton. But the Department of the Interior never fulfilled my request.
In the end, we got access to the comments anyway after the Sierra Club won a lawsuit this spring. That forced the feds to release the over 35,000 comments made across all national parks and monuments from June of last summer to January 2026.
For context, over 300 million people visited the parks in the last year.
SBF: So submitted comments made up .01% of visits. What did they write in about?
JM: The comments range from the satirical to the supportive. Some criticize the Trump administration for pulling resources from the national parks. And others show gratitude for the park service. There are personal shout outs for favorite park rangers and calls for the feds to pay rangers better.
In the last year and a half, the park service faced mass firings and a government shutdown. Grand Teton and Yellowstone haven’t seen another round of sweeping cuts, but fear that more are on the way is felt among federal workers.
And then, many commenters also asked for more history, not less. And then there’s about 13% of responses that focus on the practical. Some asked for improvements like cleaner toilets at Grand Teton or better road maintenance.
SBF: Did anyone actually report a sign with information that was “negative about either past or living Americans?”
JM: There was one comment that expressed disappointment in a sign, but here’s what it says:
“I was disappointed in a sign that said, “Be careful, bear in area.” I was careful, but I did not see a bear. I expected to see a bear and was completely let down.”
Another comment seems to joke about the park’s so-called Cathedral Mountain group, saying it “inappropriately disparages Gothic architecture.”
And then there’s another comment that, also apparently in jest, calls the French meaning of Grand Teton offensive. It says, “This mountain range name refers to a woman’s large breasts and is plastered all over every sign in the park, offending my sensibilities.”
SBF: Okay, so not exactly reports on negative depictions of American history.
JM: Right. And overall, there was overwhelming support for the current history exhibits in Grand Teton. Several people even asked for more information, especially when it comes to the tribes that call the Tetons their ancestral homeland. That includes the Eastern Shoshone, Bannock, Blackfeet, Crow, Gros Ventre and Nez Perce nations.
SBF: With all this in mind, has anything actually changed at Grand Teton or Yellowstone?
JM: I haven’t found any reports from Yellowstone. I went to Grand Teton’s visitor centers right after the order came out and again when they reopened this spring. From that, I’ve only known of the removal of one sign.
It’s the same sign that, in January, the Washington Post reported had been removed. That was based on a leaked document.
The sign had additional information on an early settler, Gustavus Cheyney Doane, and told a fuller picture of his past. Without the placard, visitors now miss that Doane had participated in the Marias Massacre of 1870, when the U.S. Army killed 170 Blackfeet women and children. The sign had said that Doane “wrote fondly about the attack and bragged about it for the rest of his life.”
SBF: Is anyone pushing back against that sign’s removal?
JM: Tom Rodgers is an enrolled member of the Blackfeet Nation. His Blackfeet name is One who Rides his Horse East. He’s speaking out against the removal of the sign that had mentioned the violence Doane waged against his ancestors.
He’s also known nationally for being the whistleblower in the Jack Abramoff scandal in the early 2000s (Abramoff was caught overbilling tribes and bribing public officials). These days, he is speaking out against Doane’s past in several national parks.
Tom Rodgers: Gustavus Doane is a War criminal. He is not to be honored and his full history needs to be told. As native people, we are so sick of the myth making of this country. Manifest destiny? That is nothing more than genocide cloaked in the divine.
JM: In 2022, Rodgers helped rename Mount Doane in Yellowstone to First Peoples Mountain after a decade of advocacy.
I also asked the Department of the Interior about its reason for changing the sign. A spokesperson emailed back that several other flagged exhibits will remain unchanged for now, but that the changes intend to “ensure parks tell the full and accurate story of American history, including subjects that were minimized or omitted under the Biden administration.”
Rodgers doesn’t agree that’s what’s going on. And neither does Molly Blake. She’s a co-founder of Save Our Signs, a national movement bringing social science librarians and the park visitors together to track what’s changed.
Molly Blake: We decided to invite the public into the process and have them take pictures of national park signs so that there would be a record of what these signs said, should they be censored or altered.
JM: Since launching last fall, she says citizen historians have sent in over 14,000 pictures across nearly 500 parks and monuments.
SBF: Is anyone going directly to Congress or the Trump administration?
JM: The National Parks Conservation Alliance advocates on behalf of the parks to Congress.
Alan Spears is the senior director for cultural resources. He testified to Congress in February.
Alan Spears: When it comes to American history, we want the full story because yes, we can handle the truth.
JM: Spears is also lobbying to counter what he says is the feds’ attempt to downplay George Washington’s ownership of slaves at Independence National Historic Park. He says remembering negative parts of history in the parks is part of critical thinking and learning from the past.
AS: What we have right now at Grand Teton, Grand Canyon and at Independence Hall in Philadelphia and scores of other sites throughout the national park system is an effort to sanitize American history.
JM: So, we’re seeing that the bulk of comments submitted to the feds are part of this bigger movement resisting the removal of stories from federal spaces.
