When Louis Downing visited Yellowstone National Park in 1911, good roads, comfortable hotels and competent tour guides left little room for adventure. But, as Downing found out, travelers could still get a thrill by taking “Uncle Tom’s Trail” to the base of the Lower Yellowstone Fall.
Most early Yellowstone National Park tourists came from the adjacent territories, because getting to the park was too expensive for those living far away. But a few wealthy adventurers from distant places found the time and money to make the long trip. Hunting, which was perfectly legal until the Army took over administration of Yellowstone Park in 1886, was a prime attraction.
Historian and writer M. Mark Miller recounts how a suspicion about a tribute to a girlfriend lies at the heart of the story behind how Tower Falls in Yellowstone National Park was named.
By the early 1800s, trappers were scouring the Rocky Mountains for beaver. Evidence of their travel is sketchy, but we know that trapper brigades reached the Yellowstone plateau by 1826. An anonymous account of a trapper’s adventures in what is now Yellowstone National Park was published in The Philadelphia Gazette and Advertiser.
How visitors have traveled in Yellowstone and other national parks has tended to reflect the culture and technology of the times. The National Park Service’s collection of historic vehicles in Gardiner, Mont. includes 30 vehicles, ranging from stagecoaches to buses to trucks and even a fire engine.
The collection, believed to be one of the largest of any National Park Service Unit, is not available for viewing by the general public, although the Park Service plans to someday exhibit the collection if funding becomes available.
I ran back a few steps, then turned a caught my breath; for at that very instant, up from the pool which I had just beheld so beautiful and tranquil, there rose on great outburst of sublimity, such a stupendous mass of water as I had never imagined possible in vertical form. I knew that it was boiling and that a deluge of those scalding drops would probably mean death, but I was powerless to move.
Many Yellowstone Park tourists have described places where an angler can catch a fish and cook it in a nearby hot spring without taking it off the hook, but few report actually doing it. Henry J. Winser described performing the feat in his 1883 guide for tourists.
Before completion of the Nothern Pacific’s transcontinental railroad in 1883, many early Yellowstone visitors often came long distances by stagecoach—and that wasn’t always safe. In 1872 a young Englishman named Sidford Hamp, who had spent the summer working on the second Hayden expedition documenting Yellowstone Park, told about a stagecoach robbery in a letter to his mother.
Most of the earliest Yellowstone National Park tourists came from Montana because that’s where the access rivers ran. The north entrance via the Yellowstone River was 60 miles from the farm town of Bozeman, and the west entrance via the Madison was 90 miles from the gold rush town of Virginia City. Both rivers flow through rugged canyons that made travel difficult. In fact, the Madison Canyon was so bad that early travelers chose to cross the continental divide twice to avoid it. But that was a small sacrifice. Passage over the Raynolds and Targhee Passes was relatively easy. Besides, traveling this route provided the reward of a stop at Henry’s Lake.
When the Washburn expedition returned from exploring the upper Yellowstone in 1870, they confirmed the rumors of the wonders there. Interest in the area that is now Yellowstone National Park surged when people learned it really did contain a grand canyon, a giant lake, geysers and petrified forests.
Washburn and his companions returned to civilization in late summer—too late to mount another expedition to the Yellowstone plateau where blizzards could trap travelers in September. But in 1871—a year before the national park was created—a small group of men set off “to see Wonderland.”
Tuesday, June 18, 2013
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