West Yellowstone

The Rock at the Corner

A rock has marked a corner in West Yellowstone since 1910, when the corner was a hotel stagecoach stop for early Yellowstone visitors.⁵ The town is in Gallatin County, next to the west entrance of the park.^1,4 A Yellowstone History Center marker says that tourism was the town’s main industry in its early years and still is.⁶

Tracks from Ashton, Idaho

In 1905 Union Pacific officials began building a branch line through pine-forested wilderness from Ashton, Idaho, to the western edge of Yellowstone Park.³ As the last tracks were laid in 1907, Samuel P. Eagle, Alex Stuart, Charles Arnet, and L. A. Murray applied for commercial leases, and in response the Forest Service surveyed and platted a six-block townsite.³ The National Register nomination gives a different date, placing the town’s beginnings in June 1908, when the Forest Service surveyed the site.⁴ Charles Arnet opened the Yellowstone Store and the first post office.⁴ Privately owned businesses did well serving crowds of park tourists, whom stagecoaches carried between the railway and the park.³ According to the nomination, the town soon became a permanent settlement that lasted year-round.⁴ A Union Pacific pylon was built and dedicated in 1910 to mark the completion of the railroad terminus, and it carries two cement shields of the 1904-1912 Union Pacific logo on a base of welded tuff.⁷ The newly created U.S. Forest Service borrowed the same shield in 1905, and the agency still uses it.⁷

The 1909 Depot and Underwood’s Dining Lodge

The 1909 Union Pacific Depot mixes Richardsonian Romanesque elements with rustic exposed wood and hood-like roofs, and the state marker says the Union Pacific Engineering Office designed it.³ The National Register nomination gives a different account: Gilbert Underwood designed the depot in 1907, and it was built in 1909.⁸ The nomination records that the depot has been the West Yellowstone Museum since 1972.⁸ The state marker says that in 1925 Gilbert Stanley Underwood drew plans for a new dining lodge and employee dormitories in the naturalistic Rustic style adopted by the National Park Service.³ The nomination says Underwood was called back to West Yellowstone in 1922, and it lists a building that his firm designed that year and the Union Pacific built in 1924.⁸ The foundations, walls, chimneys, and fireplaces were built of stone gathered along the railway line, which one marker calls native rhyolite and the other calls welded tuff.^1,3 The nomination also lists a water tower about 50 feet high, built in 1909-1910, and a building put up in 1918 to house two diesel generators.⁸ The railroad buildings, put up between 1905 and 1927, have survived severe weather, major fires, rebuilding, and expansion.³

Pierman’s Tent and the Madison Hotel

In 1910 the Forest Service gave Jess Pierman a special-use permit to build a hotel and restaurant, and guests stayed in a large tent until the present hotel was being built in the fall of 1912.⁹ Doll Bartlett began cooking for Pierman in 1910 and saved much of her ten-dollar weekly paycheck, while her husband Roxy drove the stage between Monida and West Yellowstone.⁹ The Bartletts saved enough to buy the business and ran it until Roxy died in the 1920s, after which Doll ran the hotel with her second husband, George Pickup.⁹ The hotel added fourteen rooms in 1921 and a bar and dance floor soon after, though it had no running water until the 1930s, and President Harding stayed there in 1923.⁹ The marker calls the Madison the only hotel left from the period when tourism was just beginning.⁹

Snowbound Until the Spring Campaign

Before 1936 the roads out of West Yellowstone were not plowed in winter, and once snow closed the railroad, the tracks were not cleared until about the end of March.⁶ The reopening was called the Spring Campaign, and on that day school let out and the town held a grand party.⁶ In winter, postmasters made a two-day round trip over Targhee Pass on skis or by dog sled every week to ten days to get mail from the Sherwood Store near Henry’s Lake in Idaho, and in 1933 the first winter air service gave residents a new way to send and receive mail.⁶ The mail plane landed on skis, and the pilot also brought milk, which was rare in winter.⁶ In 1939 the Federal Writers’ Project guide recorded 300 people at an altitude of 6,665 feet and thousands of visitors each summer, arriving by the Union Pacific, by automobile, and by plane from Great Falls or Salt Lake City.² The same guide described the town in winter as abandoned and snowbound, with many of its shops boarded up.²