Fred Bottler came to Montana over the Bozeman Trail in 1865, moving circa 1868 to the Upper Yellowstone, where he and brother Phil claimed 320 acres. Fred was a commercial hunter, supplying thousands of wolf pelts and elk hides to the New York market. An avid explorer who claimed to have visited Yellowstone’s Fire Hole Basin in 1866, Fred also served as guide and hunter for the 1872 Hayden Expedition. This is his fifth documented residence on the ranch, his share of which grew to over 1,700 acres. The first house was a primitive bachelor shanty. Early guidebooks described Fred’s second residence, the 1874 two-story frame hotel where he lived with mother Catherine and two brothers, as the “last abode of civilization.” Opened to serve Yellowstone Park visitors, the hotel prospered until the 1883 completion of a railroad line from Bozeman to Gardiner. In 1880 Fred married Josie Shorthill and the couple, seeking privacy, built the tidy log cabin where their two children were born. When the federal government banned most hunting in the park in 1883, Fred and Josie turned to sheep ranching; in 1893 they built a grand twenty-one-room Victorian mansion as a testament to their success. After a fire destroyed that home in 1904, they rebuilt on a more modest but still elegant scale. The gable-front-and-wing, “Free Classic” Queen Anne style residence features the jumble of rooflines typical of the Queen Anne style and the boxed cornices and minimalist detailing found in Neoclassical style homes.
]]>Nestled between dramatic cliffs and the Yellowstone River, this collection of buildings catered to the tourist trade between Livingston and Yellowstone National Park. Local entrepreneur John Hepburn came to Montana in 1888 and worked for many years in America’s first national park. In 1906, he filed a homestead claim nearby and ranched until the early 1920s. Hepburn began developing this property in the mid-1930s, crafting the buildings to look like the handiwork of early pioneers. The half-log house doubled as a roadside museum and residence. Hepburn and his son, Ralph, erected a windmill and installed a generator to provide power. Electric windmills were common in early Montana rural homesteads, but this is one of the last intact systems of its kind. Five generations of Hepburns lived at this homestead using wind-generated electricity for light bulbs and other appliances designed for twenty-four volts. John Hepburn again used the wind when he built a unique wind-powered polisher to finish geological specimens he sold to museum visitors. For over two decades, tourists and local school children regularly visited Hepburn’s museum, marveling at its eclectic collection of rare geological specimens, fossils (including a petrified turtle), Native American artifacts, historical photographs, and items that told the story of Yellowstone Park and the upper Yellowstone Valley. When Hepburn died in 1959, the museum closed and his family dispersed the collections to other area museums. Today, the John Hepburn Place offers a rare illustration of the rural use of wind power and is a unique souvenir of Montana’s early tourism industry.
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