When the Northern Pacific Railroad announced plans to build a branch line to Yellowstone National Park in the early 1880s, the small town of Gardiner quickly emerged as a “wild west” town. Early accounts labeled it “a veritable Shantyville . . . an ideal squatter town, with the rudest houses.” Though the branch line didn’t arrive until 1902, coal mines to the north, gold mines to the south, poachers in the park, and troops at nearby Fort Yellowstone brought a steady stream of men to drink, gamble, and visit prostitutes. General lawlessness ruled until Park County was created in 1887 and county officials hired a constable and built the first Gardiner jail. The jail burned down in 1898 and again Gardiner was without a place to lock up unruly drunks and criminals. The first trains of tourists arrived in Gardiner in summer 1902 to lewd displays. The local newspaper proclaimed, “Monday night there was almost continuous yelling and shooting from midnight to daylight. Women of ill-fame live in the central part of town and exhibit themselves daily on the streets in bedroom wrappers and make a show of themselves in doors and windows on arrival of the train.” Much to some residents’ relief, Gardiner’s sturdy sandstone jail was ready for its first inmates by mid-September 1903. Unchanged today, the interior still holds its original three-cell block and the walls, floor, and ceiling—inscribed with five decades of graffiti—offer the only record of its many short-term occupants.
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In April 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt laid the cornerstone for the Roosevelt Arch, a massive, Rustic style monument that symbolically marked the entrance into Yellowstone National Park. The only such grand entranceway into a national park, the arch was the brainchild of Captain Hiram Chittenden, chief of the U.S. Army Engineers in Yellowstone. Using basalt quarried nearby, stonemasons constructed two fifty-foot towers spanned by a twenty-foot wide arch and flanked by two wing walls. The effect was deliberately rustic: stones were used “with the least possible dressing” to “present as natural an appearance as possible.” The arch greeted the multitude of tourists brought to the North Entrance by the Northern Pacific Railroad. Disembarking from the train, travelers left the station in stagecoaches and later buses. Passing beneath the arch, visitors read the words inscribed in tablets of molded concrete commemorating the park’s purpose: “For the Benefit and Enjoyment of the People” (from the Act creating the park), “Yellowstone National Park,” “Created by Act of Congress March 1, 1872.”
]]>In 1887, Captain Clinton Sears outlined the core dilemma for those involved in the development of Yellowstone National Park: “The National Park is a great national trust, which should be carefully guarded and preserved, while, at the same time, made readily, safely, and cheaply accessible throughout its extent.” Safe, convenient roads designed—as far as possible—to blend with nature reflected the government’s attempt to balance these conflicting goals of access and preservation. The scenic course of the North Entrance Road signals this effort, as does its relatively narrow roadbed and the unobtrusive culverts constructed with stone headwalls so that they blend with the landscape. Such road building was not easy, and the Gardner River canyon presented exceptional challenges. Spring floods annually threatened to wash out the road, and despite construction of retaining walls and drainages, most years in the 1900s and 1910s saw crews removing huge boulders and hundreds of yards of dirt and rock from the roadbed, the result of dry slides from Sliding Hill. The North Entrance Road terminates at park headquarters at Mammoth Hot Springs. It originates at the Roosevelt Arch, an impressive Rustic style entrance gate constructed in 1903 to welcome the throngs of park visitors brought by the Northern Pacific Railroad. Although the railroad is long gone, the Roosevelt Arch still marks the passage into a special place, while the narrow, winding road through the spectacular Gardner River canyon facilitates visitors’ entrance into “Wonderland.”
]]>James Norris (Dick) Randall, “The Man who put the ‘Dude’ in Dude Ranching,” worked as a cowboy before heading to Yellowstone National Park in 1888. There, as a stagecoach driver for tourists, he soon recognized the business potential of outfitting hunting adventures for wealthy easterners and European aristocrats. In 1898, while Dick continued to work as a guide, he and his wife Dora purchased squatters’ rights to this land along Cedar Creek, in the shadow of the Absaroka Mountains. The ranch had a one-room log cabin with a dirt floor and sod roof and a corral. Soon wealthy hunting clients began sending their kids to the OTO to work as cowboys for the summer, the start of the Randalls’ dude ranching business. To accommodate the growing number of guests, the Randalls added to and upgraded their facilities into the 1920s. The new buildings evoked the rugged, frontier West through the use of native materials; a fine example is the 1921 grand lodge, which features a rubblestone foundation and unfinished log walls. The OTO’s consciously rustic style extended beyond its architecture. From 1912 to 1934, the Randalls promised western accommodations and pack trips long enough to give a person “the feel of the mountains.” During the OTO’s heyday, guests escaped the pressures of modern life while enjoying good food, horseback riding, ranch work, and music in the evenings. The Randalls retired in 1934, when former guest Chan Libby took over the operation. The OTO closed permanently in 1939.
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