Gallatin Gateway ...

One more post today about the Milwaukee Road, and its Montana passenger service.

 All of Montana's transcontinental railroad routes heavily advertised the state as a summer vacation destination in the early twentieth century, evoking Old West images of cowboys and Indians, along with the more contemporary lure of Montana's great National Parks. The Milwaukee was at a definite disadvantage in the latter category, since its mainline route was over 100 miles away from Yellowstone, while its competitors both served one of the parks directly. But that didn't stop them from trying.

Attempting to compete in the Yellowstone travel market, the Milwaukee in 1927 constructed a handsome railroad hotel in a little branch line town named Salesville, in the Gallatin Valley southwest of Bozeman. The hotel was named the "Gallatin Gateway Inn," and the town supported the venture by renaming itself Gallatin Gateway, too. Passengers could travel to the Inn on Milwaukee trains, and then board buses for the long, scenic drive up the Gallatin Canyon to West Yellowstone.

As a finishing touch to this massive promotional effort, the Milwaukee also constructed an actual Gateway, south of their hotel near the mouth of Gallatin Canyon. The imposing, pergola-like structure was a local landmark, and gave the Milwaukee's passengers a sense of arrival on their vacation.

Unfortunately, the Milwaukee's Gallatin Gateway venture was less than successful overall, and the log "gateway" itself apparently survived only a few years. I know that nowadays the Montana DOT would never approve of such a thing, but wouldn't it be cool if a big log gateway still spanned US 191 at the mouth of Gallatin Canyon?

National Parks Airways ...

Here's a wonderful old sticker issued by a company called National Parks Airways, probably the first commercial airline to operate in Montana. NPA began carrying passengers and mail between Salt Lake and Great Falls in 1928, stopping in Butte and Helena along the way. For a time in the 1930s, the airline lived up to its name by detouring its flights via West Yellowstone in the summer, landing at a little grassy airstrip right at the edge of town.

The airline's later stickers employed a flying-eagle logo, but the Native American iconography on this one is very cool, I think.

Cute little bears ...

Though the Union Pacific is one of the West's largest railroads, it barely enters Montana ... just a line from Idaho up to Silver Bow, and a now-abandoned branch into West Yellowstone. The latter line was only open in the summertime, and was built specifically to bring tourists to Yellowstone Park. It was by far the most popular rail route to Yellowstone.

For close to 40 years, the UP promoted its Yellowstone service with a series of clever, annual drawings featuring cartoon-like bear cubs, mostly drawn by an Omaha artist named Walter Oehlre. The theme was continued in other promotional materials, as well ... things like luggage stickers and children's' dining-car menus. It was definitely one of the most appealing of railroad advertising programs.

I'm trying to locate a digitized copy of one of the Oehrle ads, but they're surprisingly hard to find. Here's an ad that predates that era, but shows the beginnings of the theme. It's from 1912, and reveals that, at least for a little while, someone in the UP's advertising department thought that West Yellowstone was in Wyoming!

Cooke City ...

I've always liked the little town of Cooke City, up in the mountains near the Northeast Entrance to Yellowstone Park. It's a quirky old place, and probably has been ever since it was founded as a mining camp back in 1882. Today, it exists mostly on the tourist trade -- Yellowstone visitors, hunters, and snowmobilers -- and has a year-round population of maybe 100 or so. In some ways it's probably the most remote town in the state, especially in the winter, when the only road access involves a long drive through Yellowstone Park. The place is isolated from the Montana road network year-round ... you have to drive through Wyoming in order to get there.

Here's an old photograph of Cooke City from the Haynes photo collection ... probably taken in the 1920s or so, before the Beartooth Pass road was built and the tourists started showing up.

A complaint ...

Those of you who know me in person know that I'm inclined to complain every once in a while ... and well, I want to air a complaint today.

My post about The Big Sky mentioned Montana's long history of tourism promotion slogans, and I confess I'm perfectly happy with some of the old ones -- "Land of Shining Mountains," for example, is pretty hard to beat. Nonetheless, the state tourism folks somehow feel the need to invent new slogans every once in a while. The current one being hyped by Travel Montana is "There's Nothing There," which has apparently been getting good reviews from advertising guys ... though it just makes my eyes roll.

The thing that I really want to complain about, though, is this: a big chunk of the current Montana ad campaign focuses on Yellowstone, as in the sample below. Travel Montana has been doing this for years, blithely ignoring the fact that the Yellowstone photos they use are all shot in Wyoming! In fact, roughly 96 percent of the park is in Wyoming ... making ads like this seem pretty disingenuous at best. It's embarrassing for the state, I think, and if I were a Wyomingite I'd be a little ticked off.

Besides, we don't need Yellowstone! The real Montana is way cooler, anyway.

Laughing through disaster ...

The Yellowstone earthquake of 1959 was one of Montana's greatest natural disasters, and it was also perhaps the biggest news story of mid-twentieth century Montana. Most of the reportage, of course, was both dramatic and poignant, recounting the harrowing stories of quake survivors and rescuers.

One exception came from Dan Valentine, a very well-known columnist for the Salt Lake Tribune. Valentine wrote a daily piece called "Nothing Serious" from 1950 till the early 1980s, each one filled with sentimental quips and a banal sense of humor that was thoroughly beloved by Tribune readers. Here's how he started his piece about the Yellowstone earthquake, which was published on August 20, 1959:

Even sudden disaster can’t stop American laughter . . . even crushing catastrophe that strikes in a spilt second can’t dull the American sense of humor.

A California woman, Mrs. James Pridgeon, was in the center of the Yellowstone earthquake. She stopped off in Salt Lake City Wednesday with some light side notes on the shattering quake.

Mrs. Pridgeon, her husband and son were in a cabin near the Old Faithful Inn when the quake hit Monday evening.

“There was a roar and a rolling,” she said, “then there was a deathly quiet . . . the next thing I heard was the high-pitched voice of a woman in a cabin across the way who yelled to her husband, ‘Henry get up, there’s a bear outside shaking the cabin.’ ”

The rest of the column was more of the same nonsense, and ended with a line that was as telling of 1959 American sensibilities as any could be:

How could Russia ever defeat a people who can laugh and joke through an earthquake?

Earthquake ...

Another anniversary: fifty years ago last night, at 11:37 P.M., a massive earthquake took place in the upper Madison River Canyon in far southwestern Montana. The quake killed at least 28 people, and caused one of the largest landslides in the region's recorded history. Many of the victims were campers who were buried forever by the slide, which dammed the Madison River and created Quake Lake.

Dozens of other campers were trapped in the canyon for a terrifying night, the town of Ennis was evacuated, and the lives of thousands of others were disrupted. A number of buildings were destroyed, and Highway 287 was rendered impassible by the damage.

Of the many photographs of the quake and its aftermath, I think this remains one of the most evocative. Taken for the U.S. Geological Survey not long after the quake, it shows the shredded remains of Highway 287 through the canyon.