Images of the West

In 1874 a Bozeman entrepreneur named Zack Root purchased an old stagecoach and announced twice weekly service from Bozeman to Mammoth Hot Springs. One of Root’s customers that summer was Sarah Tracy, a young Bozeman matron. Mrs. Tracy said of Yankee Jim’s harrowing road on the canyon above the Yellowstone River “it fairly made one shudder to ride over it in a four-horse stagecoach.”

At Mammoth, Mrs. Tracy said, “We drove up to the Hotel with a grand flourish of the four-horse whip, bringing the landlord and the guests to the door to meet us.” Her phrasing suggests that the coach drew upon an imposing structure, but actually the “hotel” was a log house 25 by 35 feet with a dirt roof built by two prospector businessmen.

Taking the lead from entrepreneurs like Sawtell and Bottler, in 1871, Harry Horr and James McCartney took out 160-acre homesteads near Mammoth Hot Springs and built the first hotel in the park, a one-story, sod-covered cabin. But the hotel did have hot and cold running water — a stream of 150-degree water ran on one side of the cabin, and another of 40 degrees on the other. By the time Ferdinand Hayden’s expedition arrived at Mammoth in the summer of 1871, he was surprised to find the hotel, bathhouses, and a number of invalids there to bathe in the “curative” waters. Also in 1871 Mathew McGuirk built a cottage and a crude log bathhouse below Mammoth Springs and began advertising “McGuirk Medicinal Springs.” In an era when hot water was usually warmed on a wood stove, few people knew the luxury of a long hot bath. Given the palliative benefits of a good soak, it’s no wonder that McGuirk’s customers believed the curative properties of Mammoth Springs’ waters.

Mrs. Tracy said she paid $20 a week for room and board, and enjoyed “three hearty meals a day. She also paid $5 dollars for twice-daily baths in tin tubs that “nature had coated over with a beautiful white coating making them the rival of the modern porcelain ones.”

During the 1870s most Yellowstone travelers were of two types: pioneers from the surrounding territories like Mrs. Tracy, and dignitaries who had the money and time to travel. The Earl of Dunraven, an Irish lord who also toured Yellowstone in 1874, said the hotel at Mammoth didn’t live up to “the gorgeous descriptions contained in the advertisements in the Helena and Virginia City newspapers.” The only merit he saw was that it was “the last outpost of civilization, that is, the last place where whiskey is sold.”

Mrs. Tracy and Lord Dunraven represented what became a general pattern in evaluation of park hotels. Locals were content with rustic accommodations but visitors from afar said they were substandard.

Developments at the grand geysers came later than those at Mammoth. In 1879 George Marshall got a contract to carry mail between Virginia City and Mammoth Hot Springs. He built a small hotel on the Firehole River near the Lower Geyser Basin and started the Marshall and Goff Stage to travel the route. Marshall’s first customers were Robert and Carrie Strahorn. Robert was a newspaperman and scout for the Union Pacific Railroad. Carrie was an adventurous woman who accompanied her husband on his travels and wrote about their Yellowstone adventures in her 1911 book, Fifteen Thousand Miles by Stage.

After an idyllic stay at Henry’s Lake, the Strahorns took the stage to the Lower Geyser Basin. They arrived after dark and went to bed without seeing a geyser, Mrs. Strahorn said “with a twinge of disappointment.” It was the next morning before she could describe the hotel. She noted that the hotel was unfinished and “chinks between the logs allowed the rigorous October breezes to fan us.” But the Strahorns became friends with Marshal and his wife Sara, and Carrie was lavish in her praise of them as hosts and guides.

In 1883 the Northern Pacific Railroad completed its transcontinental route across Montana and built a spur to Cinnabar just south of Gardiner. This fact helped increase visitation to Yellowstone from 300 in 1872 to 5,000 in 1883 according to National Park Service archives. Suddenly Yellowstone Park was accessible to the middle classes and that brought changes.

That August, 58-year-old schoolteacher Margaret Cruikshank took the new train from her home in Minneapolis. Although she enjoyed the natural wonders, Miss Cruikshank said her guidebooks were far too lavish in praising the park, and she was quick to condemn the accommodations. She said she reached Marshall’s Hotel after a “monotonous day’s journey. She complained that the hotel loft had half-high burlap partitions that provided guests with dark and stifling little cubbyholes. She allowed that the bedding may have been clean, but speculated that “they had covered every teamster in the valley.”

“Marshall’s must go,” was her summary evaluation.