The Stories of Yellowstone by Mark M. Miller

Author:Mark M. Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781493016945
Publisher: TwoDot

PART 7:TRAVELING ON LAND

INTRODUCTION

Improvements in transportation transformed the Yellowstone experience.

The area that is now Yellowstone Park has undergone several transportation revolutions since it was discovered by Euro-Americans early in the nineteenth century. At first visitors had to traverse a roadless wilderness marked only by game trails that often were blocked by dead-fallen trees strewn like spilled Tinker Toys. But today travel is easy.

At first it was hard to get to the park, because there were no roads leading there. As talk of setting the area aside as a national park intensified in the early 1870s, entrepreneurs solved that problem. Businessmen from Bozeman, Montana, built a road from there to Mammoth Hot Springs, while their counterparts in Virginia City extended an existing road from Henry’s Lake to the Lower Geyser Basin. In 1880 the park superintendent built the first road across the park between Mammoth and the Lower Geyser Basin.

In 1883, railroads began delivering tourists to the edge of the park. When the US Army took over administration of the park in 1886, they began building roads. The army engineer said park roads should be the best in America and made that so. Soon comfortable carriages pulled by four-horse teams were speeding tourists from site to site on a five-day tour.

In the 1890s the good roads began attracting “wheelmen,” as bicyclists called themselves. By the dawn of the twentieth century, motorists were clamoring for admission to the park, but people feared that the noisy contraptions would scare horses and wildlife, so the park superintendent banned them. Although the ban remained in place until 1915, a few cars did get in by accident or contrivance.

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