A Nation’s Attention to the Northern Rockies 96 pages

As we enter a new century, the country is interested in protecting a million acres of wilderness. Glacier National Park is created.

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stream in the park wilderness. A competent taxidermist in Whitefish secured a muskrat pelt and did an artistic job of using it as a coat for a large rainbow trout. A photographer on the railway company’s staff took a picture of this queer fish and it appeared in newspapers from one end of the country to the other. ⁷

   Glacier National Park is to be kept in its pristine state in 1910, yet is to be opened for recreation and public development. “The virtual impossibility of administering a national park, while adhering to these contradictory objectives is obvious.”⁸ The dictionary defines pristine as uncorrupted by civilization. Initially, William R. Logan is actually not the Superintendent of Glacier National Park instead his title is Superintendent of Road and Trail Construction.⁹ “In 1910, he became acting superintendent in charge of the construction of roads and trails, later inspector-in-charge, and on April 1, 1911, the first superintendent of Glacier Park.”¹⁰

    William Logan appoints Haney Vaught in 1910 to be the first Chief Ranger overseeing six rangers to protect Glacier National Park. Vaught’s responsibility includes covering the Lake-Belton area.¹¹

    Henry Hutchings from the Bureau of Indian Affairs becomes the clerk for Logan. “They were to preserve resources for the enjoyment of future generations.”¹² Louis Hill commissions the construction of nine chalets and the Glacier Park Hotel in 1910. The Hotel will be located outside the boundaries of Glacier National Park.

   A phone call from Joe Heimes, “Our only contact with the outside world was the phone and that system went through Canada. I called the Canadian Belly River station…to Waterton Park, to Mountain View, to Cardston, to Lethbridge, and to Shelby, Montana, to Browning, to East Glacier, to Belton, and finally to the Park.”¹³

   A private citizen, Edward Hines, has hand-painted white lines to indicate traffic lanes on River Road near his home in Trenton, Michigan in 1911. These lines will be just the beginning for what is to become common practice

The Old West is being left behind and Going to the Sun Highway is built.

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east-west highway intersected two existing scenic highways at Browning-the ‘Y-G Beeline,’ a popular route linking Yellowstone and Glacier Parks, and the 6000 mile National Park to Park Highway, which connected 12 National Parks and numerous National Forests and Indian reservations across the West.”¹⁹ The Montana State Highway Commission is created March 22, 1921. They set a speed limit of 35mph for highways and for town driving at 12mph.

…the manufacture of flour having rapidly approached the status of one of the state’s leading industries and Great Falls being the chief wheat grinding center between Minneapolis and the Pacific coast. Two of the largest mills in the Northwest are operating here, the plant of the Royal Milling Company having a capacity of 3,600 barrels a day and the mill operated by the Montana Flour Mills Company having a rated capacity of 2,500 barrels daily. ²⁰

   There is very little irrigation in the Flathead Valley in 1921 as the water supply is abundant and the soil is very productive. J. Ross Eakin becomes Glacier National Park Superintendent from May 12, 1921 to January 8, 1924.

   The first $100,000 is appropriated to the Transmountain Road in 1921. Construction begins at Lake McDonald as hotel owner John Lewis is completing the road as far as his hotel this year.

   Minneapolis has been known as ‘The Flour Capital of the World’ until the end of WWI. Travelers numbering 500,000 utilize Minnesota auto camps in 1922.

   On May 19, 1922, Montana’s first radio station in Great Falls, KDYS, begins broadcasting.

   Written in 1922 “satisfying the desire to wander through its charmed area without having to think of any time limit except that set by the changing of the seasons.”²¹

   Louis Hill persuades the National Park Service to construct a trail route over Red Gap Pass to the Belly River country in the early 1920s. Prohibition ends in Canada in 1923 and auto camps begin charging a fee. “To further aid....