Rusty, Dusty Road Warriors Carve the Way West Into Montana

BILLINGS, Mont. —  At first glance, the curious pie-shaped wedges were a mystery to newly arrived homesteaders. Dozens of them were strewn in parallel tracks, sometimes for half a mile up the rise from swampy dips in the dirt roads.

It didn’t take long to decipher the slices. They had fallen from the spokes of automobiles heaved up out of thigh-deep gumbo wallows. Wedges, packed between the spokes, dried and compressed, falling in three-cornered clumps in the wagon-rutted trail.

These fresh sodbusters were seeing the signs of a new era passing through. This was the vanguard of motoring pioneers navigating a new route west, one solely for gasoline-powered vehicles.

They would call it the Yellowstone Trail. It would evolve over the next 50 years into our modern interstate.

“They were peering at the future when they saw these early roadsters,” said state highway historian John Axline. “The Yellowstone Trail eventually would go from coast to coast, one of the largest cooperative road-building efforts of the time.”

In Montana, the trail parallels the Northern Pacific Railroad and old U.S. 10, much of which was replaced by today’s interstate.

Jitneys and roadsters weren’t completely foreign to these farmers. Since the first automobile clattered out onto a city street in 1893, thousands had been built. But it wasn’t until 1912, the year the Yellowstone Trail committee first formed, that Henry Ford started his Highland Park assembly line.

His new Model Ts would cost only $250. That sharply contrasted with $1,250 for a new Oldsmobile.

But to see these chugging cars in Montana still was a novelty. Only 500 vehicles were registered in the state in 1906. Even by 1912, when 6,000 motor vehicles were registered, the state was only beginning to confront the topic of roads and roadsters. Places for the growing number of motorists to go were limited in most of the western states.

The good-roads movement, first inspired by bicyclists, became the rallying cry for the gas-powered generation. Motorists wanted to make long-range trips on a regular basis, but the roads to take them didn’t exist in 1912.

“Even when you could drive across a state, you might come to the next state boundary and be staring out into a cornfield,” Alice Ridge said. She and her husband, John, both retired Wisconsin professors, are writing a book about the Yellowstone Trail.

“All these people were getting cars--even the factory workers could afford them--and they wanted to hit the road, except there really wasn’t anyplace to go except in town or near town,” she said. “These were still pretty brittle cars, and the farther you went from the cities, the more brutal the roads.”

All that was about to change. The mud wedges the homesteaders came across were the first sign of that.

The wedges were left behind by a vanguard of visionaries intent on building one seamless strip west from Minneapolis. They called it the Twin Cities-Aberdeen-Yellowstone Park Trail. They also called it the Great Highway of the Northwest and, finally, the Yellowstone Trail.

It would stretch from the Falls of St. Anthony in the Twin Cities to Yellowstone National Park. Its motto was “See America First.” Its insignia was a yellow band with a black arrow pointing the direction.

The idea for what the promoters called “the longest road in the world” came from a meeting of citizens interested in grading just 26 miles between Ipswich and Aberdeen, S.D. But typical of this era of big dreamers and builders, the 26-mile project soon turned into a 1,200-mile dream.

Many of the trail promoters were Chamber of Commerce types eager to capitalize on the western development. But there were also a number of doctors.

“The doctors were the ones who could afford the cars. Doctors also knew how much an automobile would improve their lives and the lives of their patients. In an era of house calls for everything from births to surgeries, a car meant a lot,” Ridge said.

One of those physicians, Dr. H.F. Marsten, organized the expeditionary force of cars sent in 1912 to explore the terrain. The exploratory party returned home by train, their vehicles lashed to flatbeds.

By some accounts, it had been a disastrous journey. “Even the glorious scenery of the Rockies can’t entirely make up for the ruts, chug holes, mud and detours--to say nothing of broken springs or stone-bruised tires,” one motorist wrote.

But most of the trailblazers were undaunted. They used the trip to promote the possibility and promise of the road. They found people all along the way willing to buy into the dream.

The trail’s exploring party accomplished two things: It charted a path for the road from the East and it convinced people in the West how important the road would be to them.

By the end of 1914, the Yellowstone Trail committee--with partisans from towns and cities stretching from Minnesota, South Dakota and North Dakota to Montana--took a customary step forward. They published a book.

It was similar to the literature the railroads distributed to lure homesteaders, but instead of farmers standing in eye-high fields of wheat the photographs showed motorists on sleek gravel roads, eight cars abreast.

The Besaw Hotel in Custer, Mont., and the bulb-lit street of Miles City looked as comfortable and civilized as any eastern metropolis. There were articles about the wonders of nature and the leading citizens in the new western towns. Advertisements told of ready meals, rooms and fuel.

Come, travel, the book begged. “The best long road in the world awaits you, the climate is most bracing, hotel and garage accommodations are unexcelled, water is always near your engine.”

Trail enthusiasts drove the road when it was little more than a rutted cow path, but they still were bursting with optimism. They bragged of the 800 miles “graded the past two years . . . with all steep grades and dangerous places eliminated.”

Even after three years of work, the road was still incomplete. The promoters saw it as one big artery pulsing automobiles. But the artery had to be clear. The promoters knew how to get the job done.

They relied heavily on the towns along the way. Boosters--from land agents to hardware merchants--were happy to sign on as local agents for the Yellowstone Trail, as long as the trail veered their way.

It was the agent’s job to publicize the trail as the moneyed avenue to his town. They formed local committees to help, arguing that the trail meant commerce and an end to isolation.

It was not a desk job for these early boosters. The trail needed grading and gravel. Towns’ main avenues needed sprucing up. To build this road and maintain it, citizens, according to the trail sponsors, “must roll up their sleeves and go to work.” It was a transcontinental public works project, two decades before Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Trail reps solicited townspeople to shovel and sweep the sidewalks and streets. They lobbied county commissions to assess a head tax on the rural newcomers--which could be paid off by labor on the road. And they succeeded in obtaining the services of Montana prison inmates for the biggest chore, clearing rock from some of the toughest miles.

Volunteer labor was counted on more than the convicts. The string of towns along the trail in Montana held annual “Trail Days,” where the citizens mustered for work on the section of road east and west of their towns.

“Nearer to town, those actually were probably better picnics than work efforts,” John Ridge said. “Not too much got done with a shovel and a broom by a town person. But a good deal was done by the farmers. The poor rural landowner couldn’t really afford the tax, so he swapped it out for work. They had the horses and draglines to grade and smooth the roads.”

By 1916, the trail was a passable road in most seasons. But there were navigational problems. The trail could become entangled in a thicket of county roads, hopelessly confusing travelers.

The trail group dealt with that by adopting a distinctive symbol. The trail was marked by circular discs with a yellow band and a black arrow pointing the way.

“Sometimes inside the disc was an L or an R,” Western Heritage curator Kevin Kooistera-Manning said. “The arrow pointed you down the road. The R and L told you when you needed to turn right or left.”

It was primitive, but it worked. John Ridge said his interest in the trail came from his father’s stories about following those simple markers to the park.

“He told me you just rattled along looking for the markers and you’d be OK,” Ridge said.

By 1916, an exodus of tourists loaded up their picnic baskets and prepared for a lark on the road. Towns braced for the impact. As early as the trail came, so too came the ordinances against excessive speed in city limits.

Fromberg, Mont., enacted two ordinances in one night. The first made it illegal for a man to live off the support of a woman; the second imposed an 8-mph speed limit.

But the adventure of speed was only part of the attraction. There was also the pioneer spirit on the trip. Regardless of the hotel accommodations, many travelers preferred to camp.

As Jonathan Raban writes in “Bad Land”: “Motoring in the teens was still a privileged adventure, like small boat navigation, and the capped- and goggled-summer visitors . . . were exotic pioneers.”