See America First: Glacier Park and the Great Northern Railway

By Editor

Glacier National Park, Montana, 1910-1940

The mountains above the Flathead Valley rise in walls of argillite and limestone that were laid down at the bottom of a shallow sea more than a billion years ago, and they have been waiting ever since for someone to notice them. The glaciers that carved the cirques and hanging valleys and the long, cold lakes are themselves ancient beyond any human reckoning, and the beargrass and the huckleberry and the mountain goats that pick their way along the ridgelines are part of a community of life so intricate and so old that a man passing through on a train can barely begin to comprehend it.

The Great Northern Railway reached Marias Pass in 1891, and from that point forward the mountains were no longer remote. The railroad ran along the southern edge of what would become Glacier National Park, and the passengers who pressed their faces to the windows of the Empire Builder could see the peaks rising above the valley in the particular blue light of a Montana morning, and some of them wanted to get off the train and walk among those peaks, and the railroad was prepared to accommodate them.

Louis Hill, the son of James J. Hill who had built the Great Northern, understood that the mountains were an asset. He lobbied Congress to establish Glacier National Park, which was created in 1910. He then built the infrastructure to bring visitors into it: the Glacier Park Hotel near the east entrance, the Many Glacier Hotel on the shore of Swiftcurrent Lake, the Lake McDonald Lodge on the western side, and a network of tent camps and chalets connected by trails that allowed visitors to travel through the park on horseback from camp to camp. The railroad's advertising slogan was "See America First," and the mountains of Glacier were the primary exhibit.

The hotels Hill built were grand in the way that the mountains themselves are grand, which is to say that they were large enough to suggest that the humans who built them understood the scale of what surrounded them. The Glacier Park Hotel, which the Blackfeet called the Big Tree Lodge because of the enormous Douglas fir logs that supported its lobby ceiling, opened in 1913. The Many Glacier Hotel, set against the face of the Grinnell Glacier and reflected in the waters of Swiftcurrent Lake, opened in 1915. These were not modest accommodations. They were statements about what the railroad believed the mountains deserved.

The Empire Builder passenger train, named for James J. Hill himself, ran from Chicago to Seattle through Glacier country. It was one of the premier passenger trains in North America, and its route through the park, with the mountains rising on both sides of the track as it crossed the Continental Divide at Marias Pass, was among the most spectacular rail journeys on the continent. The train ran through country where the peaks were still covered in snow in July, where the streams ran cold and clear from glaciers that had been forming and retreating since the last ice age, where the light on the rock faces changed from moment to moment as the clouds moved across the sky.

The glaciers themselves, which gave the park its name, were already retreating when the railroad arrived. The warming that had been underway since the end of the Little Ice Age was reducing them year by year, and the scientists who came to study them understood that they were watching something that could not be reversed. The railroad's promotional literature did not mention this. It showed the glaciers in their full extent, blue and white against the gray rock, and invited visitors to come and see them while they lasted, though it did not phrase it quite that way.

The mountains do not require promotion. They have been there for a billion years, and they will be there when the railroad's hotels are dust and the promotional literature is forgotten. But the railroad brought people to see them who would not otherwise have come, and some of those people came to love them, and some of those who loved them worked to protect them, and that is not nothing.

See also

• Glacier National Park, history and establishment
• Empire Builder (train), the Great Northern's flagship passenger service
• Glacier Park Hotel, the Great Northern's flagship hotel
• Many Glacier Hotel, the crown jewel of the park hotel system