Marias Pass and the Great Northern Railway

By Editor

Glacier County, Montana, December 1889

The temperature at Marias Pass in December 1889 was somewhere below zero, and John Frank Stevens was alone.

He had sent his Flathead guide, a man named Coonsah, back to the nearest shelter before dark. The pass was close; Stevens was certain of it. He had been working toward it for weeks, following the drainage patterns and the logic of the terrain, and the logic said the Continental Divide crossed here at an elevation lower than any other point between Canada and central New Mexico. The Great Northern Railway needed that pass. James J. Hill, who had built the Great Northern from St. Paul westward across the northern plains without a federal land grant, was pushing his line toward the Pacific, and the Rocky Mountains were in the way. The other northern transcontinentals had crossed the Rockies at passes above 5,500 feet. Hill wanted something lower.

Stevens found it at 5,213 feet.

He spent the night at the summit alone, walking to keep from freezing, because a man who sits down in that cold does not get up again. The temperature dropped through the night and the wind came off the divide and Stevens walked in circles in the dark, and in the morning he was alive and the pass was confirmed. The approach from the east was broad and open, a valley ranging from one to six miles wide, with a grade gentle enough that a railroad could climb it without extensive excavation or rockwork. It was, by the standards of mountain railroading, a gift.

The Great Northern began construction through Marias Pass on August 1, 1890, starting east from Fort Assiniboine. The line followed the Middle Fork of the Flathead River on the western side of the divide and the Two Medicine River drainage on the eastern approach. The grade through the pass was 1 percent, which is to say that for every hundred feet of horizontal distance, the track rose one foot. The Northern Pacific, crossing the Rockies at Mullan Pass to the south, climbed at grades of up to 2.2 percent. The difference mattered enormously in the economics of moving freight.

The pass had been known to the Blackfeet for generations. The Piegan chief Little Dog had described it to Governor Isaac Stevens in 1853, telling him it was a broad, wide-open valley, formerly the main thoroughfare used by the Indians in crossing the mountains. Governor Stevens had pressed on without finding it, and the civilian engineer he sent back to look for it had missed it and crossed at Cut Bank Pass instead, 12 miles to the northwest and 2,637 feet higher. The pass had waited another 36 years for a railroad engineer to walk it in December cold.

James J. Hill completed the Great Northern to Seattle in 1893, two years ahead of schedule and without the federal land grants that had subsidized every other transcontinental railroad. The line through Marias Pass was the key to the route's efficiency. Where the Northern Pacific and the Union Pacific struggled with steep grades that required helper locomotives and slowed freight trains, the Great Northern moved its trains over the divide at a grade that a single locomotive could manage. The operating cost advantage was real and it was permanent.

The pass today carries US Highway 2 and the BNSF Railway's Northern Transcon line, the successor to the Great Northern's main line. Amtrak's Empire Builder crosses the divide here twice daily, eastbound and westbound, the same route that Hill's engineers laid out in 1890. A statue of John Frank Stevens stands at the summit, and a 60-foot obelisk of Montana granite commemorates Theodore Roosevelt, who made Glacier National Park possible in 1910, the same park that the railroad would spend the next two decades promoting to tourists.

Stevens survived the night at Marias Pass and went on to engineer the Panama Canal. He was 35 years old when he walked the summit alone in December 1889, and he knew what he had found before the sun came up.

See also

• Marias Pass, Wikipedia
• John Frank Stevens, Great Northern Railway engineer
• Great Northern Railway (U.S.), James J. Hill's railroad