Izaak Walton Inn

By editor

Essex, Flathead County, Montana, April 2026

The Great Northern Railway had a problem that no amount of engineering could fully solve, and that problem was winter. The railroad's transcontinental main line crossed the Continental Divide at Marias Pass, elevation 5,216 feet, threading through a stretch of the Rocky Mountains that the people who work there now call Avalanche Alley with the casual familiarity of people who have seen what the name describes. Each winter, the snow came down the slopes in quantities that made the railroad's operations a daily negotiation with gravity, and the men who kept the line open lived in conditions that would have discouraged a more comfortable class of employee.

For years, those men slept in abandoned railcars and wall tents. Essex, the nearest settlement, had a permanent population of about 150 people, which was not enough to provide boarding for sixty additional workers who arrived each winter to fight the snow between Essex and East Glacier. The workers petitioned the railroad. They petitioned again. The railroad, which was not in the habit of spending money on worker comfort unless the alternative was worse, eventually concluded that the alternative was worse. In 1939, the Great Northern built a twenty-nine-bedroom structure on its standard pattern for a division hotel, at a cost of forty thousand dollars, and named it for a man who had been dead for two hundred and fifty-six years.

Izaak Walton was an English author who published "The Compleat Angler" in 1653, which is a book about fishing that is also, depending on how you read it, a book about the proper conduct of a life. Walton was not a famous man in the way that generals and politicians are famous; he was famous in the way that a man becomes famous when he writes something that people keep reading for three centuries because it tells them something true about patience and rivers and the value of a quiet afternoon. Fishermen across the English-speaking world had been calling themselves "disciples of Izaak Walton" for generations, and the Izaak Walton League of America, founded in 1922, was one of the country's first conservation organizations. When the Great Northern Railway changed the name of the Essex station to "Walton" in January 1926, the stated reason was that "fish abound near the station," which is the kind of explanation that is technically accurate and entirely beside the point.

The point was that James J. Hill's son Louis had spent years marketing Glacier National Park as the "American Alps" and the "Little Switzerland of America," and the Great Northern had built its lodges and chalets in the Tudor Revival style to reinforce the comparison. A hotel named for a famous English fisherman fit the aesthetic program. The Addison-Miller Company of St. Paul, Minnesota, built and leased the structure, which opened on November 15, 1939, and was proclaimed to be "modern in every detail." The ground floor had a lobby, a fireplace, a newsstand, a kitchen and dining room, and four master bedrooms with private baths. The second floor had sixteen spacious rooms. The third floor housed the staff. The building was Craftsman in style, which was a departure from the Tudor Revival of the park lodges, but it was solid and functional and warm, which was what sixty men sleeping in railcars had been asking for.

The railroad workers who moved into the new hotel were employed in two distinct operations. The snow removal gangs fought the avalanches and drifts that came down from the slopes above the tracks. The helper-engine crews managed the grade. Eastbound trains, loaded with freight and climbing toward the Continental Divide, needed additional locomotives to make it over the pass. The helper engines were coupled on at Essex, pushed the train up to the summit, and then returned to wait for the next one. Westbound trains, descending from the pass, had their helper engines removed at Essex before the grade became too steep for braking to manage comfortably. The yard at Essex was, in the language of railroading, a helper station, and the men who worked it understood the pass in the way that people understand a thing they have fought with every winter for years.

The coincidences between the inn and its namesake's English cottage are numerous enough to suggest either fate or a very thorough researcher. The original Izaak Walton cottage in Shallowford, Staffordshire, was built in the Tudor style, as the inn was built in the Tudor Revival style. A railroad was constructed through the property of the English cottage, as the Great Northern ran past the Montana inn. The English cottage caught fire twice from sparks thrown by passing steam locomotives, in 1927 and again in 1938. The previous hotel and beanery at Essex burned to the ground in 1935, four years before the inn was built to replace it. Whether anyone at the Great Northern Railway noticed these parallels when they named the station and the hotel is not recorded, but the parallels are there for anyone who cares to look.

The inn has been in continuous use since 1939. The Great Northern Railway became the Burlington Northern in 1970, and Burlington Northern became BNSF in 1995, and the trains still run through Essex on their way over Marias Pass, and the helper engines are still coupled on and removed at the yard, and the snow still comes down the slopes in winter, and the men who clear the tracks still need somewhere warm to sleep. The inn serves them, as it has always served them, alongside the tourists who come for the fishing and the skiing and the proximity to Glacier National Park and the pleasure of sleeping in a building that has been doing exactly what it was built to do for more than eighty years.

Izaak Walton wrote, in "The Compleat Angler," that "God never did make a more calm, quiet, innocent recreation than angling." He was writing about fishing, but the sentiment applies reasonably well to a winter evening in a Craftsman-style inn at the edge of Glacier National Park, with a fire in the lobby and a train going past outside and sixty feet of snow on the slopes above the tracks.

See also

• Izaak Walton Inn at Essex, Flathead County (Montana Historical Society, erected 2024)
• Izaak Walton Inn Historic Site at Essex, Flathead County (Montana Historical Society)
• Essex, Montana -- Great Northern Railway helper station, Flathead County