Marias Pass Obelisk

By editor

East Glacier Park, Glacier County, Montana

If you want to hide a mountain pass from the United States government, the best way to do it is to tell them exactly where it is.

The Blackfeet Indians knew about Marias Pass for centuries. They called it the "broad, wide open valley" where a man could walk across the Continental Divide without breaking a sweat. In 1805, Meriwether Lewis heard rumors of it, but he was too busy being chased by grizzly bears to go looking for it. In 1853, Isaac Stevens, the governor of Washington Territory, was told exactly where it was by a Blackfeet chief named Little Dog. Stevens sent an engineer named Abiel Tinkham to find it. Tinkham marched right past the lowest, easiest crossing in the northern Rockies and instead dragged himself over a miserable, freezing goat-path twelve miles to the north.

For the next thirty-six years, the United States government, the United States Army, and every railroad baron in the country looked for Marias Pass. They could not find it. It was the geographical equivalent of losing your spectacles while they are sitting on your nose.

It finally took a stubborn railroad engineer named John Frank Stevens to find the thing, and he had to do it in December of 1889, in weather that would make a polar bear reconsider its life choices.

Stevens was working for James J. Hill, the empire-builder who was trying to push the Great Northern Railway to the Pacific. Hill needed a low pass, and he needed it badly. Stevens hired a Flathead guide named Coonsah, who had been hiding out in Browning, and the two of them set off into the frozen teeth of the Rockies. Coonsah, showing excellent judgment, eventually decided that freezing to death for a railroad company was a poor career move. He built a fire, sat down, and refused to go any further.

Stevens went on alone. He floundered through the snowdrifts until he found a broad, gentle saddle in the mountains. He walked back and forth across it, watching the water drain east toward the Atlantic and west toward the Pacific. He had found Marias Pass. It was only 5,213 feet high, a mere speed bump by Rocky Mountain standards.

Because it was forty degrees below zero, Stevens could not build a fire without burning down the entire forest, so he spent the night walking back and forth in a trench he had kicked in the snow, just to keep his blood moving. He survived, the Great Northern Railway got its low pass, and today you can ride the Amtrak Empire Builder right over the spot where Stevens nearly froze to death.

If you drive up U.S. Highway 2 today, you will find a monument at the summit. But it is not a monument to John Frank Stevens, or to Coonsah, or to Little Dog, or to the Blackfeet who knew the pass was there all along.

It is a sixty-foot granite obelisk dedicated to Theodore Roosevelt.

Now, Theodore Roosevelt was a fine man, and he did a great deal for the conservation of American forests, but he had about as much to do with discovering Marias Pass as Julius Caesar did. The monument was authorized by Congress in 1930, originally planned as a grand archway over the highway. They eventually settled on an obelisk, sinking it nineteen feet into the ground and covering it with seven-inch slabs of Montana granite. Eleanor Roosevelt even came out to put a copper box in the cornerstone.

There is a statue of John Frank Stevens nearby, looking suitably cold and determined, but it is entirely dwarfed by the Roosevelt obelisk. It is a perfect piece of American history: the man who actually did the freezing and the walking gets a nice bronze statue, while the politician who came along later gets a sixty-foot granite needle.

But the pass itself does not care about monuments. It remains what it has always been: the lowest, easiest crack in the great stone wall of the continent, waiting patiently for the next person to come along and claim they discovered it.

See also

• Marias Pass Obelisk at East Glacier Park, Glacier County (Erected by Forest Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture)
• The Lewis Overthrust Fault and Marias Pass, detailing the geology of the pass
• Trains, Trails, and Chalets, covering the Great Northern Railway's impact on the region