The Great Highway of the Northwest: The Yellowstone Trail

By editor

Greycliff, Sweet Grass County, Montana

When a man in the early 20th century told you he was going to drive all the way across the United States, from Plymouth Rock to Puget Sound, folks might have thought he was either a lunatic or a pioneer of some new-fangled contraption. Automobiles were still the province of the impatient rich or the particularly reckless. Roads, as a general rule, were not roads at all, but rather tracks where mud and dust took turns making travel a matter of brute endurance. Yet, against all odds, a group of businessmen and enthusiasts set about carving a path for these new horseless carriages. They called it the Yellowstone Trail. And in Montana, this trail was not just a line on a map but a lifeline threading its way through the Yellowstone Valley.

The Yellowstone Trail was one of the first transcontinental automobile routes officially marked and promoted in America. It was organized in 1912 by a coalition of businessmen from South Dakota, Minnesota, and Montana who saw the future in good roads. To them, better roads meant better towns, and better towns meant more money in the bank. Before the federal highway system gave us numbered routes, travelers had to navigate by the names these promoters slapped on their roads -- the Lincoln Highway, the National Old Trails Road, and the Yellowstone Trail among them.

Now, the Yellowstone Trail was no small ambition. It extended from Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts, crossed the northern states, and ended at Puget Sound in Washington. Montana’s segment alone stretched about 800 miles, winding through the state’s varied terrain and connecting communities that often depended as much on the road as on the railroad for their prosperity.

Motoring in Montana in those days was an adventure of the highest order. The road was less a smooth surface and more a challenge to one’s patience and mechanical skill. The summers brought choking dust, the rains turned the roads into quagmires that could swallow an axle, and winters locked them under snowdrifts. Yet the Yellowstone Trail Association (YTA), formed to promote this route, insisted that the trail was ready for the respectable tourist.

“Don’t be afraid to tour Montana,” advised the First Year Book of the Twin Cities-Aberdeen-Yellowstone Park Trail in 1914. “You can sleep in a perfectly good bed, with clean linen, each night if you desire, and have a tub bath in the morning. You will have no hair-line drives to make, narrowly escape no yawning precipices, or be compelled to undergo any unusual hardships.”

One imagines that the tourists who read that might have been a bit skeptical. After all, in 1914, “good roads” in Montana often meant a patchwork of county-maintained gravel and dirt paths, sometimes no better than a cattle trail in disguise. But the boosters were relentless. The 1919 Yellowstone Trail Route Folder doubled down on the friendly hospitality angle: “The Yellowstone Valley road is usually a splendid one, and the people of this section will be found to be the most cordial in the world. The tourist will find many free campgrounds, and cordial good-fellowship everywhere.”

The Yellowstone Trail Association did more than just print brochures. They painted chrome yellow arrows on trees and poles to mark the route, a color choice that reportedly came about because yellow was the most visible color to drivers and happened to be the state color of Montana. The YTA also appointed “Trail men” -- local businessmen who acted as informal guides and helpers to travelers. These men were expected to keep the road passable, sometimes organizing local volunteer “Trail Days” to repair washouts or clear debris. It was a grassroots effort, and in some places it worked better than others.

For towns like Greycliff in Sweet Grass County, the Yellowstone Trail was a serious economic proposition. The railroad had long been the king of transportation and commerce in Montana, but the trail offered a new avenue for growth. Tourists and travelers meant money spent on lodging, food, repairs, and supplies. For small communities, a good road could mean the difference between survival and obscurity.

Yet the reality on the ground often failed to match the sunny promises. Roads were subject to the whims of weather and local economies. Funding for maintenance was patchy, and some counties were more diligent than others. The 1912 formation of the Yellowstone Trail Association was a sign that private initiative was necessary because government investment lagged. The federal government did not yet have a comprehensive highway program. It wasn’t until 1926 that Montana’s segment of the Yellowstone Trail was absorbed into the U.S. Highway system as U.S. Highway 10, which later became part of Interstate 90.

The trail was a product of its time, reflecting the optimism and entrepreneurial spirit of the early automobile age. It also reflected the peculiar realities of the American West, where vast distances, scarce populations, and harsh conditions combined to make any road-building project a formidable challenge.

One local booster, whose name history has kindly preserved, was William A. Clark, the Montana copper magnate and U.S. Senator. Though more famous for his opulent lifestyle and political machinations, Clark was among the early advocates of better roads in Montana, seeing them as crucial to the development of mining towns and agricultural markets alike. As he once remarked in a speech to the Montana legislature in 1913, “Without roads fit for the modern age, our vast resources lie idle, and our people remain isolated. The Yellowstone Trail is more than a road; it is a pathway to prosperity.”

By the 1920s, as automobile ownership expanded, the Yellowstone Trail had helped to transform the way Montanans thought about distance and travel. It brought a measure of connectedness to a state often thought of as remote and rugged. The trail also helped to lay the groundwork for the modern highway system, linking small towns to larger cities, and the state to the nation.

Still, even as the Yellowstone Trail faded into the numbered highways and interstates that replaced it, the spirit of those early road builders and promoters lingered. They had taken a wild idea -- that a good road could cross the continent and bring progress in its wake -- and made it real.

So, the next time you find yourself driving through the Yellowstone Valley, on what is now Interstate 90, spare a thought for those tireless “Trail men” and the chrome yellow arrows that once guided hopeful drivers across dusty plains and muddy ruts. For all the fanfare and folly, they helped put Montana on the map of the motor age, one rough mile at a time.

See also

• The Great Highway of the Northwest at Billings, Yellowstone County
• The Iron Horse Comes to Billings at Billings, Yellowstone County
• The Cattle Drive of 1866 at Big Timber, Sweet Grass County