Welcome to Hamilton Ranch

By editor

Jackson, Beaverhead County, Montana

If you want to build a road across the Rocky Mountains, the first thing you need is a government appropriation. The second thing you need is a surveyor with a transit and a plumb bob. The third thing you need is a gang of men with picks and shovels.

Or, if you are in a hurry, you can just follow the buffalo.

The buffalo, being heavy and entirely devoid of romantic imagination, always take the path of least resistance. The Indians, being practical people who preferred not to walk up vertical cliffs if they could avoid it, followed the buffalo. And Captain William Clark, being a practical man who preferred not to freeze to death in the snow if he could avoid it, followed the Indians.

On July 8, 1806, Clark was hurrying east through the Big Hole Valley, trying to get back to the canoes he had sunk in the Beaverhead River the previous summer. He was traveling through what is now the Hamilton Ranch, a piece of Beaverhead County real estate that currently supports more cattle than people, which is generally the mark of a civilized neighborhood.

Clark looked at the trail beneath his horse's hooves and wrote in his journal: "The road which we have traveled from travellers rest Creek to this place an excellent road. and with only a few trees being cut out of the way would be an excellent waggon road."

He was standing at 7,460 feet above sea level, looking at a path worn into the dirt by generations of hooves and moccasins, and he was already imagining the wagons. It is the great American reflex. You cannot look at a piece of empty geography without immediately calculating how to fill it up with commerce.

The road was indeed excellent. It was so excellent that fifty years later, when the gold strikes hit at Bannack, the stagecoaches used the exact same route. The Hamilton Ranch, sitting conveniently at the foot of the pass, became a stage stop. If you were bouncing along in a Concord coach, eating dust and wondering if the driver was sober, the sight of the ranch meant you were going to survive the day.

Today, Highway 278 runs right over the top of it all. You can drive it in an hour, with the air conditioning on, listening to the radio. But if you pull over at the marker and look closely at the ground, you can still see the ghosts of the old pathways cutting through the sagebrush.

The buffalo are gone, and the stagecoaches are gone, and Captain Clark is gone. But the road is still there. It turns out that when you let a two-thousand-pound animal do your surveying for you, the results tend to last.

See also

• Welcome to Hamilton Ranch at Jackson, Beaverhead County (Erected by Montana State University (Bozeman), Bureau of Land Management, Montana Stockgrowers Association)
• "The Carroll Ranch", detailing the ranch's later history as a stage stop
• Undaunted Stewardship, covering modern conservation efforts on the property