Images of the West

IN THE DECADE BEFORE THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT CREATED THE WORLD’S FIRST NATIONAL PARK, AMBITIOUS MEN FLOODED INTO MONTANA. They came to find gold, but settled into other businesses instead. After the Washburn Expedition of 1870, word spread about the wonders of the area, these former fortune hunters anticipated a lucrative tourist trade and began building roads, hotels, and stagecoach lines.

One of these bold men was Gilman Sawtell, a blue-eyed blond who came West after the Civil War. After spending some time prospecting in 1866, he settled at Henry’s lake in eastern Idaho about 15 miles west of the present West Yellowstone.

Sawtell’s main business was harvesting and selling trout — as many as 40,000 of them a year. To make his commercial fish business work, Sawtell had to keep his product fresh and haul it quickly to market. So he built a road to the closest market, Virginia City, 90 miles away. Sawtell sawed blocks of ice from the lake in winter and stored them in a thick-walled icehouse he built of logs. He harvested fish until he had enough to fill his wagon, packed them in ice and hauled them to market.

While launching this enterprise, Sawtell built a veritable village. By 1871 he had six well-built log buildings: a residence, a blacksmith shop, a stable, a storage shed for skins and game, and his icehouse. Sawtell apparently had guests in mind when he built his compound. His whitewashed house was big enough to accommodate 20 people and had numerous bedsteads, stools, and tables. He kept enough stoneware to feed that many. Sawtell’s road and his location a day’s ride from the Lower Geyser Basin made his ranch an ideal stopover for travelers going to see the geysers.

Nobody knows when Sawtell began visiting Yellowstone, but he was telling stories about geysers by the mid-1860s and reports of his stories leave no doubt about what he saw. One traveler who heard his tales as a little girl said:

My fairy books could not equal such wonderful tales. Fountains of boiling water, crystal clear, thrown hundreds of feet in the air only to fall back into pools of their own forming; pools of water within whose limpid depths tints of various rainbows were reflected; mounds and terraces of gaily colored sand.

In 1871 Sawtell guided a group of men from Virginia City and Deer Lodge on a tour that covered the geyser basins, Yellowstone Lake, and the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. Because of that trip, Sawtell is credited with being the first commercial Yellowstone guide.

A chronicler of that trip, Calvin Clause wrote that after having a meal at Sawtell’s, the party “unanimously voted that we christen it the Hotel de Sawtell.”

Beginning with the Washburn Expedition of 1870 and continuing for the next two decades many early travelers tell of spending several happy days at Sawtell’s. Although Sawtell was sometimes absent because of threats from nearby Bannack Indians, guests made themselves at home. One group of young men spent a frigid night sleeping on a layer of sawdust that covered blocks of ice in the icehouse, but people were generally comfortable in the snug buildings. They could borrow Sawtell’s boats to fish or hunt water birds on the 8-mile lake, or hunt big game in the nearby mountains.

While Sawtell was building a business at Henry’s Lake, another pioneer was doing the same near the north entrance to Yellowstone Park. In 1868 after the Fort Laramie Treaty forced the Crow Indians to cede their claims north and west of the Yellowstone River, Fred Bottler decided to settle in the Paradise Valley on the Yellowstone River north of the park.

When Bottler was unloading his plow near the mouth of Trail Creek, he saw a group of Crow braves practicing maneuvers across the Yellowstone River. He put the plow back on his wagon moved further south to a spot across the valley from where miners worked their claims in Emigrant Gulch. The miners not only deterred the Indians, they also provided a ready market for Bottler’s produce.