Cinnabar: The Ghost Town That Was Gardiner's Front Door

Three miles north of Gardiner, on the benchland above the Yellowstone River, there is nothing left of a town called Cinnabar. It was the railroad's closest approach to Yellowstone for twenty years, and when the tracks finally reached Gardiner in nineteen oh three, Cinnabar ceased to have a reason to exist.

The Northern Pacific Railway completed its Park Branch Line from Livingston to Cinnabar in the fall of eighteen eighty-three, making it the first rail access to Yellowstone National Park. The choice of Cinnabar as terminus was not entirely voluntary. Land disputes near Gardiner prevented the railroad from pushing its tracks those final three miles to the park boundary. So Cinnabar became the end of the line, and for twenty years tourists would disembark there, climb into stagecoaches, and ride the last stretch to Gardiner and through the north entrance. The arrangement was workable but awkward, and Cinnabar grew into a genuine railroad town with hotels, saloons, and the full supporting cast of businesses that followed tracks wherever they stopped.

When the Northern Pacific finally resolved the land disputes and extended its branch line to Gardiner in nineteen oh three, the practical reason for Cinnabar's existence vanished. The station closed, the businesses relocated or shut down, and the buildings were dismantled or left to the weather. At the railroad branch's peak in the summer of nineteen twenty-five, more than seventeen thousand annual passengers used the line. The last scheduled passenger service ran in nineteen forty-eight. The location of Cinnabar is visible from the road north of Gardiner, a flat terrace above the river with nothing on it.