Coulson and Boothill: The Town the Railroad Killed

Before Billings existed, there was Coulson. Founded in eighteen seventy-seven on the north bank of the Yellowstone River, Coulson was a steamboat landing and supply point, the kind of rough-hewn town that appears wherever commerce requires a place to stop. It had a hotel, a sawmill, stores, a post office, and enough saloons to keep the peace in its own complicated way. The townspeople had named it after the Coulson Steamboat Packet Company, hoping to profit from river traffic moving through the valley.

They had not counted on the railroad. In eighteen eighty-two, the Northern Pacific surveyors chose a line that bypassed Coulson in favor of flat ground a mile to the west. The new town of Billings was born, and Coulson began dying immediately. Buildings were dismantled and hauled to the new townsite. By eighteen eighty-five, Coulson was essentially gone, leaving behind only its cemetery on the rimrock edge, which locals called Boothill, because so many of its occupants had gone to their deaths with their boots on.

About thirty-five people from Coulson were identified as buried there, though a recent ground-penetrating study suggests the true number could be well over a hundred. Gunfighters, soldiers, railroad workers, and settlers of various fortunes are all represented. One of the most documented burials is H.M. Muggins Taylor, a scout who carried news of the disaster at the Little Bighorn in the summer of eighteen seventy-six to Fort Ellis near Bozeman, and who later served as Coulson's deputy sheriff.

The city of Billings acquired the site in the nineteen twenties, and it has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since nineteen seventy-nine. It is a quiet place now, looking out over a city that exists precisely because Coulson did not survive.