Gardiner Before It Got Respectable

In the eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties, Gardiner had a reputation that preceded it. The town sat just outside a federal park boundary on land where federal jurisdiction was limited, and it served as the supply point for soldiers stationed at Fort Yellowstone inside the park and for miners working the hills north of town. That combination produced a community known for drinking, gambling, and the other enterprises that followed soldiers and miners wherever they gathered.

The town had saloons on every corner and a tolerance for behavior that would have caused trouble in more settled communities. Visitors arriving from eastern cities to tour the grand geysers would stop in Gardiner for their first night and sometimes receive an introduction to frontier life that the railroad's promotional literature had not prepared them for. The park superintendent and the Army commanders at Mammoth Hot Springs regarded Gardiner with a wariness that their official correspondence made little effort to conceal.

The wildness was not permanent. As Yellowstone became a mainstream American tourist destination, and as the automobile gradually transformed the gateway community from a rough frontier outpost into a service town for middle-class families on vacation, the character of Gardiner moderated. The rough edge never disappeared entirely. The town retained something of its frontier directness into the twentieth century, a quality difficult to name but easy to recognize, the sense of a place that had not entirely forgotten what it was before the national park made it respectable. That quality still marks the town today, in the directness of its residents and the no-frills practicality of its infrastructure.