Gardiner, Montana

Gardiner is where Yellowstone begins, and it has been since the park opened. The town was established in eighteen eighty at the park's north entrance on the Yellowstone River, and from the beginning its purpose was getting visitors into Wonderland. The Northern Pacific Railway extended its branch line to Gardiner in nineteen oh three, and it was that arrival that prompted construction of the landmark at the edge of town: a fifty-foot arch of local columnar basalt, built under Army supervision, designed to frame the park entrance opposite the new depot.

President Theodore Roosevelt laid the arch's cornerstone on April twenty-fourth, nineteen oh three, before a crowd of thousands. The inscription he chose reads For the Benefit and Enjoyment of the People. The Roosevelt Arch, completed by August of that same year, became the symbolic gateway to the world's first national park.

Gardiner remains Yellowstone's only year-round entrance, still framed by that arch more than one hundred twenty years after Roosevelt pressed the first stone into place.