Glacier Park Lodge: The Tepee Columns

Louis Hill had a problem in nineteen thirteen. He wanted to build a lodge that would stop wealthy train travelers in their tracks the moment they stepped off the Great Northern Railway at East Glacier, something that would justify the trip west and set the tone for everything that followed. The lobby he envisioned required structural columns of a size and grandeur that Montana's forests could not supply. The old growth was already gone.

Hill solved this by importing forty Douglas fir logs, each roughly three to three and a half feet in diameter, from the Pacific Northwest by rail. The same railroad that brought the tourists brought the trees. The columns stand in the lobby of Glacier Park Lodge today, unfinished, their bark still on, holding up a ceiling that Louis Hill called an outdoor dining room. The lodge opened in nineteen thirteen, two years after the Great Northern's East Glacier terminus station opened the route. Its purpose was commercial: fill the passenger cars heading west, then fill the rooms at the other end.

The lodge was sometimes referred to by the Blackfeet name Omatayo, as recorded in National Park Service historical materials, though the Blackfeet were not consulted about the use of their language or their ancestral lands for the project. The lodge sits at the edge of the reservation, on what the Blackfeet understood to be the Ceded Strip, the territory their leaders signed over in eighteen ninety-five under economic duress. The monumental lobby, the imported trees, the celebrated architecture: all of it built on that ground.

Glacier Park Lodge has never actually been listed on the National Register of Historic Places or as a National Historic Landmark, since its owners declined to take part when the nearby Great Northern Railway hotel buildings were designated in nineteen eighty seven. It remains one of the finest examples of rustic national-park architecture in the country.