Johnson Gardner and the Name Nobody Spelled Right

The trapper whose name this town carries was not the kind of man the nineteenth century would have called respectable, and the name itself arrived through an error. Johnson Gardner was a Rocky Mountain fur trapper who worked the greater Yellowstone region in the early eighteen thirties. He was a free trapper who worked the Rocky Mountain fur country, and the valley in the headwaters of what is now the Gardner River came to be called Gardner's Hole.

Gardner had a reputation for directness that could shade into violence. He is best remembered historically for a confrontation in eighteen twenty-five in which he and a group of American trappers are said to have ridden into the camp of British fur trader Peter Skene Ogden and declared the British to be trespassing on American territory, an aggressive move that resulted in a number of Ogden's men defecting to the American side with their furs. It was a bold assertion of territorial sovereignty in a region where sovereignty was still genuinely contested.

The Washburn-Langford-Doane Expedition of eighteen seventy, the first organized survey expedition into what would become Yellowstone National Park, recorded the river in their journals but spelled the name as Gardiner, with an i, either mishearing the name or choosing an alternate phonetic rendering. That spelling became official and eventually displaced the trapper's own version. The town of Gardiner, spelled with an i, sits where Johnson Gardner, spelled without one, once made camp. The river is now usually spelled one way, the town the other, and the man they were both named for has been remembered, if at all, in a slightly different form of his own name.