Livingston: The Windiest Gateway to Paradise

Livingston, Montana was born in eighteen eighty-two as a division headquarters of the Northern Pacific Railway, platted in a hurry on the benchlands above the Yellowstone River and named for Johnston Livingston, a director and major stockholder of the railroad. The town had a practical destiny: it sat at the exact point where a branch line could turn south through Paradise Valley toward the newly established Yellowstone National Park, the nation's first.

By eighteen eighty-three the Northern Pacific was running tourist trains from St. Paul all the way to Livingston, and from there south toward the park's northern entrance at Gardiner. For a quarter century, nearly every visitor to Yellowstone passed through this town. The depot the railroad built here in nineteen oh two was its largest west of Minneapolis, a grand brick structure that signaled just how much passenger traffic the park was generating.

The railroad left. The tourists eventually found other ways in. And Livingston became something stranger and more interesting than a railroad town. It became one of the more concentrated communities of artists, writers, and wanderers in the American West. The filmmaker Sam Peckinpah, director of The Wild Bunch and Straw Dogs, spent his final years in a suite at the Murray Hotel here, from nineteen seventy-nine until his death in nineteen eighty-four. The novelist Thomas McGuane settled nearby. Richard Brautigan, Peter Fonda, Jeff Bridges, and Margot Kidder all landed in the valley at various points. Russell Chatham's Livingston Bar and Grille became a gathering place that drew writers from across the country.

What they came for was what is still here: the Yellowstone River running cold and clear below town, the Absaroka Range rising to the east, Paradise Valley opening to the south, and the famous Livingston wind blowing through everything like an uninvited but honest neighbor. The valley that Jim Bridger reportedly wintered in as early as eighteen forty-four still earns its name.