Red Lodge: The Highway That Replaced the Mines
Near Red Lodge, Montana
Red Lodge is the eastern gateway to the Beartooth Highway, the road that Charles Kuralt, the late CBS News correspondent who spent his career driving the back roads of America, called the most beautiful drive in the country. That endorsement, and the road it describes, have become the defining fact of Red Lodge's economic identity for the past ninety years. But the road exists because of what Red Lodge was before it became a gateway: a coal town whose mines had failed, whose community had suffered a catastrophe, and whose civic leaders were desperate for a reason people would still come.
Red Lodge was incorporated in eighteen eighty-four and grew with the arrival of the Rocky Fork Coal Company in eighteen eighty-seven. The mines drew workers from Finland, Italy, Scotland, Ireland, Norway, Germany, and the Slavic regions of eastern Europe, who settled in distinct neighborhoods and built a town with a cosmopolitan, working-class character unusual for rural Montana. At its peak the town supported roughly fifty-five hundred people and the full commercial infrastructure of a prosperous industrial community.
The coal era ended badly. What replaced it was the highway that Red Lodge's advocates had been building since nineteen thirty-one. The Beartooth Highway opened in June of nineteen thirty-six, linking Red Lodge directly to Yellowstone's northeast entrance through sixty-eight miles of the most dramatic mountain scenery in the northern Rockies. The construction cost two and a half million dollars and took workers five years to complete a road that climbs roughly five thousand seven hundred feet over twelve miles before crossing Beartooth Pass at ten thousand nine hundred forty-seven feet, then descends through tundra and high-altitude lakes toward Cooke City and the park entrance.
Charles Kuralt was not exaggerating. The road is extraordinary. And it saved a town that would otherwise have had no reason to ask anyone to stop. Red Lodge did not simply survive the coal collapse. It built a different economy on top of the wreckage, and the highway is what it built it with.
