The Great Northern Railway Invented This Park

The lobby of Glacier Park Lodge is held up by forty Douglas fir logs, each roughly three to three and a half feet in diameter. There were no trees of that scale left in Montana in nineteen thirteen, so Louis Hill had them shipped in by rail from the Pacific Northwest. The Great Northern Railway owned the railroad. Louis Hill ran the railroad. Hill also ran the lobbying campaign that helped get Glacier designated a national park in nineteen ten, built the first three hotels, hired Swiss and Austrian mountain guides from Europe to teach Americans how to climb, coined the phrase See America First as a marketing slogan aimed at wealthy travelers who had been going to the Alps, and ran advertising campaigns in New York newspapers comparing the view from Logan Pass to Switzerland.

The park's identity, the Swiss-chalet lodges, the red touring buses, the guided-hike tradition, was not an accident of geography. It was a product, deliberately designed by a railroad company that needed passengers.

Louis Hill was the son of James J. Hill, who had built the Great Northern Railway across the northern tier of the continent in the eighteen eighties and nineties. Louis understood that wealthy tourists who came to Glacier on Great Northern trains would need somewhere to stay and something to do when they arrived, and he built it before the park was formally established, which is to say he was betting on a designation that had not yet happened. The bet paid off.

Many Glacier Hotel, completed in nineteen fifteen on the shore of Swiftcurrent Lake, is the most dramatic of the properties Hill built, a four-story Swiss-chalet structure surrounded by peaks that could have been transplanted from the Bernese Oberland. The resemblance was not coincidental. Hill's advertising said so explicitly. The Blackfeet people whose hunting grounds became the park's core were not part of the story Hill was selling, except as picturesque backdrop for the tourist experience he was designing.