West Yellowstone: The Railroad's Gateway and the Night the Mountain Fell
Near West Yellowstone, Montana
West Yellowstone exists because a railroad needed a destination, and it nearly ceased to exist because the earth decided to rearrange itself in the middle of the night.
The Union Pacific Railroad drove its golden spike on the line to the park boundary on November twelfth, nineteen oh seven. The first passenger train arrived on June eleventh, nineteen oh eight, and the town was organized almost simultaneously, platted as a gateway community whose entire economy would be built around moving tourists the final few feet from the railcar to the park entrance. The original depot building was a temporary structure, replaced in nineteen oh nine with a permanent station. In nineteen twenty five, the architect Gilbert Stanley Underwood, who went on to design several of Yellowstone's grand lodges in the same rustic style, designed the town's Union Pacific dining lodge. From the moment the trains started running, the west entrance became the most popular gateway into Yellowstone National Park, a distinction it still holds more than a century later.
On August seventeenth, nineteen fifty-nine, at eleven thirty-seven in the evening, a magnitude seven point three earthquake struck the Hebgen Lake area roughly fifteen miles north of town. The shaking itself caused extensive damage to West Yellowstone and the surrounding campgrounds. But the more lethal consequence came seconds later in the Madison Canyon, ten miles to the west. The earthquake dislodged approximately fifty million cubic yards of rock and debris from the south canyon wall. The landslide swept across the canyon floor and partially buried the Rock Creek campground, where vacationers were sleeping in tents and trailers. Twenty-eight people were killed, most of them crushed or drowned beneath the slide debris. The collapsed material dammed the Madison River entirely, and within weeks a new lake had formed behind the natural dam. The Forest Service named it Earthquake Lake. Seiche waves triggered by the tilting of Hebgen Lake breached the earthen dam there several times during the night, threatening catastrophic flooding downstream.
The nineteen fifty-nine Hebgen Lake earthquake remains the most powerful seismic event ever recorded in the northern Rocky Mountains, and the new lake it created is now a geologic interpretive site on the road west of here.
