Pageant in the rain

A merchandise-filled "drag freight," powered by Burlington Northern SD40-2 #6341 and unidentified GE and EMD units, treads eastbound in a cold drizzle on the ex-Northern Pacific mainline toward Bozeman Pass. As noted in the title, this is a pageant of color and commerce and brute force. The rail line rises sharply to east and west, requiring heavy locomotives in large quantities in both directions.

Missoula surrounds its old depot in a rough U-shaped ring. To the west, the line undulates toward the steep climb to Lolo and McDonald Passes through the Thompson River canyon. To the east, it skirts the University of Montana and the business district on its way to Butte and Livingston, where a fleet of these high-horsepower locomotives is stabled.

Shadows of the past

From Livingston, the line climbs Bozeman Pass, 5,700 feet, the top of a trail to the goldfields of Montana—discovered by John M. Bozeman in 1862. The pass—through the Belt Mountains—and the city of Bozeman, home of Montana State University, were both named after the trailblazing pioneer.

Bozeman led miners and settlers on his shortcut, and they were quite willing to pay handsome fees for his eagle eye and accurate carbine. They swung north from Fort Phil Kearney, situated between Sheridan and Buffalo, Wyoming, in the heart of the Powder River basin. Built to draw Indian predation away from the transcontinental railroad under construction to the south, it was the largest of three forts and was garrisoned for only two years.

To my back by about 150 miles is a small isolated valley surmounted on the southwest by a medium-sized hill. The Indians called it Greasy Grass. They killed buffalo and prepared for the long cold winters there, where the water was shallow but ran clear and sweet. In 1876, in a brilliant stroke of planning and luck, they destroyed two companies of the U.S. Seventh Cavalry and pinned down two others for three days, then slipped silently away.

The massacre, as it came to be called, made a cause celebré of the corps' deceased commander, a budding Presidential contender named George A. Custer. The dirt was still warm over the graves of his troops when the Army pounced on the massacre's leader—Sitting Bull. Custer's wife Livy (Elizabeth) championed his heroism for another quarter century, drawing attention to the site and bringing eager tourists flooding in.

A fortune under every rock

All this was very good news to the railroads. First came the Union Pacific on its traverse to the south, then the Great Northern to the very far north, and finally the Northern Pacific, limping gamely in and out of bankruptcy and constructing in fits and starts whenever money could be milked from the investors.

A long time later, attracted by deep vast pockets of excellent coal on the state border to the southwest of Greasy Grass, the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy (CB&Q) arrowed up the Powder River through Gillette, Wyoming. Today that coal line, with its two-and-a-half-plus-mile-long unit hopper trains, is undoubtedly the most lucrative part of Burlington Northern Santa Fe.

Even Montana benefitted from Powder River coal. When a newer, straighter line was pushed northwest from Alliance, Nebraska, it joined the Northern Pacific between Livingston and Bozeman. Another new line was kicked northwest to tap the Great Northern. Eventually, the overbuilding of these interconnected railroad lines prompted the Interstate Commerce Commission to approve in May 1, 1970, the merger of NP, GN, CB&Q, and a smaller subsidiary that connected them to the Columbia River port of Portland, Oregon.

If you walked to the rear of a Northern Pacific train going over Bozeman Pass, you would see your train winding downgrade for miles ahead of you into eastern Montana, North Dakota, and on to the railroad's headquarters city, St. Paul, Minnesota. The mountain scenery of Lewis and Clark behind; ahead miles of wheat and corn and hours of train watching; dun- and fawn-colored dust storms by day; twinkling canopies of starlight by night.

In their heyday, NP's Great Northern rival was headquartered across the Mississippi River in Minneapolis. Corporate politics—and tricks of geography—made their railroad more economical. Discarded by the Burlington Northern before its merger with the Santa Fe Railroad, much of the line under the train pictured here is scrapped, including Bozeman and Lolo Passes. The line from NP to GN, fortunately, still grazes the state capital at Helena, operating under the freight-only umbrella of the state-funded Montana Rail Link.

The tide goes back out

Missoula's red brick station still exists, though a moldering tribute to a period of American expansionism that put commerce in every town in every out-of-the-way corner and built a nation of fierce individualists. One—James Jerome Hill—saw the color of railroad money and convinced his friend J.P. Morgan to establish a pool of securities that bought Hill's Great Northern (at a princely profit to empire builder Hill) and captured for itself Northern Pacific and CB&Q as well.

What little of this depot as can be seen above is very much in keeping with the Northern Pacific's architectural styles. It was built to be an inviting place for immigrants detraining to start their new lives developing the agricultural riches of the Missoula valley. Where they went, commerce followed as towns quickly multipled and then grew and prospered.

Railroads played a critical part in that commercial expansion but outlived their usefulness. The immigrants became Americans, the farms mechanized and became corporate, growers' cooperatives discovered trucks were cheaper, and the depot joined the rail line as unnecessary … though at first the ebb-and-flow of history was miniscule. Only a well-played hand by Union Pacific's Edward H. Harriman prevented the four Northern Securities/Hill-controlled railroads from merging in 1906.

A rising tide of national opinion turned against the financiers who built the railroads, often as the means to exhort large sums from their building. Left saddled with staggering construction debts, the railroads turned to exorbitant rates to stave off bankruptcy. The public had enough—by 1890, rairload managers found themselves squeezed tightly by stringent legislation and beggared by the rulings of public commissions.

Farther east, the Livingston depot was built much larger of an unusual yellow-tan brick. Livingston was the once thriving railroad gateway to Yellowstone National Park. As the station stop for a major tourist destination, it befitted having a world-class depot with a huge passenger reception area. It invited a long gone generation of Americans to explore the turn-of-the-century tourist opportunities created by Manifest Destiny.

Picking up the pieces

The bricks came east—not west. After NP's 1893 bankruptcy, construction was halted on the railroad's hotel in Tacoma, Washington, a castle-like structure with turrets and parapets. The fourth story and part of the third were demolished so the line could build Livingston's depot. The remainder of the building eventually fell into possession of the Tacoma School District, which roofed it and turned it into Stadium High School. More recently, it has become the home of Washington State's Historical Museum.

Summertime in the 1900s, '10s, and '20s brought prosperous trainloads of Yellowstone-bound Pullman sleepers filled with celebrities, including President Theodore Roosevelt, flocking into Livingston and overflowing down the westbound line to Butte, and even here, to Missoula.

Not only did NP profitably operate its little stub to Gardner, Montana, a stone's throw from Mammoth Hot Springs at Yellowstone's northern gate, it pushed a longer line south from Missoula over Monida (Montana-Idaho) Summit to Idaho Falls, Idaho, and thence to Union Pacific's division point at Pocatello. From there, the tonnage rate Harriman could charge NP to access Southern Pacific's transcontinental interchange at Ogden, Utah, was minimal.

After the depression of the '30s, NP took great pride in its luxurious stainless steel streamliner, the "North Coast Limited", sparing no amenities in making the train a first-class ride—and advertising the Montana scenery to an eager public. The train's interior decoration highlighted the Yellowstone Park and Montana Rockies landscape … and Livingston was a major stop.

One day after taking this "summertime" photo, we drove through Yellowstone National Park—on July 4th—in a blinding snowstorm. It wasn't the warm reception we expected.

I started the poem in 1973; it sat unfinished for 25 years. I always had the concept of linking it with the Missoula depot photo, and finally the words came together. It was my first and last attempt at free verse. See the poem.