Town At The Trail’s End (July/August 1992 | Volume: 43, Issue: 4)

Town At The Trail’s End

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July/August 1992 | Volume 43, Issue 4

John M. Bozeman of Georgia was twenty-five when he went to the hills of southwestern Montana in the gold rush of 1862 and failed to get rich. Convinced there must be more money in miners than in mining, he left the goldfield in 1863 to blaze a trail there and guide others along it. He laid out the Bozeman Trail starting in central Wyoming; the depredations of the Sioux along the way were so bad that it soon was known as the Bloody Bozeman, and the trail was abandoned by 1868. But before then Bozeman finally had an idea that stuck: In 1864 he founded a town in the valley just east of the gold mines to feed and otherwise serve and make money from the adventurers in the hills—and whoever later settled in the area.

I didn’t follow the route of the Bozeman Trail into town, as I would have had I driven in on I-90; I flew over Wyoming from Denver, and just looking out the window of the plane, I was startled by how the bleached midsummer emptiness of Wyoming’s central plain and Bighorn and Absaroka mountain ranges gives way to the green of Montana’s Gallatin Valley, a broad river bottom watered by high peaks on every side. The airport, eight miles from town, lies beside deep green alfalfa fields and broad cow pastures.

The road into town parallels the route of the Northern Pacific, which cut through the valley in the 1880s, sprinkling villages along its path. Enter Bozeman from any direction, and you first drive down a commercial strip of malls and motels, but when you reach downtown, you discover a prosperous Main Street lined with some of the state’s earliest permanent buildings. Bozeman is a healthy county seat and college town—home of Montana State University—with twenty-five thousand residents, but despite its business as a gateway to nearby Yellowstone National Park, it is not known as a tourist destination. And no one has taken the kind of notice of Main Street that would ruin it.

The sunny, wide street is lined on both sides with two-story brick and terra-cotta buildings, the earliest from 1872, when the town was eight years old, and quite a few from the 1880s, when most of the buildings within many hundreds of miles were made of logs. I began acquainting myself with Bozeman by shopping. Powder Horn Sporting Goods has its walls deep in guns and fishing rods and waders, and a single display holding footballs and baseballs and bats. I dipped into McCracken’s Family and Western Store and bought jeans; I admired the pastel-colored marquee of one of three movie theaters that still thrive downtown, and I poked into the compact Victorian building that held Leslie’s Hallmark Cards. Then I headed for the county jail.

The battlemented brick fortress of a jailhouse, a 1911 structure, has been converted into a home for the county’s Pioneer