The Stony Remains of Shantyville

Two Years Later: Returning to the Remains (Again)

Around this time two years ago, a structural fire took out a few businesses sited on the end of a block bound by Park, Second, and Main streets in my hometown of Gardiner, Montana. In hindsight, my immediate reaction had all the makings of a grief response—for probably the first time in my life since I was in fifth grade, I remember speaking with every member of my immediate family in the same 24 hours. It’s not as though I could do much for any of them or they for me. The damage was done at that point. I guess some things just register on a primal level that makes you call the handful of people on the planet that you share the most genetic material with when you otherwise wouldn’t.

This scenario more or less played out again about a month ago this year, when the Yellowstone River and its tributaries saw historic flooding. The event did a number on critical infrastructure and left Yellowstone gateway towns like Gardiner fairly isolated, briefly without potable water, and facing down the intense existential uncertainty and assured economic fallout of a summer without an entrance to the park operating at full capacity. Suffice to say, this has been fucking tough to see. I can only hope that Gardiner has something of a serotinous trajectory like the lodgepole forests that predominate Greater Yellowstone and emerges from this latest cataclysmic onslaught with an identity that can weather many others.

For several days after the 2020 fire, I tried to figure out for myself what it was about the loss that felt so personal. “The Stony Remains of Shantyville” was the result of trying to process that. Most of the cranky and pedantic shit I throw up on this site gets read by my mom, a few of my childhood caregivers, and maybe six other people on Twitter these days. So the outsized amount of traffic to this piece stood out immediately, and it was clear that either I was being royally trolled by some algorithms or the piece had really hit a nerve with other Gardinerites who were reading and sharing it.

I’ve gone back to my home area three times since the fire—first in September 2020, then again in June and September 2021. I intended to venture back for summer solstice of this year for a two-week working holiday, but those plans got somewhat literally rained and washed out amid the epic flooding. It’s crazy that that was only a month ago; it already feels like the stuff of legend even though its impacts are still so plain to see. Besides getting back to the little mountain hamlet at the confluence of the Gardner and the Yellowstone—which I consider my natal stream—as often as I can, my home area has occupied an inflated amount of my brain-space since the first time I left it in August 2011.

Even though western Montana (and the Mountain West in general) only becomes less and less livable by the month for simple folks of scant means and middling talent such as myself, it’s still my endgame. If I ever had a reason to return to my natal stream or anywhere close on reciprocal, sustainable terms with something to offer that might help give regular folks a future there, I would do it in a heartbeat.

That clarity is great, but for years, I had no fucking clue what all the time away was about, what it would ever add up to. Last year, however, it dawned on me that it took all that time to learn how to love where I grew up in a way that’s unsentimental, not nostalgic, not fetishized, and not uncritical. It’s the brand of love I think we only come by when we’re actually invested in seeing something live up to its highest and best form. It’s an intensity that I don’t think is popular or common, but I definitely feel it for my hometown.

So, two years out from a collective loss that felt inexplicably personal for so many Gardinerites and just a month after the area’s latest disaster, I’m dusting the stony remains off…again. Given my track record with telepathic wellness checks (for the uninitiated, you’ll learn all about it if you read on), perhaps we’ll all live to regret that I have the nerve to do this at the same time every year, but I think it’s an appropriate time to telepathically revisit the erstwhile Shantyville that straddles the Upper Yellowstone for a few reasons.

First, as I discovered last year, there is something of a roadmap for listing historic properties, possibly establishing two historic districts, and doing some historic preservation work in Gardiner specifically. Back in 2013, a historic resources survey was done in Gardiner, and it’s worth a once-over if it wasn’t already on your radar. Moreover, last year, the Greater Gardiner Community Council was awarded a sizable historic preservation grant to restore the Gardiner Community Center (née Opera House, Eagle’s Hall, et al, built in 1910), and they are in the process of raising enough funds by 2023 to complete a phase of the work that will cost a minimum of $850,000. Preservation projects of this size can turn the tide and jumpstart long-term resilience efforts in towns like Gardiner. For real. It’s a big damn deal, and I hope you’ll show this project some love if you’re able since it’s once again that time of year when funds raised by nonprofits participating in the month-long GIVE A HOOT campaign will be eligible to receive a partial match from Park County Community Foundation.

The second reason that I’m inclined to telepathically check in on Gardiner and revisit this piece is that this one is kind of the genesis of the aforementioned “cranky and pedantic shit” I now put up on this site for public consumption with some regularity. Two years out, I can see that this reflection was galvanizing and radicalizing. I’m convinced that everything I’ve written over the past two years about life, death, and our shared struggle against dispossession and extraction can be traced back to this one.

When I revisited this piece last year, I wrote something like, “I’d love to say I’m too cool for Maclean epigraphs now that I’m a year older.” Now two years older, I regret to inform everyone that I’m still criminally uncool as ever and may very well never swear off the prose poetry of Maclean entirely. Chalk it up to developmental arrest, I guess.

With that, I’ll cede the floor to the main event: a return trip to the stony remains of Shantyville.

—JTB, July 14, 2022

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Shantyville Revisited

Not far downstream was a dry channel where the river had run once, and part of the way to come to know a thing is through its death. But years ago I had known the river when it flowed through this now dry channel, so I could enliven its stony remains with the waters of memory.
…
Now nearly all those I loved and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them.

Norman Maclean

I saw a news alert out of Montana on Twitter on July 14, 2020 with a pit in my stomach. By that time, a few photos taken from a distance of a smoky scene in Gardiner had already graced the rapturous 2020 interwebs, but as of 5:30pm Pacific Time that day, the only news story on the blaze was a generic one circulated by the four newspapers owned by Lee Enterprises in Billings, Missoula, Helena, and Butte.

I didn’t have to see any more telling visuals to have a spidey sense about where the fire hit. I have these things I call telepathic wellness checks, where I think about a place or person out of the blue. Basically, I just wonder how they’re doing. But more than once now, these telepathic check-ins with old acquaintances have been followed close in time by news of their demise.

I had done one of these wellness checks on two iconic bars in my hometown over the weekend before that Tuesday. From the Olympic Peninsula, where I’d been responsibly hunkered down since the last time I had crossed the Tacoma Narrows Bridge before pandemic lockdown in February, I’d gotten to wondering what hoops a public citizen could jump through to get the buildings those bars are in on the National Register of Historic Places.

Some context on Gardiner: In the past few years, as in many pristine mountain towns, it’s kind of become a feeding frenzy for affluent folks who will knock down beloved, old-ass buildings and put tourist trash up in their place and/or build second, third, or fourth homes without batting an eye — usually displacing some year-round residents in the process. While a listing on the National Register doesn’t guarantee a structure can never be knocked down, it can add a layer of protection to deter some opportunists and stem boom-and-bust cycles of development that are just not sustainable.

I thought about the National Register with the Two Bit and the Goose in mind because I was getting paranoid about how they’d fare left to the whims of market forces. While historically speaking, it’s pretty common for old buildings in high desert towns to catch fire, the prospect of that happening hadn’t crossed my mind. Nonetheless, because of my track record with telepathic wellness checks, when I did see the first reports about a fire, I wasn’t surprised to see those Gardiner institutions listed among the casualties. Still, it was a suckerpunch.

The Waters of Memory

Something that came with the territory of early pandemic lockdown in 2020 for me was getting reacquainted with past versions of myself. It’s something that there generally isn’t space for when that capitalist machinery is running full-bore. I have a theory on why that is: The ruling class doesn’t want us to be realized people with the ability to process trauma and see our worth outside of economic terms because, from there, we can start to question the status of the wealthy and powerful, and that’s a threat to the established order.

In any event, something that’s really empowering about having space to reconcile with past versions of yourself is that you’re made to realize what you’ve survived already in a terrestrial lifetime. And something trippy that grew out of that is that I started to take stock of the people and places I’ve known so long that I have no memory of having to be introduced to them. In the same way that nobody ever had to introduce me to my parents or older sister, I have no memory of my first time in the Goose or the Two Bit. True to the vibe of Gardiner in the 90s and early aughts, I was more or less raised in those establishments.

I’ve found myself mourning the recession of Gardiner’s gritty, proletarian vibes for a few years now. Through that time, I guess some juvenile region of my brain thought the Goose and the Two Bit would outlast the bullshit, but no dice. I was emotionally prepared for the inevitable, but I wasn’t prepared for the last bastions of a bygone era to literally go down in flames all at once.

Now, to be sure, these are buildings I’m talking about. And at that, relics of settler history in Greater Yellowstone. And that’s what made what I recognized as genuine grief complicated in 2020. I don’t know that I would have been able to view it all in proper context prior to that year. With every twist and turn, the past few years have really underscored one of the defining through lines of U.S. history. Namely, our economic system has been built on racial and class hierarchies from its inception and people have an unhealthy obsession with the made-up conventions of profit and property that sustain this whole violent, bourgeois system, largely at the expense of BIPOC and poor folks up to this point (but, as one of my favorite active storytellers puts it, the flight of robber baron gargoyles is inevitably coming for all but the criminally wealthy among us). This is the same system that enables people to be fazed about damage to private property, but not about the folks we leave to die all the time. These are just facts.

Now, if that little diatribe made you bristle, two things: 1.) If you’re feeling defensive, your brain has possibly been colonized by the aforementioned gargoyles and you should get that checked out, and 2.) Hear me out on how these things look in the context of Gardiner, Montana these days. First, let’s rewind to a piece of reporting from 2018.

Where the River Had Once Run

Back in 2018, Eric Dietrich reported on my hometown for Mountain Outlaw Magazine in the appropriately titled story, “The Scenery Economy Crucible.” The reason I refer back to Eric’s story again and again is that he recognized all the writing on the wall of a town rapidly going the way of a Telluride or Jackson. That is, here you have a cool-ass mountain town with a lack of permanent housing, a shit-ton of vacation rentals (as many as 25% of the town’s total housing units at that time — I wouldn’t be surprised if that has since doubled), and a nosedive in public school enrollment.

Now, let’s fast forward to the reporting on the ground after the July 2020 fire. With just three exceptions, most of the Gardiner residents that were quoted and interviewed by members of the regional press were folks I don’t know. Growing up, I at least recognized pretty much everyone in my hometown. So, that contrast wasn’t lost on me. But something else that jumped out at me is that one reporter from a Bozeman outlet didn’t even check the spelling of the name of a business owner who’s been in Gardiner for decades, grew up in Park County, and is the offspring of a guy who invented and patented the first cow elk call. I’m not a hunter myself, but I can read and understand this was a big deal in elk hunting circles, and I have just enough journalistic education to know that you can and should at least use a Google search to check name spellings before filing a story.

Between the numbers in Eric’s 2018 story, observations of late, and ample coverage on the flood of pandemic migration to states like Montana, we know there is inflated contingent of new and seasonal residents throughout the Mountain West now. In saying that, I’m not trying to equate people’s tenure as residents and ability to recognize family names with their level of investment in a place. I don’t really peddle that faux nativism bullshit because it’s just an extension of settler land-claiming that’s based on coordinated theft in the first place. But I will say that a surge of new, disproportionately white, and economically mobile folks in a place often coincides with what I view as one of America’s original sins: gentrification.

Property and profit exist because white settlers stole land and resources — never with any intention to honor the people who lived in a space before them, only the intention to eradicate them (which, if you haven’t noticed, has turned out to be a blatant failure of the settler project after 500 years of trying). Now, if that shit makes you bristle, what I said after that last “fuck extractive capitalism” diatribe still stands: Please get that checked out.

But the plot thickens, y’all. I don’t have to stop at virtue-signaling to make this point. Thanks to the very twisted history of displacement and treaties between the U.S. government and sovereign tribes who lived, hunted, and traded in and around Greater Yellowstone, I can implicate myself by way of my maternal ancestors of Salt Lake Valley ilk in the forceful displacement of some of the Indigenous folks who lived in what we recognize today as Yellowstone’s Northern Range.

It’s complicated as hell, but I’m going to attempt to reassemble the timeline as I understand it. The first “recorded” European-American encounter with the Tukudika band of Mountain Shoshone in Lamar Valley was in 1835. Many bands of the Shoshone presumably hunted, traded, and lived in what we now know as Greater Yellowstone, as did no less than two dozen other tribes according to the Park Service (though the actual count is probably closer to 50). But the historic range of the Shoshone and other Plains tribes extended well south of the Wind River and Snake River valleys, and many hundreds of miles east and west.

About 10 years after that Lamar encounter, a bunch of white, religious types (Mormons — maybe you’ve heard of them) took a route that went directly through Shoshone territory in what is now southeast Wyoming to get to the Salt Lake Valley. Thousands began arriving by the year, adding to the settler traffic that did enormous damage to the land of the Plains tribes, and the tribes themselves. To boot, Mormon takeover of a trading post at Fort Bridger made the U.S. government feel like they had to send 2,500 troops to the region with orders to establish federal power and install a territorial government — as I suppose one does when people who practice plural marriage start running trading posts? Kinda seems like a giant pissing contest to me, but whatever.

Anyway, the standoff destabilized the region and more settlers kept coming through, some casually murdering Native folks as they traveled. You get the idea: American imperialism and its collateral damage is fucked up as usual. But this whole build-up came to a head with an attack on a western Shoshone village on Bear River in what’s now southeast Idaho. That event is known as the Bear River Massacre, and historians recognize it as the deadliest reported attack on Native people by the U.S. military.

That spawned the first of two Fort Bridger treaties in 1863, which in theory recognized the Shoshone territory, halted stagecoach and telegraph development within it, and established an annuity system whereby the Shoshone would receive payments once a year.

Keeping with a dominant theme in white settler history, that treaty wasn’t really honored. The next Fort Bridger treaty in 1868 — signed by leaders of both the Bannock and Eastern Shoshone bands — created a reservation in the Wind River Valley for the Eastern Shoshone. Among its other terms, the 1868 treaty promised to create a separate reservation at a later time for the Bannock people, a Northern Paiute band that had been traveling and hunting with the Northern Shoshone since the 1600s.

Although the date is difficult to parse from internet scavenging, that second reservation, Fort Hall, was created what looks to be soon after the second treaty. Meanwhile, the Tukudika band of the Shoshone continued to inhabit Yellowstone’s Northern Range for several years after the park was established in 1872. I suspect there was some organized effort to drive the Tukudika out of the region once the military occupied Yellowstone beginning in 1886. And we know for certain there was a concerted effort to wipe out their main food source, the bison, throughout the 1800s. In fact, by 1880, there were only a few dozen bison left following the state-sanctioned slaughter of hundreds of thousands animals. Of the final years of Tukudika presence in Yellowstone, the historical record according to the National Park Service has this to say:

By 1900, the Tukudika had been incorporated into the Eastern Shoshone tribe of the Wind River Reservation in central-western Wyoming, and into the Mountain and Lemhi Shoshone and Bannock tribes of the Fort Hall Reservation in southeastern Idaho. Once confined to reservations, the Tukudika suffered the partial collapse of their traditional lifeways. Although the Tukudika continued to live traditionally for a generation or two after their removal to reservations, they eventually adapted to the ways of these other tribes, whose own cultural practices had already been altered by their earlier removal to reservations.

To me, one big takeaway of that whole arc is that, even by American imperialism’s characteristically fucked up standards, the way the federal government tried to take out Indigenous folks of the North Plains, and how they eventually grouped those who survived the targeted genocide only to be sequestered to reservations, is all pretty damn bananas. I struggle to follow the whole chronicle of it as a native English speaker with decent degree of research moxie. I can’t imagine how this went over in a cross-cultural interaction that probably relied on a regional trade jargon that was nobody’s first language.

An estimated tens of thousands of descendants of the different bands of the Shoshone are alive now, including thousands who are enrolled members of the Eastern Shoshone Tribe and Shoshone-Bannock Tribes. Today, the Shoshone-Bannock are one of five federally recognized tribes that come to Gardiner every fall to participate in an annual bison hunt — an aboriginal right under treaties negotiated with the U.S. government. At the time of the 2018 hunt, Fort Hall Business Council Chairman Nathan Small noted that an 1868 treaty that would’ve ceded Yellowstone and the adjacent land in southwestern Montana to the federal government was never ratified. Presumably, this was separate from the second Fort Bridger treaty, which Small said was ratified in 1869 in a 2014 statement to the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs. In any event, if it’s true that the land in and around Gardiner was never formally ceded in the form of a ratified treaty, it still technically belongs to the Shoshone-Bannock.

It’s pretty astonishing how arbitrary and confusing the federal government’s process for grouping and removing Native folks was (and still is!). The series of Fort Bridger treaties is just a part of the story for a handful of Plains people who are distinct, but culturally related. Moreover, it blows my mind that because of this convoluted process, the band of Shoshone most associated with archaeological sites in Yellowstone — the Tukudika, or Sheep Eater, descendants of whom are presumably enrolled as Eastern Shoshone or Shoshone-Bannock today — were forced south into the region that my maternal ancestors had a huge part in destabilizing and colonizing.

The Stony Remains

When you decide to honor the inhabitants and spirit of a place, how far back do you go in human history? I recognize the question is complicated. Do I know exactly what decolonizing my hometown should look like? I didn’t before July 2020 and I don’t now. But I do think when a historic building gets taken down by something as rogue as a fire (as opposed to the aforementioned bourgeois whims of market forces), there’s an opportunity to stem the cycle of gentrification that just reaffirms the principles of settler colonialism with every update.

Somebody I look to as a North Star for how to do right by the spirit of a place and its people is Robin Wall Kimmerer, a bryologist by training and an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. While this can be interpreted so subjectively, I often think about what she says about becoming lowercase-i “indigenous” in Braiding Sweetgrass:

For all of us, becoming indigenous to a place means living as if your children’s future mattered, to take care of the land as if our lives, both material and spiritual, depended on it.

It’s a place to start. And in the case of my hometown, I think another place to start is to look at trends of loss. I’ve used abstract terms like “gritty” and “proletarian” as increasingly elusive attributes of a quinitessenitally Gardiner attitude that I identify with and miss. And while one could argue that has nothing to do with caring for a place as if its children’s future mattered, I have to put weight on the spiritual dimension Kimmerer describes. There is a quantifiable piece to this Gardiner spirit that relates to the places that fire took out. And that’s the number of bars.

Something I absorbed at some point in my teens is that the scientific laws of conservation that govern the universe’s mass and energy are analogous to the distribution of liquor licenses in Montana. In other words, none are really created or destroyed, they’re just kind of recirculated in perpetuity. Shortly after the fire, I asked my mother — an Idahoan by birth, but a Yellowstoner/Gardinerite of 40 years — to outline the liquor license history of her years in Gardiner, and she was kind enough to oblige. All told, her estimate confirmed that for most of my lifetime, Gardiner was home to seven liquor licenses. Again, this place’s year-round population was always under 900 up to the time of the 2010 census. Let’s round that to about one liquor license for every 125 residents. To put that into perspective, as recently as 2014, some states with liquor license quota systems will only issue one license for every few thousand municipal residents.

Now, history suggests my formative years weren’t just a fluke. If anything, that was scaled back significantly from Gardiner’s heyday as the southern terminus of the Park Line of the Northern Pacific Railroad. From Bob Goss’s wonderful website dedicated to Greater Yellowstone history, I found that Gardiner’s population count was at 200 in 1883 with a saloon count at 21. And that was nine years before the Park Line tracks were extended to Gardiner from their original terminus in Cinnabar.

An oft-cited newspaper account of a tourist’s travel to Yellowstone in early 1883 referred to Gardiner as a “veritable Shantyville.” It goes on to describe Gardiner as “an ideal squatter town, with the rudest houses made of unseasoned boards, with not a few tents mingling with the more pretentious huts, huddled together as though the land was valued by the foot and inch.” In that account, of the 32 houses which made the settlement, that witness counted 28 saloons, and supposedly the shops that weren’t saloons had “a private bar attachment.”

I understand there’s no competing with territorial days when we’re talking about pre-Prohibition bar tallies. But I think it’s notable that, although Gardiner’s liquor license count held at a formidable seven for most of my life, the town was down to just five prior to the fire. In the immediate aftermath, it was unclear if either of the licenses associated with the Two Bit or the Goose would stay in Gardiner, but I’m pleased to report that at least one did. While I hope and get the impression that it’s an interim setup, the family who owned the buildings that burned in July 2020 have recently been able to resume operation of a watering hole on the east end of Park Street — and still under the banner of Red’s Blue Goose Saloon. My mom and I patronize it routinely whenever I make it out that way. My fondest hope is that one of these days, a brick-and-mortar joint returns to the spot, featuring some interpretive or architectural concept that pays homage to the array of businesses and characters that have graced (and darkened doors along) the corner of Park and Second in Gardiner over the years.

Now, Gardiner wasn’t always a feeding frenzy for affluent folks who will knock down the old shit without batting an eye. In fact, it feels like this progression of Gardiner getting manicured beyond recognition has accelerated in the past seven years. I left Montana for undergrad in 2011, but migrated back to the area for seasonal Park Service gigs up until 2014. As recently as then, it was difficult but not entirely impossible to find residential housing. I know that’s not the case anymore.

As strange as it sounds, I really wonder if the prevalence of bars in a small Mountain West town is a proxy for livability. Gardiner is (and I hope always will be) a great base of operation for backcountry activity and life near an iconic river, no doubt. And something I want to be super clear about is I don’t merely equate bars with wanton alcohol consumption. Substance abuse has loomed large in my life, and I’ve had to reexamine my own relationship to alcohol in recent years. Addiction and codependency are no joke, and I think we could all afford to be more honest with ourselves about that. I say all that to emphasize that down-home watering holes stand for a lot more than recreational binge-drinking to me. And when you take those places away, I don’t know what’s left for folks who live there year-round. In the case of Gardiner, what’s left is unrecognizable at best, and uninhabitable at worst.

I Still Reach out to Them

I mentioned earlier that I have no memory of being inside the Goose and the Two Bit for the first time. I also mentioned that the telepathic wellness check on the Goose and the Two Bit wasn’t the first to presage the loss of its subject. The first time this happened was with somebody I have no memory of being introduced to — somebody who, like the two bars, was in my life from the beginning.

In 2013, one of the summers I returned to my hometown for seasonal work, I asked my mom if she knew how an old family friend named Bruce Bohne was doing. I can’t remember the exact circumstances, but it occurred to me to ask as we were driving by his home together. She hadn’t heard from him in some time, and I think she intimated that she would probably check in soon since I brought it up. She found out the next day that Bruce had actually passed away the morning of August 1, the same day I’d asked about him.

I was 20 at that time, and yes, it initially creeped me the fuck out that my inquiring about somebody’s welfare could coincide with their swan song. And as a compulsive self-blamer who used to have what I think is a characteristically Anglo-American fear of death, I think I felt guilty that my thoughts somehow brought it on, or accelerated it. But I think that interpretation is marked by a hubris I don’t have anymore.

Nowadays, I feel like the telepathic wellness check that precedes the end of something is a way of bearing witness to a space or a person beyond my immediate physical environment in their last moments. Of course, I only know those were the last moments in retrospect. But that’s one very cool thing about the context that time affords us — it can totally change the stories we tell ourselves. Another big reason I think I’ve warmed to the telepathic wellness checks followed by loss or death is that I now recognize death and life as two sides of the same coin. Both are in motion constantly, even in the terrestrial lifetime of a single organism. One starts as the other ends, and vice versa.

Incidentally, whenever I telepathically reached out to the Two Bit, I was also reaching out to Bruce by extension. He bartended there for several years. The man and the bar go together in my earliest memories of both.

It feels like a stretch to tie all these threads together, but it makes sense to connect them in my mind. I think the telepathic honoring of people and space feels quite relevant to a place like Gardiner right now. The updating or destruction of a space that pays no tribute to its history is a synthetic and arbitrary move that just reaffirms the values of settler colonialism. Constantly pretending there was nothing in a place before something else takes up residence there serves no one. Failure to remember serves no one. I’d go so far as to call erasure like that a form of violence. Granted, I think change in appearance and essence that is gradual — evolution, as it were — is natural and healthy. That much bears out in the living world, and it’s not lost on me that that’s especially evident in the aftermath of wildfire.

Now, I think it would be disingenuous and arbitrary to expect all property owners to turn every relic of the settler state into a reflection of the totality of a place’s human history. Nonetheless, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to try to honor living memory. I think that’s the most genuine way to connect people to the past, and I think that’s always been true of person to person transmission of memories and stories.

The fact that I’m now 27 (now 30 as I revisit this 2020 piece in 2023) and can remember a Gardiner that sustained seven liquor licenses feels like a lowest common denominator of sorts. And if my theory about bars being a proxy measure for livability in Montana has any teeth, it seems like the path forward to a redeemed Shantyville that’s livable for regular folks is paved with, yes, residential housing, but also bars.

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About the feature image

This is a photograph of a January 1935 fire to the Wylie Hotel, which was sited on Main Street behind the W.A. Hall Building. A print of it by Bill Whithorn (and possibly original negatives) is housed in The Whithorn Collection at the Yellowstone Gateway Museum in Livingston.

Structural and wildland fire have always been a fixture of high desert terrain, and the caption of this photo briefly cites three of the structural fires that had already visited Gardiner prior to the Wylie Hotel fire:

Gardiner, served always by a volunteer fire department, has had many serious fires. On Aug. 31, 1889, the town was almost totally destroyed by a fire which started in a saloon at 12:30 p.m. and, within an hour, left a smoldering ruin of 13 homes and 19 business buildings (remaining were those of S.M. Fitzgerald, J.C. McCartney, D.P. Emmons, Frank Cramer, J. Hofer, James Parker, schoolhouse and jail). In [18]98 fire took the jail and a Chinese laundry; Moore’s building on Park St. burned in 1916.