Introducing the Yellowstone Trail: A Good Road from Plymouth Rock to Puget Sound

In the days of the Model T, there were few rural roads that “automobilists” could use. The rough dirt wagon roads often turned to mud. The government had lost interest in roads when the railroads came. So, in the American tradition, concerned citizens formed groups to “do it themselves.” Some were well-financed industrial groups. Some, like the Yellowstone Trail Association, represented grass roots boosters who hoped for a better future for their small towns. The Yellowstone Trail opened the great Northwest to auto travel, including the main route to Yellowstone National Park from east and west coasts. Trail associations painted their symbols on roadside telegraph poles and rocks, charged towns and businesses an advertising fee, beckoned tourists and lobbied governments to fund “their” road. They were successful in establishing interstate routes. But then the governments began building, maintaining, and numbering roads; down came the colorful symbols and names and up went sterile numbers. And when the Depression arrived, the death knell sounded for trail associations. Today the old route of the Yellowstone Trail is marked piecemeal by Interstate, US, state and county highway numbers. But in some places the old route is no longer a road. There is a farm near Mobridge, South Dakota, where on a sunny afternoon you can see a slight depression of a long-ago road in the waving grass and a small rising bank as the depression turns and disappears over a low hill. Stand in the quiet and imagine the clanking of the Model T, the purring of the Studebaker Six, and the chatter of the Winton.