FAMILY2 - A Camping Trip to Yellowstone in 1897

When I posted my October 8^th blog article on Pat’s and my recent visit to Yellowstone National Park, my brother Al asked me why I hadn’t mentioned previous Ring family visits to Yellowstone, specifically our grandfather’s trip in 1897.

In August 1897 my Great Grandmother (Emma Ring) and her son, my then 14-year old Grandfather (Ambrose Ring) toured Yellowstone National Park.  This is their story, told partially from Emma’s trip diary and photographs.

Emma was the second wife of Eugene Ring who is famous in the Ring family for his adventures surviving an unplanned trip to the California Gold Rush in 1848-1850.  (See the Ring brothers’ website at http://www.ringbrothershistory.com)  In 1897 Eugene and his second wife Emma lived in New York City with Ambrose, who graduated from grammar school that spring.  Emma and Ambrose then traveled to Basin, Montana, about 40 miles northeast of Butte, to spend the summer with Ambrose’s half-brother Gene who was “affiliated” with several mines in the area.

Emma Ring 

Ambrose Ring at age 14

1897 Yellowstone Trip

Yellowstone National Park, founded in 1872 as the first national park in the U.S., is about 150 miles to the southeast of Basin, Montana in the state of Wyoming.  By 1897 Yellowstone was accessible by a railroad connection to a location near the north entrance of the Park.  Travel within the park was limited to horseback, wagon, or stagecoach.

Emma’s diary begins:

August 17, 1897

“Ambrose and I arrived at Livingston [from Butte] at 6:30 am.  Here we changed cars for Cinnabar, Montana, the terminus of the Park Branch Railroad. … Mr. Burket, agent for the Wylie Camping Company, met us at Cinnabar station.  Several others were there waiting for him to convey us to a small town on the very edge of the Park called Gardiner, a supply station for the mining camps in the vicinity.  Here we had dinner and rested an hour before we started our trip.”

For six days Emma and Ambrose toured the wonders of Yellowstone National Park with their tour group led by the Wylie Camping Company.  They traveled by stagecoach over rough dirt roads and stayed overnight at semi-permanent tent camps, conveniently positioned around the Park, each day stopping at lunch stations along the route.  In order of their travel, they saw the Mammoth Hot Springs, Gibbon Falls, the Lower and Upper Geyser Basins, Old Faithful, Yellowstone Lake - that they crossed on a steamer, and the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, including the Upper and Lower Falls.

The Yellowstone Park tour route, with major sites and camps, is shown on the map below from a 1908 Wylie Camp Company brochure.

In their 1908 brochure, the Wylie Camp Company provided this map for tours of Yellowstone National Park.  (Courtesy of Geyser Bob's Yellowstone Park History Service)

Between 1883 and 1903, a typical tour to Yellowstone began when visitors descended from the train in Cinnabar, boarded large "tally ho" stagecoaches (shown here), and headed up the scenic Gardner Canyon to Mammoth Hot Springs.  (Courtesy of the National Park Service.)

Here are a few more excerpts from Emma’s diary, along with three of her photos.

August 19, 1897 - Upper Geyser Basin

“After breakfast we all took a walk through different parts of the Basin.  Our guide explained all the different geysers as we passed them, including Old Faithful who played for us as we were going by.  She plays every 65 minutes and throws a stream of hot water 150 feet high, plays 4 minutes. … Afternoon we visited the Devils Bowl, situated on the summit of a small mound of siliceous deposit, some 5 feet above the general level, it is about 10 feet in diameter, with a glittering of brilliantly colored formation 18 inches in height.  The constant boiling of its contents is agitated by the bubbles of escaping steam.”

Old Faithful Geyser, August 1897.

Devil's Punch Bowl, August 1897.

August 20, 1897 - Yellowstone Lake

“After lunch we took the steamer Zillah for a 17 mile sail across the lake where our next camp was situated.  On this trip the steamer stops at Dot Island, permitting tourists to go on shore to see the herd of buffalo, elk, and mountain sheep kept on the island.”

August 21, 1897 - Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone

“After we got rested and had our dinner we drove over to the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone.  The first thing of interest was the Upper Falls of the Yellowstone.  They have a perpendicular drop of 140 feet.  A quarter of a mile below, the river takes another leap of 360 feet, called the Lower or Great Falls. … Inspiration point is considered by many as being of all points the best from which to see and appreciate the immensity of the canyon.  … It’s beyond my power to describe the coloring and wonderful make of nature along the canyon.”

Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, August 1897.

Wylie Camping Company

The Wylie Camping Company, founded by Ohio native William Wylie, began tent camping tours in Yellowstone National Park in 1883, with a goal of providing a safe, comfortable, and enjoyable camping experience during a period when the few hotels available in the Park were rather crude facilities with only the most basic amenities and services.  Starting with portable camps, Wylie eventually received permission in 1896 to establish permanent tent camps, erected each spring and left in place throughout the tourist season.  Wylie gradually began building camps at the premier Park sites; he also built lunch stations at appropriate places along the tour route.  Wylie’s rates were considerably less than the hotels’ ($35 vs. $50 for six-day tours around 1898) and he offered a personalized camping experience.  Though there were other tent camping businesses in the Park, Wylie became the standard to emulate.  In 1901 he accommodated 1371 guests during the season.

Wylie sold his company in 1905; the business continued to expand and improve “Wylie Way” operations through 1916.  Automobiles had been introduced to the Park in 1915 and began to take over as the transportation of choice.  With decreased travel times, many tent camps and lunch stations were closed down, and in 1917 the National Park Service mandated the consolidation of the camping, hotel, and transportation companies into a new organization called the Yellowstone Park Camping Company.  The new company was eventually absorbed into the Yellowstone Park Company in 1936.

The Wylie Company published brochures every year of its operations, expounding on the wonders of camp life in Yellowstone.  A brochure from 1908 describes four-room and two-room tents with single beds, available with board floors and rugs.  Every tent had a wood stove, beds with fine mattress, and “good clean sheets, blankets, quilts, etc.”  The tent canvas was candy-striped and meals were served in large dining tents with white table cloths and dishes.  Each camp also featured milk houses, cold storage, warehouses, photographer’s work rooms, swings, and hammocks.  Evening entertainment was provided in the form of a large campfire with singing, storytelling, games and fresh-cooked popcorn.  Camp capacity was about 80 guests and recreation tents were featured nearby.

A Wylie Camp at Yellowstone's Upper Geyser Basin.  (Courtesy of Geyser Bob's Yellowstone Park History Service)

By 1908 the Wylie Company provided two-room permanent tests at Yellowstone.   (Courtesy of Geyser Bob's Yellowstone Park History Service)
  

A permanent Wylie Camp dining tent in 1908 at Yellowstone.   (Courtesy of Geyser Bob's Yellowstone Park History Service)

Steamer Zillah

The Wylie Company’s comprehensive tour of Yellowstone offered tourists a steamboat cruise across Yellowstone Lake from West Thumb to Lake Camp, on the north side of the Lake near where the Yellowstone River outlets from the Lake - with a stop at Dot Island to visit a “zoo,” containing elk and bison.

The steamer Zillah was built in Iowa in the mid-1880s to carry tourists on Minnesota’s Lake Minnetonka. But several structural flaws marred the boat.  Its three-foot draft was too deep for the shallow uneven contours of Lake Minnetonka and the ship listed badly to the starboard side.  Improvements were made to the boat, but dipping Lake levels finally doomed the boat for local use. 

The Yellowstone Park Association purchased the Zillah in 1889; crews quickly chopped it into three pieces and shipped it a thousand miles to the shores of Yellowstone Lake, where it was reassembled and put into use as an alternative to the dusty-road route from West Thumb to Lake Camp.  The steamboat trip was a very popular Yellowstone attraction; the 125-passenger boat transported nearly 4,000 people in 1904.

The ultimate fate of the Zillah is unknown.  It was an old rattletrap by the late 1900s, was reported seen in dry-dock in 1920, and then disappeared from history.

The steamboat Zillah cruising across Yellowstone Lake.  (Courtesy of the National Park Service)

Across the Years

Today, Yellowstone National Park hosts over four million visitors per year.  The Park is accessible through five entrances; accommodations include nine hotels/lodges and 13 campgrounds.  Instead of a water  transit path from West Thumb to the Lake Hotel, Yellowstone Lake provides recreational boating, fishing hiking and camping.

Following his visit to Yellowstone, Ambrose Ring returned to New York City to attend high school and then the Columbia School of Mines, where he earned a mining engineering degree.  He spent almost 50 years working as a mining engineer all over the western U.S.  He returned to Yellowstone in 1924 with his three children, including my father, Clinton Ring, documenting the trip with diary comments and photographs.  Ambrose’s entire life, along with other Ring-family members, is documented on the Ring brothers website under “Ring Family History & More.”

Yellowstone Park today is accessible through five entrances.