On the far side of these mountains, an old sawmill sits near the Many Glacier Hotel, and the head of the National Park Service wants it gone. Stephen Mather and the Great Northern Railway have traded letters for years over who really runs this park. Boone tells how the argument finally ended.
Who runs a national park? In August of nineteen twenty-five, a man answered that with a lit fuse. It happened on the far side of these mountains, at Many Glacier, where the Great Northern Railway had put up its enormous hotel. They'd cut the timber with a sawmill in nineteen fourteen and nineteen fifteen, then walked off and left it. Stephen Mather, who ran the National Park Service, called it an eyesore. He asked them to take it down. They stalled. Years of letters, telegrams and meetings, and underneath all of it one question. Did this park answer to the government, or the railroad? So Mather came out himself and had the charges laid. Somebody warned the hotel manager, Binder, who went at Mather face to face. That ranger station across the lake, Binder said, was a good deal uglier than any sawmill. Mather asked the hotel guests to come outside for a demonstration, and he put the flame to the first of thirteen charges himself. A man fishing on the lake saw machinery fly into the air. With each blast, Mather's mood lightened. By the fifth, people were asking why. Celebrating my daughter's nineteenth birthday, he said. A vice president of the railroad called it the most high-handed, unwarranted and illogical thing that has probably ever occurred in any park. The railroad's management was convinced he had lost his mind. That cut closer than they knew. More than once his family had put him away for weeks and months at a time in a sanitarium, and his assistant, Horace Albright, was often the only official allowed to see him. That trip was Mather's last to Glacier. Sixty-one years after the blast, in nineteen eighty-six, Albright was still writing letters to that birthday girl. My dear Betty, he wrote. A book had told the story with her birthday in it, and he understood how she felt. He'd asked them to take that part out. In his telling of the story, Albright wrote of her father, he liked to mention your birthday. And he added a line. I am not keeping a copy of this. Somebody did. It sat in the attic of the old Mather homestead. A letter to an old woman, up under the rafters, with thirteen charges still going off inside it, for a girl of nineteen.
Photo: Kiser Photo Co. / Library of Congress (LC-USZ62-136270) · Public domain (no known restrictions)