The Long, Long Trail

The panel leaves the road unpaved and renumbered in 1926, and it stayed rough a long while after. Duluth interests organized the highway's association on February 17, 1919, a little over a month after Roosevelt died, but the renumbering did not finish the route: the 56 miles over Marias Pass were not completed until 1930, and dedication of the full highway followed in Montana. Hard surfacing in Montana began about the same year, and by the National Register's history of the corridor the job was not done until 1948, more than two decades after the road became U.S. 2.

What the plaque says

The Long, Long Trail In 1919, the Duluth, Minnesota Chamber of Commerce sponsored the creation of the Theodore Roosevelt International Highway as a memorial to the recent passing of the former president. An early interstate highway, the route stretched 4,000 miles between Portland, Maine and Portland, Oregon. A little over 750 miles of the Roosevelt Highway spanned Montana, none of it paved. The Roosevelt Highway Association warned motorists in 1921 that the route between Glasgow and Malta was a partly improved dirt road that was almost impassable because of gumbo in wet weather. Despite that, hundreds of adventurous automobile tourists undertook the difficult road to visit Glacier National Park and other attractions along the way. They had their cars serviced in local garages and stayed in hotels and campgrounds along the way, enriching businesses in the small towns along the Montana High Line. One promoter wrote that the Roosevelt Highway "opens to the tourist the door of the treasure-box of beauties and grandeurs and varied scenery of the North continent as no other highway does." In 1926, the Bureau of Public Roads re-designated the route as U.S. Highway 2. For some, though, it will always be the Roosevelt Highway.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sleeping Buffalo Rock — steps away
  A sacred boulder marked as a resting buffalo, taken off its ridge above the Milk River in the 1930s and sheltered now beside U.S. 2.
• Great Plains Dinosaur Museum — 16 mi
  Home of Leonardo, the duckbill that kept its skin for seventy-seven million years, found in the breaks north of Malta in 2000.

More markers nearby

• Sleeping Buffalo Rock — steps away
• Cree Crossing — 5.3 mi
• Cattle Brands — 15 mi