The Montana - Utah Road

This board repeats, almost word for word, the one near Barretts about nineteen miles north, and its opening lines belong there. The Rattlesnake Cliffs stand beside that board, and the expedition never came this far up the Red Rock: in August 1805 it turned west for Lemhi Pass at Camp Fortunate, now under Clark Canyon Reservoir, and Clark's party returned to the same camp in July 1806. The boards also start the road in different towns. Salt Lake City, named here, was its first terminus; Corinne took over once the railroad reached it in 1869.

What the plaque says

The Montana - Utah Road Interstate 15 is the latest in a series of roads that have crossed this area since prehistory. Although used for generations by Native Americans, the first recorded use of this route was by the Lewis and Clark Expedition on August 10, 1805. They named cliffs to the north of here after the scores of rattlesnakes they encountered on their trip upriver. With the discovery of gold at nearby Grasshopper Creek and Alder Gulch in the early 1860s, thousands of people came to southwest Montana to mine gold and to "mine the miners." The road originated in Salt Lake City and traversed a series of high plateaus and narrow canyons on its way north to southwestern Montana. The road was the best route into the territory for the freighters who supplied the mining camps. Drawn by teams of mules or oxen, each wagon carried up to 12,000 pounds of freight. The trip from Utah typically took three weeks and a freighting outfit could usually make three or four round trips each year. Near Dell, the road branched into three separate trails that led to Bannack/Deer Lodge, Virginia City and Helena. This section of the road terminated at Helena. With the arrival of the Utah & Northern Railroad in 1880, the road became obsolete. In the 1920s, however, it again became an important travel corridor as U.S. Highway 91 and, in the early 1960s, Interstate 15.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Bannack State Park — 23 mi
  The first capital's second life: a county seat lost to the railroad, a courthouse turned hotel, a town that emptied slowly.

More markers nearby

• The Tendoy Mountains — 18 mi
• Howdy Everyone! Glad to See You — 18 mi
• The Montana Road — 18 mi
• Bannack — 19 mi