Roosevelt Arch

The arch at Gardiner was built to be seen from a train. When the Northern Pacific pushed its Yellowstone branch to the park boundary it put up a rustic depot here, and Hiram Chittenden, the Army engineer building the park's roads, thought the dusty flat where passengers climbed into stagecoaches needed some emphatic sign of arrival. The arch went up through the spring and summer of 1903, facing north toward the depot so that people stepping off the train would see it, and was finished on August 15 at a cost of about $10,000. Who designed it has never been settled: Robert Reamer, the architect of the depot and later of the Old Faithful Inn, gets the credit most often, but the records do not prove it.

It stands fifty feet high, built of columnar basalt, hundreds of tons of the six-sided stone quarried nearby, with curved basalt walls running off to either side. Above the opening is the line from the 1872 act that created the park, "For the Benefit and Enjoyment of the People"; the east tower is cut with Yellowstone National Park and the west with Created by Act of Congress, March 1, 1872. Roosevelt laid the cornerstone while the arch was half built and never came back to see it finished.

The other half of the ensemble is gone. The last scheduled passenger train ran to Gardiner in 1948, charters kept coming for a few more summers, and the depot was torn down in 1954; the track was later pulled up. The arch stands alone now at the park's north boundary, free to walk through, and in winter bison sometimes walk through it too.