Big Hole National Battlefield Administrative History

Chapter Six:
Visitor Use

Visitor use of Big Hole National Battlefield increased in the 1990s. Having see-sawed either side of 40,000 people per year in the 1980s, visitation averaged around 50,000 in the early 1990s and climbed to 65,000 by 1997. The seasonality of visitor use remained about the same between the two decades with roughly half of annual visitation falling in the months of July and August and fully 95 percent of annual visitation appearing in the six months from May through October. [27]

Big Hole staff attributed much of the increase to population growth in western Montana, particularly in the Bitterroot and Missoula valleys to the west and north of Big Hole, as evidenced by the county numbers on Montana license plates commonly seen in the parking lot. "In the late 1980s, western Montana was discovered," Jock Whitworth recalled. The influx of population to these counties seemed to spring not from economic opportunity but from the area's attractiveness as a place "to enjoy the good life." [28] Many of the new day visitors to the battlefield appeared to the staff as greenhorns. At worst, they did not give the battlefield proper respect. Kermit Edmunds, a Missoula high school teacher who had served as a seasonal interpreter at Big Hole sporadically since 1964, remembered an incident in 1991 that seemed to epitomize the change. Once during that summer he had to apprehend some visitors who had brought a pair of llamas in a horse trailer to the battlefield and were allowing the animals to graze in the Siege Area. For Edmunds, this signaled that "the era of the cappuccino cowboy had arrived." [29]

Whitworth obtained an analysis of visitor use in 1991. He found that Montana residents comprised 30 percent of visitors in that year. Washington, Idaho, and California supplied the largest percentage of out-of-state visitors, while Oregon, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, Minnesota, and Wisconsin accounted for 2 to 4 percent of visitors each. Texas, Wyoming, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Nevada accounted for another 1 percent each. [30] Approximately 15 percent of visitors were over 61 years of age, approximately 55 percent were between 61 and 18, and the remaining 30 percent were under 18. Whitworth estimated that 50 percent of visitors came in nuclear family groups (including couples traveling without children), 10 percent in organized tours, 10 percent by themselves, and the remaining 30 percent in some other grouping of extended family, multiple family, partial family, or peers. "Special populations," such as visitors with handicaps, non-English speakers, and ethnic minorities, had a relatively small presence at this unit of the National Park system, accounting for about 1 percent each. [31]

Whitworth's analysis included breakdowns of visitor use by duration of stay and activity. An overwhelming 99 percent of visitors were day users. Of these, approximately 10 percent were "home-based visitors" on a one-day excursion and approximately 89 percent were "through visitors" on an extended trip. Four out of five visitors centered their visit around the unit's "primary resource" – the battlefield, while one in five entered the area for purposes incidental to the primary resource. [32]

In 1994, another analysis of visitor use was made under contract by the Cooperative Park Studies Unit, University of Idaho. This study, based on results from several hundred visitor surveys, corroborated the demographic profile described by Whitworth in 1991. It disclosed additional information about the visitor experience: for example, some 18 percent of visitors were repeat visitors, 99 percent of visitors made use of the visitor center, and 90 percent of visitors came "to learn history." Completed in 1995, the visitor study provided detailed statistics on visitors' length of stay, activities, reasons for the visit, primary area of interest, sources of information, use of visitor services and facilities, and preferences for educational subjects and tribal contact in the future. [33]

The staff was aware of another significant if intangible feature of visitor use: increasingly, visitors expressed more sympathy for the Nez Perce point of view. Staff members attributed some of this change to broad currents in American culture: for example, the pro-American Indian sentiment elicited by the popular Hollywood movie, "Dances with Wolves." Staff members also believed that the Nez Perce story was becoming more widely known among the general public. Many people, already knowledgeable about the story, came to the battlefield to pay homage to the site and to contemplate the tragedy. Although these visitor perspectives could not be documented statistically, they nevertheless had a potent effect on the interpretive program. [34]