As the railroad constructed hotels, camps, chalets, and trails on the east side of Glacier, it also completed a major road from Midvale northward to Many Glacier, making motorized transportation possible in "seven and twelve passenger White machines." All of these projects unquestionably made the government efforts look puny in comparison. According to historian James Sheire, by 1917, the government had spent $634,000 in Glacier while the Great Northern had spent approximately $1.5 million. Thus, in response to the railroad effort, or possibly as a result of a perceived public demand, Logan and his successors suggested "a road from some one of the mountain passes from the east to the west side." Just as Logan managed to turn the path from Belton to Apgar, "formerly a combination of quagmire, corduroy and misery," into a "broad, well drained, macadamized highway," the Federal Government planned the major development project which would facilitate automobile travel, open Glacier's wilderness, and draw tourists in substantial numbers. Lyman B. Sperry commented in 1915: "Nature has done much for the Glacier Park region. The Great Northern folks have done, and will doubtless continue to do, much in the way of hotels etc. Let the Government do equally well in providing roadways and trails."

Drawing people to Glacier, became an art in itself. Attractive brochures, scenic photographs, touring Blackfeet Indians, slogans like "See America First," all promoted the adventure, the accessibility and the accommodations available in a newly developed national park. (Courtesy of Glacier National Park Historical Collections)

Almost every superintendent of Glacier echoed Logan's plea for a transmountain road. Most administrators agreed that this road to "points of scenic interest" was necessary and, as Supervisor S. F. Ralston wrote in 1915: "It will afford quick and easy transportation to hundreds of tourists who will not undergo the hardships of a horseback trip, and would open up a new and scenic transcontinental route during the summer months." Ralston added that this national park experience planned for future travelers would also "greatly increase the revenues of the park."

Following the formation of the National Park Service in 1916, the newly appointed Director, Stephen Mather, took a direct interest in Glacier's proposed roadways and development. Mather traveled over some of Glacier's passes by horseback, viewing various routes, and he corresponded with men like Sperry, asking their opinions concerning the location for the proposed road. Mather would later justify this road construction by stating: "Roads . . . had to be developed and expanded because cross-country motoring was just then developing and motorists were urging that the parks be opened to automobiles." Mather's successor as Director of the National Park Service, Horace M. Albright, justified this major development when he stated: "Although Glacier will always remain a trail park, the construction of this one highway to its inner wonders is meeting an obligation to the great mass of people who because of age, physical condition, or other reason would never have an opportunity to enjoy, close at hand, this marvelous mountain park."

Park supporters, administrators, and concessionaires alike agreed that a road should be built, but they disagreed as to the route. Logan, Marshall, and the other early planners proposed a variety of routes: one from Lake McDonald northeastward over Fifty Mountain to Waterton, another over Trapper Creek (Logan) Pass, one from Waterton Lake over Brown Pass to Bowman Lake, and another over Gunsight Pass. Lyman Sperry wrote lengthy letters to Director Mather and others advocating the Gunsight Pass-Sperry Trail route. Sperry wrote to the Kalispell Chamber of Commerce advocating his plan and told them that Louis Hill wanted the Swiftcurrent Pass route used so that Many Glacier Hotel would have a steady stream of clientele. Subsequently, Kalispell's Chamber of Commerce supported Sperry against the railroad. In fact, Louis Hill had written to Sperry: "When the road finally goes through I am inclined to think that it should be farther north for the purpose of enabling travelers to see as much of the mountain country as possible, and to have an ultimate destination in the Park, probably in the vicinity of Many-Glacier Hotel." Sperry countered that an additional road over Piegan Pass to St. Mary Lake could connect "his" road with Hill's hotel. While the bickering continued, government surveys in 1917 and 1918 found Logan Pass to be the lowest and most practicable east-west route.

The automobile was introduced to Glacier by 1913. It soon became a popular way of transporting people to the larger hotels, especially on Glacier's east side. By 1915, specific plans were being made to create a transmountain road cutting across Glacier's interior, with the rationale that those people inclined not to hike or ride a horse would still be able to see a substantial portion of the park. (Courtesy of Glacier National Park Historical Collections)

As Park Service crews began to maintain and improve the nearly one hundred miles of park road on the east side near Many Glacier, St. Mary, Cut Bank, and Two Medicine and on the west side at Fish Creek and into the North Fork region, the first segment of the Going-to-the-Sun Road was initiated by a private landowner and hotel operator, J. E. Lewis, in 1919. Lewis managed to construct approximately three miles of road along the east shore of Lake McDonald and spent over three thousand dollars in his effort. By 1921, Congress appropriated the necessary funds and the Park Service engaged private construction firms to continue road building to the Lewis Hotel (now Lake McDonald Lodge) and then northeastward along McDonald Creek. By 1925, contractors had completed the road to Avalanche Creek, work had begun on the east side heading into the mountains from St. Mary, and the Bureau of Public Roads initiated the final survey of the route over Logan Pass.

During the early 1920s, work began on an automobile road through the heart of Glacier over Logan Pass. Crews worked under dangerous conditions which the loose rock, avalanches, and weather of these mountains frequently provided. In two places, the precipitous slopes could not be made into a roadway and tunnels were constructed. Regardless of the danger, only one man died of an accidental fall during the decade of construction activity. By 1933, the Going-to-the-Sun Road was completed at a cost of three million dollars. (Courtesy of Glacier National Park Historical Collections)

Various private firms from Spokane, Tacoma, St. Paul, and Montana participated in the final phase of the massive construction project. The Williams and Douglas Company of Tacoma received the contract on the most difficult section along the west side of the Garden Wall and moved crews and equipment to the foot of the Wall in June 1925. Packhorses moved all construction equipment in and out of the area until the Mount Cannon section of the road was completed, which then allowed truck transport to be used. From 1925 until 1929, six camps were established with three hundred men engaged in construction work. Of all the men involved in this dangerous labor, only one man, a foreman, was killed when he lost his grip on a rope and fell sixty feet to the roadway. Both the east and west side tunnels presented specialized problems and were subcontracted and bypassed as work continued beyond them. They became the most difficult projects to complete. By late 1928, construction approached Logan Pass and by June of 1929, automobiles could travel from the West Entrance to Logan Pass. In October 1932, the east side tunnel was completed and the final section of the road was roughed out and graded. And on July 15, 1933, the three million dollar Going-to-the-Sun Road was dedicated with a very elaborate ceremony and celebration atop Logan Pass and was officially opened for public use.

Going-to-the-Sun Road became an overnight success at drawing motorists, and it developed into a major attraction of Glacier National Park. Some estimates indicate that over ninety-five percent of all park visitors centered their entire visit along the roadway and confined their entire park stay to the two-to-four hour drive in and out of the park. Statistical evidence also displayed a significant increase in travel to Glacier, showing forty thousand people visiting in 1925 as construction was beginning, increasing to seventy-four thousand in 1930 as construction was nearing completion, and skyrocketing to two hundred and ten thousand in 1936 after the road had been open for three years. The combination of the opening of U.S. Highway 2 south of Glacier in 1930, along with the opening of Going-to-the-Sun Road in 1933, made scenic Glacier a new and attractive objective for transcontinental automobile travel. The Going-to-the-Sun Road became the major National Park Service development in Glacier, opened Glacier's wilderness to "the great mass of people," and became a major administrative center of attention for many years thereafter. Road conditions, snow removal, traffic control, repair, and maintenance, all became primary concerns for park officials.

The establishment of the National Park Service in 1916 served not only to unify all national parks, to increase their annual budgets, and to make projects like Going-to-the-Sun Road possible, but also it made numerous other construction requests more orderly and general planning less haphazard than it had been. After World War I ended and visitation and Congressional appropriations returned to normal, the park officials began constructing bridges, patrol cabins, ranger stations, employee housing, administrative buildings, telephone lines, campgrounds, trails, and many additional improvements deemed necessary for various administrative purposes or to enhance visitor use and enjoyment. Trail construction ranked high on the priority list. In 1917, Acting Supervisor George E. Goodwin reported that only two hundred miles of trail existed (Logan had reported 199 in 1911) and recommended that more be built. By 1930, Director Horace Albright recorded that 841 miles of trail existed, and by 1940 nearly one thousand miles of trail had been built reflecting several decades of trail-building effort.

The Great Northern Railway sponsored writers who would come to Glacier, and describe the park environment as well as the convenience of its accommodations. Some of the writers were more impressed than others. Novelist Mary Roberts Rinehart recorded her impressions of life in these mountains in Through Glacier Park (1916) and Tenting To-Night (1918). Regarding the rangers, she wrote: "The rangers keep going all winter. There is much to be done. In the summer it is forest fires and outlaws. In the winter there are no forest fires, but there are poachers after mountain sheep and goats, opium smugglers, bad men from over the Canadian border. Now and then a ranger freezes to death. All summer these intrepid men on their sturdy horses go about armed with revolvers. But in the fall—snow begins early in September, sometimes even in August—they take to snowshoes. With a carbine strung to his shoulders, matches in a waterproof case, snowshoes and a package of food in his pocket, the Glacier Park ranger covers unnumbered miles, patrolling the wildest and most storm-ridden country in America. He travels alone. The imprint of a strange snowshoe on the trail rouses his suspicion. Single-handed he follows the marks in the snow. A blizzard comes. He makes a wikiup of branches, lights a small fire, and plays solitaire until the weather clears. The prey he is stalking cannot advance either. Then one day the snow ceases; the sun comes out. Over the frozen crust his snowshoes slide down great slopes with express speed. Generally he takes his man in. Sometimes the outlaw gets the drop on the ranger first and gets away." (Courtesy of Glacier National Park Historical Collections)

Just as trail mileage increased, campgrounds appeared in response to a certain segment of the public who did not care to patronize the hotels, camps, or chalets supplied by the Great Northern or to use the cabins of the park's private operators. In 1921, Steve Mather reported: "The number of automobiles now visiting Glacier Park made it necessary to provide additional campgrounds." He added that other needs like toilets, grills, showers, water supplies, and picnic areas should also be considered. By 1923, Mather felt the campgrounds needed enlargement and added: "The existing hotel and chalet facilities were overtaxed during the peak of the season, and with the nearing completion of the Transmountain Road a serious problem is presented in the matter of furnishing the visiting public adequate accommodations. These must be anticipated and provided before the park is overwhelmed."

The Glacier Park Hotel Company found the brisk business of the 1920s particularly satisfying since its investment of the previous decade was substantial. Historian Ober referred to this period as "the Golden Years" for the company. By intensive publicity campaigns, by encouragement of group tours, by using Blackfeet Indians as traveling publicity agents (referred to as the Glacier Park Tribe in railroad literature), and by many other techniques, the Hotel Company successfully encouraged travel to Glacier. Earlier the Great Northern sponsored tours of writers and encouraged and published their writings about the park. Books like M. E. Holtz and Katherine Bemis's Glacier National Park, Its Trails and Treasures became a Great Northern-Glacier Park Hotel Company advertisement as well as a description of Glacier. In sponsoring historical writers, the companies gained booklets like Grace Flandrau's The Story of Marias Pass (1935) which paid appropriate homage to Great Northern heroes. Some of the more perceptive books came from the pen of James Willard Schultz, whose Signposts of Adventure (1926) related the historical-legendary source of place names for Glacier. Even Mary Roberts Rinehart's two books, Through Glacier Park and Tenting To-Night, while contributing a female point of view, gave substantial credit to railroad investments. In Through Glacier Park, published in 1916, Rinehart gave a dutiful, twenty-page chapter describing the various hotels, chalets, and camps. Rinehart began:

In perfect harmony with their setting, deep in among the mountains . . . are the hotels, chalet-villages, and tepee-camps. They form not the least interesting feature of this mountain land. True, some who are looking for a wilderness in their visit to this great play-ground, and who carry their "hotels" in a "rucksack" on their backs, consider these accommodations an unwelcome luxury and an unnecessary comfort, if not a sacrilege. But in every play-ground are there not those who care only to look on, as well as those who play for all there is in the game?

With the construction of the Prince of Wales Hotel at Waterton Townsite in Alberta's adjoining Waterton Lakes National Park in 1926-27, and its opening for business by mid-1927, Hotel Company officials anticipated that their construction efforts were completed. However, this major concessionaire of Glacier had signed a twenty-year contract in 1917 which, while it gave the company many privileges, it also mandated that they function in the "best interests of the public." These privileges meant that the company could provide exclusive lodging and dining facilities in Glacier's east side (and in nearly the whole park after the company purchased the Lewis Hotel at Lake McDonald in 1930), could graze livestock near their chalets and hotels, could plant ten-acre garden plots near their facilities, could seine whitefish out of St. Mary Lake for menu use, and could engage in other activities to improve their business.

But their twenty-year contract also stipulated that they must respond to Park Service requests. Director Mather began to assert firmer control over hotel activities during the mid-1920s. His well-publicized dislike of an old and unsightly sawmill at Many Glacier brought his wrath into the open. While inspecting Glacier National Park in 1925, he became disgusted at the hotel managers indifference toward this unsightly mess of woodpiles and slash. He enlisted the aid of a Park Service crew, which placed thirteen sticks of dynamite under the sawmill, and blew it up. After leaving Park Service crews there to insure that hotel employees cleaned up the scene, Mather left to continue his "fight against corruption, commercialism and destructive private interests in the national parks." If Director Mather suggested—as he did in 1920—that a small hotel be built at Logan Pass or at Kintla or Bowman Lakes, or a large hotel be placed in the Belly River valley, then the Hotel Company was expected to respond.

By 1929, a Park Service policy called for each national park concessionaire to develop a five-year plan for construction. Presented to Park Service officials in Glacier, as well as to regional and national offices, the plan was intended to allow park planners to work with the hotel management in providing for the anticipated needs of future park visitors.

The Glacier Park Hotel Company failed to submit a plan on schedule. Whether they felt their construction was complete or whether they were beginning to feel the economic squeeze of the Depression apparently was of little concern to park officials who became upset at their display of indifference. The Park Service hoped to add "auto-cabins" or "bungalows" for the numerous automobile tourists who visited the park, but who wished to avoid the expensive accommodations of the massive hotels. Local critic W. C. Whipps wrote that the park was meant as a "playground for ALL the American people, not simply . . . for the bridge and golf players, not for the sole benefit of the Great Northern Railway company or a few park rangers and white pants dudes." In response to Park Service insistence and changing public demand, the Hotel Company extended its services by building the Swiftcurrent Auto Cabins (near Many Glacier) in 1934, began to construct another auto-cabin complex at Rose Creek (now Rising Sun) in 1940, and prepared plans for a similar development at Apgar. So, while both Park Service officials and hotel operators hoped to serve the public, the meager profits of short summer seasons, combined with hard times throughout the country, made hotel officials reluctant to expand when the Park Service proposed additional projects as addenda to the attraction of Going-to-the-Sun Road.

Both the Park Service and the Glacier Park Hotel Company appeared successful in satisfying the traveling public, and from thousands of visitors, there were very few complaints about services or facilities. The irony of the rift over the auto-cabins at Swiftcurrent was their subsequent destruction during the Heavens Peak Fire of 1936, only two years after their completion. While the fire threatened Many Glacier Hotel, Park Service and hotel crews combined their efforts to insure its survival. But many Park Service buildings and the auto-camp would have to be almost entirely rebuilt.

A lack of rainfall, drying winds, and hot summer days occasionally led to Glacier's forests becoming susceptible to a lightning or man-caused fire. Forest fires burned over one hundred thousand acres in the park during 1910 and they continued to threaten nearly every summer, with the Half Moon Fire of 1920 burning thousands of acres of mature forest and destroying considerable private property. Today the attitude toward fire in national parks is beginning to change as ecologists view fire as a natural stage in forest life cycles. As the forest fire fighting symbol, Smokey the Bear, entered retirement, fire would still be viewed by many people as needless destruction, but ecologists began to alter that traditional view of fire as an unquestionable evil. (Courtesy of Glacier National Park Historical Collections and United States Forest Service (insert))