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 Bozeman Pass - Bozeman, MT Posted by:  T0SHEA
N 45° 40.016 W 110° 48.350
12T E 515124 N 5057061
At the summit of Bozeman pass are a pair of Montana Historical Highway Markers, one each for the eastbound and westbound halves of I-90.
Waymark Code: WMWB23
Location: Montana, United States
Date Posted: 08/06/2017
Views: 3
BOZEMAN PASS
Sacajawea, the Shoshone woman who guided portions of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, led Captain Wm. Clark and his party of ten men over an old buffalo road through this pass on July 15,1806. They were eastward bound and planned to explore the Yellowstone River to its mouth where they were to rejoin Captain Lewis and party who were returning via the Missouri River.
In the 1860s John M. Bozeman, an adventurous young Georgian, opened a trail from Fort Laramie, Wyoming, to Virginia City, Montana, across the hostile Indian country east of here. He brought his first party through in 1863 and the next year guided a large wagon train of emigrants and gold—seekers over this pass, racing with an outfit led by Jim Bridger. The old mountain man had blazed his own road, boasting that it was safer and faster than Bozeman's route. Bridger used a pass north of here. These pioneer speed demons made as much as fifteen to twenty miles a day — some days. The outfits reached Virginia City within a few hours of each other.
From the Montana Historical Highway Marker
The History of the Montana Historical Highway Markers
[It was a man named Bob Fletcher whose idea it was, in 1935, to produce roadside signs which imparted knowledge of Montana's history, each sign containing a bit of the story of some local event or site.] The rustic-looking sign boards were mounted on lodgepole pine posts and hung from decorative routed crossbeams. The posts were set in fieldstone bases to make them eye-catching, rustic—and crash resistant. The sign texts were hand-lettered on five-by-eight-foot plywood boards set in log frames. The first marker, "Gates of the Mountains," was installed on U.S. Highway 91, about sixteen miles north of Helena, in early July 1935. It was followed by twenty-nine more signs by the end of the year.
Bob Fletcher's success in promoting and developing the tourist industry in the early 1930s enabled him to pitch a project that he'd been considering since the 1920s: roadside highway markers that described and celebrated Montana's colorful history. This idea allegedly originated after he became bored reading the historical markers installed by the Daughters of the American Revolution along South Dakota's roads in the mid 1920s. He felt he could do better in Montana by making the marker texts big enough to read from a car "and sometimes humorous." Fletcher later recalled that the texts "should not be a lot of stilted copy with dates and all. I wanted them to be like a native standing there and telling you about the place."
By the early 1950s, severe weathering of the signs compelled the department to begin routing the texts onto redwood boards. By 1952, the highway department had installed over one hundred markers along Montana's highways. Although Montana's historical highway marker program was not the first of its kind in the United States, it proved among the most influential. According to one newspaper article, twelve other state highway departments requested copies of the marker plans.
By the early 1980s, the interstates had diverted much of the traffic off the two-lane highways and onto the four-lane superhighways. Although some signs had been reinstalled at interstate rest areas, most had simply been forgotten, vandalized, stored in maintenance shops, or allowed to deteriorate next to bypassed highways. In 1985, the Forty-Ninth State Legislature allocated $200,000 to refurbish the 132 old markers (the original markers cost $400 each—including the support posts and field-stone bases!) and write twenty-four new ones.
Since 1985, over one hundred new historical markers have been added, covering a wide variety of subjects and styles. The markers have been printed on sturdy, weather-resistant plastic since 1999.
From the book Montana's Historical Highway Markers by the Montana Historical Society
Describe the area and history:
This is the marker for the eastbound lanes of I-90; the westbound marker is across the highway and about a tenth of a mile to the west. Though this is the same piece of ground over which the Bozeman Pass traversed, it's difficult to get an appreciation of what it may have been like to travel it on a horse drawn freight wagon in 1863, let alone on foot in 1806. Both markers are placed at large pullouts and the "freight wagons" of today whizz by the markers at 70 miles per hour and more.
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