The first white man to take up residence at the confluence was Johnson Gardner, an American Fur Company trapper who caught beavers along the Yellowstone River in the 1830s. The area became known as Gardner’s Hole, in part due to legendary guide Jim Bridger, who used the name when he brought the Washburn-Langford-Doane expedition to Yellowstone in 1870. The name of the campsite (but not the river) was misspelled in the expedition’s accounts, and in the official government report of geologist Ferdinand Hayden, who brought the first federally funded scientific team into Yellowstone the following year.
Hayden’s survey led to the passage of the Yellowstone National Park Protection Act in 1872, preserving more than one million acres in the Yellowstone Basin and creating the first national park in the world. Within the year, entrepreneurs had built a toll road from Bozeman, Montana, to Gardiner and up to Mammoth Hot Springs. Settlers arrived and built a restaurant and bakery, post office, schoolhouse, barber shop, saloon, general store, and hotel. But the area was still difficult to reach; only a few hundred tourists came through Gardiner to visit Yellowstone in the next ten years.
In 1882, the Northern Pacific Railroad reached the town of Livingston, and the hundreds of tourists became thousands, disembarking at Livingston and then taking stagecoaches to Gardiner and the park. It wasn’t until the completion of a Northern Pacific spur line—a short extension of the track from the main line at Livingston to the park’s northern entrance—in 1902, however, that Gardiner’s status as the park’s first gateway town was secured.
As the first issue of the Gardiner Wonderland declared in May 1902, “This town is the supply point of the surrounding country, and headquarters for most of the team work and freighting in and about the park.”
By then, officials had established the park’s headquarters at Mammoth Hot Springs, one of Yellowstone’s premier attractions. But visitors also wanted to see the upper and lower falls of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, as well as Old Faithful and the other wonders of the geyser region.
Park personnel constructed two “loop roads” connecting these sites and several new entrances, which linked the park to communities that would become additional gateway towns: Jackson Hole (south) and Cody (east) in Wyoming and West Yellowstone (west) and Cooke City (northeast) in Montana. The western entrance quickly became the park’s most popular. After 1902, when the southern entrance was completed, Jackson Hole and Gardiner vied for the second spot.