It's Not Just The Fish

STEP THROUGH TIME

The Marshal Hotel
Nez Perce Creek Slowing
and some firehole fishing

1903 Northern Pacific RR map
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.. Constrain your activities to just fishing, (let alone catching,) and you miss a bit of the flavor and personality of Yellowstone National Park.
.. As our nation's first park there is history lurking at every beat and run of most rivers.
.. If you've enjoyed a dalliance on the Firehole River or if you've bothered to stroll Nez Perce Creek, you've trod the ground where Chief Joseph did. You've also wandered in the footsteps of early visitors who stayed at the Marshall Hotel.
.. The hotel started out as a crude affair. A simple cabin that apparently was never completed.
.. The second Marshall Hotel was not much better but was at least two stories tall and had wooden, (instead of canvass,) walls. The later structure and it's associated ramshackle buildings was also known as the Firehole Hotel.
.. The compund was the only one in the interior of the park for years. The helter-skelter assortment of buildings was a portent of future development in a park that pretends to be wilderness.
.. The modern road construction in the early 20th century destroyed what little was left of the buildings and the site. If you've driven to the barrier on the Freight Road you've driven over the old hotel. It sat at the confluence of Nez Perce Creek and the Firehole River.
.. Guests at the hotel could not fish. There were no fish!
.. Stocking of invasive species on this bit of park waters first took place in 1889, (just two years before the hotel was abandoned in favor of the Fountain Hotel - a bit further south.) The Army used a few of the crude structures until about the second decade of the 20th century.
.. If you just fish - forget it. The Firehole River and it's artificial fishery is now a world wide commercial attraction.
.. The commerce generated by this economic asset is enjoyed by park managers, concessionaires, and feather merchants alike, (to say nothing of fishers only interested in catching.)
.. Speaking of catching: it's pretty good right now, (and getting to be that way on Nez Perce Creek as well.) Today the streams are dotted with waders, (wearing waders.) and dodging the bison.
.. Today the mayflies, whose natural history has been forever altered by the fish, are hatching. Today the caddis flies, who have dodged fish ever since, will bloom voluminously from late afternoon to twilight.

.. Catching will be good and history will lurk over your shoulder if you fish here, (whether you know it or not.)

-------click on map for enormous image