"A Dreary Waste": How Glacier National Park Got Its Name, and Who Objected

When Glacier National Park was created in 1910, not everyone in Montana was pleased with the name. The Helena Independent ran a critical editorial:

"Glacier Park in Montana" has a chilly sound. To the uninitiated it may indicate that Montana is all glaciers. We want homeseekers to know the truth--that Montana is a perpetual summer resort. Glacier Park won't help us in spreading that truth.

The park, the paper allowed, was picturesque — and "barren, unproductive, frigid and a dreary waste." It was wrong about the effect. The chance to see a real glacier drew tourists, and the Great Northern Railway built advertising campaigns around the ice.

Named by the ice, long before the park

The names are much older than the park. Indigenous people have long called the area the place where there is a lot of ice, and other tribes call it the land of the shining mountains, for the snow and ice that shine when seen from the plains to the east.

The first to see it, and the first to say "park"

In 1873, U.S. Army Lieutenant John Van Orsdale, climbing over Cutbank Pass, became one of the first white Americans to see one of the park's glaciers. In 1883 he wrote to the Fort Benton River Press that Montana would benefit greatly if the area were set aside as a national park — the first suggestion of a park here.

In 1887, George Bird Grinnell and Lieutenant John H. Beacom photographed Grinnell Glacier spilling out of the mountains. About 1920, T. J. Hileman photographed it again from the same area — probably the first pair of repeat photographs taken in the park. Grinnell spent the rest of his life visiting the region's glaciers and speaking up for the land, and was especially fond of the one that would carry his name.

Grinnell Glacier from Lake Josephine, 1887. Lieutenant John H. Beacom.

The same view around 1920. T. J. Hileman.

Who chose the name

Jackson Glacier around 1900. F. E. Matthes.

William C. Alden's The Glaciers of Glacier National Park, USGS, 1914.

What a glacier is

After the park was established, the USGS sent Alden into the backcountry every year to survey and map its glaciers. His definition:

Here what is left of the many snows of many winters has become compacted and changed to granular ice. When such ice accumulates to a sufficient thickness internal movement begins. Such moving ice constitutes a glacier.

More simply: if more snow falls in winter than melts in summer, for long enough, a glacier forms. Alden also noted that glaciers of the distant past carved much of the park's scenery.

Standing where they stood

The expeditions of Grinnell, Matthes, Alden and others — and the railway's advertising photographers — left a trove of pictures that can be retaken from the same spots. This repeat photography, or rephotography, shows how the landscape has changed, or not. In 2008, Lisa McKeon of the U.S. Geological Survey repeated a Great Northern Railway view from about 1940 to document that change. The glaciers still draw visitors; the photographs show they are not as timeless as they look.

Sources

Based on "How Glacier Got Its Name," National Park Service, Glacier National Park, which cites Alden (1914), Vernon Finley's film One of Our Homelands (2009), Ethan Newberry's film Shining Mountains (2023), Michael J. Ober (2004), John Taliaferro's Grinnell (2019) and the Helena Independent of April 17, 1910; a work of the United States government in the public domain; rewritten in hubnx's own words. The source gives two versions of Van Orsdale's and Matthes's words, so both are paraphrased here.