A Short History of the Marshall Hotel

[Note: This history is adapted from Ms. M. J. Harris' draft masters thesis, "The History of the 1880-1891 Marshall/Firehole Hotel, Yellowstone National Park and Conservation Methods for Artifacts from a Thermal Riverine Environment," Department of History, Maritime Studies Program, East Carolina University, Greenville, North Carolina (2002). Used with permission.]

The Marshall/Firehole Hotel was a prominent feature of Yellowstone National Park from 1880-1881. Over its life, the hotel occupied two sites along the Firehole River, providing simple tourist lodgings during Yellowstone’s early years. The hotel was the first to receive a Department of the Interior concession permit and was used until completion of the nearby Fountain Hotel in 1891.

George W. Marshall and the Marshall Hotel
George W. Marshall was born in Illinois on March 24, 1846. His family lived on a farm and young George attended common school. In 1860, Marshall moved to California and began working as a blacksmith and cattle buyer. Nine years later, he relocated to Ogden, Utah, where he managed the Junction House and gained his first experience running a hostelry. In 1872, Marshall moved again, this time to Elko, Nevada, where he operated a stage station for the next four years. In 1875, he married Sarah Romrell and moved to Montana in 1876, where he operated a stage line between Eagle Rock and Butte City.

 In 1879, Marshall was hired to carry mail between Virginia City and Mammoth Hot Springs, Yellowstone. The route was discontinued after only a year, but during that time Marshall became very familiar with the geyser basin area, and began thinking about establishing a hotel there. He chose a location just west of the forks of the Firehole River, close to the river’s confluence with Nez Perce Creek. Marshall took on John B. Goff as a partner, and in 1880 they built a shingle-roofed mail station, hotel, barn, and outbuildings at a cost of $1,000. Marshall, his wife Sarah, and their children spent the winter of 1880-1881 in the unfinished hotel, and on January 31, 1881, Sarah gave birth to her fourth child, Rosa Park Marshall, the first white child born in the park.

A map of the Yellowstone geyser basins, c. 1880, the year George Marshall and John Goff
established their hotel on the bank of the Firehole River (blue arrow). Image courtesy
Library of Congress, call no. G4262.Y4 1880 .Y3 TIL.

Marshall and Goff also established a stage company that brought passengers to the hotel from Virginia City, Montana, a distance of about 60 miles (100km). The first passengers were Robert and Carrie Adell Strahorn. Robert Strahorn had been hired by the Union Pacific Railroad to explore and publicize the West. The Strahorns left Virginia City with Marshall in his stagecoach on October 1, 1880, against the advice of many who warned against traveling so late in the year. The Strahorns and Marshall spent a grim night in the hayloft of a windowless house near Henry’s Lake, then continued on to the Lower Geyser Basin the next morning. The party reached the Marshall Hotel as night fell on the second evening. As Mrs. Strahorn later recounted in their book, Fifteen Thousand Miles by Stage, Marshall Hotel was not quite what she expected:

the log house was far from being finished, and the part we occupied was partitioned off with a canvas wagon cover. The second floor was only partly laid, and a window or two was missing in the upper part while the unfilled chinks between the logs allowed the rigorous October breezes to fan us at will. At that time the office and sitting-room and dining-room were one, and a single stove did its best toward heating the whole house.

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