The “Boys” of the Yellowstone Trail Association

As the founder, lead spokesperson, and tireless organizer of the Yellowstone Trail Association, Joe Parmley got most of the notoriety, but there was a plethora of people in the Association as dedicated as he.

Space allows only for mention of a few of the many stellar gentlemen who cast their lot with this great road experiment. There was no expectation of payment. Getting a transcontinental highway through their town was payment enough.

Establishing a trail, these men worked with no computers, no cell phones, no television, no auto pay, no internet, no Google maps, no apps. Rural telephones had to be cranked and long- distance calls were pretty alien. Crystal radio sets were only on the horizon for rural folk. The telegraph was their fastest line of distant communication, although the U.S. postal service (RFD) seemed speedier than today. Few connected roads existed to get these automobilists to Association national or even state meetings. Although passenger train service was good, it was vexing to have to take a train to a good roads meeting.

Hal Cooley

Besides Joe Parmley and Michael Dowling (See Trail Tale: Parmley, and Trail Tale: Dowling, the most physically and intellectually engaged in the Association was Harold (Hal) Cooley, certainly a public relations expert way before the PR term was invented.

He spent his whole career in civic, political, and road promotions, jobs seemingly intertwined with the warp and woof of his Type-A personality. His was the public face of the Yellowstone Trail Association for 15 of the Association’s 18 years.

Some years ago we interviewed Cooley’s granddaughter and elderly son-in-law and we drew a picture of Hal consistent with newspaper accounts of his day. He was everywhere on the Trail speaking at all of the state and national Association meetings.

He appeared regularly in most of the Trail towns from Ohio to Washington to speak, but more importantly, to beat the drum for dues payments. It was a Sisyphean task. Son-in-law, Julius Maland, remarked that “Hal was never home.” This popular speaker was also sought by civic organizations unrelated to the Trail.

Maland related a tale that Cooley liked to tell: Cooley and a line of cars got stuck in the mud. He worried that the Yellowstone Trail would get a bad name from this occurrence so he went from car to car to get people out, formed a big circle and led them in singing to raise their spirits until they all got pulled out. His favorite song was “There’s a Long, Long Trail Awinding.”

Dozens and dozens of newspaper clippings described a very entertaining speaker who was humorous, yet mesmerizing, with his almost eidetic memory of Trail facts, delivered rapidly because he usually had a limited time allotted to him on the program. This rapid-fire delivery of sometimes startling road or Trail facts, all laced with humor, kept his audiences awake and kept the ever-present press on their toes.

Cooley wore several hats with the Trail Association as his position evolved, but it all boiled down to General Manager.

It was he who managed the Aberdeen, then Minneapolis, then, briefly, Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Cleveland offices while writing the Arrow newsletter, building a budget, handling correspondence, supervising the 15 Trail Bureaus, and supervising weather/road condition regional reports.

It was Cooley who let loose over one million pieces of Trail literature in one year with a small staff, and it was Hal Cooley who wrote many articles for road magazines and newspapers.

It was Hal Cooley who, in 1926, braved the unthinkable. He published the names of people and organizations in South Dakota with the amounts of their pledged dues that were in arrears!

He wrote that “Since this is a public business operating without a profit, in each bulletin we will designate one or more towns along the Trail which owes the most.” There followed a list of South Dakota “welchers.”

By May of 1927 he was able to report in the Aberdeen American News that “The Association is out of debt for the first time since 1920.” The embarrassing ploy must have worked.

This heavy-handed approach was frequently garbed with the threat of pulling the signs off of a town’s Trail and moving them away if dues were not forthcoming. That approach apparently worked.

Yes, the Trail was moved in areas as new and better roads were built, but never was it removed for lack of payment.

And it was Hal Cooley who crossed swords with Trail founder, Joe Parmley. Beginning around 1927 Parmley began to disparage Cooley in speech and writings. We can only guess that it was a difference in management style that drove them apart at the end. Joe favored honoring old route commitments; Cooley favored moving to new, better routes. Cooley kept up his busy regimen even as late as December of 1929, three months before the collapse of the organization.

Rev. George R. Keniston

George Keniston had a much shorter career with the Yellowstone Trail Association, only a few months, but it was colorful. He, too, wore two hats: one hat as the financial agent for the Association in 1914, and one as the preacher for the Congregational Church at Hettinger, North Dakota, which he had served since 1907.

Like Hal Cooley, George Keniston was apparently a mesmerizing speaker, but with an entirely different style. Handsome Keniston depended upon “friendly persuasion” with a sincerely happy persona as he more gently prodded his audiences. He was a very popular preacher and Chatauqua speaker, possibly due to his sunny disposition and richly textured reasonings.
Keniston’s job for the Trail Association was to raise funds for the badly needed bridge over the Little Missouri River at Marmarth, North Dakota, and to buy the rights-of-way for the road through the Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota. These were the two weakest links in the Trail. In March of 1914 it was thought that $50,000 was needed, $15,000 for the bridge and $35,000 for Corson County and the Reservation.

Keniston hit the road running. Quickly he raised $28,000 in pledges and was soon off to Washington D.C. to confer with congressmen. A bill was written for $50,000 for the Indians, but only $5,000 of it was eventually passed. In late March, the necessary funds had dropped to $40,000 with $10,000 promised to Marmarth. Billings County, North Dakota, sold $5,000 worth of bonds at 4.9% for the bridge. The Association reported in June that “the remainder of the funds will be raised by contributions guaranteed by different communities along the Trail.” But next thing we read was that in September the Trail Association reneged on it’s promise of bridge help. Nothing was said about the Reservation.

We are puzzled. George Keniston was so charismatic and so quickly raised a good share of the funds. Let’s see. $40,000 minus $28,000 raised, minus $5,000 from Billings County leaves $7,000. Washington D.C. apparently would not come through with $5,000 for awhile yet. But success was on the horizon. What happened? Did people not honor their pledges? Was the saga of the Marmarth bridge repeated injunctions off-putting to the pledgers? We read nothing about him after June. Keniston’s honesty was never in question. For more about the saga, see Trail Tale: Marmarth Bridge.

By spring of 1915 Keniston was reported “helping the Bismarck Commercial Club in its fundraising efforts for a bridge over the Little Missouri River at Medora.”

And, simultaneously, he left Hettinger and became the preacher for the Congregational Church at Beach, North Dakota.

We can only guess that he was offered a better deal from Bismarck and their road project with the National Parks Highway (Red Trail) than the $300 a month from the Yellowstone Trail Association.

Other Trail-ers of Note

Most Trail members received less notoriety, but were nonetheless tireless volunteers without whom the Association would not have thrived. Due to space limitation, we only mention three here who really deserve a longer personal narrative.

Marcus Beebe, founder of Beebe, South Dakota, was a friend of Joe Parmley’s in Ipswich.

Marcus served as interim president of the Association, October 1912 to February 1913, until the first national meeting was held.

He was a quiet philanthropist and on the Board of Regents of the South Dakota University.

The most memorable tale about him was his impatience with the Edmunds county board’s slow action about road funding. That resulted in his marching in and plunking down $500 in cash with a promise of another $500 to come! It shamed the Board into action.

Judge (Magistrate) J. E. Prindle of Ismay, Montana, was the first elected president of the Yellowstone Trail Association, serving 1913-1914.

He, like Joe Parmley, was a land dealer.

This first year of the Association presented many problems faced by entrepreneurs today – deciding on a business plan, budget, and organizational structure in addition to creating marking symbols and dues structures.

He also had to shoulder the burden, along with other founders, of persuading folks to accept the new idea of a national highway, and to look beyond their local RFD route.

R. B. Anderson was the father of the idea of Trail Day. That idea was not necessarily original, but it was new to the Trail Association in 1914 when it was first decreed. All citizens in towns along the Trail from Minneapolis through Montana were to get out and work on bettering the Trail on the same day with members of the press on hand. It worked! Newspapers along the Trail loved it.

Two members’ names may ring a bell with modern readers: Asahel Curtis, famous Washington photographer, and vice-president from 1925 to 1928, and John Willys of Willys Overland autos in Toledo, member of the Executive Committee.

It would be easy to assume that these and other Trailmen portrayed a picture of self-importance and posturing, what with their “smokers” after each meeting and their many pronouncements to an accommodating press and eager townsfolk. Actually, they seemed like sincere guys who wanted the best for their communities and wanted to be part of something that they recognized as historic. They may have seen the scope of this project as requiring boldness, and a certain foolhardiness.

Perhaps it was a combination of Mary and Oscar Handlin’s observation that, “Voluntary associations proved essential to give the individual a place in a fluid society” and architect Daniel Burnham’s 1900 admonition: “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s souls” that also moved these men. They were characters with character. •