The Commodore

It takes real effort to get thrown out of a national park. You have to apply yourself. Ela Collins Waters applied himself for twenty years. I call him the Commodore. Nobody else did, that I can find, but a man who names a ship after himself has it coming. He was a Civil War veteran and a local politician who came to Yellowstone in eighteen eighty seven to run the hotels for the railroad's investors, and folks who dealt with him settled on three words. Abrasive, cantankerous and greedy. Early on they arrested him and banned him for soaping a geyser, to make it go off. He was back before long, being a friend of Benjamin Harrison's son. He saw what nobody else saw, I'll give him that. People had been pounded half to death in stagecoaches by the time they reached this lake, and they'd pay to sit down. So he bought a steamboat from Minnesota, cheap, because she leaned hard to one side and her whistle was an ear-piercing shriek. They called her The Useless. He hauled her out here in three pieces, bolted her together at West Thumb, named her Zillah after the railroad president's daughter, and charged two fifty or three dollars a head to cross the water. Word was, he slipped the coach drivers fifty cents a ticket for steering you aboard. It worked. That's the trouble with the Commodore. It always worked. In eighteen ninety six he stocked a speck of land called Dot Island with bison and elk, and called it a game show. Stop in, he told the passengers, have a look. And when you'd had your look and went to board again, you learned your ticket only covered the run to the hotel, and you could pay up or admire the island. Those animals were looked after at first. Then they weren't. Visitors complained of bison gone thin to the point of starving, out on that island with all that water around them. He asked leave to run an elevator down to the floor of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. You won't find one. Then came nineteen oh five, and the ship. Five hundred passengers. Sixty thousand dollars. The biggest boat this park had ever laid eyes on, and he named her the E. C. Waters. And that was the day the park finally had him by the collar, because a ship needs a license. They had a drawer full of complaints by then, unpaid help, lumber cut without leave, poaching. Your five hundred passenger ship, they told him, may carry a hundred and twenty five. He fought it and fought it. She sat at the dock. A few empty trial runs and one last trip out to Stevenson Island, and that was all the sailing she ever did. In nineteen oh seven, Superintendent Samuel Young wrote the finest sentence in the history of the federal government. E. C. Waters, having rendered himself obnoxious during the season of nineteen oh seven, is debarred from the park. Aubrey Haines, the historian the Service got so sore at, said the ban was for those buffalo, and added that he was guilty of much more. He never got back in. I've tried to enjoy that, and I can't, quite. All those years on this water. The boats, the island, the store, and out in a cove at Stevenson Island a ship with his own name across her, and he wasn't going to set foot on her again. She lay out there for years. In nineteen twenty one a storm drove her up on the shore. They salvaged what was worth having, and that turned out to be the boiler. Every cold morning for nearly fifty years, the heart of that empty ship kept the guests warm at the Lake Hotel, the last thing E. C. Waters ever got past the superintendent.