Carrie Strahorn and the Flying Centaur of Yellowstone
The Art of Travel in the face of 1879 obstacles including rampant mansplaining
On a September morning in 1879, Carrie and Robert Strahorn set out from the Old Faithful area in the seven-year-old Yellowstone National Park. With a guide, they rode their horses east, toward Yellowstone Lake. Their objective was to see the great wonders of the park. But their adventures demonstrated the trials and triumphs of early travel in Yellowstone— especially for women.
To start, their trail was faint and overgrown. “The sky was full of threatening clouds,” Carrie wrote. They had been warned that it was dangerously late in the season to be traveling in Yellowstone, where winter often arrived early. But the Strahorns were great adventurers. Robert worked in real estate development for the Union Pacific railroad, which meant that he traveled a lot—and he always insisted on bringing his wife with him. Indeed, her late-life memoir was titled Fifteen Thousand Miles by Stage. But in Yellowstone the trails were so poor that they had to ride on horseback, not in a stagecoach. Carrie wrote that this portion of the trip was “a more agreeable memory than the living reality.”
As their horses left the east fork of the Firehole River to cross the Continental Divide, Carrie wrote, “We saw what seemed to be a flying centaur coming rapidly toward us.” A centaur, half-man and half-horse, was commonly associated with barbarism, chaos, lust, and wilderness.
The centaur turned out to be Colonel Philetus W. Norris, his “great coat flying in the wind as he rode madly down the trail.” He was Yellowstone’s superintendent, equal parts rugged risk-taker, canny genius, and egotistical buffoon. Norris proclaimed that he would lead their party. They need not worry about getting lost. There was no danger. He was in charge. Suddenly the trail became obvious, the only visible trail they’d seen all day. Nevertheless, every half-mile or so, he turned in his saddle to reassure them again.
When they reached Yellowstone Lake, Carrie Strahorn found it beautiful. She described it as “cold gray mountains lift their snowy heads and gaze with just admiration at their reflections in the vast wealth of blue below.” They saw timbered islands, all sorts of birds, many animal tracks, and curious specimens of past human habitation. Norris camped with the party on the lakeshore, and they continued north the following day.
Mid-afternoon, they were delayed by a nasty hailstorm on the Yellowstone river downstream from the lake. Norris volunteered to ride ahead and select a camp. When Carrie caught up to him, she was disappointed. “Instead of selecting a place under good trees, he had stopped in the middle of an opening on a side hill,” Carrie wrote. “The rain began to fall almost as soon as we were out of the saddles.” It rained through their dinner of “the same old bread and bacon.” It kept raining as they stood around the campfire trying to dry out. It kept raining while Robert reminded their guide to be sure to tie up the horses so they wouldn’t run away in the night. And it kept raining as they went to bed soaking wet.
Overnight the rain turned to snow, and the horses ran away because the guide had failed to tie them up. “The many warnings not to go into the park so late went buzzing through our minds like bumblebees. The snow was several inches deep and falling faster every minute,” Carrie wrote. Their food rations were nearly gone, they were thirty miles from base camp, and without horses they would be stranded in the storm.
I first came across Strahorn’s story while trying to understand her traveling companion, P.W. Norris. (I wrote about Norris here). From the centaur to the lousy campsite, he here provides comic relief. Strahorn gives my still-favorite description of him: “We were lulled to sleep by the deep, sonorous voice of Colonel Norris who forgot to stop talking when he went to sleep, and he was still talking right along when we woke up.”
Yet there’s also something sweet in the way Norris volunteers to show these tourists around his park. Something troubling in the fact that he may have done so simply to ensure that they wouldn’t vandalize the wonders, taking home a piece of rare rock as a souvenir—a sadly common way that people then traveled through the park. And something hideous in the way he provided such personalized service to the privileged while unceremoniously booting Indigenous people from their homeland.
Yet the natural story of Yellowstone is not just the story of its employees. It’s the story of its tourists, its users. Carrie Strahorn had a wanderlust, a hunger to see amazing natural sights. When she did finally see the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, she was transfixed. She regretted only that the experience had to be so quick, given their lack of food.
Travel developed her skills and sharpened her personality. When they finally returned to base camp at Old Faithful, having ridden 125 miles in three days, most of it in snow and rain, Carrie was so stiff in the saddle that it took three men to get her out. Yet she remained cheerful.
Carrie Strahorn is sometimes known as the first white woman to make a complete tour of Yellowstone. But that odd, gendered, racialized honorific doesn’t do her justice. (In part, it only highlights how many stories have been passed down from privileged perspectives, how much more we need to hear from marginalized voices. We do, although that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t also listen to Strahorn.) She was a splendid writer, adept at describing landscapes, characters, and adventures. She was a game traveler, apparently an invaluable companion to her husband. She had a vivacious sense of humor. She was someone who made the most of her life.
She was also intrepid. That morning of the snowstorm, the men went out and found the horses. Then, Norris told her, she and the guide needed to stay in camp and pack up. Norris would escort her husband on a five-mile ride to see the wonders of the waterfalls and canyon.
Carrie stewed for an hour and then rebelled. She mounted her horse and followed her husband’s tracks through the snow. Joyfully reunited near the falls, the Strahorns realized that it was their vacation, their national park. Why would Robert want to see the Canyon with Norris, such a bumbling, ineffectual leader? It was Carrie he loved.
They sent Norris back to camp to pack up. Then they lingered as long as they could with the sublime waterfalls and unimaginably colorful canyon walls.
Discussion:
I quote Carrie Adell Strahorn from Fifteen Thousand Miles by Stage: A Woman's Unique Experience During Thirty Years of Path Finding and Pioneering from the Missouri to the Pacific and from Alaska to Mexico. Boise, ID: G. P. Putnam's sons, 1911, p. 278.
The Yellowstone Heritage and Research Center in Gardiner currently has an exhibit on women in Yellowstone. Brett French covers the story.
Good read!