Helena Public Schools school resource officers want to be someone students can talk to and be open with to help them succeed in school. The Helena Police Department and Lewis and Clark County Sheriff 's Office take pride in their roles in schools not to enforce laws, but to be a welcoming presence. HPD has four resource officers and the sheriff 's office has three within the school district stretched across its middle and high schools.
The sheriff 's School Resource Officers (SROs) float throughout the county to schools as needed, while all SROs work collaboratively during the school year. Helena police Cpl. Mark Baker was assigned to Capital High School.
He had spent one and a half years as an SRO then left, but came back because he had plans to make connections with students and their lives. He said he left due to a promotion and was put back on the street to serve the community. "When I was an SRO it had an impact on me," he said.
One of his goals that was "cut short" due to the promotion was to make sure students knew he was there to help. "Relationship building is paramount and we are somebody you can come to," Baker said. Growing up in Big Fork, he said he did not know what he wanted to do, but he spoke with an SRO at his school about the law enforcement field and figured it would give him a sense of fulfillment.
Baker has spent 17 years with the HPD and said he wants to be an outlet for students and for them to know "my door is always open because this is a communication job." Helena police Officer Nick Ransom shared the sentiments of his colleague and said he also wants to be someone students can talk to. He will have spent 3 years with HPD in January, but this year was his first as a SRO.
The area wasn't always so busy, but it's long been on people's radar. Native American history in the region dates back thousands of years following the retreat of the area's massive glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age. An obsidian Clovis point was found in the late 1950s during excavation for the Gardiner post office.
Bighorn sheep traps were built by their descendants in the cliff s of the Gardiner Valley. Euro-American interest in the region began to accelerate in 1872, after Congress decreed Yellowstone the nation's first national park, sparking tourism to the area. Seizing the opportunity, James McCartney opened a hotel at Mammoth Hot Springs, the park's headquarters.
But in 1879 he was kicked out by the park's superintendent, reportedly due to the sale of large quantities of liquor. So McCartney relocated 5 miles north to a bench above the Yellowstone River near its junction with the Gardner River. This was the inauspicious founding of the community of Gardiner.
An 1883 visitor to the town called it a "veritable Shantyville" with crude houses, tents and huts crowded together. Of the 32 structures, the visitor said 28 were saloons. By the end of the 1880s, the region was also attracting coal and gold miners, sparking movement to the area.
In 1890, the U.S. Army arrived to police and protect the park and its wildlife, providing Gardiner's saloons with more patrons.
During this early period of settlement, access to Gardiner was via the west side of the Yellowstone River, through Yankee Jim Canyon, along a toll road built by James George, nicknamed Yankee Jim. Along this same route, the Northern Pacific Railroad would punch a branch line built south from Livingston through the Paradise Valley.Completed in 1902, the railroad sealed Gardiner's existence as a prominent jumping off point for Yellowstone tourists.
The railroad abandoned passenger service in 1948 as more post-World War II tourists chose to drive. Park County built the first steel bridge connecting Gardiner to the east side of the Yellowstone River in 1893, about a half-mile below the existing bridge. The structure made it easier for miners in the Jardine and Bear Gulch areas to access the nearby town.
By 1922, however, the bridge — accessed by a steep road on the east side — was considered unsafe. In 1914, a swinging bridge was built across the Yellowstone River near the site of the current bridge. The span was not for the faint-hearted, as it would buck and swing as no more than four people could cross.
In 1921, the Montana State Highway Commission decided to re-align the highway between Livingston and Gardiner, moving it to the east side of the Yellowstone River and beginning construction of Highway 89. In 1929, federal agencies allocated $50,000 to the construction of a new highway bridge in Gardiner, with the county contributing $10,000. In today's dollars, that same amount would be just shy of $1 million.
Unfortunately, the money was diverted following a funding dispute involving the Montana attorney general, which led to a state Supreme Court ruling, Axline reported. Then the National Park Service's chief, Horace Albright, objected to the new route, saying it didn't provide a proper entrance to Yellowstone "from an aesthetic standpoint." The new route wasn't through the stately Roosevelt Arch gateway to the park.
As a result, the federal money was diverted to another project that year. Albright wanted a bridge built farther downstream, which would have been more expensive as it required a trestle over the railroad tracks. "The Gardiner Bridge was actually doing OK until Horace Albright got involved and temporarily stopped it," Axline said in an email.
"He couldn't have been a very popular guy with the Gardiner business people, the Bureau of Public Roads or the state highway commission." Albright finally relented when he was promised both bridges would be built, but that never occurred. "The compromise didn't really make much sense — two bridges at Gardiner," Axline noted.
By February 1930, construction was beginning with excavations for the bridge's foundations. The bridge was the first deck-truss design built by the federal Bureau of Public Roads in Montana and is one of the few remaining such bridges in the state. "The Bureau of Public Roads (BPR) often built this style of truss bridge in Montana's national forests because of canyon river crossings and because they provided unobstructed views of the state's natural wonders," Axline wrote.
"The handsome bridge features two 64-foot cantilevered truss spans, a 202-foot center span and two 40-foot reinforced concrete T-beam approach spans on the north and south ends of the structure," he added. In 1975, when the bridge was widened, steel trusses similar in appearance to the originals were used. "The new bridge allowed automobile traffic through Gardiner's business district, enabling an expansion of tourist-related commercial enterprises and allowed development on the previously undeveloped north side of the Yellowstone River," he wrote.
When first completed, the bridge served "as a key component to a new north entrance to 'Wonderland.'" "It's a beautiful bridge, and one of the last deck truss highway bridges left in the state," Axline said..
