Yellowstone Buys a Piece of Its History on EBay

With an Internet bid of $3,815, Yellowstone National Park officials have purchased a missing ledger from a stagecoach operator that preceded the automobiles and RVs that jam the park’s roads today.

The bound leather and suede ledger from Yellowstone Park Transportation Co., which provided stagecoach transportation for park tourists from 1892 through 1916, now belongs to park archives.

The ledger for the years 1892-1906 was lost to Yellowstone historians until it surfaced recently on the Internet auction site EBay, which is home to a flourishing trade in Yellowstone collectibles.

“It’s a log of men of the day,” park archivist Lee Whittlesey said. “There’s some corporate history, there’s some business history. . . . It provides a picture of what the company was doing.”

The park outbid several competitors in the timed auction, purchasing the missing ledger from a former employee of a park concessionaire, Patrick Batchelder, who lives in Boulder, Colo.

Batchelder worked as a waiter for the stagecoach company’s successor, Yellowstone Park Co., in 1965. During a tour of storage areas under the Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel, Batchelder came across the ledger, and company president Art Bazata said he could keep it.

Since then, the ledger, measuring 12 by 18 1/2 inches, has been collecting dust at Batchelder’s home, until its appearance on EBay.

“History is full of that kind of stuff,” Whittlesey said. “I had figured that it existed, or at least at one time existed, for many, many years, but I had long since given up hope.”

With one ledger in hand, the archivist now wonders about another volume detailing the company’s records through the end of the stagecoach era in 1916.

“That was really late in America. Yellowstone was really the last place to hold out to the internal combustion engine,” Whittlesey said, noting that buses entered the park in 1917. “That’s what they called them--buses--but of course we would call them touring cars.”

In years past, the park has watched historical Yellowstone items go to private collectors because it could not afford to pay their prices.

But Whittlesey was ready for the EBay auctions this year, bolstered by $10,000 in grants from the Yellowstone Foundation and the Yellowstone Assn.

He said the ledger purchase was a bargain.

“We were prepared to go to $10,000,” he said. “For once, we had the money.”