Originally published in Points West magazine
Summer 2008
Byways, boats, and buildings: Yellowstone Lake in history, part 3
By Lee Whittlesey
In the past two issues of Points West, Yellowstone National Park Historian Lee Whittlesey discussed the earliest accounts of Yellowstone Lake and how roads developed in the area to accommodate visitors to the nation’s first national park. Given a lake this size, boating activities were naturally “a given,” too. Boats are the subject of this third installment of Whittlesey’s story, especially the infamous story of steamboat operator E.C. Waters.

Boats on the lake
Boats on Yellowstone Lake and a few buildings on the northern lakeshore actually arrived before roads did. Surely Indians built rafts and attempted to reach islands in the lake, but nothing substantive is so far known of those endeavors. Archeologist Ann Johnson reports that archeological sites have been documented on six of the lake’s seven islands, indicating that ancient humans or more recent Indians reached the islands at various points in time. In addition, a number of parties traveled on the lake to map, explore, or eventually provide boats for hire.

Because of his personal experiences in a small boat on the often turbulent lake, and his explorations on horseback around the lake, Superintendent P.W. Norris supported the idea of using a large boat for tours on Yellowstone Lake. He noted in his 1878 report that “with another season’s improvement and construction of roads and bridle-paths, the promised routes of access… I have all the confidences of being able to effect leases to responsible parties for the construction of much needed hotels, and also for a yacht or small steamer upon the mystic Yellowstone Lake.” In 1889, the Department of Interior issued a lease to one E.C. Waters for just such a boat, the Zillah, which was brought to the park in pieces and assembled on site.
E.C. Waters: Yellowstone’s “gadfly”
Ela Collins Waters, called “E.C.” by many, was a gadfly who was present in Yellowstone for twenty years (1887 – 1907), working first as general manager of the Yellowstone Park Association (YPA) hotels and then with his own company, the Yellowstone Lake Boat Company. He caused trouble for nearly everyone around him, including fellow employees, other concessioners, tourists, and the U.S. Army. Still, it was hard for park officials to get rid of Waters because he was politically connected to Russell Harrison, the son of President Benjamin Harrison.

In fact, Acting Superintendent F.A. Boutelle would recall some years later that when he arrived as superintendent in 1889, it was understood by him and many others in the park “that Waters was under presidential protection” because of his connection to the president’s son. Speaking further about Waters, Boutelle fumed that “aside from the [his] bad business practices, the man was morally rotten. It was a common practice for him to leave the Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel at sundown, en route to one of the hotels, with some poor girl, employed for service, and spent most of the night on the road between the starting point and Norris.”
Ironically, it was Boutelle who would eventually be transferred out of the park several years before Waters.
Nevertheless, Waters, embattled though he often was, moved up by becoming president of the new boat company for YPA, obtaining a lease for additional land along the lake shore. He used this land to erect ramshackle buildings for his boat business near the dock in front of Lake Hotel.
Booted from Yellowstone the first time
In early 1890, YPA placed the Zillah, a steamboat that could hold forty passengers at Lake to carry passengers from West Thumb to Lake Hotel. Waters made plans to manage it for the company even though he did not yet own it himself. However, Waters’s bosses abruptly fired him when they learned that he was using his position to extort money from a meat contractor. According to the newspaper account in the August 23, 1890, edition of Montana’s Livingston Enterprise, Waters was eventually “escorted to Cinnabar [just north of Gardiner, Montana, outside the park’s north gate] by the military and told not to return to the Park under penalty of arrest.”

But apparently Waters was successful in using his connections with the President’s son Russell Harrison to get reinstated in the park, for in October of the same year, Secretary of the Interior John W. Noble informed Superintendent Boutelle that he had entered a contract with “the Yellowstone Lake Boat Company, whereby E.C. Waters is President,” allowing Waters to lease parcels of land on the lakeshore, as previously mentioned, and to run the steamboat on the lake. By 1897, Waters owned the boat company and was running it into the ground, a turn of events that apparently didn’t bode well for Waters. “Always an obnoxious character,” writes historian Richard Bartlett in his 1985 book Yellowstone: A Wilderness Beseiged, “Waters became impossible to deal with as his business declined.”
Making a buck in the park
At some point, probably in 1891, Waters added rental rowboats—in which potential fishermen could be taken onto the lake to fish—and a store in which he sold curios and fishing supplies. The store was established in 1895 to “sell candies, nuts and small groceries to camping parties, [and] to do blacksmithing for the same.”
There are numerous accounts of the high prices that Waters charged for his products and services; one visitor noted he knew why Jesus walked on water because “if he had to pay those prices, he certainly would have walked on water to save the boat rental.”

Looking for additional money sources, Waters in 1896 placed buffalo, elk, and bighorn sheep in a pen on Dot Island, using them to attract boat riders. This boat trip offered travelers a break from dusty stagecoach travel, stimulating views of snow-capped peaks, cool breezes in their faces, and the chance to see the animals at Waters’s Dot Island zoo. He fed them garbage and generally treated them poorly, so much so that one tourist complained that he saw elk so hungry that these herbivores actually ate meat. As early as that first year, a visitor saw four buffalo, two elk, and three sheep on the island and reported that they “look poor and half starved, [even though] there is a man here all the time to take care of them.”
In late 1907, the Department of Interior ordered the animals released.
The fly in the ointment
Throughout his tenure there, Waters made trouble for nearly everyone in the park. His anger probably started in 1888 when the army arrested him and Northern Pacific Railroad officials for vandalizing a geyser, and that humiliated Waters in front of his bosses. The army then caught him in a winter scheme to poach animals from the Lake area while his boat was being assembled. Later he tried using his political connections to stop Hiram Chittenden from building the new road between Old Faithful and Lake, claiming it would hurt his business. He made tourists who rode his steamer or rented his rowboats angry enough to write complaint letters that cited misrepresentation and overcharging.
The list of those whom Waters aggravated is extensive. He alienated other park concessioners. He let his boat deteriorate to such a point that some visitors refused to ride it. He angered stagecoach drivers by cutting off the fifty cents per passenger that he had formerly given them for putting people onto his boat. And his unpleasant actions and strange letters convinced Superintendent John Pitcher, photographer F.J. Haynes, and others—eventually including later historian Aubrey Haines—that he suffered from a mental illness. Pitcher wrote in 1904 that Waters’s “rambling communications referring to many subjects, are a nuisance to everyone, and confirm the suggestion made some time since that he is mentally disordered.”
One 1906 male visitor met Waters at Lake Hotel and noted that his two lady friends were invited to ride the boat for free by Waters but were hesitant to go on his boat alone with him. The traveler, Dr. Edward Newman Roberts of Pocatello, Idaho, went along but, like so many others, did not care much for Mr. Waters:
“After cleaning up, I accompanied Ester and Katharine White down to the pier. The old captain of “The Zillah” invited the girls to be his guests over to the island in the Lake where his new boat was [being built], but they insisted that they would not go unless he took me, and although I protested they made me go. It was a pleasant ride but I could never learn to like the old walloper.”
Waters eventually pushed things too far by alienating a New York congressman. This congressman protested to President Theodore Roosevelt, who noted that all he, the President, knew about Waters was “to his [Waters’s] discredit.” Roosevelt turned the matter over to Park Superintendent S.B.M. Young, who issued this bulletin on October 16, 1907:
NOTICE!
E.C. Waters, President of the Yellowstone Lake Boat Company, having rendered himself obnoxious during the season of 1907, is, under the provisions of paragraph 11, Rules and Regulations of the Yellowstone National Park, debarred from the Park and will not be allowed to return without permission in writing from the Secretary of the Interior or the Superintendent of the Park.
Despite whatever else Waters had done that summer to “render himself obnoxious,” Young’s major pique at Waters was based upon Waters’s blatant disregard of Young’s orders to remove the animals from Dot Island. Thus Waters’s long anger at “everybody and everything” finally led to the ruin of all his enterprises by 1908, for one visitor reported that Waters was banned that year and that his store was a mere tent. However, Waters apparently—somehow—hung on in some capacity until he was removed from the park for the final time on June 21, 1909.
A ship that didn’t sail
In 1905 Waters built a large ship named the E.C. Waters that was capable of carrying over 600 passengers, but the regulator (the U.S. Steamship Navigation Service) refused it a permit. Consequently, it sat beached for many years at Stevenson Island until it was set afire in 1930. The Zillah operated through 1907; the Jean D. replaced it during 1909 – 1910 along with numerous smaller boats. In late 1907, Elwood “Billy” Hofer took over management of the company and in 1908 operated two boats with strange names: the Busha and the Etcedecasher.
Boat operator Ela C. Waters’s business began at the same time as Lake Hotel, and for sixteen years each of those operations bolstered the other. How Waters managed to operate in the park as long as he did is still somewhat astounding given his penchant of alienating just about everyone.
But if it had not been he, it would have been someone else. After Yellowstone was created in 1872, numerous parties saw the possibility of a money-making contract to run a steamboat across Yellowstone Lake; in fact, the number of applications for such a concession to the Secretary of Interior was startlingly high. However, until 1889, only one concession had been granted on the Lake to anyone, and that person never used it. E.C. Waters was thus in a timely position to capitalize by getting into the boat business.

In the Fall 2008 issue of Points West, Whittlesey concludes his account of the Yellowstone Lake with stories about lodging facilities and other buildings in the area.
About the author
A prolific writer and sought after spokesman, Lee Whittlesey was the Yellowstone National Park Historian at the time this series of articles was written. His thirty-five years of study about the region have made him the unequivocal expert on the park. Whittlesey has a master’s degree in history from Montana State University and a law degree from the University of Oklahoma. Since 1996, he’s been an adjunct professor of history at Montana State University. In 2001, he received an Honorary Doctorate of Science and Humane Letters from Idaho State University because of his extensive writings and long contributions to the park.
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