Back when 25 mph was top speed, drivers took this route through Minnesota

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“Can automobiles traveling over country roads maintain an average speed of 24.3 miles an hour for 100 hours night and day?”

That’s what the Minneapolis Tribune wanted to know in 1915, as organizers of a pioneering auto route prepared to celebrate it. They planned a grand relay race from Chicago to Seattle, and drivers in Minneapolis, Olivia and Ortonville were prepared to each travel about 100 miles to do their part.

At the time, railroads were dominant and driving an automobile was an adventure. Within a few years, the Yellowstone Trail expanded to become the first auto route from coast to coast through the northern states. “A good road from Plymouth Rock to Puget Sound” was its motto.

A reader asked Curious Minnesota, the Strib’s audience-powered reporting project, to find out more about the trail’s Minnesota history.

The Yellowstone Trail — marked with yellow paint on trees, rocks, barns and businesses — went from Lakeland to Ortonville in Minnesota, sharing much of its route with today’s Hwy. 212. It went on to Yellowstone National Park and beyond.

“Route 66, Lincoln, Jefferson highways, none of their stories compare to that of the Yellowstone Trail. And yet nobody knows about this one. It’s just been this kind of hidden gem,” said Yellowstone Trail Association President Scott Tedrick, who lives in Granite Falls, Minn.

During the winter of 1880, Dowling was 14 years old and working as a farm hand in Canby, Minn., when he became lost in a terrible prairie blizzard, according to an account his grandson, Barry Prichard, told the Bemidji Pioneer.

Dowling’s frostbite was so severe that a doctor had to amputate both legs below the knees. He also lost one hand and part of another, according to Prichard, who lived in Puposky, Minn., and died January 2025.

Yellow Medicine County offered to pay a farmer to care for Dowling, but he asked commissioners instead to pay for him to attend Carleton College. Dowling went on to become a teacher, state legislator and more, including the founder of what is now Dowling Elementary School in Minneapolis.

Dowling was the first in Renville County to own an automobile, Tedrick said. He was living in Olivia and working as an auto dealer when he became involved in what was called the “Good Roads Movement” to find and promote the best auto routes.

A South Dakota man named Joe Parmley founded the Yellowstone Trail Association in 1912. The next year, Dowling took a summer road trip with his wife and three daughters to demonstrate the promise of the still-forming trail.

Early on, one of the vehicles couldn’t make it up a hill. All the passengers piled out and the driver maneuvered up backwards, according to Dorothy’s account.

They made it there and back again, braving mud and other tough terrain and fixing tire punctures. “At points they were literally driving over virgin prairie,” Tedrick said.

A few years after Dowling’s trip came the Yellowstone Trail relay of 1915, which newspapers called a “remarkable chase.”

Drivers each traveled a segment of the trail as fast as they could, passing along a letter from the mayor of Chicago. They covered more than 2,400 miles, according to the Minneapolis Tribune, and eventually delivered it to the mayor of Seattle.

The first driver left Chicago at noon on June 15, 1915. In Minnesota, one participant drove a car called a National Racing Roadster, another, one called an REO Six. “But it is not in cars primarily that the hope of the promoters of this run is based. It is on the road,” the Tribune wrote.

The racers met with trouble in Minnesota, however. The car making the stretch from Minneapolis to Olivia was “completely wrecked” near Hector, the Tribune reported. “The machine skidded on a piece of slippery road while going top speed.”

No one was injured, and the driver ran to a farmhouse. He was able to phone someone to drive over with a substitute automobile. It ended up creating a 24-minute delay, but he still made it to Olivia ahead of schedule, the paper reported.

In the end, the relay was completed in 97 hours and 10 minutes.

In 1917, Dowling took over as president of the Yellowstone Trail Association, and the group’s headquarters moved from Aberdeen to Minneapolis (in the Andrus Building on Nicollet Mall) the following year. Dowling served as president until 1919 and worked to secure the trail’s eastward route, according to Tedrick.

Decades ago, Hwy. 212 used to have “Yellowstone Trail” signs designating it as a “historic national automobile route.” Minneapolis musician Charlie Maguire often spotted them while driving to gigs, wondering about what it once was like to drive local roads like 212 all the way to the national park.

“If you are coming from Minneapolis, start at the junction of Seamans Drive and the Yellowstone Trail just off Highway 7 in Shorewood. Follow the road as it winds past the former Minnetonka Country Club. Gentle hills and curves and shady scenery evoke a time when auto travel was slow and scenic, so take it easy!” he wrote. “The section of trail ends when you cross Glencoe Road in Excelsior, where it is renamed Academy Avenue, and soon after you’ll find yourself back in present-day Excelsior.”

The old Yellowstone Trail Association folded in 1930. But in 1999, a group of historians and enthusiasts brought it back. A pair of retired professors from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire named John and Alice Ridge spent decades researching the trail, and the association used their findings to create travel guides and maps for anyone who wants to recreate the experience of driving the old route at yellowstonetrail.org.

The association’s current president, Tedrick, also started a state chapter of the group. He has been working to connect Minnesotans who live along the old route with its history.

In 2026, that will include performances of a musical penned by St. Paul musician Randy Sabien about Dowling and his family’s trip along the Yellowstone Trail, Tedrick said.

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