Monday, September 5, 2011

Cunningham Cabin

The Grand Tetons National Park is very large, more than 480 square miles. But the entrance/exit gates don't match the actual boundaries. We'd been driving along the west road all morning, inside the gates. We reached the south end and exited the gates, but didn't exit the park.

At Moose Junction, we turned north and traveled the east road through the beautiful Jackson Hole prairie. You can travel the entire east side of the park without encountering an entrance gate at all.

As I mentioned earlier, there are several historical structures left from the homestead days. One of them is the Cunningham Cabin, pictured above.

John and Margaret Cunningham established the Bar Flying U Ranch here in the 1880s. The couple managed to remain profitable through drought and falling livestock prices, but they eventually succumbed in 1928. They sold out to the Snake River Land Company (the dummy corporation set up by John D. Rockefeller to unite Jackson Hole with Grand Tetons National Park).