Nava Streiter curates the Yellowstone Gateway Museum, a historic three-story brick schoolhouse in downtown Livingston. The museum preserves Park County’s cultural and natural history and serves as a vital hub for education, research, and connecting locals and visitors to the region’s past.

When you arrive at the museum, your eyes are immediately drawn to the bright red Northern Pacific caboose sitting proudly on the lawn. Its small windows frame a world of history: a tiny sleeping nook, a compact bathroom, and the tools that kept trains moving across this rugged land.

Livingston itself was born of the railroad. The Northern Pacific chose this spot as a hub, linking the Midwest to Puget Sound, and the town sprang to life almost overnight. For many years, Livingston was known as the gateway to Yellowstone, because it was here that the railroad funneled travelers south to the park’s north entrance. That connection shaped the town’s identity, and Livingston thrived as a hub for tourism and trade. The railroad didn’t just bring people here; it helped create Yellowstone as we know it, sponsoring early expeditions and cementing the park in the American imagination. The park’s origin story even intersects with financiers and visionaries tied to the Northern Pacific, highlighting how the railroad’s ambitions were both economic and cultural. While the tracks carried settlers, goods, and livestock, they also launched a tourism empire, promoting Yellowstone as a must-see destination. It’s hard to overstate just how vital that vision was in shaping the park, the town, and the region’s identity in the early 20th century.

One of my favorite parts of this story is how the museum began, not with experts, but with a handful of friends and retirees in the 1960s. Bill and Doris Whithorn and their neighbors, didn’t have curatorial degrees, they simply loved this place. They gathered objects, photographed everything they could, and built archives of letters, documents, and stories. Bill and Doris even lived downstairs and ran the Wanigan Press, publishing local histories with boundless care. Their passion created more than a museum. It created a living testament to community, and the power of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

Step inside, and you’ll explore transportation galleries from early Native hunting routes to modern roads, alongside exhibits on Yellowstone, Ice Age archaeology, and Native cultures. But outside, that caboose remains the heart of it all, a reminder of the lives lived and the journeys taken.