Family History
A Place Called Paradise
How my great-grandfather shaped Yellowstone National Park
“There can be nothing in the world more beautiful than . . . the Canyon of the Yellowstone” — Theodore Roosevelt
My great-grandfather must have had these words in mind almost 100 years ago. After suffering unbelievable hardship and adversity, losing his father at 7 years old and his mother at 16, this is where he left his mark on the world. He gave his offspring the best possible chance at a normal life, something that he would never have.
Elias George Cross, known affectionately as “Ike” by his family, was born in Ogden, Utah, in 1896 to Charles and Anna Cross. His father was the owner of a western clothing store that recently went out of business, after being continuously operated for more than 100 years. However, he died before he was even 40 in 1903, leaving his wife and 5 children to make it through the world. Ike’s mother died 9 years later, and the entire inheritance and family business was given to his older brother.
Ike had nothing, but he also wasn’t like most people. Instead of giving up, he did whatever he had to, including leaving the remnants of his family. Instead of staying in Utah, he moved to Detroit and started working in Ford’s car factory, a place which changed the course of history. Ford built the Model T, a cheap, reliable car which was available to almost anyone, at a time when cars were for the 1%. Starting in 1914, Ford paid $5 a day to its workers, which gave my great-grandfather a steady flow of money and a reliable job. By 1930, more than half of all cars that were driven were Model Ts. His participation in this industry may seem small, but every person who worked there shaped the world into what it is today.
Of course, being a Cross, he was never going to stay in one place forever. During Prohibition, he decided to return to Utah and found work in Salt Lake City playing the piano at a speakeasy. This was a dangerous field of work, especially because Utah had some of the strictest drinking laws in the country. If he had been caught, the consequences would be worse than anyone could have imagined. However, he didn’t stay here for long and soon moved to his favorite place in the world.
Nowadays, Yellowstone National Park is known almost solely for its large-scale tourism and geysers. However, in the early 1900s, it was a vastly different place. Tourists were there to vandalize, poachers illegally hunted big game, and there was little government funding to keep it afloat. This began to change around 1920 when the National Parks Service started to clean it up, but the people are the real reason it changed. Elias Cross was one of the first of these people thanks to his business. He loved fishing, hiking, and anything else that happened outside. He always had a love for the outdoors, something that all Crosses seem to have, and he wanted to build a place for him and his family to stay during their vacations. It was undoubtedly one of his favorite places, with vast canyons, huge geysers, and some of the most beautiful scenery in the world. Using what little he had, he built four hotels in West Yellowstone, Montana, all of which are still standing and operating. He barely had the money and or the workforce, but he and his partners built them and changed the shape of Yellowstone. Now, 3.8 million people each year visit the 2.2-million-acre beauty that was once called “Wonderland.”
I never met my great-grandfather, but from knowing his story and my grandfather, I think that almost all Crosses are alike. I don’t know the little details about him, but I do know that my grandfather has many things in common. He loves the outdoors, he works hard, and above all, he has lived a genuine life. Never compromising or giving in, it is a trait passed down through generations of my family. I want to know more about his life and what kind of man he truly was. I also want to know about his impact on Yellowstone and what it would be like without him.
“The Finest Man You’ll Ever Meet”
A conversation with Elias Cross
I interviewed my grandfather over the phone on a Wednesday night. When I called him I asked him how he was doing and told him about my school and sports when he asked. He and I both run track, so we talked about it for a little and he reminisced about his time doing it. He’s the kind of person that you can make small talk to all day, he almost enjoys it, but I was ready to start the interview. I was almost excited about it because I was hoping to learn more about my family from him. There were almost no issues or things that I was worried about for the interview, I just wanted to get started.
Jack: What is your name and where were you born?
My name is Elias, middle initial G, George, and Cross the last name. I was born in Ogden, Utah,
Jack: Where did you grow up?
I grew up in Ogden, Utah.
Jack: How many siblings do you have?
Well, there were 5 of us all together, 4 siblings, 2 brothers and 2 sisters.
Jack: What was it like growing up with them?
It was like being an only child because I was the last one born. My siblings were born 10 years earlier. They would always have a great time, my big brothers and two sisters, but they would exclude me, going out to parties without me. I was like a child left out in the end, they would be playing in high school and I was just left out.
Jack: How often did you move as a child?
How often did we move as a child? I only remember two moves, when we moved twice around Ogden, Utah.
Jack: What do you remember about where you were born?
What I remember is where we were located in the city. We were not too far from the railroad tracks and we used to get a lot of hobos that lived on the tracks and we never could figure out how they got food because we could see them walking up and down the block, and they would stop at any house. They would come to my mom and dad’s house, and she’d always give them something to eat and they’d always do come little chore, cut the grass, trim the trees, but uh, that’s the thing that I remember.
I remember the neighbors across the street, the police car would pull up there probably sometimes twice a day with the mother who had brain problems, and she was going to be a big shoplifter, so much so that the cops just pulled up at her home and returned what she stole. The kids were very rough and rowdy, I think it had a lot to do with their parents, so they were always getting into fights, which happened more often then I liked. It was a really rough neighborhood back then. I remember that it was a very different time, we had chickens and animals in our yard, and one time one of my friends fell out of a tree and stuck his arm out, and the bone went into the ground and got infected, and they had to cut his arm off. The thing I regret is that never once did I go to church with my parents. They were good people, they went every Sunday, but I never went with them
Jack: What was it like growing up with your father?
My father involved us in the hotel business, my oldest brother was working with him while my other brother was off in the service and then I didn’t spend as much time with my father as I would like to because he was building his hotel and didn’t have a lot of money and worked pretty hard doing it. I don’t remember a lot of the things with him except for a few fishing trips up to a place “Paradise” which was a little creek in the mountains. But I didn’t have that much because my whole family was more than old for me. You know, they were 10 years further down than the street from me, my sister was dating, my brother was dating, you know, so, it wasn’t a childhood life to grow up with your brothers and sisters older, my brother was almost 10 years older, one of them was 20 years older when I was born. It wasn’t an ideal childhood, there was always a lot of work to do around the house like mow the grass and pick the food off the trees. There was always plenty of work to do and I would always get to clean up, I was too young to hunt but I would bring the ducks home and the geese home, and I was the one to clean them and pluck them, and it was always my job to do that, and they were pretty big so it took a long time.
Jack: What is your favorite memory with him?
My memory with my parents was, um, my dad was gone most of the time and my mom never had a job, which is fine, you know, women didn’t really work back then. And um, my mother was kind to me, she gave me a drawer in the kitchen and said “this is your drawer” so I was assigned a drawer that I had to keep my stuff in, it was totally fine, I remember I had everything that was mine and was in the kitchen. And I had the job where I worked at the furnace in the basement, and I had to keep feeding it and I was always responsible to bring in the coal and put it in the hopper and make the sure the fireplace was burning, and when the fire was good I would play in the dirt like a playground and use it like a playground. I remember digging small tunnels that I could park a car in, just something to play with. The basement didn’t have a floor and they eventually put a floor in it, and I remember the shower was down there and it was just a pipe coming out of a ceiling and we would hang the laundry up down there.
Jack: Are you proud of your father?
Very proud, my father was one of the finest men you’ll ever meet. He was the most honest, I won’t say he was the most loving, but I know he was the most honest person I’ve ever met. My older brother was kind of under my dad’s wing, and he was always the favorite in the family, and he was the laziest in the family, but there was always something special about him to my dad. But my dad, to show you how honest he was, when he built the first hotel, he worked with friends to build it, and the hotel business wasn’t big, and when they couldn’t keep up with payments, and he gave them back every penny they gave him. He never cheated anyone out of a dime, and he told me about some of his childhood, and he used to say they would get the neighborhood together and they would have a cowboy hideout and they would have friends who would all bring a toy to put under a hat, and the idea was that when the hat was lifted up if you grabbed something you could have it, and he would always grab only one so everyone got one.
Jack: What year were your father’s hotels built?
Around the 1930’s the first was probably around ’31, because I was 17 when I was helping him build hotels, it was quite a ways back, but my dad, I can’t say anything bad about him he was an honest man, he was a good man. My mother was much better at affection, but I was the stranger in the family cause I was born so late, my mother was 42 when I was born, so I was treated a little differently than my brothers. Of course, they were all older than, you know, 10 years is a lot.
Jack: Why did he build them in Yellowstone?
That was my dad’s idea. We used to go up to Yellowstone every year, and that was about a 5-hour drive from the house and I remember going up there fishing with my dad and I had pictures of us. But there weren’t a lot of hotels up there at the time there were always two of them, basically log cabins that weren’t in that good of shape, and businesses in West Yellowstone were trying to sell their land and he decided to build hotels in Montana.
Jack: Have you ever visited any of them?
Oh yeah, I helped build them. I was working for my dad a lot, my brother was the manager of one, and I remember dad working weeks at a time, and what I had to do was lay bricks and build the hotels. We worked up there and didn’t have facilities to stay in, we stayed in a garage with holes in the roof you could see through, in the rain we always got wet and the squirrels came out every morning to wake us up. I remember doing that, yeah, I remember the hotel business then wasn’t like it is now.
The interesting thing is that he was the first one to have running water in the bathrooms and it was a high item to have a bathroom and running water actually in the room. That was really well regarded, but as time went by, it became really outdated, and he sold the cabins and one of the interesting things is my wife Shanna’s dad bought one of the cabins from my dad to build into his farm to house German prisoners in because they would let them out to work in the field, and I never knew my neighbor, her, until after I met her down here and that was 6 years ago.
Jack: What other work did your father do?
Well, he was a painter, of course, and he did work at the C.W. Cross Sporting Goods for a while but he didn’t like it because he wanted to be more independent, and that’s where all his siblings were working and they made saddles, but he didn’t like because I don’t think the siblings got along very well. There was a lot of animosity and jealousy because of the different pay that people made. They weren’t a real close family, but we did have annual reunions in the canyon and my aunt was in charge of that and we used to go up there and I remember once a year we would go up there with the whole family, which would be about 75 people. We would show up and there was a hotel with a restaurant and that’s where we would have our party.
Jack: What jobs have you had/where have you worked?
One of my first jobs was working at a quarry alongside this big bulky guy, and we had to keep a hopper full of gravel and sand, and it was all done by hand and I remember that he gave me the gravel to load up which is the most difficult because you would have to grab a shovel and pick up the gravel and some of the rocks would fall out, but the sand would stay in there. After a while, he said “lets trade for a while” because I was working really hard to keep that hopper full, and he was a full-blooded Navajo who was really well built and a really nice guy. I delivered paper, I did that, and I worked for my dad just for being part of the family I didn’t make any money, but I do remember that he would give me a quarter sometimes to take to town as a little reward, and that would get me into the movie and some candy and popcorn and I remember we would walk by this can factory, and when I was old enough to work I applied there and we would stack the cans and work the machinery, that was one of the first major jobs I had was the American Can Company. We had sticks to move the cans where they’d have five or six prongs on them and the cans were always stacked up in the bins and you’d grab the cans and put them on the line to be filled with fruit or something else.
That was the first really important job that I felt good at, I enjoyed that. The quarry was a really dirty job, lotta dust, lotta sweat, you’d have to fill a wheelbarrow full of whatever you were getting and move it around the quarry. It was kind of a difficult job, so was building my dad’s hotels with all the construction and things. When I got into college I found a good job, which was working as an assistant credit manager at Sear’s and that was the first job where I got to wear nice clothes and didn’t get hurt hands working all day. It was a good life, it was better than the quarry and the hotels that was quite a while ago.
Jack: Is that all you did?
No, I enjoyed dentistry for a little while but the suicide rates for dentistry are higher than almost any other profession, and I think its because you could never take any pride in it, you could never show off what you worked on for so long. The two things that bother dentists, number one its very boring because it’s the same things, same teeth, and number two you can't show anybody what you’ve accomplished, because you can really enjoy construction and building homes and stuff like that but you can't do that with dentistry, that’s why I didn’t stay for very long. I did other things, like building houses, helped build my father’s hotels, worked as an assistant manager at Sear’s and worked my way up through that.
Jack: Do you think your father influenced this?
No, I don’t. I always wanted to build, it was always what I wanted to do, not dentistry. When I got to college I wanted to be a geologist, they said “no you can't do that, we want you to go to dentist school” because my brother had graduated and was a dentist and I went there really at the request of my parents which I would never suggest parents to do, and I found out that I don’t really care if my kids outrun a garbage truck picking up trash, as long as he's happy with his work, and I’m always of the philosophy “if you love to work, then you're not working anymore” but you shouldn’t hate your work either.
There was always a lot of work, you know, because dad was building all the time, and I remember trying to work up in Montana with my dad, and it was poor, only 32 cents an hour, but it was good wages it could buy you some clothes and food. When I went to school before that the highest paid job I ever had was $2 an hour and I thought I was making a ton of money that was high wages. I learned to paint working for my dad because we built the hotels and had to paint them and keep them painted, people were a little abusive to them sometimes. It wasn’t like it is now, Shanna’s got grandchildren who start at $100,000 dollars a year, but they're into computers, they're getting that advantage we didn’t know what a computer was, we had those public phones where you'd see who was on the line and you couldn’t really tell and once they said “yeah, I'm on the line” you'd have to hang up and you couldn’t use the phone, but they didn’t have to hang up and they could listen to your whole conversation, this conversation could be your next-door neighbor, totally different world. I worked as a painter when I was 18, that was a good job, and that’s when I got $2 an hour, I went on strike for a quarter and got a nickel so I was making $2.05 an hour, that was something to brag about, I was making 2 dollars an hour. It was a different time, you have to realize I’m 86, you have to go back 67 years, times were different back then.
Jack: Where do you think your family is most strongly rooted?
West Yellowstone is where we went for vacations, where we went fishing a lot, its where we went as a family. I remember dad taking me to California once, when I was about 9 or 10 years old, I will never forget that trip down there because when we took the trip down by the ocean, I had never seen the ocean and had never swam in the ocean before, I remember this huge pipe, it must have been 6 or 8 feet in diameter and it was spewing into the ocean and what it was fecal material from restrooms and stuff and it ran 24 hours a day like that down in California and I asked him what it was and he said “oh, its just fecal material that they dump in the ocean” and I thought that was pretty wild.
Jack: How much has the Cross family moved throughout history?
Oh, they all moved. There’s not a Cross left in Ogden. There’s not one. They either died or they moved to California, they moved out of there. The other ones moved to Las Vegas, there lived my dad’s brother. He became an alcoholic and died from alcoholism. He had a heart attack and he died, that was his brother. The ones who went to California, quite frankly, they didn’t stay together as a family anymore. Family reunions were wonderful because we got to meet everybody, but now we don’t have that, we haven’t done them for years and years, I can’t even think of the last one. But they were wonderful, when our family had family reunions, everybody would come from California, from Oregon, Idaho, and that’s when we’d get together, but there was so much conflict among the brothers and sisters and what was happening, and they purposely got away from each other, I’m not proud of that, I’m just saying that’s what happened. I remember they would see each other walking down the street and cross the street so they didn’t have to say hello to each other. It’s a different world nowadays.
Jack: Where is your favorite place that you have lived?
Favorite place I’ve been? My favorite place is West Yellowstone because that’s where I’d always go with my family, we had a lot of vacations up there. My next favorite is probably California, but I don’t like the people who took it and changed it. And we used to go up to Paradise, which was absolutely the best place I could imagine. We fished up there, it was high in the mountains, I used to stay with my father and he didn’t have cabins but there was a shed we could sleep in, and back then we would practice shooting with .22s, and we throw coins up and shoot them out of the air.
Jack: Where do you think your father’s favorite place was?
I think his favorite place was West Yellowstone because that’s where he would always take us, he didn’t travel a lot back then, he didn’t have much time to go on vacation, he put in a lot of work, you know, we had some wonderful times up there. Things were different from how it is now and how it was then.
Jack: Do you have any memory of the Great Depression or its effect on your family?
I do remember it affected me, it also affected my dad. That’s when his hotel business hit a slump, the prices for everything went up.
Jack: Did you look up to your father as a child?
Oh, my father was a wonderful man, he was, absolutely. There has never been a finer man than my dad, he drank, and he smoked, but he was honest, I liked the honesty in him. I always respected him for that.
Jack: Was he present in the household with your family?
He went away for work a lot, but he tried to be with us whenever he could. We used to go to Ogden 25th street and watch the drunks get thrown out of the bars. Back then, you didn’t get asked to leave, you were thrown out, and that was part of our Saturday entertainment with him.
Jack: Did you stay close with your father as you grew up?
Not as close as I would have liked, to be honest, I wasn’t as close to my dad as I wanted to be, I wish I could have been a lot closer to him, but he just wasn’t there, I was this young kid with all my older siblings.
Jack: Did how he raise you influence your life and decisions?
Yeah, he's the reason why I went to dental school, my mom and dad, I never would have gone, I would have been a geologist, after doing his hotels I was qualified to do a home and I did, I loved it, but he thought I should get an education, so I did. It wasn’t my choice, to be a dentist, I wasn’t looking forward to that when I was growing up I was looking forward to building.
Jack: Did his parenting shape how you fathered your children?
I’m not sure he did, I can’t say to a certain degree, but I didn’t go to church with him, I did all the cleaning after hunting and fishing, I was on a lower level in the family because I was so much younger. I know he influenced me, I can't say whether it was good or bad, I love my dad dearly, he was such an honest person, he smoked and drank a little bit, never fell to it, he was such a good person.
Oral History Questions
1. This project showed me that there is so much history all around us, but you would never know that it’s there. In every community, no matter how big or small, there are so many stories, families, and connections that run deep. I never thought that my family could have this much important, meaningful history.
2. I learned so much about my family during this project and I almost want to learn more. Interviewing my grandfather, while slightly difficult, was fascinating, especially to learn so much about my great-grandfather. It also makes me interested in the community around me and all the history that is contained inside our town.
3. The biggest challenge I faced during this project was the interview. The questions were easy to make as I knew what I wanted to learn but recording and transcribing it proved to be a challenge. The quality of the recording was almost incomprehensible and transcribing it took almost 4 hours. There wasn’t much I could do about this as I had to interview my grandfather over the phone. He lives in Utah so I couldn’t meet him face to face and his voice is naturally hard to understand over the phone.
4. If I was the tradition-bearer, I would like to tell stories about what I did during my childhood, as those are some of the most formative years of our lives. I would like to compare it to what life is like whenever I am telling the story to contrast how the world changed or stayed the same. Overall, I would want to interest the person I am telling the story to and make them want to know more.
Bibliography:
National Parks Service. “Park History.” National Parks Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, www.nps.gov/yell/learn/historyculture/park-history.htm.
Detroit Historical Society. “Encyclopedia Of Detroit.” Detroit Historical Society — Where the Past Is Present, detroithistorical.org/learn/encyclopedia-of-detroit/ford-motor-company.
Gross, Jamie. “36 Hours in Salt Lake City.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 3 June 2010, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/travel/06hours.html?mtrref=www.google.com&gwh=7A516D273A4336681705917B557AA01F&gwt=pay&assetType=REGIWALL.
Randall, Ann. “Uncovering Salt Lake City Speakeasies.” Wander With Wonder, Wander With Wonder, 23 Sept. 2017, https://www.wanderwithwonder.com/2017/09/23/uncovering-salt-lake-city-speakeasies/
