The brown reel-to-reel tape spun like crazy, whined and crashed to a stop. Another punch of a button, and out came the voice of an old stagecoach driver who's been dead for years.
"I was coming from Norris, and you have to walk your team up, and he was coming down just that last mile into Norris 'fore you hit the river," said the voice. "He seen me and stopped, and he said, `Red, seen your wife down there at the ranch the other day.' "That voice belonged to "Society" Red Malon, and the tape was recorded in 1961. Malon, Herb French and Jack Haynes, all stagecoach drivers from the early days of Yellowstone, were being interviewed by then park historian Aubrey Haines.
The tape, part of a series of oral histories compiled by Haines, is now on file in the basement library of the Albright Visitor Center in Mammoth.
It may be obscure history as not many visitors listen to these old tapes. But the stories told by these drivers, and others, provide a sharp, vivid picture of life in the nation's first national park before the arrival of the automobile in 1915.
"Society" Red Malon got his nickname around 1909 because, at that time, the drivers would go to these dances every night, but "Society's" clothes always smelled like a horse, related French. "Society" would walk up and down the lines of girls, getting turned down by one after another. So Pete Myers started calling him "Society," and it stuck. The name "Red" came from his hair.
There's the story of Tim Connolly shooting craps down in the barn, losing every penny he had one day, all of $90. Connolly quipped that he guessed he'd just walk back to Gardiner.
But apart from the anecdotes, French, Malon, Jenkins and the others tell a great deal about how the stagecoaches were run in the early days of Yellowstone National Park, from the roads to the equipment to the wages the drivers earned.
The drivers of the tally-hos - the big, six-horse stagecoaches that could haul up to 11 passengers - earned $75 a month, far more than the drivers of four-horse teams, the two-horse rigs or the surreys, who got $35 a month and slept in the bunkhouse, according to Malon.
"They were bankers, them was," he said of the tally-ho drivers. "They didn't have to do nothin'. They wouldn't even speak to us."
Taking that cue, French threw a little insight into life in the bunkhouse.
"They were nice blankets, if you could get the dust out of 'em," he said. "Get pretty dusty by the time you went around the park."
The historical detail in the tapes, which run for hours, is amazing. The smell of the stables, texture of the blankets, depth of the potholes, sandiness of the soil near the Lake - they roll off the reel-to-reel as these old men talk in 1961 of events that happened more than half a century before. In retelling one incident of a bear getting trapped, Malon and French argue whether it was cloudy that day or not.
An average run around the park took five days. They started at Mammoth, passing through the Fountain Paint Pot area, Old Faithful, down to West Thumb and back to Mammoth via the Canyon.
French told of the time Teddy Roosevelt, during one of at least four visits to Yellowstone in the decade after the turn of the century, got driven around the park in a four-horse sleigh.
During that visit, a drunken "Buffalo" Bill Jones refused to dine with Roosevelt.
"He said he wasn't going to eat with all those dressed up sons-of-b------," said Malon, although in the transcript of the tape, the typist wrote: "I refuse to type this series of words."
Although the stagecoach drivers' tapes are marked "Very important interviews," they are just a small fraction of the oral history collection in the library compiled by Haines, current park historical archivist Lee Whittlesey and others. There are interviews with Army scouts, superintendents, secretaries, researchers and many others that have played some role or other in the park.
Not many people listen to the old tapes, as indicated by no one in the library knowing how to run the archaic reel-to-reel tape machine. But people do use the basement library as a whole, said librarian Barbara Zafft.
"Summer was incredibly busy," she said, guessing that 15 or 20 people a day came in. Some are simply inquisitive visitors, but many are serious researchers, historians, belong to groups of college students or are relatives of people documented in Yellowstone re-cords.
Those ancestors made up a wild bunch of characters, if accounts on the tapes can be believed. There was "Old Dad Crap," who would "chew tobacco to beat the band" and spit the juice right into the veil he wore over his face to protect from Buffalo Gnats.
"Geyser" Bob Edgar told ladies to throw their handkerchiefs into one hot spring and watch them appear in another, according to Malon. When they were not looking, he'd fish the cloths out and drop them in another pool later in the day, to the astonishment of his guests. Then he'd get big laughs around the bunkhouse later.
Old Gil Scott, he loved to dance. Bill Jones chained a live mountain lion in front of his place.
And Teddy Roosevelt was "a fine feller," according to Red Malon.
The effort of Haines, Whittlesey and other historians have made it possible for future generations to experience the early days of the nation's first national park.