Zimmerman Trail:

How Two Immigrant Sheep Ranchers Carved Billings' Road to the Sky

THE CITY BENEATH THE RIMS

Billings, Montana, sits in a river bottom pinned beneath a wall of sandstone bluffs known locally as the Rims, an escarpment that rises roughly three hundred feet above the Yellowstone Valley floor and separates the city's downtown core from the benchland to the north (Encyclopedia of the Great Plains). Before there was a Billings, there was Coulson, a steamboat town founded on the north bank of the Yellowstone River in 1877 by settlers drawn from the Gallatin Valley, who built their community around a sawmill, a trading post, and the hope that riverboat traffic would sustain it (Encyclopedia of the Great Plains). That hope collapsed in 1881 and 1882, when the Northern Pacific Railway, extending its transcontinental line up the Yellowstone Valley, chose to build its own townsite two miles to the west rather than lay track through Coulson. The railroad named the new town for its president, Frederick H. Billings, and Coulson emptied out almost as quickly as it had filled (HMdb, "The Railroad Arrives").

It was into this raw, rapidly reorganizing landscape that Joseph Zimmerman arrived. Born in Fellering, in the Alsace-Lorraine region of Germany, Zimmerman immigrated to the United States in 1872 and enlisted in the United States Cavalry two years later, a decision that carried him to the Montana Territory (HMdb, "Along the Zimmerman Trail"). After leaving the army in 1883, he opened a clothing store in Billings, a mile or so west of the fading settlement of Coulson. Commerce, however, was not where Zimmerman's ambitions settled. Within a few years he had purchased three sections of land west of the young city and turned to sheep feeding, a business that would eventually give the Rims their most enduring place name.

THE ZIMMERMAN BROTHERS AND THE SHEEP TRAIL

Zimmerman's ranch straddled both the valley floor and the top of the rimrocks, a geography that created a persistent logistical headache. Moving bands of sheep from the homestead below to a natural spring atop the bluffs, at the forks of the North and South Alkali Creeks, required a round trip of some thirty-two miles by the only route then available, a path that ran down to Boot Hill Cemetery and back (HMdb, "Along the Zimmerman Trail"). In 1890, Joseph summoned his brother Frank, who had followed him to Montana years earlier and worked for the railroad before briefly returning to Alsace-Lorraine and then farming in Michigan, to manage the ranch and help engineer a shorter path up the rock face (HMdb, "Along the Zimmerman Trail").

What the brothers built over the summers of 1890 and 1891 was less a road than a scar deliberately cut into sandstone. A hired miner named Thompson handled the blasting, while the grading itself was done with a two-handled scraper capable of moving only a single yard of dirt at a time. With three men and two mules doing the work, the trail was finished by the close of the second summer (HMdb, "Along the Zimmerman Trail"). A regional retrospective published decades later by the Billings Gazette, drawing on the recollections of Wayne Bromenshenk, Frank Zimmerman's great-grandson, confirms the same basic account: a road built by the two brothers expressly to move sheep, not to serve the traveling public (Billings Gazette, "Zimmerman Trail Is Billings' Expressway"). The original alignment ran roughly two and a half miles north of where the modern highway crosses the Rims today, a detail that separates the Zimmerman brothers' hand-cut trail from the paved route that later inherited its name.

A ROAD LARGELY UNTRAVELED

For all the labor it demanded, the original Zimmerman Trail saw little use beyond its intended purpose. According to the historical marker erected at Zimmerman Park, the trail was never adopted by the stagecoach lines that served Billings in that era, and the single surviving photograph of the original route is thought to show a group of dignitaries being given one of the few rides ever taken up it by coach (HMdb, "Along the Zimmerman Trail"). Both Zimmerman brothers remained in the Billings area for the rest of their lives, and the trail that bore their name lingered for decades as a working ranch road and a local curiosity rather than a public thoroughfare of any consequence.

THE WPA REBUILDS THE TRAIL

The transformation of Zimmerman Trail from ranch path to civic infrastructure was a product of the Great Depression. In 1938, three of Billings' civic service organizations, the Rotary, Kiwanis, and Lions clubs, joined a fundraising committee led by Mearl L. Fagg, Grover C. Cisel, Frank G. Connelly, and Chandler C. Cohagen to raise the $750 needed to purchase the land that would become Zimmerman Park along with the right-of-way for a rebuilt road down the rimrocks. The acquired property was then deeded to Yellowstone County (HMdb, "Along the Zimmerman Trail").

The reconstruction itself fell to the Works Progress Administration. The federal government allocated $95,252 for labor and equipment, and Yellowstone County contributed a further $23,388, funding a project that the historical marker describes as requiring more than 150 men working nearly four months (HMdb, "Along the Zimmerman Trail"). An independent account maintained by the Living New Deal project, an archive documenting public works from the era, corroborates the outline while adding a telling detail: the WPA crew, numbering between 100 and 150 laborers, began the project in 1939 intending to finish within four months, but the work in fact stretched past seven, a delay the project traces to reporting originally published in the Billings Gazette in 2008 (Living New Deal). The discrepancy in crew size between the two sources is minor and likely reflects fluctuation in the workforce over the course of a multi-month project rather than any real disagreement about the scale of the undertaking. What both sources agree on is the essential fact: this was no small local improvement but a substantially re-engineered mountain road, built by federal relief labor at a moment when such projects were reshaping public infrastructure across Montana and the nation.

FROM GRAVEL TO PAVEMENT: THE HIGHWAY ERA

The WPA-era rebuilding gave Billings a wider, more durable route to the top of the Rims, though it would be another several years before the road received a hard surface. According to the marker maintained at Zimmerman Park, the trail was finally paved in the 1940s, a step that converted a rerouted relief-era gravel road into something closer to a modern highway (HMdb, "Along the Zimmerman Trail"). As Billings expanded northward and westward across the bench atop the Rims in the postwar decades, Zimmerman Trail took on a role its builders could scarcely have imagined: rather than a route for sheep bound for a mountaintop spring, it became one of the city's principal connectors between the valley floor and the growing residential districts of the West End, a function it continues to serve today as one of only a handful of paved routes linking Billings' upper bench to its downtown core.

REBUILDING FOR A NEW CENTURY

That function came under renewed strain in the twenty-first century, as Billings' population and traffic volumes grew faster than the aging road could comfortably absorb. Local news coverage from 2018 documents a lengthy, multi-phase reconstruction of Zimmerman Trail and its junction with Montana Highway 3 atop the Rims, a project budgeted at roughly $8.17 million and driven in large part by a sharp rise in crashes at the intersection, from four collisions recorded in 2015 to twelve just two years later (KTVQ, "Work Beginning"). Public information officer Becky Bey, representing the engineering firm managing the project, told reporters that a roundabout was expected to reduce crashes at the site by as much as sixty-eight percent while also accommodating growth anticipated on the West End (KTVQ, "Work Beginning").

The timeline of the 2018 project underscores how much this stretch of road, even after a century of rebuilding, remained subject to the same terrain that had challenged the Zimmerman brothers in 1890. Crews closed the trail at the end of June after discovering a large crack in the roadbed, work that later reporting attributed to drainage problems worsened by heavy spring rain (KTVQ, "Last Phase of Construction"). The road reopened to traffic that November, widened, better lit, and anchored by a new roundabout at its summit, following months of detours that inconvenienced commuters across the West End (KTVQ, "Zimmerman Trail in Billings to Reopen"). The project also laid groundwork, quite literally, for a pedestrian and bicycle underpass intended to connect with a planned recreational corridor along the Rims, an indication that the trail's role continues to expand beyond automobile traffic alone (KULR8, "Zimmerman Trail Construction Will Pave the Way").

A TRAIL THAT ENDURES

Little about Zimmerman Trail as it exists today would be recognizable to Joseph and Frank Zimmerman, who hacked their original path into the sandstone with hand tools and mule-drawn scrapers for the narrow purpose of watering sheep. Yet the name has proven remarkably durable, attached in turn to a ranch road, a Depression-era relief project, a paved postwar highway, and, most recently, a modern arterial rebuilt with an eye toward roundabouts, guardrails, and multimodal trails. The persistence of that name across nearly a century and a half of change says something about how Billings has grown: not by abandoning the routes its earliest residents improvised out of necessity, but by rebuilding them, again and again, to meet the needs of a city that outgrew its river bottom long ago.

Works Cited

Billings Gazette. "Retrospective: Before Billings, There Was Coulson." Billings Gazette, billingsgazette.com/news/local/article_50ac710e-20dc-58c4-8a2e-2d5ef9df278e.html. Accessed 16 Sept. 2026.

Billings Gazette. "Zimmerman Trail Is Billings' Expressway to Top of the Rims." Billings Gazette, billingsgazette.com/news/local/zimmerman-trail-is-billings-expressway-to-top-of-the-rims/article_6f611243-c89b-53d6-82e8-a309e3100991.html. Accessed 16 Sept. 2026.

"Billings, Montana." Encyclopedia of the Great Plains, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, plainshumanities.unl.edu/encyclopedia/doc/egp.ct.005.html. Accessed 16 Sept. 2026.

Historical Marker Database. "Along the Zimmerman Trail." HMdb.org, erected 2005, www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=169996. Accessed 16 Sept. 2026.

Historical Marker Database. "The Railroad Arrives." HMdb.org, erected by the Western Heritage Center, www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=308895. Accessed 16 Sept. 2026.

KTVQ. "Last Phase of Construction Finished on Zimmerman Trail in Billings." KTVQ, 28 Nov. 2018, ktvq.com/news/local-news/2018/11/28/last-phase-of-construction-finished-on-zimmerman-trail-in-billings/. Accessed 16 Sept. 2026.

KTVQ. "Work Beginning on Improvements to Zimmerman Trail in Billings." KTVQ, 10 July 2018, ktvq.com/news/2018/07/10/work-beginning-on-improvements-to-zimmerman-trail-in-billings. Accessed 16 Sept. 2026.

KTVQ. "Zimmerman Trail in Billings to Reopen Wednesday." KTVQ, 20 Nov. 2018, ktvq.com/news/local-news/2018/11/20/zimmerman-trail-in-billings-to-reopen-wednesday. Accessed 16 Sept. 2026.

KULR8. "Zimmerman Trail Construction Will Pave the Way for New Walking Trail." KULR8, www.kulr8.com/news/zimmerman-trail-construction-will-pave-the-way-for-new-walking-trail/article_c5b0d0cc-78e0-56b2-bda4-22e6ed3f4046.html. Accessed 16 Sept. 2026.

Living New Deal. "Zimmerman Trail - Billings, MT." Living New Deal, livingnewdeal.org/sites/zimmerman-trail-billings-mt/. Accessed 16 Sept. 2026.