Wolf Creek grew from Cartersville, a mile east, to serve the Montana Central Railroad as it wound through steep Prickly Pear Canyon in 1886-1887, an area prized for trout fishing. James Carter built a small one-story hotel there in 1887, then soon sold it to Charles Forman, a young Englishman, who around 1892 replaced it with a three-story frame building and attached it to the original manager’s house, covering its log walls with clapboard siding. In a simple style once common across rural Montana, the hotel offered ten rooms and home-cooked meals to outdoor enthusiasts, stage travelers, and railroad passengers. Forman, a butcher by trade, also ran a livery stable and meat company, and a small rear house packed with ice cut from the Missouri River kept his food cool. From 1887 to 1984, the hotel operated under only five owners and served as a stage stop on the Mullan Trail and on routes from Helena to Augusta and Fort Benton. It later housed workers building Holter Dam in 1910, gas pipeline laborers in the 1930s, and highway crews who split the town in the 1960s. After witnessing decades of winds, floods, fires, births, and deaths, it entered a new phase when restoration as a private home began in the 1990s.