Nothing Daunted (15 page)

In his final letter, he described his trip on horseback to the scattered cabins that comprised Elkhead. One of the places he visited was a spot
that “we call Little Arkansas, where they live on porcupine and bear cabbage and the quakers [quaking aspen] are so thick you can hardly ride thru from one place to another.” He said there would be about thirty “head”—referring to pupils, not cattle. Until then, Dorothy and Ros hadn’t been fully struck by the audacity and strangeness of their undertaking.

H
ELL
H
ILL

I
n Denver on July 27, as Dorothy and Ros boarded the train at the Moffat Depot, a man lifted their suitcases onto a brass luggage rack in the parlor car. There were facing leather lounge chairs near the back, with little tables between. They sat down and tried to work, but the dozen other people on the journey across the Great Divide made no effort to conceal their curiosity about the two young women. Dorothy wrote to her family the next morning from the Hayden Inn, “We were soon all bosom friends.” The rapidly changing landscape was rejuvenating after the monotonous plains of the previous days. They soon left behind the soot and crowds of
Denver, and the rolling brown prairie gave way to green foothills. They passed some farms and homes, then wound toward a high, broad mesa—the start of the Front Range. The air was clean and cooler as the pine forests began to thicken. The sky was a brilliant azure rarely seen in the East.

The train snaked up along the wide ridges. Then, suddenly, they were surrounded by spires and ledges of stone and passed through the first of thirty-three tunnels that had been blasted through the hard rock. The tracks were toylike beside jagged sand-colored cliffs that rose abruptly on one side, close to the train window, and chasms that dropped away on the other. The first canyon, Coal Creek, was followed by South Boulder. When they walked out to the observation platform, they saw valleys occasionally open up and rapids churning against the rocks far below. Dorothy wrote, “The altitude didn’t bother us a bit—and although there was some snow—they all said they never saw so little—due to this intense heat.” The trip would not have been advisable for anyone with vertigo or claustrophobia or a lack of faith in the technological advances that had made possible the building of the railroad. The Devil’s Slide Trestles, two in a row, were built directly into the side of the mountain. The canyon floor was over a thousand feet below. The switchbacks were so extreme in some spots that when the locomotive rounded a bend, the train virtually folded in two. Ros wrote, “we hung out of the window and off the observation platform—talked to everyone in the car and found many interesting people—got as many side lights on the country as possible.” The Moffat Road, Dorothy commented, “
seems to be something of a joke
—with its one train and delays—but long before we arrived I thought it was the most gigantic accomplishment I ever saw. We went through and over sheer rock, high mountains, & superb canyons—and I can’t imagine how they ever did it.”

They weren’t the only ones to be astonished at the achievement.
As an early historian of Colorado wrote
, the building of the line “attracted the attention of engineers and scientists throughout the world.” David Moffat’s railroad, like so much of what they were already experiencing, represented a triumph of will and perseverance
over prudence. It was also widely seen as a lifeline to people fighting to survive in Routt County—the difference, over the long term, between penury and a decent living. Ros and Dorothy learned more from the other passengers and, subsequently, from Carpenter, about the extraordinary man behind the railroad.

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David Moffat arrived in Denver from Omaha, Nebraska, at the age of twenty on March 17, 1860. He had entered into a partnership with a man who supplied him with three drivers, two wagons, and enough paper and books to open a stationery store on Larimer Street. Moffat intended to return home to New York after he had made $75,000, a small fortune at the time. Instead, he broadened his endeavors over the next four decades to include banking (he rose from cashier to president of the First National Bank of Denver); mining (he came to own more than a hundred mines); streetcars (he was treasurer of two companies); and railroads (he had interests in at least nine of them).

In 1867 Moffat, along with former territorial governor John Evans, and William Byers, the owner of the
Rocky Mountain News,
joined investors from the East to form the Denver Pacific Railway, the first railroad into the city. Denver had been bypassed by the first transcontinental railroad—a joint undertaking of the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific, completed in 1869, which had chosen the less risky northern route through Cheyenne, Wyoming.
This caused Thomas Durant, the vice president of Union Pacific, to gleefully announce
that Denver was “too dead to bury.” He underestimated Coloradans’ faith in their state’s future. The Denver Pacific connected Denver to Cheyenne and the national rail system, and it brought the city back from its post–gold rush slump.

Moffat was described by a friend as
“quiet, unpretentious, lovable, a man of patience and courtesy” who “never spoke ill of anyone.” Lovable he may have been, but his drive and political connections matched those of his rapacious eastern counterparts, E. H. Harriman
and Jay Gould, and later, Gould’s son George. Moffat also knew more than they did about Colorado’s varied terrain and hidden riches, and his greatest ambition was to build his own transcontinental railroad, which would cross the Continental Divide.

One of Moffat’s key backers was Sam Perry, the father of Ferry Carpenter’s friend Bob. Perry, a director of the Denver Tramway Company, owned several coal mines and a great deal of land and some other businesses in Routt County. A railroad over the Rockies and into the Yampa Valley, he and Moffat believed, would mean an end to the isolation of residents to the west of the Rockies: prosperity for the mine owners, ranchers, strawberry growers, and tourism entrepreneurs; and vastly more power and profits for whoever managed to build the line. It also meant that Harriman and Gould would be denied access to some of the most valuable and stunning land in the United States.

Moffat continued investing in railroads until, in June 1902, portly and bald at sixty-two years old, he announced his plan to create a standard-gauge “air line”—the shortest, straightest route possible—over the Rocky Mountains. There were already narrow-gauge railroads in the Rockies. But Moffat’s was the first standard gauge: its eighty-pound steel rails would be four feet, eight and a half inches apart, rather than three feet, made for bigger engines that could haul heavy cargo. Moffat was by then one of the richest men in Colorado. After two months in New York, he told the
Times
that he had completed the financing of his railroad.
He promised it would reduce the travel time
between Denver and San Francisco by twenty-four hours.

He intended to build the Denver, Northwestern & Pacific Railway, dubbed the Moffat Road, north and northwest from Denver to Salt Lake City. His decision to connect the two cities, he disingenuously told the
Times,
was not “for the purpose of entering into a competitive field or for the purpose of making another road to the Pacific Coast.” It was simply to form “a link in the railroad chain.” Moffat’s road would join the San Pedro, Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad in Salt Lake City, which would run from there to southern California and thus “become a transcontinental proposition.” Incensed at this taunt, Harriman and
Gould prevented Moffat from using Union Station in Denver as his terminus, but Moffat built his own depot several blocks west.

The Moffat Road is still the highest standard-gauge railroad ever built in North America
. Although Moffat was not easily discouraged, his years of experience did not prepare him for the expense and technical challenges of the undertaking. Gunpowder and twenty tons of TNT were used along the route to bore into the rock, but the longer tunnels also required the use of electric drills, air drills, and “up-right boiler” steam drills. At some locations, the granite was rotten and difficult to prop up with timber. Although teams of Chinese, Italian, and Scandinavian muckers shoveled dirt out of the tunnels and hauled it away in wheelbarrows and horse-drawn carts and wagons, there never seemed to be enough of them.

The railroad’s chief locating engineer
, based in Denver, was H. A. Sumner. His greatest quandary as he plotted the sinuous path—nothing like the straight air line Moffat had pledged—was how best to tackle the treacherous stretch that rose to the summit, Rollins Pass, at 11,600 feet, and down the west side to Idlewild (now Winter Park). The workers called it “Hell Hill” and referred to five particularly tight switchbacks on the east side as the “Giant’s Ladder.” Sumner said of his task, “
The battle of Gettysburg was a Quaker meeting
by comparison.” Moffat regarded Hell Hill as a temporary branch line to be used for several years to shuttle workers and equipment as well as tourists, cattle, and coal, across the Divide, until he could raise the money needed to complete a six-mile tunnel through James Peak. On maps, the route looks like a line drawn by a palsied madman.

Sumner’s teams worked from both sides of the mountain. One of the parties on the west side was led by an imperturbable engineer, a husband and father of five, named J. J. Argo, who kept a record of his men’s progress. They worked through two winters, hauling their tents, camp stoves, food, and surveying equipment on sleds from one location to the next. Arctic temperatures, blizzards, and drifting snow were daily occurrences from September through June. The wind blew some places clear of snow, but at many cuts, it was as deep as
two hundred feet. They dug themselves out with shovels. When they suffered from snow blindness, they rubbed slices of raw potatoes on their eyelids at night, and they tried to deflect the glare during the day by lining their eyes with charcoal.

At Gore Canyon, the men at the top rappelled down the cliff, drove steel pitons into the rock, and attached ropes, prompting Sumner to refer to them as “Argo’s Squirrels.” The workers below chopped down trees and made sixteen-foot sections of logs, which they floated down the Grand River. These were lifted out and attached to the ropes at the lower end, creating footbridges that swayed in the heavy winds. The workers, clearing a path to lay down a roadbed for the train, stood on the bridges as they drilled holes for dynamite with handheld star drills.
Argo wrote in his diary one June day
, “Built foot bridges in afternoon along bluffs. Hoklas fell in river and narrowly escaped drowning.”

Newspaper reports described a worker whose arm was amputated; another lost both eyes. One man died after a mule kicked him in the head. Rockslides were common, carrying away workers and filling tunnel portals. In the summer of 1905, the construction crews at the top of the Divide had to work furiously to get two miles of snowsheds built in order to protect the most exposed tracks before the heaviest snows and winds descended. The workers’ quarters were flimsier shacks attached to the sheds.

Once the freight trains started running, they required four state-of-the-art Mallet locomotives, designed by a Swiss engineer, run in tandem with “hogs,” the second-most powerful engines, to get them up the mountain. Even when paired with gigantic rotary snowplows, the locomotives were defeated by storms and avalanches, which occasionally sent cars hurtling off the side of the mountain.
Remarkably, no passenger was ever killed
on the Moffat Road, although many were stranded at the summit for days or even weeks, waiting for the blizzards to subside and unprotected sections of the tracks to be cleared.
There was at least one birth
at Rollins Pass during a delay. The expense of snow removal accounted for 40 percent or more of the railroad’s operational costs. One man recalled getting
stuck at the top as a child: “
They brought some Chinese in to shovel the snow
. It was impossible. The big [rotary] snowplow chewed up two or three of the Chinese. After that, they refused to go out and shovel, and I don’t blame them.”