Welcome to the Wild West - Part #4: Roads and Rails

The Colorado Mountains presented a huge obstacle to transportation throughout Colorado and this was one of the reasons the gold rush didn't start any earlier. But as placer gold deteriorated and more complicated extraction processes were needed, and as Colorado began experiencing its companion silver mining boom, not only were roads necessary, but railroads also became critical to making mining economically viable. They were also necessary to opening up the territory to settlement and development.


Rail and Trail down Ute Pass. Source.

TRAILS:

Trails were first set down by the native Indians but these were nothing more than tracks. As Colorado developed, real roads needed to be constructed to get in and out of the mining camps. Can you imagine how difficult it would've have been to build these roads on the sheer sides of mountains or through deep canyons? But before railroads were built, these were the only means of access and they became very busy indeed despite the tolls lumped on them by private owners. See, since there was a lack of strong communities in the west, or provisions to pressure the government, private road building was a free-for-all.

Mears' Million Dollar Highway. Source.

One of these private road-builders was Russian-born immigrant Otto Mears, who built some 300-450 miles of toll roads in and around the San Juan Mountains in south-western Colorado. With a keen vision, he built his roads in conformations and at grades suitable for railways and subsequently many of his routes were purchased by railway companies moving into the area.

His most enduring legacy is a 25 mile (40km) section of road of what is now US 550 running from Ouray to Silverton. Built in the 1880s, it was cut directly into the side of steep mountains, however, the 12 mile section that spurred the road’s nick-name as The Million Dollar Highway starts just south of Ouray through the Uncompahgre gorge to the summit of Red Mountain Pass.

And not much has changed on that section since, except that it is now paved. Drivers still must negotiate the nail splitting, hair-pulling, narrow twists, turns, and switchbacks running along clear, steep drop-offs. Chase and I travelled this section of road in 2008. Going south we were stuck on the cliff-edge side and even with the snow banks providing a faux guard-rail (since there are none), it was still scary as hell!

There are several legends to why it was called the Million Dollar highway, though nobody knows for sure. One was that it cost a million dollars a mile to build in the 1920s, another that its fill dirt contains a million dollars in gold ore.

1880s                                          (Source)

2000s                                                                          (My photo)

In addition to wagon roads, Mears built railroads and eventually owned four separate lines around the Silverton area.

Ute Pass is another road of historical importance in Colorado, lying west of Colorado Springs in central Colorado. It skirts the north side of Pikes Peak through the Fountain Creek canyon, climbing 3,000 feet to its summit in the settlement of Divide at 9,165 feet, and remains one of only a handful of access points into the Rocky Mountains along Colorado's Front Range.

Having its beginnings as a Native American trail used by the Ute Indians it became the most popular wagon route to the gold-fields by the 1860s. It was also one of the few roads in the mountains that wasn’t a toll road. But it was only a one lane trail and those coming by stagecoach or hauling goods by oxen and cart had to work out a plan so they wouldn't run into each other. It was also steep on the east side, with a 7% gradient. As you can see below, wooden railings were built to keep the animals from falling off the side!

Ute Pass Wagon Train. (Source).

Ute Pass 1890. (Source).

In 1872, to lessen the danger as more traffic headed to the mountains, a new route was built over Ute Pass using Fountain Creek as a guide. It would be widened several times before becoming US highway 24, one of the originals in this new nationwide system.

After the turn of the century, the state started rebuilding and organising roads in response to public pressure and the advent of the automobile, though improvements were scattered and mountain roads were the last to be touched. The city of Denver undertook an aggressive program of building mountain touring roads, including the highest road in the US up Mount Evans (which I hope to go up once the road is reopened after winter) in response to a toll road that was built to the summit of Pike’s Peak in 1917. Convict labour was used extensively to build roads in Colorado beginning in 1905 and the state led the country in its use until abolishing it in 1926.

RAILS:

Denver & Rio Grande Railway. Source

At the time of the Colorado gold explosion, railroads were being built everywhere in America from the east to the west coast. Competition was strong to build the first transcontinental railroad (TC) and while the Union Pacific got the rights, Denver and Colorado were left out of the plans with the line cutting north of the state through the gentler hills of Wyoming, avoiding the Rockies altogether. It was completed on May 10 1869.

Colorado Central narrow gauge train in Clear Creek Canyon
Source

Still, there were a number of Denver businessmen that competed with plans to build their own branch lines north to tie in with the TC line, for without such a vital life-line, the young city of Denver would quickly fall off the map. It didn't take long, and the Denver Pacific Railroad, backed by many prominent local investors, had linked Denver with the TC line at Cheyenne, WY in 1870. It had beaten the Colorado Central Railroad out of nearby Golden to be the first, and with the completion of the Kansas Pacific line to Denver (completed at Strasburg on the Colorado Eastern Plains), the Denver Pacific became integral to the first transcontinental rail link between the east and west coasts of America, and Denver’s future as the State’s Capital was sealed.

Railroad fever took off in Colorado after that, and companies began to spring up in abundance.

The set-back of the Colorado Central (CC)Railroad to build its line north to the TC didn't deter the company's ambitions. First it built a line to link up to Denver before building the first rail lines up to the valuable mining communities west of Golden: Black Hawk, Central City and Idaho Springs. With the help of engineeer Edward Berthoud, they founded a route through Clear Creek Canyon reaching about 50 miles from Denver at its farthest extent. It was short compared to other lines and traversed no spectacular mountain passes, yet it was the prototype for rail lines into Colorado's mountains and of tapping the wealth that lay within them. 

Union Station in Denver Circa 1880. Source

Early railroads all ran on standard gauge track, but Colorado's steep terrain required a narrower gauge railroad. Enter the single-gauge, narrower dimension railroad. The new Denver & Rio Grande Railroad (D&RG), founded by a former director of the Denver Pacific, was the first to introduce these into operation in Colorado which allowed its steam trains and their cars to better negotiate the narrow curving canyons and steep grades in these mountains. With this the D&RG succeeded in connecting central and southern Colorado's high altitude mining towns with Denver, and hence markets back east.

The D&RG was the epitome of mountain
railroading, with a motto of "Through
the Rockies, not around them" and
later "Main line through the Rockies".

At its height, around 1890, the D&RG (now D&RG Western) had the largest operating narrow gauge railroad network in North America and was operating the highest main-line rail line in the US, traversing the Continental Divide at 10,240 ft (3,120m) north of Leadville over Tennessee Pass.

Colorado Springs, Pueblo, Durango, Salida and Gunnison were all towns that began because of the line. Two of its major legacies are the Durango to Silverton line, which was blasted out of sheer cliffs above the Animas River, and the Royal Gorge route, which cut a line through the bottom of one of the deepest canyons in Colorado with the Arkansas River just a few feet from the tracks on one side, and 1,250 foot sheer granite canyon walls on the other. Needless to say, the scenery was spectacular.

One more line of note was the Colorado Midland Railroad, the first standard gauge railroad built over the Continental Divide, running from Colorado Springs to Leadville over Ute Pass, and through the divide to Glenwood Springs and Grand Junction. It was meant to be a serious competitor to the Rio Grande in conquering the Great Divide and constructing the first transcontinental standard gauge railroad through Colorado but due to several problems it only succeeded in becoming a close second and eventually failed.

The Colorado Midland, who's motto was "Throught the mountains, not around"
Source.

Most of Colorado's mountain railroads didn't have a hope to succeed, and the plethora of Colorado Front-Range railroads was as much a competition among cities as among train lines. Too many trains travelled to too many places with no chance of recovering their costs. In fact, as new "hot" mining camps replaced old, dead ones, tracks wandered around the mountains unfinished, searching for a destination. Inevitably, smaller lines fell off the radar or were bought out by the bigger companies after the silver crash and the depression. In fact, none of these Colorado rail companies exist today.

What became of these Railroads?

·       The CC, through a series of reorganizations and acquisitions, eventually became part of the Colorado and Southern (CS) Railway. Its historic mountain lines were dismantled by the mid 20th century but its connecting lines on the Colorado Eastern Plains survive as active lines of BNSF (Burlington Northern & Sante Fe) Railway, a major freight company (of which the CS Railway Company also ended up);

·       The D&RG railroad company is now defunct. Today, most former D&RG main lines are owned and operated by the Union Pacific Railroad;

·       By the 1880s, the Denver Pacific Railroad also merged with the Kansas Pacific and Union Pacific Railroads, with the resulting company retaining the Union Pacific name.

·       The Colorado Midland Railway ceased operations in 1918. Segments of the railroad were then sold to the Midland Terminal Railway; the rest of the line, mostly west of the Midland Terminal connection at Divide, was abandoned. The line was scrapped in the early 1920s.

·       The Union Pacific Railroad remains the largest rail network in the US.

Since the 1990s, 13 railroads, and many scenic historic byways, through some of the most dramatic and beautiful scenery in Colorado, have been revived throughout the Rockies to take modern day tourists on a ride back in time, and reviving some ghost towns in the process.



Above photos from The Colorado Directory

Welcome to the Wild West - Part#2: Before Colorado became Colorado

Colorado has a fascinating cultural heritage; a confluence of Native American, Spanish, French and ultimately US influence. The Native Americans inhabited the region for more than 13 millennia before the first Spanish explorers arrived. The Ancient Pueblo Peoples built settlements right into the rock of the valleys and mesas of the Colorado Plateau, the Ute Indians inhabited the mountain valleys of the Southern Rocky Mountains and the Western Rocky Mountains, and the Arapaho people and the Cheyenne people moved west to hunt across the High Plains.


Mesa Verde: ancient Pueblo settlement in southern Colorado
Picture: Wikipedia.org

[Insight Guides: Colorado]

"Spaniards and other strangers barged right in, reconfiguring the social landscape and rewriting a whole region's history."

As far as modern history goes, Colorado's is quite short. While the Spanish were the first foreigners to traverse the area, it was the French who first claimed the region east of the Rockies in 1682 as part of the Louisiana Territory. The Indians lived in relative harmony with the French who hunted and traded fur with the natives, but overall, their influence was minimal. Fearing a French advancement, the Spanish claimed the western portion of the region in 1706. They never established permanent settlements here but Spanish explorers broke a lot of ground and coined a number of place names, including that of "Colorado," which is a term to describe the red earth they beheld. They also introduced horses to buffalo hunters on the plains which revolutionised the enterprise.
 

Formal boundaries were never demarcated between the lands of French Louisiana and Spanish New Mexico since the areas only real inhabitants were "mountain men": the fur traders and trappers that roamed the countryside. Fur was big business at the time, and it was the trade which played a major role in opening up the American West.

Eventually, France sold their portion of the land to America in the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, yet eastern Colorado still remained a wilderness for the next few decades. Legends were made of the American traders and scouts such as Charles and William Bent, Kit Carson, Jim Baker and Jim Bridger who ventured into the still largely uncharted territory and inhospitable land, establishing trading posts and building friendly relations with the Indians.

Trading posts were established to exchange goods and gather supplies in central locations, as well as provide protection from Indian attacks. Many Colorado towns were created as a result of these trading posts. The first trading-post was established at the mouth of Clear Creek, a tributary of the South Platter River, near present day Denver in 1832, by Louis Vasquez, and named Fort Vasquez, after its proprietor, but never grew into much importance and was soon abandoned. The most famous is Bent's Fort built by the Bent brothers in south-east Colorado near present day La Junta and now a National Historic Site and Landmark.

America's western frontier grew by more than 500,000 square miles when the U.S. won the Mexican-American War in 1848 (Mexico having gained its independence from Spain in 1821). As the victor, the U.S. was ceded territory extending west from the Rio Grande River (which originates in southwest Colorado) to the Pacific Ocean. Americans were now free to settle the southern Rocky Mountain region and American explorers began surveying the area.   

The first American to formally explore the Colorado area was Lt. Zebulon M. Pike in 1806, who was commissioned to document the southern portion of the Louisiana Purchase and to find the headwaters of the Red River. With a party of 22 men he pushed into the mountains west of Pueblo and Colorado Springs and amongst other things discovered what would later be called Pikes Peak, although he did not manage to make the summit.  The next major expedition was by an Army force commanded by Major Stephen H. Long in 1820. His mission was to explore the southwest boundary of the territory and his report basically wrote off the plains as a "Great American Dessert" unfit for exploration. In 1853, Captain John W. Gunnison led an exploring party across southern and western Colorado territory searching for a railroad route westward through the Colorado Rockies before being slain in Utah in an Indian attack.

John Charles Fremont, an American military officer, explorer and politician played a major role in bringing the west to the nation's attention. His flamboyant personality and lively reports stimulated public interest in the American West but also managed to offend a few people. His reports countered a kind of badlands view of Colorado that had taken hold in the public imagination from the early explorers and the the stories of frontiersmen. It was also Fremont's memoirs that served to fix Kit Carson's place as an American Legend.

He's efforts in Colorado are largely forgotten as his two expeditions were never completed and considered failures. His fourth expedition, his first in Colorado, was to find a railroad route through the Rockies and demonstrate that a 38th parallel railroad would be practical year-round. However this expedition took a fearful toll in human life when he and his men became snowbound. His fifth and final expedition was also in Colorado and retraced some steps from Gunnison's expedition through the Gunnison River country and San Luis Valley. He travelled across Kansas, southern Colorado and Utah in search of another railroad route over the Central Rockies. The trip remained inconclusive when the group reached, and was saved by, a Mormon settlement in Utah. But his other accomplishments throughout the west, his lively egotistic nature and his drastic swings from poverty to wealth and back to poverty again make him one of the best known explorers of the 19th Century.

When the Fur Trade collapsed in the late 1830s, trading posts were generally abandoned while some became military forts along isolated frontier settlements and trading routes as relations with the native Indians were growing ever more hostile. It seemed that this land was about to fade into oblivion, and remain a wild wilderness only for the fearless. But some significant events were about to take place that would advance Colorado into the 38th State and accelerate its quick development.

Welcome to the Wild West - Pt #1: Move Over Cowboys

Colorado is much more than mountains and rugged land, which is all I knew it to be before I went there. But if I thought Vieques was the 'wild west' so to speak, I'm really in for it moving to Colorado! This is true Wild West territory; it was the last frontier for American exploration and settlement (of the contiguous states, that is). Wild animals with precious fur and mountains rich in minerals is why hardy men entered this unforbidding territoy to begin with, but I'm sure it is the beauty of the mountains and the serenity of this landscape that has kept people coming ever since.

"The Old West, often referred to as the Wild West, encompasses the period after the Civil War, the rest of the 1800's, and the early part of the 20th century. During this time, thousands of pioneers pushed their way westward in search of land, better lives, gold and silver, and sometimes, to escape the law. Geographically, the "Old West" applies to those states west of the Mississippi River." [1]

Colorado's history is a heady mix of mountain men, cowboys, Indians, gunslingers and miners, and despite the metropolitan 21st century cities of Denver and Colorado Springs, much of the state still retains a good deal of its old west charm. The buildings and abandoned mines and mills stand as mementos to this era and the vast railroad network that crisscrosses this land is a legacy of the hardships and progress these men (and women) made.

This is conveniently all coming alive for me in the new TV show here in the States on AMC (I think it's playing in Australia too but perhaps on cable) called Hell on Wheels. It centres on the settlement of a camp adjacent to the construction of the first transcontinental railroad in 1865 (specifically, the Union Pacific Railroad). It showcases the company men, surveyors, support workers, labourers, prostitutes, mercenaries and others who populate such settlements and the dramas that arise in a lawless, hostile society such as that. The tensions between the former black slaves and the white men, and also with local Indian population play a major role. From what I've been reading of Colorado's history, it's a great to be able to visualise and personalise the stories, even though this particular railroad never went through Colorado.

I've gotten to know a little about Colorado from the stories and people I've met who currently live here. It's a great outdoors state; much of the countryside remains undeveloped and as it was centuries ago. This breeds a conscious society. Many people go hiking, farmers are environmentally conscious and recycling has long been fashionable. A slogan I've seen about captures these ideals: "cows not condos." But this is all dubiously misleading. On the outset, one would think the state is predominantly liberal, and maybe it's turning that way with the newer generations and the new arrivals that flock here for this reason, but underneath, this place maintains its country roots. For one, hunting is a huge past-time.

But with the lawless days of the Wild West a fond memory, the state is emerging as an interesting mix of hash-cooking hippies and hard-core Republicans, and this clash of ideals is clearly evident in the current political climate of Coloradoans and its emergence as a swing state [2].

A Wide, Wild Landscape:

But let's start with Colorado's geography, because it does play a large role in defining the state and its people. Colorado is considered part of the Western United States and creates the division between east and west with the Continental Divide that runs north to south along the Rocky Mountains which stretch from Canada down to the state of New Mexico. It is the highest state in the US, with an average altitude of 6,800 ft. The State itself contains three distinct landscapes: The Great Plains, The Rocky Mountains, and The Colorado Plateau.

Colorado is best known for its Rocky Mountains but over one third of the state is very flat. East of the Rockies the High Plains (part of the Great Plains) unfold flush to Kansas and beyond. 

If you thought Australia was flat, well this is flat - pancake flat; and predominantly bare, as a result of the semi-arid climate. We drove through this countryside in 2008 towards Denver on Interstate 70, a very uninteresting drive; the only deviation in the monotonous scenery were the oil derricks scattered here and there and a wind farm, all the way across Kansas! But though it appears flat to the naked eye, the landscape rises subtly from approximately 3,500 feet at the eastern border of Colorado to 6,000 feet east of the Denver Basin.

Continuing west across the plains, the slopes of the Rocky Mountains rise magnificently behind Denver, the capital, as if from nowhere. Coming from Kansas you start to see them as little ridges on the horizon and slowly and surreally they form as you continue closer, and then suddenly there they are, in all their glory.

Driving across the High plains towards Denver, the Rockies beginning to rise in the distance

The Rocky Mountains of are a magnificent mountain range and the Colorado Rockies contain approximately 54 peaks14,000 feet (4,267 m) or higher in elevation above sea level (known as fourteeners). These are 'mountains' in the pure sense of the word; mountains that stay snow-covered all year round and who's peaks are bald and jagged like their namesake (tree-line stops at about 12,140 feet (3,700 m) in southern Colorado and about 10,500 feet (3,200 m) in the north). 

The Rockies form the backbone of the continent. Over 30 million years old, their peaks have been carved by glacial ice into "cirques", "hanging valleys" and knife-edged "arêtes." [Insight Guides: Colorado]



The Switzerland of America: Maroon Bells near Aspen. Source

The Canadian Rockies get all the attention in Australia, but although I haven't seen the Canadian Rockies, I can't imagine they are any better than what I have seen of the Colorado Rockies, especially since the 30 highest major summits of the range all lie within the state. However:

"The Canadian Rockies are more jagged than the American Rockies, because the Canadian Rockies have been very heavily glaciated, resulting in sharply pointed mountains separated by wide, U-shaped valleys gouged by glaciers, whereas the American Rockies are more rounded, with river-carved V-shaped valleys between them. The Canadian Rockies are cooler and wetter, giving them moister soil, bigger rivers, and more glaciers [and] the tree line is much lower in the Canadian Rockies than in the American Rockies." [4]

West of the Rocky Mountains is the Colorado Plateau which flows into Utah, New Mexico and Arizona. It is largely dessert with scattered forest characterised by valleys, deep canyons and mesas (this is where the Grand Canyon of Arizona, and the other wonderful formations in Utah, such as Bryce Canyon and Zion, are found). This north to south area west of the Rockies in Colorado is commonly known as the Western Slope. It is sparsely populated with only 2 major centres, Grand Junction and Durango, though there are many ski towns along this region, such as Telluride, Vail and Aspen. To the southeast of Grand Junction is the Grand Mesa, said to be the world's largest flat-topped mountain.