6

Straight West from Denver

Denver in the 1860s was still a dusty, bawling infant of a town. In 1858, reports of a few light pans of placer gold from nearby creeks had somehow mushroomed out of proportion. Wildly overstated and nowhere near Zebulon Pike’s grand peak, the find nonetheless encouraged tens of thousands to paint “Pikes Peak or Bust!” on their wagons and head west, hopeful of duplicating the success of the California Gold Rush a decade earlier. Disappointment and despair swept many back across the plains, but enough stayed along the foothills of the Rockies to stake out a future.

A group of Kansans laid out a town site where Cherry Creek empties into the South Platte River and named it after James W. Denver, the governor of Kansas Territory, in whose jurisdiction they were. In 1861 Kansas became a state, and its far-flung western county was split off as Colorado Territory—organized less on its own merits than to permit a clean western boundary to Kansas. Four years of civil war in the East, declining placer operations in the mountains to the west, and a disastrous flood took their toll, but Denver was still there to welcome the vanguard of the postwar rush. The town quickly figured in the plans of railroads with transcontinental goals.

Arriving in Denver in May 1862 as Colorado Territory’s second governor, John Evans wasted no time in promoting a railroad connection with the East. A medical doctor by training and a real estate investor in Chicago, Evans had helped to organize the Fort Wayne and Chicago Railroad in 1852. Then, as a member of Chicago’s city council, he’d been instrumental in getting its right-of-way into the city. It would not be the only time that Evans would mix politics and railroads.¹

Prospects for Colorado looked quite promising, the new governor told a large gathering from the balcony of his Denver hotel upon his arrival. This was because Congress was completing the Pacific Railroad Act of 1862, and it had not one but two railroads pointed toward them.

Noting that Kansas was subject to severe droughts and Nebraska occasionally beset by drowning rains, Evans claimed that the railroad bill safeguarded Colorado in either event because it provided two routes from the Missouri River—what would become the Union Pacific from Council Bluffs and the Kansas Pacific from Kansas City. “Whether famine reigns in Kansas, or drenching storms farther north, you will always have a source of supply,” Evans boasted.²

Indeed, the governor’s railroad enthusiasm knew no bounds. On one of his early trips from Denver, Evans inspected Berthoud Pass, a high passage in the Continental Divide, about 50 miles west of Denver. When a surveyor reported that a wagon road was feasible, but a railroad would require a 3.5-mile tunnel, Evans optimistically suggested that gold might be discovered during the tunnel’s construction.

A few months later, Evans was back in Chicago trying to convince the other 157 members of the unwieldy board charged with organizing the Union Pacific that the railroad should build through Colorado because of its mineral prospects. In return, he received only a gratuitous statement acknowledging that the development of settlements in all the western territories was a welcome impetus to the construction of the road.³

By the time Evans returned to Colorado in November 1862—this time he brought his family along as permanent residents—the growing territory was on a collision course with the Arapaho and Cheyenne tribes that roamed the eastern plains. Tensions culminated two years later when, without warning, army and militia units attacked a peaceful Cheyenne camp on Sand Creek, killing over 150, more than half of them women and children. The role that Governor Evans played personally in this atrocity would be long debated, and ensuing recriminations were enough to force him from office.

Despite this, Evans was only getting started with Colorado politics and its railroads. The ex-governor asked John Pierce, one of the assistants on the 1862 Berthoud Pass survey, to take a second look at the pass in the hope that a temporary track might be laid across its heights prior to the construction of a tunnel.

Sure, said Pierce, a temporary track could be run over the pass by a series of switchbacks “with no trouble,” but if Evans was determined to reach the Pacific through Colorado, there was an even better route. It would also require a tunnel under the Continental Divide, but it would be less than half the length of the Berthoud bore.

Pierce’s suggested alternative ran southwest up the South Platte River from Denver, crossed the wide basin of South Park, hopped across the upper Arkansas River, and burrowed under the divide at the headwaters of Chalk Creek. “The richness of the country and the abundance of fuel on the line through Colorado,” Pierce concluded, “… demand that these passes should at least be surveyed in a thorough manner.”

But the Union Pacific was not interested in either route—Berthoud Pass or Chalk Creek. In fact, the Union Pacific’s chief engineer, General Grenville Dodge, had little interest in traversing Colorado by any route. John C. Frémont’s wintry folly lost in the San Juans, John Gunnison’s grim assessment of the Black Canyon as a railroad route, and Dodge’s own personal experience in a November blizzard atop Boulder Pass (now called Rollins Pass) had convinced him to stay well clear of Colorado’s mountains. No doubt the Central Pacific’s challenges in the Sierra Nevada only added to his conviction.⁴

Try as he might, Evans couldn’t budge the Union Pacific crowd. Its main line would be built across Wyoming and only nick the corner of Colorado Territory at Julesburg. Denver despaired, but rallied to organize the Denver Pacific Railroad to build from Denver to the Union Pacific at Cheyenne. It might have been only a short line, but Denver was determined to have a railroad with transcontinental connections. With the Kansas Pacific still deep in Kansas, and the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe not yet out of Topeka, a connection with the Union Pacific was the logical and most promising choice.

John Evans joined the Denver Pacific’s board of directors, and four months later, in March 1868, he was elected its president. The first task of the president of any paper railroad was to raise funds for construction. Without a federal land grant or deep-pocketed investors, the most likely source was county bonds. Local voters were asked to approve a bond issue; the county willingly exchanged its bonds for unmarketable railroad stock because it wanted a railroad built; and then the railroad sold the county bonds—marketable securities instead of unmarketable stock—to finance its construction.

There was, of course, an inherent element of lobbying in this process. Sometimes it went far beyond mere arm-twisting. When a representative of the Kansas Pacific pointedly suggested that the advancing railroad would bypass Denver and head south unless surrounding Arapahoe County floated $2 million in bonds to support it, the locals responded with outrage at the apparent blackmail.

No doubt William Jackson Palmer would have finessed the proposal better, but at the time, he was completing his western survey and brashly telling the Big Four that the Kansas Pacific planned to build to San Francisco with or without them. Indeed, that southern bent by the Kansas Pacific may have been what Denver feared most. With the Union Pacific wedded to Wyoming, if the Kansas Pacific bypassed Denver to the south, instead of two transcontinental railroads—as Governor Evans had boasted back in 1862—Denver might end up with none.

Thanks in part to the indelicate demands of the Kansas Pacific, Arapahoe County turned to the Denver Pacific as its railroad savior and voted $500,000 in bonds for the construction between Denver and Cheyenne. But even these county bonds proved difficult to sell. Eastern capital markets were salivating over the U.S. government bonds from the Central Pacific and Union Pacific with their government-guaranteed interest, and there was no rush to buy Arapahoe County bonds no matter what the yield.⁵

Finally, Evans went hat in hand to Sidney Dillon and Thomas Durant, who along with brothers Oakes and Oliver Ames were the principal powers building the Union Pacific. When their negotiations were complete, the fledgling Denver Pacific agreed to grade the right-of-way, provide and lay the ties, and build the bridges. Dillon and Durant, through their Crédit Mobilier construction company, would supply and lay the rails and provide the rolling stock—this for a majority of Denver Pacific stock and the lease of the road to the Union Pacific. So much for local control, but Evans and the Denver Board of Trade deemed any railroad preferable to none.