THE debate over what came to be called the Sand Creek Massacre erupted into a national as well as a Colorado political issue—the beginning of widespread concern for the plight of Indians in the West. It drove Chivington into exile and brought the removal of John Evans from the governorship by President Andrew Johnson in August 1865. Chivington had strong support in the territory at first, but sentiment turned against him when Captain Silas S. Soule was murdered on Larimer Street shortly after testifying against him in a Denver inquiry.
Chivington’s boast that he had broken the will of the “savages” did not pan out. He merely increased the frustration of the two tribes and added to it the desire for revenge of all the Plains Indians from New Mexico to Canada. While the debate raged as to whether Black Kettle’s village was a hideout for criminals or a haven for innocent families under federal protection, the Cheyennes and Arapahoes began a campaign to drive the whites from their ancient hunting grounds. As a result, the fear of Plains Indians lasted more than two years—until veterans of the Civil War returned to their army posts and forced removal of the two tribes to reservations in Indian Territory by terms of the Medicine Lodge Creek Treaty of October 1867. Much of the Indian devastation occurred along the Platte River trail in the northeast corner of Colorado. The warriors had a special triumph in February 1865 when they destroyed the town of Julesburg. This infamous stopover on the stage road to Denver had been headquarters for a clutch of white bandits, led by Jules Beni, who often covered their crimes by posing as Plains Indians.
Many people blamed John Evans as much as Chivington for Sand Creek, which was unjust. The governor was overburdened with insoluble problems during that Civil War period when no help came to him from Washington. The criticism pained him deeply. But he would not be deterred from the ambitions that had brought him to the wilds, and he had the comfort of his wealth and an attractive wife Margaret sixteen years his junior. By Margaret he had two toddling sons and, by his late first wife, a daughter Josephine, who pleased him by marrying Sam Elbert. Sam had become the governor’s closest friend—a blood relative in effect. Until Josephine died of tuberculosis in 1868, Sam occupied a cottage in the Evans yard. Thereafter, he lived with the Evanses a good deal of the time.
Other events besides Sand Creek put Coloradans to marking time during the middle 1860s. Much had been expected of President Lincoln’s Homestead Act of 1862 for getting the public domain into private ownership. But farmers had to pay claim fees and have these “free” one-hundred-and-sixty-acre tracts surveyed before deeds could be issued to them. Many Colorado surveyors of the General Land Office were incompetent and corrupt. Speculators acquired more land than the Homestead Act allowed by hiring people to claim homesteads and then buying them out. The platting of townships was a very slow process. The surveys of only a few along the Front Range were completed in the 1860s, and most of these had to be corrected later because corners were often marked by ephemeral blazes on trees or movable stones or even magpie nests.
The first townships in the Denver area were marked in 1861, following the plan devised in 1784 by a Continental Congress committee under Thomas Jefferson. A township was, and is, six miles square, consisting of thirty-six sections of 640 acres each. The east-west dimension of a western township is called a range, indicating how far it is in six-mile segments from the “sixth principal meridian,” a longitudinal line just west of Abilene, Kansas. The Colorado township has a second number, a “tier,” revealing its distance north or south of the “base line”—which is the fortieth parallel where Baseline Road in Boulder is now. In 1861 Denver was (and still is) located in a township described as “range 68 west”—408 miles west of the sixth principal meridian in Kansas—and “tier three south”—or eighteen miles south of that base line which serves as a street in Boulder.
Because of the increasing difficulty of removing gold from its ore, dozens of the camps that had boomed in 1860 were almost ghost towns by 1865. Disappointed miners on Blue River and the Upper Arkansas and in South Park thought of returning to the comfort and dull security of their homes back East but found themselves held by the appeal of their giddy environment, the spaciousness, the violence and serenity of the climate, the brightness of stars, and the gorgeous sunups. The hangers-on believed that their luck would turn, maybe tomorrow. Horace Tabor was typical of this irrational optimism—a Vermonter in his mid-thirties who mortgaged his Kansas homestead in 1859 to climb the beanstalk of hope with his wife Augusta and small son Maxcy. The trio crossed the plains to Denver and moved on to Colorado City at Pikes Peak, to Oro City in California Gulch near the head of the Arkansas, and finally over that frightening Mosquito Pass (at 13,188 feet still the highest road in North America) to a camp tucked like a bird’s nest in a cleft under Mount Bross. Tabor christened the camp Buckskin Joe while serving as postmaster there before moving his family back to have another go at California Gulch.
Tabor was an engaging human being of average size and mind and looks, gregarious, outgoing, moderately hardworking, honest as the falling rain. He found time to play poker, to dabble in county politics, to organize volunteer fire departments. Augusta was thin and small, smelling of starch and Calvinism. Hers was not a loving nature. She lacked sex appeal, preferring balanced budgets to the techniques of romance. But she was incredibly industrious, capable, and loyal. Though Horace wasted money grubstaking any miner who came to his general store for a loan, Augusta kept the household better than out of debt. As the years of high-altitude striving and hardship passed, she realized that her overgenerous husband was not apt to strike it rich. She did not complain. She gave him all she had to give because she knew that he was a good man.
While Tabor waited for his bonanza in Oro City, John Evans toiled on in his admirable indoor way for his own advancement and that of his community. He founded Colorado Seminary of the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1864, but the financial stagnation forced it to close soon. (It would reopen in 1880 as the University of Denver.) He pushed hard for the admission of Colorado Territory to the Union, which would lead to fulfillment of that old yearning of his—a Senate seat. The effort embroiled him for years in a tangle of thrusts and counterthrusts by lobbyists in Washington and by partisans in Colorado. The statehood process required an enabling act by Congress and creation of a state constitution and the selection of a slate of state and congressional officers to be passed on by the Colorado electorate. In 1864 Congress granted Evans’s request for an enabling act, being eager for two new Republican senators to insure enough electoral votes for Lincoln’s re-election and to help push reconstruction legislation through the Senate. But Colorado’s voters turned down statehood, fearing taxes and military conscription.
A year later the same electorate barely approved statehood, helped, the Democrats said, by the fraudulent Republican votes of inebriated Ute Indians corralled in the saloons of Denver’s Blake Street. The slate of officers included Evans and Jerome B. Chaffee as U.S. senators. The nominee for governor was William Gilpin, who hoped to talk himself back into office while proving up a Spanish land grant in San Luis Valley. Jerome Chaffee was a smooth, tough, grizzly bear of a man who made people wince when he shook their hands. He had wrung a small fortune out of gold milling (crushing the gold ore with iron stamps and removing it from the crushed rock by amalgamation with mercury) in Gregory Gulch. Thereafter he rose rapidly to power in the Evans orbit as a founder of the First National Bank of Denver.
So the voters of the territory approved statehood—but Lincoln was in his grave by then. President Andrew Johnson, a Democrat, was threatened by impeachment, and he had no use for any more Republican senators to vote him out of office. Through Johnson’s opposition, Congress denied statehood to Colorado that year and again in 1866. Meanwhile, Evans and Chaffee considered themselves to be duly elected U.S. senators. They were addressed as such by friends, maintained quarters in Washington, wore somber black frockcoats, and appeared occasionally in the Senate chamber, where they were ignored by the regular members. The dogged Evans made one last statehood effort in 1868. He failed again—not through the skulduggery of Andrew Johnson but through the treachery of another influential Colorado Republican, Henry Moore Teller, a thirty-eight-year-old lawyer from Central City. Teller told Congress that Colorado was disqualified from statehood because it had less than half the 75,000 population that Evans and Chaffee claimed for it. Teller’s real objection to statehood—with Evans and Chaffee as U.S. senators—was something else. He wanted to be a senator himself.
Henry Teller was born of Dutch ancestry on a farm in western New York. He was quiet, studious, and reserved—a teetotaler whose high moral principles were written in his pale, austere face and shock of stiff brown hair rising from his high forehead. At the Republican convention of 1860 in Illinois he met Sam Elbert, who infected him with the Pikes Peak gold fever. He hurried to Central City and, having a gift of leadership, soon was in command of the Republicans of Gilpin County from Nevadaville down through Gregory Gulch to Black Hawk. As a lawyer he made money defending and contesting for his miners the singular Colorado law of apex, which ruled that if a gold-bearing vein surfaced on a man’s claim, he could follow that vein all the way to China even though it passed out of the bounds of his claim into other claims.
Young Teller had a patron named William Austin Hamilton Loveland, a storekeeper who had helped to found the town of Golden. Everything about Loveland was mysterious and romantic. He was alleged to have been born in Massachusetts in 1826, to have stormed Chapultepec with General Scott in the Mexican War, to have lost a fortune or two as a California Forty-Niner, to have had a role in William Walker’s seizure of Nicaragua in 1855 and in Cornelius Vanderbilt’s unsuccessful scheme to put a canal across the Nicaraguan isthmus. He was tall, narrow-hipped, broad-shouldered and with a striking profile. There was about him something that suggested the sweep and beauty of the pass above Georgetown that bears his name. That name would be applied also to a mountain, a park, a fire station, and a town which has made a business of postmarking cards on Valentine’s Day with its “Loveland” stamp.
Loveland’s Golden stood at the point where Clear Creek tumbled out of the mountains. Its citizens fought bitterly with those of Denver for supremacy. (Denver and Golden shared the status of territorial capital until 1867 when Denver became the permanent capital.) Loveland directed the strategies of the so-called “Golden crowd” and did what he could to prevent “the Denver crowd,” dominated by John Evans and Jerome Chaffee, from taking over the treasures of Gilpin County.
In 1861, Congress was planning a transcontinental railroad from Omaha to San Francisco, to be built by two companies, Union Pacific and Central Pacific. Loveland was among those who urged the building of the Union Pacific part of this line through the Colorado Rockies—the old Frémont-Gilpin idea. The promoters hired the famous scout Jim Bridger and a young Swiss engineer Edward Louis Berthoud to find a feasible crossing of the Continental Divide from headwaters of Clear Creek above Golden to Middle Park, leading to Salt Lake City and California. Bridger and Berthoud did find a crossing—at 11,316 feet above sea level—and Berthoud wrote lyrical stories on the beauty of this Berthoud Pass for The Rocky Mountain News. But the railroad engineers wanted easy grades, not stuff for poetry—not wildflowers, avalanches, alpine tarns, exotic fauna, and uplifting vistas. In 1866 U.P. officials announced that the Union Pacific-Central Pacific would run from Omaha through the prairie settlement of Cheyenne, one hundred miles north of Denver.
The decision only increased Loveland’s determination to put a railroad over Berthoud Pass. He acquired a territorial charter for what would be called the Colorado Central and Pacific Railroad, to run from the U.P. tracks at Cheyenne to Golden and then, by a mere spur, to Denver, signifying the demotion of that would-be metropolis to the status of a suburb of Golden. The main line would proceed west from Golden over Berthoud Pass, by tunnel if necessary.
While Loveland scrambled for funds to build the Colorado Central, Evans and Chaffee prepared to meet this challenge of “the Golden crowd.” They sent a twenty-five-year-old assistant cashier in Chaffee’s bank, David Moffat, to New York to inform financiers that whereas Loveland was operating on a shoestring, they had the money and the political influence to bring rails directly into Denver not only from Cheyenne but from Kansas City also. Kansas City was the start of a line being built westward by John Charles Frémont who, as head of the Kansas Pacific Railroad, was recovering from defeats as a presidential nominee and Civil War general.
With mining at a standstill, the mid-1860s were bad years to be promoting anything in Colorado Territory. No one dreamed that salvation was on the way, particularly since it involved William Gilpin, regarded generally as the region’s most harum-scarum character, even though Congress had finally redeemed some of his Civil War scrip. When in 1844 Gilpin had ridden Old Flash over Cochetopa Pass on his way back from Oregon, he had fallen in love with that million-acre San Luis Valley empire known as the Sangre de Cristo Grant lying between the Rio Grande and the crest of the Sangre de Cristos. Now, twenty years later, he bought the property from its owners, the heirs of the late Charles Beaubien, for $41,000 on easy terms. To make his payments, he planned to sell bits of it to those English and Dutch financiers who were becoming fond of speculation in Colorado lands and mines.
Gilpin believed that the grant was full of gold. In June of 1864 he hired an expert to evaluate its mineral wealth—a professor of chemistry at Brown University, Nathaniel P. Hill, who was in Colorado examining mines for a group of investors from his native New England. Hill, aged thirty-two, was far more than a chemistry teacher. His interests were global, his curiosity insatiable. He was an intellectual possessed of an excellent business sense and a passion for health nostrums—cayenne pepper to purify his drinking water, senna preserved in prunes to aid digestion, Perry Davis painkiller for headaches.
From the first, Professor Hill liked Gilpin and found him endlessly entertaining as they toured Gilpin County and then rode from Denver south over Sangre de Cristo Pass to San Luis Valley. However, Hill deplored the ex-governor’s “habit of living on whiskey in homeopathic doses.” In a letter to his wife, Alice, in Rhode Island, Hill described Gilpin’s beloved ponies Toby and Fanny:
. . . the ugliest, homeliest, and meanest little rats I ever saw. They are so little that you can lift them out of a mud hole with ease. They are so baulky that about once an hour they stop till they get ready to go. In addition to this virtue, they kick at every opportunity. But the Gov. thinks they are splendid. . . . Gov. G. knows almost everything, but he is the most impractical man I ever knew. When driving, he talks incessantly. Part of the time I think he is talking to me, part of the time to Toby and Fanny. The rest is soliloquy.1
The professor was not impressed by the mineral potential of Gilpin’s Sangre de Cristo Grant. But he saw a great future for Gilpin County if he could find a smelting process to reduce its difficult ores into concentrates of gold, silver, and copper. In 1865 he went to Central City again and made a side trip to Horace Tabor’s Buckskin Joe, to California Gulch and the Twin Lakes area of the Upper Arkansas. This time he loaded into wagons several tons of ore from Jerome Chaffee’s Bobtail Mine in Gregory Gulch and accompanied the load across the plains to the Missouri and on by steamer to New Orleans and to Swansea in South Wales, one of the world’s top smelting centers. The crossing must have been rough. Hill wrote to Alice, “I have taken such a dislike to the Atlantic (I don’t know that it hurts the ocean any) that if I get safely home I will remain on that side.”2
While the Bobtail ore was being tested in Swansea, Hill settled down at Morley’s Hotel in London and dined with men who were interested in Gilpin County mines—international bankers like J. S. Morgan (father of J. Pierpont Morgan) and George Peabody, and speculators like William Blackmore, whose brother Richard had just finished writing a novel that would become an English classic—Lorna Doone. Hill was a good tourist. He made the rounds of London’s historic places and rose one morning at dawn to watch the Oxford-Cambridge boat race on the Thames. The race had to be held so early because that was when the tide was right.
Hill did not neglect London’s seamy side, hiring as escorts two police detectives to be sure that he missed nothing. He wrote to Alice that with their help he examined
places where the well-dressed aristocratic thieves meet and also the places where only the lowest and most wretched vagabonds gather together to drink and gamble & revel. . . . We visited one place which they called a soup house, where it is said the meat used is principally horse and cat. Our evening labor closed by calls at some of the most noted dance houses, where you can see twenty or thirty objects having the form of women and as many drunken sailors illustrating the very lowest stages of degradation.
Perhaps to reassure Alice, Hill closed his London travelogue with:
Nobody’s morals were ever corrupted by going to such places. Good night, my precious wife. As I retire, thoughts of you and the children exclude all others.3
At Swansea early in April 1866, Hill received promising reports on the high gold content of the Bobtail ore and smaller Gilpin County specimens. The reporter Richard B. Pearce, a Cornish metallurgist in his thirtieth year, had built smelters on the Swansea pattern all over the world. He told Hill that such a process would work on the gold and silver ores of Colorado and that large profits could be made by shipping the concentrate—the matte—to Swansea to remove the precious metals. Pearce could not accept Hill’s invitation to come to Colorado just then, but he produced a crew of Cornish experts. The professor hired the crew to construct a plant on a piece of land in Black Hawk at the foot of Gregory Gulch, which he had acquired for his New England backers.
Hill’s Boston and Colorado smelter began treating ore in December 1867. The plant was a success almost from the start. An immediate effect was to stop the stampede of Denver businessmen north to the coming rail metropolis of Cheyenne—a stampede spurred by the arrival at Cheyenne in November of the first Union Pacific train from Omaha. By spring, investment capital in quantity was arriving in Denver and its satellite towns from the East and from Europe—Civil War profits that had been piling up for years. The gentle professor from Brown University took in stride the revival of mining that he had created, though it meant exchanging a peaceful life of lectures and correcting papers into that of a leading Colorado industrialist.
The Hill smelter did far more than stimulate the dormant gold production of Gilpin County and the infant silver industry around Georgetown. It set the stage for the spread of Colorado mining on a large scale three hundred miles southward along the Continental Divide through the San Juan Mountains to New Mexico. There was a by-product. The technique of hard-rock mining improved as hundreds of Cornishmen—whose forebears had followed the craft in the tin mines of England for generations—flocked to the Pikes Peak country at the urging of Richard Pearge, who would join them in Gilpin County soon. These “Cousin Jacks” with their picturesque dress and language and colorful singing and dancing brought a much-needed touch of gaiety to the drab mining camps.
The rejuvenation of Colorado mining in 1868 came at just the right time for railroad development—the first big technological step in reducing the vastness of the territory to a manageable dimension by reducing travel time and transport costs a thousand percent, lifting land values, removing what remained of the Indian menace. For two decades, politicians in Washington had been so preoccupied with trying to push rails from Omaha to San Francisco that they had tended to ignore the land between. Now Coloradans saw their chance to convince Congress that their region was too important to be bypassed.
The prospect inspired Loveland and Evans to intensify the rivalry between Golden and Denver. It was an uneven contest. Evans was known nationally because of his successful career in Illinois. Loveland was virtually unknown outside of Colorado. After two years of striving, he made no progress in pushing his Colorado Central north from Golden toward Cheyenne, though he did complete a twelve-mile spur to Denver in 1870.
Meanwhile Evans and the rest of “the Denver crowd” organized on paper the Denver Pacific Railroad, a hundred-mile line to connect Denver with the U.P. at Cheyenne. Evans’s plan was to have this vital link built with someone else’s capital, as he was averse to risking his own. He made progress when he put together in Washington a lobby of Methodists who induced Congress to give the Denver Pacific a generous grant of land. Then Evans contracted with the builders of the Union Pacific, Credit Mobilier, to lay Denver Pacific tracks south from Cheyenne in exchange for a controlling interest.
But the corrupt Credit Mobilier defaulted on its contract while the D.P. tracks were a long way from Denver. It was the kind of imbroglio that Evans loved to resolve, working long hours in his office half buried in legal briefs, contracts, and correspondence. During his talks with Credit Mobilier, he had kept in touch with directors of the Kansas Pacific Railroad, which had been wandering west for years from Kansas City without being able to decide whether to head for California by way of Raton Pass or to veer north to a junction with the U.P. in Nebraska. Early in 1869 at a railroad shantytown called Sheridan, near the Colorado border, construction of the Kansas Pacific was halted while the directors went in search of funds.
John Evans was impressed by the K.P. director who was in charge of construction. His name was General William Jackson Palmer, a small, tidy Philadelphian who had served with distinction as leader of the Fifteenth Pennsylvania Volunteer Cavalry through the Civil War. When Congress rescued the Kansas Pacific by increasing its land grant, the company instructed Palmer to build the railroad into Denver rather than to California or Nebraska. The assignment caused Evans to hire Palmer to finish building the Denver Pacific into Denver.
Palmer took on his double task in July 1869. He had some fifty miles of gap to close in the Denver Pacific and one hundred and seventy-five miles of Kansas Pacific to build across the Colorado plains. By putting every idle teamster and laborer in the territory to work, Palmer brought trains from Cheyenne into Denver on June 17, 1870. He shifted these men at once to building east from Denver toward the west-building Kansas Pacific crews. A race ensued, during which it became commonplace for the rival crews to lay a mile of track in a single hour. On August 15, the entire Denver population gathered at the depot of the two railroad terminals to cheer the arrival of the first passenger train from Kansas City. Several of the cars were crammed with prostitutes, gamblers, and saloon men, who had been keeping the construction men entertained in railhead tent towns through the years as the K.P. rails had inched toward the Rockies.
Some Colorado pioneers—John Evans and Jerome Chaffee, for example—remained Easterners in their outlook—cautious, down-to-earth, unresponsive to the charm of their environment. William Jackson Palmer was not like them in spite of his foxhunting dress and courtly Philadelphia manner. In 1867 the young general had made a four-thousand-mile horseback trip to Southern California and back past Pikes Peak, surveying for the Kansas Pacific. The trip had transformed him into as dedicated a mountaineer as Kit Carson and William Gilpin.
At the age of thirty-three, Palmer was a split personality. He had a poet’s idealism combined with a hard-as-nails gift for corporate management. His poet’s eye and his keen commercial sense made him see values in the grandeur of the high Rockies that few pioneers had perceived before him—the ingredients of a resort industry such as that which was emerging back East because of the affluence and leisure created by Civil War profits. Palmer believed that Colorado’s setting was at least as attractive as the country around Newport, Rhode Island, or Saratoga, New York, or the various springs of Virginia. He was aware also that Colorado Territory was becoming known as a health center with a climate where consumptives and asthmatics found cures, where people survived horrible accidents such as Pegleg Smith the trapper had survived in North Park in 1828 by sawing off his own leg after it was shattered by an Indian’s bullet.
Palmer’s resort dream was heightened by a romantic involvement. In the spring of 1869 he became engaged to a nineteen-year-old debutante from Flushing, Long Island, named Queen Mellen, a girl he had met on the New York–St. Louis train. Queen was not the outdoor type. She hoped secretly that her dynamic fiance would take a soft job as head of the Kansas Pacific office in New York so that she could begin a career as a patroness of the arts and a leader of Long Island society. But her husband-to-be had quite different ideas. When the directors of the Kansas Pacific turned down his recommendation that they build the road on over Raton Pass and on to California, he became a bitter critic of Eastern rail executives, whom he considered to be cynical, corrupt, and opposed to the public good. His distaste for a Long Island career was implied when he wrote to Queen: “I find myself doubting that a kind Providence ever intended man to dwell on the Atlantic slopes.”4
He wrote his beloved almost daily of the delights he had found at the foot of Pikes Peak, of the soda springs and the eerie beauty of the Garden of the Gods, of the tailor-made resort that he intended to build near it, of their wilderness home “where the Monument or Fountain comes leaping from the cavernous wall of the Rocky Mountains.” His letters contained paragraphs like these:
Could one live in constant view of these grand mountains without being elevated by them into a lofty plane of thought and purpose? And then our future home occurred to me, and I felt so happy that I would have such a wife who was broad enough, earnest enough, wise and good and pure enough to think that a wild home amidst such scenery was preferable to a brown stone palace in a fashionable city; to go out each evening on some neighboring hill and find each time a new vision of beauty and grandeur!5
In his missive of January 17, 1870, to Queen, he described the commercial part of his plans:
I had a dream last evening while sitting in the gloaming at the car window. I mean a wide-awake dream. Shall I tell it to you? I thought how fine it would be to have a little railroad a few hundred miles in length, all under one’s own control with one’s friends, to have no jealousies and contests and differing policies. . . . In this ideal railroad all my friends should be interested. . . . I would have every one of these, as well as every other employee on the Road, no matter how low his rank, interested in the stock and profits so that each and all should feel as if it were their own business. . . . Then I would have a nice house-car made, just convenient for you and me, with perhaps a telegraph operator and secretary, to travel up and down when business demanded. . . .6
Palmer began building his “little railroad” south from Denver on July 28, 1871, some months after marrying Queen. His conception was totally Western. Other railroad men of the period thought only of money to be made by transcontinental east-west traffic. Palmer’s scheme was to connect the Colorado Rockies with lands to the south—to exploit the ancient Spanish trade routes between the South Platte and the Mexican border. He called his line the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad, projected from Denver to Pueblo, up the Arkansas beyond the Royal Gorge, over Poncha Pass to San Luis Valley and the Rio Grande, and down that stream to El Paso, Texas. Spur tracks from every Colorado mining district would descend the mountain streams to join the main line.
Half of Palmer’s financial supporters were Philadelphians who had served under him through the Civil War. Others were Englishmen with interests in Gilpin’s Sangre de Cristo Grant and in the adjacent Maxwell Grant, which had been owned until 1870 by Lucien Maxwell. These Englishmen believed that Palmer’s road would increase the value of their lands by passing near them. The tracks of the D. and R.G. arrived at Palmer’s three-month-old dream town under Pikes Peak in October 1871. In another year trains were running to Pueblo to start the transformation of that sleepy adobe town of seven hundred people into the industrial metropolis of southern Colorado. The general had named his resort Colorado Springs even though it had no springs, because that was the fashionable thing to do. Many of its early residents were English, sent by investors in London to keep an eye on Palmer’s projects, which was why the place acquired the nickname “Little London.”
As an experiment in public transportation, the Denver and Rio Grande was a striking example of how the territory challenged its people to be innovative. Its gauge was narrow—rails three feet apart instead of the usual four-foot-eight-inch standard gauge. Its tiny locomotives and gold-painted cars were so light that a strong wind could blow them off the track. But lightness permitted grades as steep as six percent compared to the three percent maximum of standard-gauge lines. Curves could be so sharp that a locomotive could pass its own caboose—a feat that made for cheaper construction as the rails wound around narrow gulches.
Though the panic of 1873 stopped Palmer from getting his little trains along to Texas, he would push them into the most rugged parts of the Colorado Rockies at higher altitudes than rails had ever been pushed before, including crossing the Sangre de Cristos at La Veta Pass (9,383 feet above sea level) and the Continental Divide at Marshall Pass (10,846 feet). Their comic huffing and puffing had a great deal to do with the growth of the territory and the founding of towns, leading to statehood and a five-fold increase in Colorado’s population and wealth.
1. Nathaniel P. Hill, Hill to his wife, 23 June 1864. The Colorado Magazine 33:251–252 (October 1956).
2. Hill, to his wife, 16 March 1866. The Colorado Magazine 13:167 (September 1936).
3. Hill, to his wife, 30 March 1866. The Colorado Magazine 34:195 (July 1957).
4. John S. Fisher, A Builder of the West (Caldwell, Idaho: The Caxton Printers, 1939), p. 150.
5. Fisher, Builder of the West, p. 178.
6. Fisher, Builder of the West, p. 177.