Early city leaders engineered rail link to Cheyenne

By Guy Kelly

Talk about reports of a death being greatly exaggerated.

In the late 1860s, some important people thought Denver was history.

Indeed, Thomas Durant, vice president of the Union Pacific, pronounced Denver ``too dead to bury.''

The remark, however scornful, was hard to dispute.

After all, folks in Denver were dealing with the potentially crushing reality that the transcontinental rail line had bypassed their city.

``Any town of any consequence had its own railroad line,'' Charles Albi of the Colorado Railroad Museum in Golden said. ``Without it, a town never really prospered.''

More than prosperity might have been at stake in 1867.

A death knell seemed to have sounded for Denver when the Union Pacific decided to lay tracks across southern Wyoming rather than deal with Colorado's mountains.

The move essentially left Denver in the dust - and almost overnight turned Cheyenne into the city of the future.

``Denver is too near Cheyenne to ever amount to much,'' sneered the Cheyenne Daily Leader.

At that point, it was hard to argue Denver had a future.

But territorial Gov. John Evans, William Byers, founder of the Denver Rocky Mountain News, and other high-powered men of that era didn't see it that way, and they started working on the railroad.

To survive, they knew Denver - somehow, some way - had to build a rail link to the transcontinental line at Cheyenne.

Unless they could do so, Evans and others would have to pack their bags, leave town and rebuild their lives elsewhere.

Many businessmen did just that, moving to Cheyenne on the assumption it would be the region's dominant metropolis.

Denver's crisis brought together a group of men as diverse as any in the nation. While some were from the great cities in the East, educated at the best schools and already wealthy, many others had come from the hinterlands to seek their fortunes in a frontier town.

The coalition was held together by a budding sense of community and a desperate fear that if Denver didn't work out, neither would their lives.

More than a few said Colorado might just dry up and blow away.

``Colorado without railroads is comparatively worthless,'' Evans declared.

Folks in Denver, however, were already a fairly hardy bunch, having survived fire and flood.

In 1863, a massive blaze destroyed many of their homes. Just as they were getting back on their feet the next year, they were hit by a devastating flood.

Perhaps after the ravages of nature, the economics and politics of a transportation system didn't seem so daunting.

But Denver's boosters had barely begun talks of tying into the track that had become Cheyenne's lifeline when there was more bad news about railroads.

The Kansas Pacific was in deep financial trouble, and its plans of pushing its rail lines from western Kansas into Denver were on hold.

Company officials said they could finish the line only if Denver raised $2 million.

At the same time, a competing group in Golden was talking about building a tributary line to Cheyenne, which would make it the center of transportation in the Rocky Mountains.

That's when Denver's power elite embarked on one of the most frantic and furious merging of business and transportation interests in the state's history.

About 120 years later, a similar civic offensive would lead to the construction of Denver International Airport.

In just a few months in 1867 and 1868, Evans, Byers, David Moffat, who was to become a giant in the history of Colorado and railroads, lawyer Bela Hughes, Walter Cheesman and Luther Kountze of the Colorado National Bank formed the organizational structure that would become the Denver Pacific Railroad and Telegraph Co.

They were astute businessmen and persuasive speakers, and in a series of meetings, they set about alerting the citizenry that Denver's survival hinged on their support of the company.

The next few months were a whirlwind. Evans handled the economics and politics. Some of his colleagues lobbied the wealthy to invest in the new company, while others persuaded the less fortunate to give what they could, even if it was only a pledge to donate time working on the line.

Within a few days, they had sold $300,000 in stock. Then they hit the wall.

Evans was well-connected, but many of his richest friends didn't buy into the project. Congress didn't want to help, either, and the Union Pacific reneged on a promise to pay for part of the line's cost.

Just as things were looking their darkest and Denver seemed doomed, everything changed.

Evans persuaded Congress to give the Denver Pacific a 900,000-acre land grant on the condition that the company connect the Union Pacific and Kansas Pacific lines. The land allowed the Denver Pacific to obtain loans and raise money by selling land.

Then, Kansas Pacific came up with $6 million from German investors to stretch its line from Kansas to Denver.

On May 18, 1868, a crowd of 1,000 cheered as officials broke ground for the Cheyenne line in a ceremony near where the Denver Coliseum now stands.

The beginning of work mostly stemmed the momentum of the Golden group to build its line, and history shifted away from the town west of Denver.

Denver's first railway station was constructed between Wazee and Wynkoop streets, the foundation of lower downtown Denver.

The Cheyenne line took about two years to complete.

In June 1870, the efforts of Denver's powerful interests and ordinary people were rewarded when the first locomotive from Wyoming rolled into town.

Two months later, a train arrived from Kansas. But that trip didn't go down in history, and Strasburg didn't get the credit it deserves.

Many think the first transcontinental railroad came together at Promontory, Utah, in 1869. But travelers still had to cross the Missouri River on a boat to continue west on that track.

If you're talking about the first joining of tracks from sea to shining sea, it happened in Strasburg in August 1870.

The place was called Comanche Crossing in those days, but in 1875 it was changed to Strasburg in honor of John Strasburg, who worked for the Kansas Pacific Railway.

About three years after Denver had been pronounced dead, lifelines were heading into the city south from Cheyenne and west from Kansas.

Denver now had two major rail connections, ties to both coasts, the Great Lakes and the Mississippi and Missouri river basins.

Denver was on its way from being a crude, chaotic outpost into a major hub of commerce.

At the very least, it was certainly back from the dead.

June 8, 1999

Colorado Millennium 2000 is a yearlong project by the Denver Rocky Mountain News, NEWS4 and the Colorado Historical Society
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