They had started west from Las Animas in late summer 1875, led by teams of “tie men” who ascended the Arkansas River into the Rockies to harvest timber for wooden crossties, which were floated downriver and stockpiled along the surveyed route.
Behind them came the crews under the supervision of A.A. Robinson, chief engineer for the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway, the “fillers” who leveled the ground and put the ties in place, and finally the “iron men” who offloaded and installed as many as 10 trailing carloads of rails and spikes per day.
After a relatively slow start, by January 1876 the A.T. & S.F.’s gang of roughly 120 workers was laying an average of 5 miles of track per week en route to their destination: Pueblo, the Colorado Territory’s second city, where residents were beside themselves with anticipation as they awaited their first direct railroad connection to the east.
Pueblo had twice been bitterly disappointed by the Kansas Pacific Railway – first by the company’s decision in 1869 to build toward Denver rather than Southern Colorado, and again when it reneged on an 1872 promise to complete a southern branch to Pueblo, stopping in Las Animas instead.
The rival A.T. & S.F.’s move into the Arkansas River Valley represented salvation. When tracklayers reached city limits in late February, the Pueblo Chieftain overflowed with “exceeding gladness” at “this much desired consummation.” Puebloans could soon depart on an eastbound train in the morning and arrive in Kansas City by the following afternoon.
“The suspense in which our citizens have lived for several years past, occasioned by doubts as to the future prospects of our city, is at length at an end,” the Chieftain wrote. “Our great through line to the states is finished, and the commercial superiority and importance of Pueblo as a great railroad center are assured.”
When 30 people arrived on the first passenger train at 10:15 p.m. on Leap Day, Feb. 29, 1876, the platform was still under construction. Some railroad workers remained at work on the new train depot, while others were discharged. One, within hours of collecting his pay, was reported by the Chieftain to have been “picked up on the street, helplessly drunk and not a cent of money in his possession,” and another was “shot through the thigh” after a fight outside the city’s dance hall a few nights later.
Soon every hotel in the city was full – even before the arrival of the hundreds of “excursionists” from Kansas, including A.T. & S.F. officials, politicians and journalists, due in town for a grand celebration of the railroad’s completion March 7. Pueblo Mayor James Rice issued a proclamation encouraging a “suspension of business” on that day, since “our citizens one and all are going to be called upon to assist in entertaining our guests and visitors.”
“Let those who have feather beds, horse blankets, rugs, buffalo robes, Ulster overcoats, bunks and shakedowns, prepare to shed them now,” wrote the Chieftain, “for the brave men and fair women of Kansas … are coming down upon us six hundred strong.”
The passengers the A.T. & S.F. trains would bring to town, however, mattered less to Pueblo than the wealth of commercial opportunities the new road would open up. The economic fortunes of Southern Colorado, where residents had long felt neglected by the territorial government in Denver, had already been revived somewhat by the San Juan mining boom, and now many of its residents believed it was “probable to infer that Pueblo will soon become a rival of Denver.”
The new route’s most immediate effect was to end the monopoly that the Denver & Rio Grande Railway had enjoyed in Southern Colorado since it had built south from Denver four years earlier. The arrival of the Rio Grande, founded by the colorful Civil War hero William Jackson Palmer, had been celebrated in Pueblo in 1872, but its citizens had since come to resent the “narrow gauge” road – so named for the shorter 3-foot distance between its rails – almost as much as the Kansas Pacific.
In part, that was because of Palmer’s decision to incorporate a rival town, South Pueblo, on the southern banks of the Arkansas River – repeating a scheme he’d first tried 40 miles to the north, where the Palmer-founded Colorado Springs had already outgrown the old Colorado City and would eventually annex it. The Chieftain aired other long-held complaints in a March 1 editorial expressing hope that the Rio Grande would soon be “abolishing some of the most odious features of the monopoly it has hitherto exercised to the detriment of Pueblo and the surrounding country.”
“The business men of Pueblo for the first time in the history of this city feel in a measure independent. They feel and know that they have a broad gauge competing line direct to the principal markets of the east,” the paper wrote. “They will be very apt to bestow the bulk of their patronage elsewhere, unless the narrow gauge corporation make some very sensible concessions and reductions.”
For days, the paper’s columns were filled with news items and advertisements detailing the instant impact the new railroad and its lower rates were having on Pueblo’s economy.
“Wilson Bros. & Shepard commenced receiving today, per the A.T. & S.F. railroad, their mammoth stock of goods from the east,” reported the Chieftain.
“Owing to the arrival of the broad gauge we can now afford to come down with our prices,” said William Hyde and Charles Kretschmer, blacksmiths and wainwrights at the corner of 3rdand Main streets.
“Everything that is good in the grocery line, is arriving daily over the broad gauge road, and sold low at Sayles and Miller’s,” read another advertisement.
The meeting of the A.T. & S.F. and the Rio Grande in Pueblo in the centennial year would have far-reaching consequences for Colorado and the nation. The rivalry between the two corporations as they raced to build toward Mexico and the Pacific Ocean – featuring dramatic battles over routes through Raton Pass and the Royal Gorge – became what author John Sedgwick calls “the railroad war that made the West.”
Pueblo’s location at the junction of the two roads made it an important industrial hub for decades to come, supplying coal and steel to railroads all over the country. At its peak, the A.T. & S.F. would rank as by far the largest U.S. railroad company by track mileage – and when it reached the temperate valleys of Southern California in 1887, it helped quadruple the population of the region’s main city in just a few short years, making an overnight metropolis of the formerly remote backwater known as Los Angeles.
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