Part 3

After the turntable was abandoned a train leaving Red Mountain headed into Corkscrew Gulch, backed down to Joker Tunnel, headed into Corkscrew again and finally backed to Red Mountain. Or the operation was reversed by backing out of Red Mountain to begin with. As trains will not back through much snow downhill and practically none uphill this railroad got into trouble in the winter no matter how it started out or what it did.

Mears was employed by the D. & R. G. to reconstruct the railroad in the Animas canyon after the disastrous flood of October 5, 1911. He used S. Ry., S. G. & N. and S. N. engines and crews to work from the north end. Trains went to Joker Tunnel to pick up rails that had been brought that far by freight teams from Ouray. Silverton ran out of coal, and some that had already been hauled to the Treasury Tunnel at Red Mountain was brought back to town. In about 60 days the line was open and the first two freight cars to arrive in Silverton were one of caskets and one of beer.

Many derailments and minor accidents occurred but in its 39 years of operation only one fatality. In 1902 or ’03 an engine ran off a short rail at Sheridan Junction causing it to overturn. The engineer, Bally Thompson, was caught and crushed under the boiler. The whole top of his head and jaw were torn off and his skin was cooked like that of a roasted turkey.

The year ending June 30, 1911 showed a cash balance of $9 while the year ending December 31, 1917 turned up with a deficit of $25,241. Regular operation ceased in 1921 and abandonment proceedings were held in the early fall of 1922. All rolling stock, including Engines 100 and 101 (1) were turned over to the S. N.

Below is the last station list ever published:

.00 Silverton 9,300 5.30 Burro Bridge 10,236 7.23 Chattanooga 10,400 10.64 Summit 11,235 11.97 Red Mountain 11,025 12.66 Vanderbilt 12.85 Yankee Girl 13.26 Robinson 13.46 Guston 13.93 Paymaster Coal Track 14.38 Corkscrew Gulch 14.81 Paymaster Ore Track 15.03 Silver Belle 16.06 Joker

As the track was not immediately removed an occasional train was run to Red Mountain or even to the mines beyond. With the salvaging of the rails in 1926 the Silverton Railroad made its last run.

The original Red Mountain Town was on the east side of the small hill called the Knob. The place began declining about 1907 and the time came when it was deserted and all structures were in a state of near or complete collapse. The Idarado, the old Treasury Tunnel, to the north side of the Knob, with all its prosperous looking mine and mill buildings and its nice dwellings, most of which were moved there from Eureka, now constitutes the town of Red Mountain. _This_ Tunnel is a World War II development and is famous because it bores through the mountain to the mines on the Telluride side.

The new highway has almost obliterated the old railroad grade. It may be seen crawling along on the sidehill up to Burro Bridge, and again at Chattanooga Loop and overhead as it climbs to the summit. It also may be seen curving around the Knob to old Red Mountain town, crawling along the mountain to Corkscrew Gulch and dropping down to Joker Tunnel. Then all traces of it are gone except some old grade at Albany. First a road, then a railroad and again a road!

SILVERTON, GLADSTONE & NORTHERLY

The Gold King Mining Company, under President W. Z. Kinney, promoted a railroad for the purpose of hauling concentrates from mills along Cement Creek to the smelters at Silverton. According to the Manual the railroad was chartered April 6, 1899 and completed in July. James Dyson located the route and the Rocky Mountain Construction Co., incorporated in Maine, constructed the 7.5 miles of line and the one-half mile of sidings from Silverton to Gladstone. Forty-five-pound rail was used. Track left the main line of the D. & R. G. at the north end of Silverton and there a roundhouse was built. San Juan County records show that the property was conveyed from the construction company to the railroad company July 21, 1899. Two figures, $247,838 and $252,979, have been given as the cost of the job. The difference may have covered equipment.

The S. G. & N. bought Engine 32 from the Rio Grande Southern through the D. & R. G. purchasing agent, C. M. Hobbs, for $3252. Mr. Hobbs instructed Mr. Lee, general superintendent of the R. G. S., to letter it properly, deliver it to W. Z. Kinney at Silverton on August 1, 1899 and collect the money. Two very nice made-to-order coaches, that had seats for passengers in one end and baggage compartments in the other, were obtained. Two trains ran daily consisting, generally, of an engine, two loads and a passenger coach. The first year of operation showed a surplus of $35,366.21.

The company, evidently, did not have enough power and in October 1900 it was asking the R. G. S. for another locomotive like the one it already had, but none was available. Meanwhile, a company in Palestine, Texas had bought R. C. S. 33 (exactly like 32) but on finding it unsatisfactory, had shipped it back. The R. G. S. placed it in the Burnham Shops at Denver where, in 1902, it underwent extensive repairs. Then it was sold to the S. G. & N.

The two locomotives mentioned above were sisters to the Silverton Railroad’s No. 101 (1), formerly R. G. S. 34. All three were of the same make and the same class and had the same owners at the same time and in the same order—the D. & R. G., the R. G. W. and the R. G. S. All of these engines ended up with the S. N. (So did S. R. No. 100.) All had five owners. The 33 had six owners if one would count the company in Texas but, as far as is known, no money changed hands.

A new locomotive, No. 34, a Baldwin of the 100 class, was purchased in 1904. The Manual of 1905 lists three engines, two coaches, and twenty freight cars; the one of 1909 says two locomotives, two coaches, ten box cars and twenty-one gondolas. Engine 32 was the one out of service at this time. Eventually its boiler went to a sawmill at Cascade. No. 33 lasted a few years longer.

Except for Mr. Kinney of Silverton, the board of ten directors elected in 1904 were all from Maine, Massachusetts or New Brunswick and the trustee under the mortgage was the Newtonville Trust Co. of Newtonville, Mass. In 1905 the funded debt was $100,000 and the outstanding stock, $121,000. In the year ending June 30, 1909, the railroad had carried 16,667 tons of freight and 3,916 passengers.

It was not uncommon for service to be discontinued for short or long periods in any winter on account of snow blockades but the suspension in the fall of 1911 was due to the extensive washouts on the D. & R. G. in the Animas Canon. S. G. & N. men and equipment were sent to assist in the reconstruction.

Excursions were often run to Gladstone for picnics or to gather columbines either to send out of town for some special doings or for any kind of local celebration.

According to the Official Guides of 1913, 1914 and 1915 mixed trains ran thrice weekly—Monday, Wednesday and Friday. In 1913 trains left Silverton at 1:00 P.M. and arrived at Gladstone at 1:45 P.M.; left Gladstone at 2:15 P.M. and arrived at Silverton at 3:00 P.M. This was a considerable decline from the original two trains per day.

About the first of January 1910, Mears, Slattery and Pitcher leased the Gold King mine. On January 15 of the same year the Silverton Northern Railroad leased the S. G. & N. and five years later, on June 10, 1915, bought it at auction. San Juan County records show that the deed was made July 23. Mears then owned all three railroads. Only one S. G. & N. engine, the 34, was in service. The partners gave up the lease on the mine in 1917 and Mears, then 77 years old, left for California, never to return.

Mrs. Percy Airy has a little story to tell of this period. In 1911 her husband was working at the Gold King mill at Gladstone and they were living in a little cabin with almost no furniture and conveniences. One morning while she was washing, Percy came rushing in, saying he was bringing his uncle Jack Slattery, Otto Mears, James Pitcher and Louis Quarnstrom in for dinner. Flustered and dismayed were no words for it! At such a camp no fresh stuff was available but she managed a dinner of ham, scalloped potatoes, a canned vegetable, biscuits with butter and jam, fresh canned mountain raspberries, cake and coffee. She had only two stool chairs and one of them was occupied by the washtub which Mears urged her not to move. She put one man on the other stool chair, two on the bed and two in rockers. Being very young, only nineteen, she was so embarrassed she wouldn’t sit down at the table. Everybody praised her dinner and she felt better. When Mears left he presented her with a very rich piece of gold ore, about the size of a large orange, and told here if she’d always keep that she’d never be poor. Later she engaged a jeweler to make a watch charm from it for her husband. A small cracked charm and two small pieces of ore were all that was returned to her. The fellow claimed he had had to break the big chunk all to pieces to get the charm and had thrown the scraps away. Of course every small grain of that ore was valuable.

Business kept dwindling until only an occasional train was run. The following table indicates that the track was still lying in 1923.

SILVERTON, GLADSTONE & NORTHERLY Official Roster 1923

0 Silverton 9,300 3.2 Yukon Mills 5.0 Porcupine Gulch 7.0 Fishers Mill 7.5 Gladstone 10,600

No exact date can be found for the tearing up of the rails but it probably was in 1926, the same year the S. R. was dismantled. All equipment went to the S. N. as it already belonged to it anyway.

The government, during our war with Japan, established military posts in Alaska. The railroad up there, the White Pass and Yukon, needed more locomotives and in 1942 it purchased all that were left on the S.N.—the 3, 4 and 34. (The S. N. had ceased operation three years previously.) The 34, as should be remembered, had belonged to the S. G. & N. When the Alaskan railroad received the 34 it numbered it “24”. After Diesel power was obtained there the 24 (nee 34), then about forty years old, was retired to the boneyard.

One of the original S. G. & N. coaches was bought from the S. N., moved to Durango and set up on Main Avenue as the “Pioneer Diner”. Later, after changes and additions, it became the “Chief Diner”. It is still operating and may be seen in Durango.

SILVERTON NORTHERN

Mears hoped to run a railroad from Silverton to Mineral Point and possibly on to Lake City, following practically the same route as the wagon road he had built twelve years previously. C. W. Gibbs, chief engineer, made surveys from Silverton to Eureka in both 1889 and ’90 but nothing was immediately attempted, probably because of all effort and money going toward the construction of the Rio Grande Southern. However, two miles from Silverton to Waldheim were built in 1893 as an extension of the Silverton Railroad.

According to San Juan County records the Silverton Northern was incorporated on September 20, 1895. Fred Walsen was the president, Otto Mears the vice-president and Alex Anderson the secretary-treasurer.

Construction began at the North Star bridge, the end of the first piece of railroad, in late April of 1896 and the 6½ miles were completed to Eureka in late June. The transfer of the property from the construction company to the railroad company was made on July 1st. Silverton Northern books gave the cost of construction as $272,400. Meanwhile the first two miles had been transferred from the Silverton Railroad to the Silverton Northern. A big celebration took place at Eureka on the completion of the line and Mrs. Edward G. Stoiber drove the golden spike. A picture is extant which shows the crowd there.

S. R. Engine 101 was transferred to the S. N. but henceforth was to go by the number of 1. Of course, the company could borrow a locomotive or other equipment from the S. R. or the D. & R. G. as needed.

Ever since the panic of 1893 with its demonetization of silver, mining in the San Juan had been seriously crippled but, since the Sunnyside mine near Eureka and the Silver Lake mine near Waldheim produced good values in gold, the S. N. could make a profit.

Mining men, Mears among them, had great hopes that mining would revive as of old if William Jennings Bryan could be elected as president. Bryan, it should be remembered, was running in 1896 on a platform of silver coinage at 16 to 1 with gold. When he was defeated Mears lost hope for any improvement in mining and moved to the East where he took up several projects. One was the building of the Chesapeake Beach railroad from Washington to the beach. Another was the promotion of the Mack Truck Co. with himself as the first president. He, at that early date, saw the possibilities of automobile transportation.

Though Mears stayed in the east until 1907 he exercised a strong supervision over his San Juan railroads and made a number of trips back to the country to oversee them.

In 1901 the company owned one locomotive, one passenger coach, ten box cars and one service car. For the year ending June 30, 1901 it had operated 3376 miles of mixed and 1310 miles of passenger service. In 1902 it paid a dividend of 10%.

The Gold Prince mine, four miles up the Animas River canon from Eureka, was then flourishing so Mears decided to build a railroad to the place. He hired Thomas Wigglesworth as surveyor and constructor. Construction from Silverton to Eureka had been easy—no hard grading and only two small bridges—but from Eureka to Animas Forks, the little town near the Gold Prince, it was to be very difficult—up a rough canon and over 7% to 7½% grade, the very maximum for a steam railroad.

Mr. Vest Day gives an account of its building:

“Mr. Thomas Wigglesworth, for whom I had worked several times before, hired me to get stuff together and go up to Animas Forks to establish a camp. Late in May of 1904 I loaded on the train at Durango about a carload of surveyor’s equipment and camp supplies, among which was a 350-lb. cook stove, all to be taken by rail to Eureka. There the two Peck brothers packed it on burros and, since the snow was deep and soft, they often had to spread gunny sacks out for the burros to step on, especially for the one with the stove, to keep them from sinking in too deeply. Everything arrived at Animas Forks in good order.

“The snow was six feet deep around the cabins we were to occupy so I had to shovel paths and dig down to get the doors open. Then I had to gather wood out of the tree tops but had the stove up and a good supper ready when Mr. Wigglesworth arrived with three other young fellows.

“We first did some preliminary surveying, running a line from Animas Forks to the divide in case Mr. Mears should decide on a railroad to Lake City. The snow was so deep we could not drive the stakes so we cut turning points in the hard crust with a hatchet.

“Then we started to work in the canon which was a hard problem and had labored a month trying to get a line up the east side when Mr. Wigglesworth remarked to Mr. Mears that he’d like to build the railroad on the other side where the road was. Mears told him to go ahead and take it as it was his road anyway. Even though we used the road grade, still a lot of work had to be done and R. T. F. Simpson, who was to run the commissary, brought with him from New Mexico, 100 Navajo Indians to do the rough labor. About 25 whites were employed but they acted as powder men, clerks or other such things. We were all finished in the fall.

“While we were there Mr. Wigglesworth procured for Roy Goodman and me a railroad bicycle that Mears had had made for Mrs. Stoiber. She was not at that time using it. This contraption had a framework to which was fastened four light-weight flanged wheels with rubber on them, that ran on the track. Above was a platform on which were two stationary bicycles side by side. The riders treadled the bicycles and the two chains that pulled the two rear wheels and were connected with two small wheels on the axle of the car, drove the car, so it ran nicely on the track. We had a grand time going back and forth to Silverton on it.”

Marion A. Speer, a lad from Texas, went to work in the spring of 1904 as a nipper on the railroad which was building from Eureka to Animas Forks. His job was to carry heavy tools such as drills and picks from the blacksmith shop to the drilling and blasting crews, and the dull ones back. The work was very hard but he had to have the money if he expected to go to the Colorado School of Mines, which was his intention. One day Wigglesworth, his boss, came to him and told him he’d have to let him go as the work was too heavy for him. Marion, then, proceeded to “bawl his eyes out”. When Wigglesworth found out the reason he not only took him back but hired a Mexican boy to help him.

The construction outfit used Engine 3 which was brand new that year, was very powerful and a beauty and was called “Gold Prince” after the mine at Animas Forks. That piece of railroad was completed in the fall except for sidings which were laid the next year.

Young Speer worked at the Silver Lake mill for several summers and often got to ride in Engine 100; he also went to Gladstone in the 34 and was on the S. N. coach, the Animas Forks, when it turned over the first time. The track still lay to Albany in 1907 for a train took a bunch of picnickers, of which he was one, down that way and let them off.

The railroad workers, among whom was Speer, ate at the Silver Wing (Condit) boarding house, and they were lolling around outside one evening in June of 1904 when a terrific explosion took place at the Toltec blacksmith shop, directly across the river, about 200 feet away. Debris of all descriptions peppered the boarding house.

The Silverton _Standard_ reported the event thus:

_An Awful Explosion_—“Three men, Percy Kemper, Edward Crane and L. W. Lofgren, were killed last Sunday night about ten o’clock by a powder explosion at the Toltec Tunnel of the Sioux Mining Company, located above Eureka near the mouth of Picayune Gulch.

“Kemper and Crane were literally blown to pieces, parts of their bodies being found in different places, 300 and 400 yards from the scene of the explosion. The blacksmith shop was, of course, demolished. When the sound of the explosion brought others to the scene, Lofgren was still alive, but he died on the way to Silverton. The remains of the other two unfortunate men were brought to this city Monday afternoon.

“Lofgren, it seems, had been working behind a metal mine car which absorbed much of the force of the explosion. This accounts for the fact that Lofgren was not killed outright.

“At the coroner’s inquest held Monday a verdict was returned that the three men came to their deaths by and through carelessness in heating powder.

“The largely attended triple funeral was held Wednesday afternoon under the auspices of the Miner’s Union of which all three of the deceased were members in good standing, the local Odd Fellows, however, turning out in honor of their deceased brother, Lofgren. Reverend Shindler preached the funeral sermon.”

Vest Day reports that his survey crew helped pick up the pieces of the bodies the next morning and put them into nail kegs.

Mr. Meyer, the locomotive engineer on the construction crew, claimed the Indians would stop work on almost any pretext but especially to chase ground hogs. Mears decided to put a stop to such foolishness and hired 25 white kids and supplied them with rifles to kill the animals. It didn’t help much because when they were out of the way the Indians could find plenty of other excuses to dawdle.

Mr. Arthur Ridgway stated that when he came to the S. N. in October of 1904 work was still going on under the supervision of Marshall B. Smith, Mears’s son-in-law, with Navajo labor. Operation of the line began the next Spring after the snow went off.

In 1905 Mr. Ridgway surveyed and built a branch from Howardsville up Cunningham Gulch to the Green Mountain and Old Hundred mines, which added 1.3 miles of railroad to the system. The S. N. must have been in financial straits at this time for Mears had to raise money in New York to pay interest on the bonds.

This railroad went north from Silverton as did the other two. The termini of the S. R. and S. N. were not much more than six air miles apart with the S. G. & N. in between. Animas Forks is at the foot of Mineral Point. One may ride out on the top of Mineral Point, as this writer has done and see the waters divide, the Uncompahgre going to the north and the Animas to the south. Mears never got the courage to build a railroad up there as first projected nor on to Lake City.

During the year ending June 30, 1905 the railroad carried 31,433 passengers and 43,349 tons of freight. The Manual or Guide lists for 1905, two engines, for 1909, three and for 1911, two. One or two passenger cars, one or two baggage and several freight cars were claimed. It should be remembered that equipment was interchanged between these little lines and was also borrowed from the D. & R. G.

The S. N. used or acquired S. R. Engines 100 and 1. Then it bought an old one from the D. & R. G, which it numbered 2, but it was of such little good it was soon scrapped. Mears bought the 3 new in 1904 and the 4 new in 1906, both Baldwins of the 76 class. In 1910 the S. N. leased and in 1915 bought the S. G. & N. and got its engines, the 32, 33 and 34. Numbers 100, 32 and 33 were scrapped between 1909 and 1912 but 1 was still in use in 1916 for it is shown in the picture of the zinc train that was running at that time. All four of those just noted sat for a number of years in the boneyard at Silverton. Numbers 3 and 4 were used on the snow bucking because 34 was too large for the plow.

Mears could always think up something novel and smart. He had already put out the silver and gold passes and had devised the railroad bicycle but now he wanted to do something special in the way of a passenger coach for this run. He bought an old narrow gauge sleeper from the D. & R. G., that had been used on the run from Pueblo via Salida to Alamosa after 1890 and is thought to have been one of those that came to Durango and Silverton From ’81 to ’83. He had it painted a bright green, put the words in gold, “Silverton Northern Railroad” over the windows and named it the “Animas Forks”. It had four upper and four lower berths on each side, half as many as a modern sleeper has. It was different also in that the berths had wooden slat bottoms instead of solid metal as we know them. Ten feet or less at one end was walled off for a kitchen while 20 feet or more was equipped with seats and tables. There was a menu card, lengthy and beautifully printed, and a liquor list to delight a connoisseur. Of course a porter was present to administer the drinks.