How Workers Built the World's Tallest Wooden Railroad Trestle by Hand in 1883

[00:00:00]In the summer of 1883, in a narrow gulch in the mountains of western Montana, a man is standing on a tower of timber more than 200 ft above the ground. There is no steel beneath him. There are no cranes anywhere on the horizon. There is only wood, thousands of squared timbers [music] bolted and braced and stacked one frame on top of another until they climb higher than a 20-story building.

[00:00:28]He is helping to build the tallest wooden railroad trestle the world has ever seen.

[00:00:34]When it is finished, trains will roll across a gap that men said could not be spanned, riding on nothing but braced timber 226 ft in the air.

[00:00:47]This is the story of the Marent Gulch Trestle. How a crew of about 150 men raised the highest wooden bridge on earth entirely by hand and why it stood for only 2 years.

[00:01:02]To understand why anyone would build such a thing out of wood, you have to understand the pressure of the moment.

[00:01:10]In 1883, the Northern Pacific Railway was racing to finish the second transcontinental railroad across the United States. A line meant to run from the Great Lakes all the way to the Pacific Coast.

[00:01:23]It had been a brutal road to get there.

[00:01:26]The company had already survived more than a decade of surveys through unmapped country, a financial collapse that helped trigger a national panic, and years [music] of stalled half-built track.

[00:01:39]Now, at last, the two ends of the railroad were closing in on each other in the mountains of Montana.

[00:01:46]Every mile mattered. Every delay cost money the company could barely afford.

[00:01:53]And then the route ran straight into Marent Gulch, a deep ravine cutting directly across the path just [music] north of Missoula.

[00:02:02]Going around it would have meant miles of slow, expensive grading through rough mountain country.

[00:02:08]Filling it was out of the question. The only way forward was to go over it, to carry the rails straight across the [music] gap, high above the creek at the bottom.

[00:02:18]The trouble was the depth. The floor of the [music] gulch lay more than 200 ft below the level of the grade.

[00:02:25]No one had ever built a railroad structure that tall out of timber.

[00:02:30]The Northern Pacific decided it would be the first.

[00:02:34]It is worth being clear about what a trestle actually [music] is, because it is not the arched stone bridge most people picture.

[00:02:42]A trestle is an open framework, a long row of braced towers called bents, [music] standing in a line across a gap with the railroad track laid along the very top.

[00:02:52]Instead of one great span leaping from one side to the other, a trestle [music] marches across the emptiness on leg after wooden leg.

[00:03:00]It uses far less material than filling a ravine with earth would, and it can be built astonishingly [music] fast. But, it also means that every one of those towers has to carry its share of a moving train, and the tallest towers out in the middle of the gulch have to do that while standing more than 200 ft in the air on a base no wider than a house.

[00:03:21]The man given the task of designing it was an engineer named C. [music] C.

[00:03:24]Schneider.

[00:03:26]Schneider belonged to a generation of bridge designers who were learning, one project at a time, how to carry the enormous weight of a moving locomotive across empty air.

[00:03:35]His answer at Marentz Gulch was bold in its simplicity.

[00:03:39]Rather than wait for iron to be shipped into the remote Montana mountains, slow, costly, and scarce [music] this far from the mills, he would build the entire structure out of wood.

[00:03:50]Timber was everywhere in these forests.

[00:03:52]It could be cut, squared, and framed right there on the site.

[00:03:56]And a skilled crew could raise a wooden structure far faster than they could ever assemble iron work.

[00:04:02]In a race measured in [music] weeks, speed was everything.

[00:04:06]So, Schneider designed a trestle of stacked timber towers, a structure that would [music] reach 226 ft at its highest point and stretch nearly 800 ft from one side of the gulch to the other.

[00:04:17]On paper, it was elegant. In [music] the gulch, it would have to be built by men working higher off the ground than almost any laborers in the entire country.

[00:04:26]Here is the part that is hard to believe.

[00:04:30]There were no cranes as we would understand them today.

[00:04:34]There was no machine anywhere on that site capable of lifting a heavy timber into place 200 ft in the [music] air.

[00:04:42]Everything went up by muscle, rope, and ingenuity.

[00:04:46]It began at the bottom.

[00:04:49]Before a single tower could rise, the crew [music] had to prepare solid footings on the floor and the walls of the gulch, anchoring the base of each bent >> [music] >> so that nothing would shift once the weight of a train came down on it.

[00:05:03]From there, the work became a rhythm.

[00:05:05]>> [music] >> Frame a bent, rig the gin poles, haul it into position, brace it, bolt it, and start the next one.

[00:05:14]Timber came down out of the surrounding forests and was squared and cut to fit right there on the site.

[00:05:21]The men worked through the Montana weather, through summer heat and mountain wind and the cold that arrives early at that altitude, and they held the pace because the entire railroad was waiting on them.

[00:05:34]What is genuinely hard to grasp is how quickly a structure this size went up.

[00:05:41]This was not the work of years. A trestle that would stand taller than almost any building in the country was framed and raised in a matter of months by hand with rope and muscle doing the work a crane would do today.

[00:05:56]The crew [music] built the trestle the way you might stack a set of wooden frames one on top of another.

[00:06:03]At the base they set heavy [music] timber bents, framed towers, each one a rigid box of squared beams locked together with diagonal [music] cross bracing.

[00:06:15]On to that first tier they raised a second and then a third tying [music] each level into the one below it with bolts and long iron rods and bracing the whole thing against the wind that funneled down through the gulch.

[00:06:29]To lift the timbers they used gin poles and block and tackle, simple rigs of pole, rope, and pulley that let a handful of men haul a beam weighing hundreds of pounds up the face of the growing tower.

[00:06:43]There was no shortcut and no substitute for it. Each timber was raised, positioned, and fastened by hand.

[00:06:51]And as the structure climbed the men climbed with it.

[00:06:55]They stood on the very frame they were building out over the open drop setting each new beam and driving each bolt home while the ground fell further and further away beneath them.

[00:07:06]About 150 men worked [music] that site.

[00:07:10]They felled and squared the timber, framed the bents, hauled the beams, and fitted the joints. And slowly the towers rose out of the gulch.

[00:07:20]When it was finished the top of the trestle stood 226 feet above the creek, taller than any wooden structure of its kind anywhere on earth, and it ran 797 feet across the gap.

[00:07:35]Standing at the bottom and looking up you did not see a bridge so much as a a cliff built by hand with a railroad running along its top.

[00:07:47]When it was finished, the Marent Gulch Trestle was not merely a piece of railroad engineering.

[00:07:54]It was a sensation. [music] In an age fascinated by the sheer scale of what industry could do, a wooden tower 226 [music] ft tall carrying locomotives across a Montana Gulch was exactly the kind of marvel people wanted to see and read about.

[00:08:13]Photographers hauled their heavy equipment out to the Gulch [music] to capture it from below.

[00:08:18]Illustrations of the Trestle spread across the country and late in 1883, one of the leading science and engineering journals of the day put the structure in front of a national audience.

[00:08:31]Passengers crossing it for the first time pressed against the windows to look down at the drop falling away beneath them.

[00:08:39]For a short while, this remote crossing [music] in the western mountains was one of the most talked about structures in all of America, living proof of just how far timber and human skill could be pushed.

[00:08:53]What that height meant for the men who built it is easy to say and hard to truly imagine.

[00:08:59]They worked without harnesses, without nets, without any of the safety equipment a modern crew would consider the bare minimum.

[00:09:08]A worker framing the upper tiers stood balanced on narrow timbers with 200 [music] ft of open air beneath his boots, guiding beams that weighed as much as he did in heat and wind and the occasional mountain storm.

[00:09:24]A single slip, a single beam [music] swinging loose on its rope, a single moment of lost footing and there was nothing at all between him and the floor of the Gulch far below.

[00:09:37]Picture the ordinary reality of it.

[00:09:40]A man near the top passes [music] a squared beam hand over hand along the frame, leans out to guide it as it swings on the rope, and holds it steady with his own weight while another man drives the bolt.

[00:09:54]Then he does it again, >> [music] >> and again, and again, all day with the wind pulling at his coat and the creek a thin silver thread far below his boots.

[00:10:06]There is no point in the day where the danger [music] eases off.

[00:10:11]The height is simply the condition of the job, present in every single motion.

[00:10:16]From the first timber lifted at dawn to the last one set before dark.

[00:10:22]The records of this kind of work are painfully thin.

[00:10:27]The men who built America's great timber [music] structures were laborers and immigrants, hired by the day and rarely named in any history that survives.

[00:10:36]What we know, in general terms, is that high timber construction in this era killed and injured men as a matter of routine, falls from the frame, [music] crushed hands and limbs, beams that got away from the crew and swept a man off the edge.

[00:10:53]What we almost never have are the names.

[00:10:57]A man could die on a structure like this and [music] leave behind nothing in the official record but a single line in a company ledger and an empty place in the crew the next [music] morning.

[00:11:09]The trestle went up quickly, and it went up on the courage of men whose risk we can measure today only by imagining ourselves standing where they stood.

[00:11:20]And they were far from alone.

[00:11:23]Across the entire Northern Pacific project, and across every railroad clawing its way through the Western mountains in these years, >> [music] >> the human cost was enormous and almost entirely uncounted.

[00:11:37]Men died in the rock cuts, [music] in the tunnels, under falling timber, and off the sides of high structures, and the companies kept on building.

[00:11:48]There was no federal agency keeping [music] track of these deaths, no requirement to report them, no one whose job it was to add them up.

[00:11:58]The true toll of building the American railroads will never be known.

[00:12:03]What we can say is that the tallest wooden trestle in the world was not raised safely.

[00:12:10]It was raised fast, and fast work at that height always came at a price.

[00:12:16]For all its height and daring, the Marent Gulch trestle carried its first trains in the spring of 1883. [music] And by the autumn of that same year, the Northern Pacific, [music] under its president Henry Villard, drove the final spike of its transcontinental line >> [music] >> at a grand celebration in Montana.

[00:12:37]The line was complete, coast to coast, and the wooden giant at Marent Gulch had done exactly what it was built to do, [music] carrying the traffic of a brand new transcontinental railroad across a gap that had stood in its way.

[00:12:53]And almost immediately, the railroad began to worry about it.

[00:12:58]The problem was fire.

[00:13:01]A wooden trestle more than 200 ft tall, standing in a dry mountain gulch with steam locomotives throwing live sparks and hot cinders across it every single day, was a disaster [music] waiting to happen.

[00:13:16]One ember lodged in the wrong joint, one dry summer, and the whole structure, along with any train unlucky enough to be crossing it, could come down into the gulch in a wall of flame.

[00:13:29]The very thing that had made the trestle possible so quickly, all that beautifully framed timber, was also its single greatest weakness.

[00:13:38]So, the Northern Pacific made a decision that tells you everything about how they really saw it.

[00:13:44]Only 2 years after completing the tallest wooden trestle on Earth, in the winter of 1884 and '85, they built a new iron bridge right [music] beside it, and then tore the wooden one down.

[00:13:58]They did it in the most matter-of-fact way imaginable.

[00:14:02]Over that winter, an iron structure was assembled directly alongside the wooden trestle, [music] in the same gulch, on the same line.

[00:14:11]When it was ready, [music] the train simply moved over onto the iron, and the record-breaking wooden structure was pulled down.

[00:14:19]There was no ceremony for it.

[00:14:22]It had been the tallest wooden trestle in the world, and it was dismantled almost as quickly as it had gone up, because the men who ran the railroad valued a bridge that would not burn far more than they valued a record.

[00:14:35]The iron span that took its place would go on carrying trains through that gulch for generations.

[00:14:42]The wooden giant that came first, the one that actually made the crossing for the very first time, lasted 2 years, and then vanished from the landscape almost without a trace.

[00:14:56]The record holder had stood for barely 2 years, and the age it belonged to was already ending.

[00:15:03]Across that same [music] decade, iron and steel were quietly replacing timber on the largest structures everywhere.

[00:15:11]And in France, an even taller iron viaduct had already taken the world height record away.

[00:15:18]The era of building the tallest things on Earth out of wood was closing, and the Marent Gulch Trestle [music] was one of its last and greatest monuments.

[00:15:28]It is worth pausing on that.

[00:15:30]For one brief moment in 1883, the tallest railroad structure in the entire world was made of nothing but wood, framed and [music] raised by hand by a crew of about 150 men in a remote Montana gulch in a matter of months.

[00:15:47]They had no cranes. They had no steel.

[00:15:51]They had no safety [music] net of any kind. They had timber, rope, muscle, and nerve. And with those four things, they built something 226 ft tall that [music] carried locomotives across a gap everyone else had called impossible.

[00:16:09]We remember the golden spike and the men who posed around it.

[00:16:13]We almost never remember the men who stood on the towers at Marent Gulch and made the crossing possible in the first place.

[00:16:21]The structure they built was replaced and then largely forgotten for the simplest [music] of reasons, because it worked.

[00:16:30]It did its job long enough for iron to catch up.

[00:16:33]But for 2 years, >> [music] >> the highest bridge on Earth was a wooden one, and the hands that raised it belonged to men whose names, for the most part, the record never bothered to keep.

[00:16:45]The next time you cross a valley on a bridge without giving it a second thought, think about that crew in the gulch standing on the frame they were still building 200 ft in the air with nothing beneath them but the work of their own hands.

[00:17:03]If you want more forgotten stories of what American labor built by hand, the structures, [music] the machines, and the men that history left out, take a moment to subscribe and stay with us.

[00:17:16]There is far more still to uncover out here, and we are only just getting started.