How Workers Built the Rio Grande Southern Railroad Across the San Juan Mountains at 10,000 Feet

[00:00:00]In October of 1891 in Howard Fork Canyon in the San Juan Mountains of Southwest Colorado, a construction superintendent named Frederick Lovevel stood at the edge of a narrow granite shelf 100 ft above the canyon floor and watched his carpenters walk the final bent of the Offier Loop trestle into position using rope and block and tackle rigged from the cliff face above him. The bent was 34 ft tall. The men walking it upright were standing on the deck of the previous bent with nothing between them and the canyon floor but 90 ft of cold mountain air. Lavvel watched the bent drop into the mortised cap timber below it. Watched the iron rods driven through. Watched the carpenters tighten the nuts by hand and then by wrench until the [music] joint was seated. Then he walked out onto the deck himself, cited down the stringer line with a transit and called it square. The Rio Grand Southern Railroad was 162 mi long.

[00:01:07]It ran from Ridgeway in the Encompag Valley south through the San Juan Mountains to [music] Durango on the Animas River. It crossed three mountain passes. Two of them were above 10,000 ft. It served the silver and gold mining camps at Telleluride, Reicho, Ofia, and Dolores. It was surveyed in 1890, graded and tracked in 1891, and opened for revenue service in December of that year. The entire main line, 162 mi of 3-FFT narrow gauge railroad through some of the most extreme mountain terrain in North America, went from survey stake to first paying train in 18 months. Most people who know the Rio Grand Southern know it from one photograph. The Offier Loop image, a narrow gauge locomotive crossing a wooden trestle with the loop track visible on the hillside below it, is one of the most reproduced photographs in Colorado railroad history. What most people do not know is who built it, how fast they built it, and what it cost the men whose names do not appear in the photograph. I have been working through the construction records at the Colorado State Archives in Denver, the Denver Public Library Western History Collection and the Colorado Railroad Museum in Golden and through the surviving Ottomir's papers. What I found is the story of how a Russian-born orphan who came west with nothing taught himself [music] to read mountain terrain better than any engineer in the country. And what happened to the 800 men who did the actual work while history was writing his name down? If you care about the men who built [music] the West with their hands, the workers nobody ever wrote a monument for, please subscribe to Forgotten Labor right now. Hit the button. Come back. The San Juan Mountains in Southwest Colorado are not a range you can negotiate with. They are a compact [music] volcanic massive roughly 100 m across with 13 peaks above 14,000 ft and passes that close to wheeled traffic in October [music] and do not reopen until June. The rock is hard volcanic tough and pre-Cambrian granite. The canyons cut by the Dolores River, the San Miguel River, and Howard Fork drop 2,000 ft in a horizontal distance of a few miles. The wind on the high passes comes off the western slope and hits 70 mph in winter storms. The snow on Lizard Head Pass, the highest point on the Rio Grand Southern at 10,250 ft, accumulates to 15 ft by February. In 1890, the mining camps inside those mountains [music] were producing silver and gold in quantities that justified a railroad. The problem was getting the railroad there. The man who solved that problem was Otto Mes. Born in 1840 in Kurland, which is now Latvia, Mia was orphaned young, brought to England by a relative, and immigrated to the United States at the age of 12. He worked his way across the country, arrived in California during the later years of the gold rush, learned retail trade and grain milling in the St. Louis Valley of New Mexico, and moved north into Colorado in 1865.

[00:04:48]He was 25 years old. He spoke accented English. He had no formal engineering training of any kind. What he had was an eye for terrain. He looked at mountain country the way a hydraulic engineer reads a whed following the slope and the drainage and the natural grades with a traveler's instinct that turned out to be better than anything a transit [music] could measure. He built his first toll road over Poncha Pass in 1866.

[00:05:17]By 1880, he had constructed more than 450 mi of toll road through the Sanan Mountains. overpasses that men on horseback had declared impossible. The Ute people called him Pathfinder of the San Juans. The Colorado newspapers called him the little giant of the Rockies. He stood 5'4 in tall, weighed 145 lb, and worked from horseback and on foot, trusting his own eyes over any instrument in the field. By 1889, the Denver and Rio Grand Railroad had reached Ridgeway to the north and Durango to the south on its narrow gauge lines. [music] The mining camps between them, Telleluride, Rico, Opia, were connected to neither. They were shipping ore out by wagon over the toll roads Mia had built, paying freight rates that consumed a significant portion of every mine's operating margin. The mines needed a railroad. Mes was the only man in Colorado who knew the terrain between Ridgeway and Durango well enough to find a route through it that a railroad could actually use. He filed the articles of incorporation for the Rio Grand Southern Railroad Company in November of 1889. He spent the spring and summer of 1890 surveying the mainline personally on horseback over terrain that most survey parties would have taken two seasons to cover. He contracted the grading and track work to construction firms in the fall of 1890, broke ground near Ridgeway in October, and set a completion target of December 1891.

[00:07:07]14 months of construction, 162 mi of mountain railroad, three passes, dozens of bridges and trestles, 800 men in the field at peak. The two names that anchor the construction story on the ground are Frederick Levelvel and a track superintendent on the southern section whose payroll entries name him only as WS Jackson.

[00:07:35]Lavvel was Mia's chief construction engineer, the man who translated the survey stakes into a finished grade, specified the cuts and fills, and told the foreman where to place the powder charges [music] and how deep to drive the cuts. Jackson managed the track, laying crews on the Rico to Durango section, where the grade was more settled and the [music] pace could be pushed harder. Between them, Laval and Jackson managed [music] a construction workforce that at its peak numbered more than 800 men spread across 60 mi of active grade simultaneously.

[00:08:15]The workforce on the Rio Grand Southern was drawn from the same labor pool that had built the Denver and Rio Grand and the Colorado Midland in [music] the previous decade. A substantial portion were Irish immigrants. many of them veterans of railroad construction in Pennsylvania and Ohio who had followed the contracting crews west through the 1870s and 1880s.

[00:08:43]A smaller portion were Italian immigrants brought west by the labor contractors who supplied grading crews to the Rocky Mountain lines in the early 1890s.

[00:08:56]A third group were Mexicanamean workers from the St. Lewis Valley and from northern New Mexico who brought experience in stonemasonry and adobe construction and adapted it readily to the rock cutting and retaining wall work that mountain railroad grades required.

[00:09:15]And there were experienced hard rock miners hired out of the telleluride and Rico camps for the tunnel and blast work on the steepest canyon sections. men who had spent years drilling in mines and knew what powder would do in close quarters. The wages on the Rio Grand Southern Construction in 1890 and 1891 were consistent with other Rocky Mountain construction projects of the era. Common laborers on the grading crews were paid $1.75 to $2 a day. Skilled carpenters on the bridge and trestle work earned $3 to $3.50 a day. Hard rock blasters, the men drilling and firing on the cliff faces above the canyon roots, earned $3.50 to $4 a day and earned every cent of it.

[00:10:10]The construction contractors paid in cash, typically by weekly. The commissary deducted 30 cents a day for board. three meals and a bunk in the tent camps that moved with the line as the grade advanced. The narrow gauge track gauge of 3 ft compared to the 4'8 1/2 in of standard gauge was a deliberate choice for mountain construction. It was not a compromise.

[00:10:37]It was an engineering decision driven by the terrain. A three-foot gauge railroad requires a narrower roaded, which requires less rock cut on cliff face grades and less fill-in narrow canyon bottoms. The curves can be tighter, which means the line can follow a canyon more closely rather than needing long tangent sections that would require additional tunnels or switchbacks. The locomotives are lighter, which means the bridges and trestles can be built to a lighter loading standard. That last [music] advantage mattered enormously on the Rio Grand Southern, where the trestle crew was cutting timber on the canyon rim and framing bents within a few hundred yards of where the trees had grown. A lighter loading standard meant smaller crosssections on the framing members, which meant faster cutting and faster framing. The same portable sawmill that would have spent a week producing the timbers for a standard gauge bent could produce a narrow gauge bent in half the time. The most technically demanding section of the entire line was the climb out of Howard Fork Canyon near the mining camp of Afir. The track had to gain approximately 600 ft of elevation in a horizontal distance where a straight grade would have exceeded 4%. The practical maximum for a loaded or train [music] behind the locomotives the Rio Grand Southern was operating. 4% sounds like a modest number. It means a rise of 4 ft for every 100 ft of forward travel.

[00:12:20]A narrow gauge locomotive pulling a consist of full silver ore cars on a 4% grade is working at the absolute limit of its tractive effort. Wheel slip is constant. Sandboxes on the drive wheels are running continuously. The fireman is feeding the boiler as fast as the door will open. Mirrors and levelvel solved the elevation problem with a loop. The offier loop is exactly what it sounds like. The track climbs a section of grade, curves around a tight horseshoe bend, crosses a trestle over the track it just came from on the lower level, and continues climbing on the opposite canyon wall. The loop adds horizontal distance to the climb, which reduces the effective grade to something the locomotive can manage. A train on the offier loop appears to anyone watching from the canyon floor to be crossing directly over itself. The trestle at the apex of the loop was 100 ft tall and 278 ft long, framed in the standard western narrow gauge trestle pattern that Arthur Brown and Samuel Reed had proved on the Central Pacific and Union Pacific 25 years earlier. stacked bents of squared Douglas fur, mudsills at the canyon shelf base, cap timbers tied with iron rods, lateral bracing between adjacent bents to resist the wind load. The bents were framed in two stories at the shallower ends and three stories at the center where the height reached its maximum. The iron rods through the tension members were threaded and nutted so they could be retightened in the field as the green wood of the bents seasoned and shrank. The same how trust principle that had dominated American railroad bridge engineering since 1840 [music] and that was still the right answer for fast field construction from standing timber in 1891.

[00:14:22]The Offier Loop crew worked from both ends simultaneously. A gang on the upper canyon shelf built outward, lowering ropes and [music] tackle to the men on the stories below. A gang on the canyon floor built the lower bents upward, walking each new frame into position with the block and tackle rigged from the deck above. A portable sawmill on the upper shelf ran dawn to dusk six days [music] a week, cutting the Douglas fur that had been felled and skidded from the timber on the canyon rim. The sawdust and edgings from the mill piled up along the shelf edge and fell in slow drifts to the canyon floor 60 ft below.

[00:15:03]The trestle [music] was complete in approximately 6 weeks. That is a pace of roughly 47 linear feet of finished structure per week, which is slower than the best speeds on the Union Pacific's Dale Creek Bridge 23 years earlier. But the Dale Creek crew had the advantage of precut timber shipped by rail from Chicago. The offier loop crew was cutting and framing from trees that were still standing when the survey stakes went in. The slower pace was the cost of working in a canyon that no supply wagon could reach without the railroad that the trestle itself was part of building.

[00:15:43]Quick pause. If these stories matter to you, I am putting them into a series of books. The men nobody wrote a book about. The ones who built this country with their hands. Volume 1 is out now.

[00:15:58]Scan the code on your screen or click the link in the description, then come back because what happened at Lizard Head Pass is the part of this story that most people have never heard.

[00:16:11]The second major challenge on the line was the summit crossing at Lizard Head Pass itself. The pass sits at 10,250 ft above sea level. It is above tree line. There is no timber at hand for framing or fuel. The tent camps [music] that housed the construction crews were exposed to the full western wind. A July thunderstorm at Lizard Head drops lightning on the open grade without warning. An August snow squall at the summit is not unusual and is not light.

[00:16:44]The men who graded the approach sections and the summit cut at Lizard Head in the fall of 1891 were working in conditions that no eastern contractor's schedule had ever been designed around. The approach from the Rico side to the south climbs through the upper Dellores River drainage in a series of curves so tight that the curve radius on the finished railroad was in places less than 150 ft.

[00:17:11]A radius that would have been impossible on a standard gauge line and was barely possible on three ft narrow gauge with specially designed truck assemblies on the locomotive. The approach from the offier side to the north gains elevation through the same canyon country the offier loop had been built to solve then breaks out of the tree line and runs across exposed alpine terrain for the final 3 m to the summit. The grade on both approaches ran in sections at 3.5 to 4%.

[00:17:47]In winter, which at 10,250 ft arrived in October, those grades were covered in snow that packed and iced under the weight of the rotary plow. The Rio Grand Southern had to run [music] continuously through the winter months to keep the pass open. The rotary snowplow assigned to the lizard head section was a secondhand piece of equipment purchased from the Denver and Rio Grand's own fleet. Its operator in the early years of the railroad was a man whose name appears in the southern Colorado livestock record as MJ Connelly, a former Denver and Rio Grand fireman who had worked the mountain grades for 10 years before signing on with the Rio Grand Southern. Connelly is the kind of name that history almost drops. He is in one payroll record, one livestock subscription log, and nowhere else. He ran the rotary plow over Lizard Head Pass through the worst of the Sanan Winters from 1892 through approximately 1896.

[00:18:55]He was not the man who built the railroad. He was the man who kept it open after the builders were gone. Those are different kinds of courage and the record honors neither of them adequately. The construction records from the Colorado State Archives that cover the lizard head section are incomplete. Some of the contractor files were lost in a courthouse fire in Dolores County [music] in the early 1920s.

[00:19:22]But the records that survive indicate that the summit grade was completed in November of 1891 under extreme time pressure with me's December deadline driving the pace of the final section regardless of weather. The men who died on the Rio Grand Southern Construction between 1890 and 1891 are difficult to count precisely because the contractor records that survive are fragmentaryary.

[00:19:50]From the records available in the Colorado State Archives, I can document 11 deaths during the construction period. The causes listed are three blasting accidents, two falls from trestle work, two from rockfall during cliff grading, two recorded [music] only as killed on the work with no further detail, one from fever, and one with cause unlisted.

[00:20:17]The actual number was higher.

[00:20:20]Construction accident reporting in Colorado in 1890 and 1891 was not mandatory under state law. A contractor who lost a man in a remote canyon section on a Tuesday might not report it until the next payday and might not report it at all if the man had no local family making inquiries.

[00:20:41]The men most at risk of disappearing entirely from the record were the single men, the recent immigrants, the workers without family in Colorado, the men whose next of kin were in Connor or Calabria or Sonora and would not hear anything definite for months if they heard anything at all. I want to say this plainly. The names the Denver newspapers published when the Rio Grand Southern opened in December of 1891 were Otto Mir and his investors. The names the photographs preserved are the locomotives and the mountain scenery.

[00:21:16]The names in the accident ledgers are partial. There were men buried in the cemetery ground of Dolores County and San Miguel County and Ure County under grades that trains ran over for 60 years. and most of them were never named in any newspaper that has survived. The Rio Grand Southern opened for revenue service on December 19th, 1891.

[00:21:43]The first paying train ran from Ridgeway South through Placeville, Telleluride Junction, Offier, Rico, Dolores, and Manos into Durango. The journey covered 162 mi and took approximately 11 hours.

[00:22:01]All cars from the smuggler union mine at Telleluride were in the first consist.

[00:22:07]The Opia loop trestle held. The lizard head pass crossing held. The locomotive made the grade. The line served the mining camps of southwest Colorado through the silver crash of 1893 that wiped out the profit margins of the mines the railroad [music] had been built to serve, through the partial recovery of the gold camps in the early 1900s, through the slow decline of metal prices in the 1920s, through the depression years when it survived by carrying tourists and cattle and whatever the farms and ranches along the route needed shipped. In the 1930s, the Rio Grand Southern converted a fleet of surplus automobile bodies and spare passenger car frames into gasoline powered rail buses the crews called Galloping Geese. Because the traffic had fallen too low to justify running full steam power for a handful of passengers [music] and a few freight crates. The galloping geese ran the offier loop and crossed lizard head pass with a Ford engine and a homemade body and the same track the construction crews had laid in 1891. The wooden trestles on the Rio Grand Southern lasted longer than anyone writing the original construction contracts would have predicted. The ofir loop trestle framed from Douglas fur cut on the Howard Fork Canyon rim in the fall of 1891 was still carrying revenue traffic in 1951 when the line was finally abandoned. That is 60 years of service on original timber with periodic bentby-bent replacement of individual members as they aged out. the same maintenance model that kept the old western trestles in service wherever a railroad was willing to pay for section gang labor. The Rio Grand Southern was willing because replacing the trestle with fill or steel was a capital expenditure the thin margin narrow gauge operation could not fund. What you need to understand about 60 years of trestle service is that it was not passive endurance. It was active maintenance by [music] men whose names were never attached to the structure. Every winter, the snow load on the trestle deck was cleared by section gangs walking the structure with shovels. Every spring Thor, the same gangs walked it again, checking for frost heave in the mudsills and split grain in the bent posts. Every summer after the tourist season was over and the fall or traffic had started, the bridge foreman walked to the entire 278 ft deck with a hammer, tapping every trunnel, checking every rod, listening for the sound that meant a member was going soft. The bad members were pulled and replaced. The sound ones stayed. The abandonment came in 1951, not because the railroad was structurally unsound, but because the traffic was gone.

[00:25:00][music] The mines were depleted or had converted to truck holage on the improved highway network. The farms and ranches had paved road access. The Interstate Commerce Commission approved the abandonment petition in 1951. The salvage crews came in and pulled up 162 mi of 3-FFT rail and burned what they could not haul out. The offer loop site is still there today. The grade is still visible on both walls of Howard Fork Canyon. The concrete peers that replaced the original wooden mudsills sometime in the 1920s are still standing on the canyon shelf. The loop itself, the horseshoe curve in the mountainside where the track turned back on itself to gain the elevation can be walked on the converted trail. If you stand at the apex of the loop on a clear September morning and look down the canyon, [music] you can see exactly what Frederick Lovevel and his carpenters were looking at in October of 1891 when they decided that a loop and a trestle was the only way through.

[00:26:04]Otto Mir lived until 1931 and died in Pasadena, California at the age of 91.

[00:26:10][music] He had outlived the silver boom that built his railroad, outlived most of the construction engineers who had worked under him, outlived the Denver and Rio Grands own a narrow gauge empire that had absorbed and released the Rio Grand Southern multiple times through the corporate restructurings of the early 20th century. His obituary in the Denver Post on June 25th, 1931 described him as the pathfinder of the San Juans, the builder of more than 450 mi of mountain road, and the president of a railroad that had hauled silver across the highest operating pass in North America.

[00:26:49]The obituary did not name the Irish laborers who drove the Lizardhead Summit, cut in November of 1891, with the first snow already on the ground. It did not name the Italian workers who carried blast powder up the cliff faces above the Dolores River. It did not name the two men who fell from the offier loop trestle during construction, whose [music] names I have not been able to recover from any archive I have examined. It did not name MJ Connelly, who ran the rotary plow over the pass through the winters of the 1890s and kept the line open for the trains that paid Autotars's operating costs.

[00:27:25]Frederick Levelvel, the chief construction engineer, is documented in the Colorado State Archives files and in the Colorado State Business Directory for 1895, where he is listed as a civil engineer working out of Denver. After 1895, the record goes quiet. I have not found him in the 1900 census under any spelling. He may have left Colorado. He may have died. The archives have not told me yet. What I want you to picture now is the working day on the [music] offer loop trestle in October of 1891.

[00:28:02]Sunrise at 6:15 in the mountain fall.

[00:28:05]The bridge gang assembles at the canyon rim in the dark with bed rolls and water cantens and axes and soarses in leather sheath framing squares in cloth bags over their shoulders. The cook fire is at the camp a/4 mile back along the grade and the smell of the fire and the salt pork comes down the canyon shelf on the morning wind. The portable sawmill is running already. The blade turning in the halflight, the first squared timber coming off the carriage as the gang arrives. The day's bent goes up before noon. The framing crew stands on the previous day's deck, and walks the new posts into position with rope, drops them into the mortised cap timber below, drives the iron rods through the board holes, tightens the nuts with a box wrench. The crew on the canyon floor 90 ft below, sights up the line with a transit to confirm the new bent is plum.

[00:28:59]If it is not, the men on the deck loosen the nuts, shift the bent, retighten. By 2:00 in the afternoon, the new bent is sound. By 4, the stringers run out across it. By 6, the ties go on. By the time the sun drops behind the western ridge of the San Juans, and the temperature falls fast the way it does at 9,000 ft in October, the trestle [music] is 10 or 12 ft longer than it was that morning. Multiply that day by 42 and you have the offer loop trestle.

[00:29:28]Multiply it by the grade over lizard head pass at 10,250 ft with the snow coming in and the deadline coming in faster than the snow and you have what the 800 men on the Rio Grand Southern were doing through the fall of 1891.

[00:29:44]Multiply it by every bridge and every trestle and every cliff face cut between Ridgeway and Durango and you have the railroad that opened on December 19th of that year and ran for 60 years across some of the most extreme mountain terrain on the continent. Most of it is gone now. The rails were pulled. The wooden trestles were dismantled or burned. The tent camps rotted into the grade. The portable sawmill that ran on the Howard Fork Canyon shelf was probably moved to the next job. [music] and the next job after that until it wore out somewhere in the mountain country and was left where it stopped.

[00:30:20]What is left is in the photographs in the Colorado Railroad Museum in Golden and in the Denver Public Library Western history collection. The loop is in the terrain. The grade is in the hillside.

[00:30:33]And the names that history almost lost are in the accident ledgers and the payroll records and the cemetery lists of three southwest Colorado counties waiting for someone to read them all the way through. The next time you see the photograph of the Afir loop, the narrow gauge locomotive on the wooden trestle, the loop grade visible on the mountain side below, the San Juan peaks white behind it. I want you to think about the men who framed those bents from timber.

[00:31:04]They cut themselves on the canyon rim in the fall of 1891. They had axes and saws and iron rods and a mill on the shelf.

[00:31:13]They had a deadline they were not going to miss. They had $3 a day and a tent bunk and the work in front of them. They built the trestle. They got the train across and then they packed up the mill and moved on to the next crossing. That is the work I came to tell you about.

[00:31:29]One more thing before you go. Every name I find, every number, every record, I am collecting it all into a series of books so these men are not forgotten again.

[00:31:42]Volume 1 is available right now. Scan the code on your screen or follow the link in the description. See you in the next