History
In the late 1870s miners descended on the upper Arkansas River valley of Colorado in search of carbonate ores rich in lead and silver. The feverish mining activity in what would become the Leadville district attracted the attention of the Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad and the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway, each already having tracks in the Arkansas valley. The Santa Fe was at Pueblo and the D&RGW near Canon City, Colorado, some 35 miles west. Leadville was over 100 miles away. For two railroads to occupy a river valley ordinarily was not a problem, however, west of Canon City the Arkansas River cuts through a high plateau of igneous rocks forming a spectacular steep-walled gorge over a thousand feet deep. At its narrowest point sheer walls on both sides plunge into the river, creating an impassible barrier. Sharing is not an option along this route.
On April 19, 1878, a hastily assembled construction crew from the Santa Fe began grading for a railroad line just west of Canon City in the mouth of the gorge. The D&RGW, whose track ended only ¾ of a mile from Canon City, raced crews to the same area, but they were blocked by the Santa Fe graders in the narrow canyon. By a few hours they had lost the first round in what became a two-year struggle between the two railroads that would be known as the Royal Gorge War.
Read more about this topic: Royal Gorge Route Railroad
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“All things are moral. That soul, which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its inspiration; out there in history we can see its fatal strength.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“All history becomes subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only biography.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)