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5 C L E M E N T S Rails to the Rockies the 1850s locating the transcontinental corridor became a sectional issue, unresolved until Congress passed the Pacific Railway Act in 1862 after the southern secession. The act stipulated that the Union Pacific Railroad be built “from a point on the western boundary of the State of Iowa, to be fixed by the President of the United States.” In November 1863 President Lincoln, a former railroad lawyer from Illinois, declared Omaha, almost due west of Chicago, to be the Union Pacific’s starting point.4 That northern location clouded Denver’s transcontinental dream, but the city’s boosters were already working on the problem. The Rocky Mountain News frequently extolled Colorado’s “large and constantly increasing trade,” especially when compared to the “sterile and barren country” to the north. But the paper’s assertions that a line through Denver would be “the shortest and most practical . . . route between the two oceans” would be put to the surveyors’ tests.5 Coloradans had begun to scout the possibilities in 1861, with a survey up Clear Creek led by E. L. Berthoud. Engineer F. M. Case, with Rocky Mountain News editor William Byers in tow, resurveyed Berthoud’s pass the following July and returned with discouraging findings. His assessment was partly dictated by the terms of the Pacific Railway Act, which required that the railroad’s “grades and curves shall not exceed the maximum [2.2 percent] grades and [400-foot minimum] curves of the Baltimore and Ohio railroad.”6 Case reexamined potential routes west of Denver in the fall of 1864, this time as the Union Pacific’s division engineer. He quickly realized that every option he scouted presented formidable challenges, including routes up the Platte and Cache la Poudre valleys and over Hoosier and Berthoud passes. In one instance he didn’t even do the survey, just the math. Case estimated between Boulder City and Boulder Pass “a difference of elevation of 6,300 feet [to be] overcome in a distance at most of 35 miles [an average grade of 3.4 percent]. Knowing these facts, I have not even visited the Boulder Pass.”7 The Union Pacific conducted a few more surveys, and Union Pacific chief engineer Grenville Dodge and his surveyors visited Denver and the mountains Edward L. Berthoud, 1864 10041097 6 D E N V E R I N S I D E & O U T for one last look in September 1866 before deciding to build to the north of Colorado. Savings in construction and operating costs, as well as time, won out against detouring south to claim the wealth of Denver and the diggings. Although loath to admit it at the time, the News later conceded that railroaders would not build over Colorado’s 11,000-foot passes when they could cross Wyoming’s divide at less than 8,000 feet, “and they would be fools to attempt it.”8 Following the decision, Denver’s allegiance to the Union Pacific quickly shifted to the Union Pacific, Eastern Division (UPED), a separate company later renamed the Kansas Pacific. This company was building west along the Smoky Hill River in Kansas under a provision in the Pacific Railway Act intended to mollify St. Louis for the loss of the UP to Chicago. At the end of 1865 the UPED surveyed to Denver, and in February 1866 stockholders determined to build to the city within three years. But the cash-starved road built slowly across the prairie and came to a halt forty miles east of the Colorado border in September 1868. So that year saw one transcontinental railroad building north of Colorado and another stopped dead in its tracks in Kansas from lack of funds. But by then Denver’s do-it-yourself project was in the works. Some of the city’s business leaders incorporated the Denver Pacific Railway and Telegraph Company on November 19, 1867, capitalized at $2 million. Residents privately subscribed $300,000 within a few days to help finance the project and overwhelmingly approved $500,000 in Arapahoe County bonds for the railroad in January 1868. This civic enthusiasm was propelled, in part, by threats from rival towns along the Front Range. The most significant came from Golden, where, in 1865, William A. H. Loveland and his associates organized what became the Colorado Central Railroad to connect with a road arriving from the east, northeast, or north, and then to build west over Berthoud Pass. The...

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