Steel Rails

When Henry Villard Brought the Northern Pacific Railroad Eastward and Westward Across Montana in 1881, 1882, and 1883. Driving the “Golden Spike” at Gold Creek, September 8, 1883, Marked the Opening of State’s Era of Development

(Editor’s note: The following is the beginning of a “Three part” story, when it was originally published - but because the Hysham Echo doesn’t allow as much room for these articles as it did in 1926 it will take a few weeks to publish it in it’s entirety - so this is the “beginning” of a “lengthy” story!)

Originally published in the Hysham Echo on Dec. 23, 1926
(By Dan R. Conway)
Story of the “Steel Rails”
Montana’s First Railroad
“Every man in the land is interested daily and constantly in the railroads and the transportation of persons and property over them.”
- - Judge Thomas M. Cooley

Nineteen and twenty-six and nineteen and twenty-seven are to go down as two more “red-letter” years in the railway annals of Montana. The three great transcontinental trunk railway lines whose “steel rails” traverse the Treasure state have now either entered upon construction work, have officially announced, or are contemplating developments and extensions which, when completed, will represent outlays running well into the millions of dollars. Some of these will comprise extensions that have been planned or surveyed for a number of years; yet, all are to mark the opening up to positive development vast areas of naturally resourceful territory.

In terms of years, Montana is young, while in terms of development, her record is vast - almost incomprehensible. This state was the Old West’s “last stand,” and, short as the time may seem since first the intrepid adventurers, traders and argonauts crossed the Plains to the Rockies’ eastern shadows, the West that WAS is gone.

This immense commonwealth, which the uninformed (or misinformed) legislators of an effete East, in the sixties, were wont to term a boundless desert of wind-swept plains and snow-bound mountain defiles, has been marvelously transformed. The Union Pacific, Northern Pacific and Great Northern railways, whose shining “steel rails” blazed trails through an unbroken wilderness, have been followed by other lines and a network of branches. Immense valleys and plains once overrun with brown grass, stubborn sagebrush and the wild denizens of an uninhabited area, are now the waving green fields which feed a nation. The waterfalls, at whose beauty and magnitude explorers marveled, have been harnessed for the generation of industrial energy. Thriving cities have sprung up, developed by the taking from Nature of her rich stores of treasure. The Indian has long since become accustomed to the whistle of the locomotive, and his home on the reservation, provided for him by the federal government, is typical of thrift, enterprise and a practice of the customs of a white man’s civilization. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have been provided with comfortable homes and a contented livelihood.

All of this, then, followed in the wake of the coming westward of the “steel rails”; this alone made possible by the dauntless pioneers, those engineers, construction workers and financiers who so bravely and hopefully set their faces frontierward, refusing to look back, and, in the face of most trying difficulties, dangers and privations, blazed pathways which today endlessly “gleam” the rays of a bright western sun, monuments to their memory and a blessing to posterity.

“What Are the “Steel Rails”?

These present developments we have before us; yet, few there are, who possess anything like an accurate knowledge of the railroad and of railroad exploration. But comparatively few can now appreciate the venturesome work of engineers and railroad construction worker. Fiction and a distorted Western air have grossly soiled and belied those noble characters. The bloodsuckers and parasites, the gamblers and thieves, the saloon-keepers and dancehall operators who preyed upon the habitues of these camps, gave to them their black name. As is always true, the dark deeds of these totally eclipsed the innumerable acts of unselfishness, courage and actual heroism which, among the workers were daily and hourly events - all “in a days’ work” along the route.

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