In the late spring of 1879, Charles Shaylor Smith stood at the bottom of a granite chasm in Colorado and was handed a problem that should have been impossible. He was to carry a railroad track through the Royal Gorge, where the walls of solid rock rose more than a thousand feet straight up and the canyon floor pinched down to barely thirty feet across. The Arkansas River already filled that floor. There was no ground left to build on.
And all around him, two railroad companies were at war over this exact strip of stone, with hired gunmen, stone forts, and rifles. The answer Smith gave them is still hanging over the water today. Everyone who knew him called him C. Shaler Smith.
He was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1836. His father died when he was a boy, and his mother died when he was sixteen, and that was the end of his schooling. He learned engineering the hard way out in the open, walking survey lines as a rodman, carrying the measuring rod for older men in the mining country around Lake Superior. He worked his way up under a famous bridge engineer named Albert Fink on the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, served as a captain of engineers through the Civil War, and by 1879 he was forty-three years old and one of the most respected bridge builders in the country.
Two years before the Royal Gorge, he had thrown a cantilever railroad bridge across the Kentucky River, 275 feet above the water, the first great cantilever railroad bridge in America. It was built for the Cincinnati Southern Railway in 1876 and 1877, carrying the track over a deep limestone gorge. Rather than try to raise scaffolding all the way up from the water, which would have been slow and deadly in that valley, Smith built the span out from each side as a cantilever, each arm reaching toward the middle, carrying its own weight until the two halves met in the open air. The lesson he carried out of that Kentucky valley was the same one he would carry into the Royal Gorge: when the ground will not help you, stop fighting the ground.
Build out from the rock and let the structure carry itself. The second name in this story is James Dramer. James Richard Dramer was a Civil War veteran and a construction engineer for the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad. While Smith was solving the gorge, Dramer was building something stranger.
He was building forts, dry-laid stone breastworks with gunports cut into them, scattered up and down the Arkansas River, around seventeen of them, meant to physically block a rival railroad from laying its own track. One of them, at a place called Spike Buck near Texas Creek, still carries his name: Fort Dramer. These two engineers are the bookends of the story. One man building a way through, the other building walls to stop the other side.
To understand why grown men brought rifles to a railroad survey, you have to understand what was sitting at the top of the Arkansas River. The answer was silver, and the place was Leadville. In the late 1870s, the mining town of Leadville, Colorado, came up out of the mountains almost overnight. For years, prospectors there had cursed a heavy black sand that clogged their gold pans.
Then somebody finally assayed that sand and found it carried about fifteen ounces of silver to the ton. The black sand they had been throwing away was silver ore. In the spring of 1878, the big lodes opened up, and the Colorado silver boom was on. A storekeeper named Horace Tabor, who had just been elected the first mayor of Leadville, grubstaked two broke prospectors named August Rische and George Hook, staking them a little food and supplies in exchange for a share of whatever they found.
What they found was the Little Pittsburgh mine on Fryer Hill, and it made Tabor one of the greatest and most sudden fortunes in American history. Leadville’s mines turned out about two million dollars in silver and lead in 1878 and more than nine million dollars the very next year. Over the following decade, the district would produce more than eighty million dollars in ore. The town itself swelled from around fifteen hundred people in 1879 to more than thirty thousand by the summer of 1880, which made Leadville the second largest city in all of Colorado behind only Denver.
Thirty thousand people two miles up in the Rocky Mountains, all of them needing food, lumber, machinery, and a way to ship the silver out. There was only one practical way up to them, and it ran straight through the Royal Gorge. The gorge is a chasm about six miles long. The granite walls drop almost vertically to the Arkansas River, in some places more than a thousand feet down, by some measures as much as 1,250 feet.
At the narrowest point, the gap between the two walls is only about thirty feet wide, and the river takes up nearly all of it. Through most of the gorge, a crew could blast and chisel a shelf into the rock for a single line of track. But at one pinch point near the lower end, there was no shelf to cut and no floor to stand on. The river owned the bottom of the canyon completely.
Whoever wanted the silver of Leadville had to get past that thirty-foot gap, and there was only room in the gorge for one railroad, not two. That single fact, one slot of rock wide enough for one line and not a foot more, is the whole reason this turned into a war instead of a race. Building through the rest of the gorge took everything a crew had. For six miles, the railroad had to carve a shelf for the track out of the canyon wall, blasting a roadbed into solid rock a few feet at a time with black powder and hand steel, often with the river licking at the workers’ boots.
The stone is some of the oldest and hardest in Colorado, ancient granite and gneiss, the kind of rock that turns a drill dull in an afternoon. Crews were lowered on ropes to set their charges in the cliff face, then hauled up before the blast. The Arkansas itself, fed by snowmelt off the highest peaks in the Rockies, could rise fast and run brown and violent in the spring, and it gave the men no margin for a slip. By the time Smith’s crews reached the thirty-foot pinch point, the railroad had already spent months and lives just getting there.
Two railroads looked at that gap, and both decided they had to have it. One was the Denver and Rio Grande, founded back in 1870 by a Civil War general named William Jackson Palmer, a narrow-gauge line built on rails only three feet apart so it could thread the tight curves of the mountains. The other was the much larger Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe, pushing in from the east with deeper pockets and standard-gauge ambitions. Both had crews near Cañon City.
Both wanted Leadville. And the law had not yet settled who held the right to the gorge. So the two companies simply raced to seize the ground first, on the old frontier theory that whoever held the dirt would hold the route. The Santa Fe moved fastest.
On the eighteenth of April 1878, Santa Fe work teams threw their equipment down at the mouth of the Royal Gorge just west of Cañon City and started grading a roadbed before the Denver and Rio Grande even understood what was happening. The Denver and Rio Grande scrambled crews up the canyon to grade their own line in the same narrow space, sometimes within sight of the other company’s men. And that is when this stopped looking like railroad construction and started looking like a war. The Denver and Rio Grande sent James Dramer up the canyon to fortify it.
He laid up his dry stone breastworks at the choke points, the narrow places where one armed crew could physically stop another from passing, and he cut gunports into the walls of them. Up and down the Arkansas, these little forts went up, maybe seventeen in all. Crews working on the cliffs above would roll boulders down on the crews working below. Men threw each other’s tools into the river.
Survey stakes were pulled up in the dark. Picks and shovels worked next to loaded rifles. For more than a year, the gorge was less a construction site than a contested border. The Santa Fe decided it needed professional fighting men.
In March of 1879, the Santa Fe hired Bat Masterson, then the sheriff of Ford County, Kansas, to protect its interests. Masterson did not come alone. He brought in something like sixty or seventy hired guns, and the recruiting pulled in names that sound made up but were entirely real. Doc Holliday helped find men.
Ben Thompson came. So did two gunfighters remembered as Dirty Dave Rudabaugh and Mysterious Dave Mather. A railroad right-of-way dispute now had a small private army on its payroll, and the men holding the picks in the gorge were working in the shadow of hired killers. The fighting came to a head in June of 1879.
The courts had been wrestling over the gorge for more than a year, and in the spring the Supreme Court of the United States had handed the Denver and Rio Grande the primary right to build through the canyon. Then on the tenth of June, a local court issued an injunction restraining the Santa Fe from operating on Denver and Rio Grande track. The very next day, Denver and Rio Grande crews moved to take their railroad back by force, seizing depots and stations down the line. Bat Masterson and around sixty of his men loaded onto a special train and rushed to Pueblo, where they dug into the Santa Fe roundhouse, the strongest defensible building they had, and prepared for a fight.
For a few tense days, an industrial dispute in the state of Colorado looked exactly like a siege, with an armed garrison holed up in a railroad roundhouse and gunfire reported in the streets. When it was over, a handful of men were dead across the length of the whole conflict, and the Santa Fe’s grip on the gorge had finally been broken loose by the courts and by the men on the ground. It would be easy to turn this into a story about villains in boardrooms, but that is not quite what it was. The men actually swinging picks in the gorge were laborers, many of them immigrants and out-of-work miners, doing some of the most dangerous work in America for a day’s wage while two companies fought over whether their work would even count for anything.
The real villain in this story is not a person at all. It is the gorge itself, that thirty-foot slot of granite and rushing water, and the very real possibility that all of this blasting and fighting and dying would end with no railroad at all. That is the pressure Smith was working under when he was handed the single worst piece of ground in the entire canyon. Picture the spot the way he first saw it.
The walls have closed in to about thirty feet. The Arkansas River is moving fast and cold across that whole width, swollen with snowmelt in the spring. There is no bank, no ledge wide enough for a roadbed. You cannot simply blast a shelf into the wall here, because on the riverside the rock drops straight down into the water and there is nothing to carry a track.
The old idea, the obvious idea, was to dam or divert the river and build a stone causeway along the bottom. But that would have cost a fortune and eaten months that the railroad did not have, with a rival company grading toward the same gap. A diversion might have washed out with the next spring flood and taken the whole investment with it. Smith looked at it and decided to stop thinking about it as a roadbed problem.
He chose to think about it as a bridge problem. If you cannot put the track on the ground, then you hang the track in the air and brace it against the only thing in that canyon strong enough to hold it: the canyon itself. Here is what Smith designed, and it is so simple in its idea that it almost hides how daring it really was. He built a steel plate girder 175 feet long to carry the track across the pinch point.
A plate girder is a deep beam built up out of flat plates and angle iron riveted together, strong enough to carry the pounding weight of a locomotive. On the inside, against one canyon wall, that girder could rest on the narrow shelf of rock that did exist. But the outer edge of the track, the side hanging out over the river, had nothing at all beneath it. So Smith held that outer edge up from above.
He set a pair of heavy iron girders rising at an angle, anchored hard into the solid granite of both canyon walls and leaning in toward each other until they met over the middle of the track like the two strokes of the letter A. That A-frame caught the weight of the outer rail and threw it sideways and upward into the rock walls. The river carried none of it. The mountain carried all of it.
It is one of the rare pieces of engineering that you can understand in a single sentence and still find hard to believe when you see it. When it was finished, only about one-tenth of that long plate girder was actually sitting on solid ground. The other ninety percent of the hanging bridge was suspended in open air over the Arkansas River, held up by iron wedged against stone. Before the girder could go in, men had to get out over the river to cut the anchor seats into the rock, and there was nowhere to stand.
They worked from timber falsework and rope, drilling the holes for the anchor bolts by hand, two men to a drill, one turning the steel and one swinging the hammer in a canyon where a dropped tool fell a long way into cold water. They set the great iron legs of the A-frame into those seats and wedged them home against the granite. Only then could the long plate girder be floated out piece by riveted piece and hung from the frame. Every rivet was heated in a forge, tossed up, caught, and hammered home before it cooled.
There were no cranes worth the name down in that slot, no power tools, no way to bring heavy machinery to bear in a thirty-foot gap already full of river. It was iron, muscle, black powder, and nerve in one of the least forgiving places in North America. This is where the record is painfully thin. We know Smith’s name.
We know Dramer’s name. We do not know the names of the men who actually hung over that river on ropes and timber scaffolds to set the iron and drive the anchors into the granite. The ledger gives most of them no name, only a number, a day’s wage, and a job. They worked with hand drills and black powder to cut the seats for the wall anchors.
They worked above and beside a cold, fast river with nothing soft anywhere below them. They did it in a canyon where the other company’s crews might roll a boulder down at any moment or pull their stakes or pitch their tools into the water. They are the reason the track is up there at all, and almost none of them got a single line in any history book. While the iron was going up at the pinch point, the larger war was grinding to its end, and it did not end in the gorge.
It ended in courtrooms and in a boardroom in Boston. The legal fight over who owned the canyon climbed through the courts. The citizens and sheriffs along the line increasingly sided with the home company, the Denver and Rio Grande, and the armed crews and hired guns slowly stood down. Early in 1880, the two companies signed the agreement history remembers as the Treaty of Boston, and by the end of March the Denver and Rio Grande had its railroad back for good.
The terms tell you who truly won the gorge. The Denver and Rio Grande kept the route through the canyon. In exchange, it paid the Santa Fe well over a million dollars for the grading and construction the Santa Fe had already done in the gorge, the materials on hand, and the interest, a figure the sources put somewhere between one and a half and two million dollars. The Santa Fe agreed to give up its plans to reach Denver and Leadville, and the Denver and Rio Grande agreed in turn to stay out of certain territory the Santa Fe wanted for itself.
So the narrow-gauge line that William Jackson Palmer had been pushing through the mountains would be the one to carry the silver down, and the bridge that a Santa Fe engineer had designed ended up carrying Denver and Rio Grande trains. With the war finally settled and the bridge secure, the railroad did what all that money and blood had been for. Denver and Rio Grande crews drove the line on up the Arkansas through the gorge and toward the high country, and on the twentieth of July 1880 the rails reached Leadville. The richest silver camp in the world was finally tied to the rest of the country by iron, and a great deal of that wealth came rolling back down through the Royal Gorge, out across the hanging bridge on a track that touched the ground at only one edge.
For the next decade, the Royal Gorge route was the lifeline of the Leadville district, carrying ore and bullion down out of the mountains and carrying everything a city of thirty thousand needed back up: lumber, coal, machinery, food, and people. The whole silver economy of the high Rockies leaned on a stretch of three-foot track threaded through a canyon and on one short iron bridge that hung most of its length over a river. The bridge was small. What crossed it was not.
For decades, that hanging bridge was one of the most famous pieces of railroad in America. Passenger trains slowed down at the pinch point so travelers could lean out and look straight up the granite walls and straight down at the white water roaring under the track. In 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt himself rode through the Royal Gorge and stopped at the hanging bridge to take in the canyon. People came from all over the country just to feel a train roll out over the river on iron braced against the mountain.
The bridge itself was also strengthened as the railroad changed. Because the Denver and Rio Grande had built its line on narrow-gauge rails only three feet apart, light and nimble for the tight curves. But narrow gauge could not easily trade cars with the rest of the country’s standard railroads. As traffic grew, the company gave it up.
Between about 1888 and 1890, the Denver and Rio Grande widened its main line to standard gauge, four feet eight and a half inches between the rails, the same as nearly every other railroad in America. Standard gauge meant heavier locomotives and heavier loads, more than the original hanging bridge had been built to carry. So crews added support beneath the plate girder to take the new weight, and over time the balance shifted. Where the original bridge had hung about nine-tenths of its length over open water, the reinforced bridge came to rest something closer to half on the rock and half over the river.
They did not replace Smith’s bridge. They strengthened it and kept running trains across it. There is a number that stops nearly every reader of the old records. This piece of engineering, the thing that solved a problem two railroads had gone to war over, was built for $11,759.
That is the figure that comes down in the record, a few thousand dollars of iron and labor to cross the one gap that all the money and gunfire in Colorado could not cross any other way. Set that small number next to the millions the two railroads spent fighting, and the contrast tells you something about the difference between force and ingenuity. Later, in 1929, somebody built a tourist suspension bridge for automobiles more than a thousand feet directly above Smith’s railroad, and a lot of people now confuse the two. But the one that mattered, the one the war was fought over, is the low iron bridge down on the canyon floor, the one that actually carries the trains.
The line through the gorge changed hands many times over the years, and by the late twentieth century the heavy through traffic had moved elsewhere. In 1997, a group of local interests bought about twelve miles of track through the canyon to keep the route alive, and in May of 1999 they started running passenger trains again as the Royal Gorge Route Railroad. Today, a train still leaves the old depot in Cañon City and runs down along the Arkansas River into the gorge and out across Smith’s hanging bridge, much as travelers did when Theodore Roosevelt rode through. As for the two engineers, their stories close very differently.
James Dramer’s forts did their job and then became relics almost the moment the fighting stopped. Once the war was over, nobody needed dry-stone breastworks with gunports along a peaceful railroad. The forts were robbed for their stone and worn down by weather until most of them disappeared, though the name Fort Dramer still clings to that spot at Spike Buck near Texas Creek, a stubborn reminder that this railroad was once defended with rifles. Dramer had built walls to stop a railroad, and the day the railroad was settled, his walls had no more reason to stand.
Charles Shaylor Smith’s story is the opposite. He built a thing meant to last, and it lasted. He went on building great bridges across the country after the Royal Gorge, over the Missouri, over the Mississippi at Minneapolis, his spans crossing some of the largest rivers in North America. But he did not have long.
C. Shaler Smith died in 1886, only about seven years after he solved the Royal Gorge, still in his forties, worn out early the way so many of these hard-driving engineers were. He did not live to see most of the century of trains that would roll across his hanging bridge. The man who spent his entire life learning to put iron where iron could not go was gone before he turned fifty.
And the bridge stayed. The Royal Gorge War is long over. The silver of Leadville played out and the boom town shrank back into the mountains. Horace Tabor made and lost his fortune.
William Jackson Palmer is gone, and Bat Masterson is gone, and Doc Holliday is gone, and Dramer’s seventeen stone forts are scattered rubble. But the hanging bridge is still down there at the bottom of the gorge, still carrying trains out over the Arkansas River on iron wedged against the granite. Almost a century and a half after a fatherless boy turned engineer figured out that if you cannot stand on the ground, you lean on the mountain instead. We remember the silver kings and the gunfighters and the generals because somebody bothered to write them down.
We almost never remember the men who actually built the thing the gunfighters were fighting over. The ledger gave most of them no name, only a number. But every train that rolls across that hanging bridge is rolling across their work. It is easy to say the American West was won by the men with the guns, the lawmen and the gunfighters and the generals.
The gunfighters decided who would own the Royal Gorge. The nameless men decided whether anyone could ever cross it.
