A History of Summit County

Transportation

CHAPTER 7 TRANSPORTATION T. oday, motorists on Interstate 80 dash past the two-story sand­stone building without giving it a thought. But in the 1860s it was a welcome sight for westbound travelers weary from the jarring stage­coach ride up Silver Creek Canyon. Built in 1862 by William H. Kimball, eldest son of Heber C. Kimball, counselor to Brigham Young, Kimball's Hotel has been a witness to great changes in trans­portation. Standing near the head of the canyon on the Overland Stage route-between today's Silver Creek and Kimball lunction free­way exits-the eleven-room sandstone structure is said to have wel­comed such famous guests as Horace Greeley, Walt Whitman, and Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain). The hotel was renowned for its din­ners of trout, wild duck, sage hen, beef, and mutton. About two decades after its construction, Robert Taylor Burton used the hotel for his headquarters during the construction of the Utah Eastern Railroad. And, when the Lincoln Highway Association chose a route for the first transcontinental highway in 1913, it selected the old Overland Stage route, right past the front door of the old sandstone hotel. Later, during the 1960s, the construction of 121 122 HISTORY OF SUMMIT COUNTY Interstate 80 was almost the end of the line for Kimball's Hotel; but the route was changed and the building was spared. Today, the hotel is one of the few remaining original stations on the Overland Stage route-and may be the oldest intact structure in Summit County.1 It has outlived the stagecoach, the Lincoln Highway, the Utah Eastern Railroad, and the Park City branch of the Union Pacific. It stands with its back to the westbound lanes of Interstate 80, near its junction with U.S. 40, as if indifferent to the current mode of transportation. "This, too, will pass," the building seems to say. Who can say what future mode of transportation will replace Interstate 80? One thing appears certain: If the past 150 years are any indication, whatever it is, it will have an impact on Summit County. Early Trails Captain Francis Bishop, traveling through Echo Canyon on the way to Salt Lake City in 1870, exclaimed of the canyon, "It is one of nature's masterpieces of wild grandeur. Here grand old rocks lift their stately heads, giving weird shapes."2 A natural corridor that has been in use for centuries, the canyon does provide a spectacular entry into Summit County-and into Utah itself. Since long before the arrival of the first European settlers, Echo Canyon has served as a natural funnel for human beings and other creatures heading east and west through the Uinta Mountains, including elk, deer, and buffalo herds. Trapper William Ashley reported that northeastern Utah was "well supplied with buffaloe," and early settlers found buffalo skulls in the canyon, a hint that these animals may have passed through the canyon on their way to or from the shores of the Great Salt Lake.3 However, the buffalo apparently had disappeared from northern Utah by the time the Mormon pioneers arrived in 1847.4 Other game animals remained, however, and early settlers capi­talized on the presence of this ready source of meat, hunting for deer and elk in the canyon. One early settler, Priddy Meeks, recorded in his journal his frequent hunting expeditions in Echo Canyon hunt­ing food for the settlers in Salt Lake Valley.5 Centuries ago, very early Native Americans probably also used the canyon. The journals of trappers and early settlers are sprinkled with references to trails made by Shoshoni Indians and other Native TRANSPORTATION 123 American tribes. Usually, the trappers and pioneers used these same trails. By the early 1840s, emigrant trains in increasing numbers were making their way across the Great Plains and through the Rocky Mountains to California and Oregon. Most followed the Oregon Trail via Fort Bridger and Soda Springs, passing north of the Great Salt Lake to the Humboldt River. The leader of one of those groups in 1842 was Lansford W. Hastings, whose observations became the basis of a book, The Emigrants Guide to Oregon and California. In that book, published in Cincinnati in 1845, Hastings suggested that trav­elers could save time by leaving the Oregon Trail at Fort Bridger and heading southwest, around the south shore of the Great Salt Lake. By 1846, Hastings had begun personally advising groups to take this largely untested route, which followed Echo Canyon to the Weber River and then descended Weber Canyon to present-day Ogden. However, the lower part of Weber Canyon proved so rough for wag­ons that, later in 1846, Hastings advised a group to leave the Weber River near present-day Henefer and cross the Wasatch Mountains via East and Emigration canyons. That group, known as the Donner-Reed party, with great diffi­culty blazed a new trail through present-day Summit, Morgan, and Salt Lake counties. Although their decision to take the "shortcut" ended in disaster as they met early snows in the Sierra Nevada, the route the Donner-Reed party blazed set the pattern for thousands of other emigrants, including the first Mormon pioneers in 1847.6 The Mormon pioneers entered Utah-and Summit County-at the head of Echo Canyon on 13 luly 1847. They entered Weber Canyon near the present community of Echo and, after sending an advance party to scout the lower part of the canyon, decided to fol­low the tracks of the Donner-Reed party across the mountains. While in Echo Canyon, many apparently picked up a mysterious disease that some modern historians believe was Colorado tick fever. After that, the pioneers spread out while traveling down the canyon, per­haps to avoid passing the illness from person to person. Thanks to the trailwork done by their predecessors, the Mormons moved much more quickly than the ill-fated 1846 party. By 22 luly, the advance party had reached the valley; the last wagons, including the one car- 124 HISTORY OF SUMMIT COUNTY Cache Cave in Echo Canyon was a regular resting place for fur traders and early settlers from the 1820s to the 1870s. Its soft sandstone walls still carry the names of more than 135 of these 19th-century travelers. (Patrick Cone) rying ailing Brigham Young, pulled out of Emigration Canyon on 24 July. For about fifteen years, most Mormon immigrants to Great Salt Lake City took the same route through Echo Canyon, moving down the canyon's south side to Cache Cave, then veering to the south and crossing through the Yellow Creek area. By 1860, thousands had passed over this trail on their way west. The rock walls of Echo Canyon evoked fantasy images that became signposts for the wagon trains coming down through the mountains into the Salt Lake Valley. Travelers eager to arrive at their destination looked for prominent rock formations like Castle Rock and Cache Cave to mark their loca­tion. 7 Orson Pratt described Cache Cave in his journal entry for 12 luly 1847. "Here is the mouth of a curious cave. . . . The opening resem­bles very much the doors attached to an outdoor cellar We called it Redden's Cave, a man by that name being one of the first in our company who visited it."8 More than 135 pioneers recorded their names on the walls of Cache Cave, and hundreds of others left TRANSPORTATION 125 behind supplies or treasures, fully intending to return to reclaim their goods. Between 1855 and 1856, t h e Mormons used Cache Cave to store supplies for the Mormon handcart companies coming through the canyon on their way to the Salt Lake Valley. Later, outlaws fre­quently used Cache Cave as a hideout or as a place to store their loot. Charles Wilson and Isaac Potter, b o t h later shot near Coalville, hid stolen grain in Cache Cave during the 1860s.9 At the j u n c t i o n of Echo and Weber canyons, a place known as Wilhelmina Pass, Pulpit Rock stood guard, a familiar image to the Mormons. Echo Canyon itself was also known as the "Valley of Red Forks." Howard W Stansbury, surveying the area for the United States government in 1850, identified it as "Red Fork Canyon" because of the rich w a rm colors of the canyon walls; he called the stream that meandered through the canyon "Echo Creek."10 Ninety-five wagons were met today, containing the advance of the Mormon emigration to the valley of the Salt Lake. Two large flocks of sheep were driven before the train, and geese and turkeys had been conveyed in coops, the whole distance, without apparent harm. One old gander poked his head out of his box and hissed at every passer-by, as if to show that his spirit was still unbroken, not­withstanding his long and uncomfortable confinement. The appearance of this train was good, most of the wagons having from three to five yoke of cattle, and all in fine condition. The wagons swarmed with women and children, and I estimated the train at one thousand head of cattle, one hundred sheep, and five hundred human souls.11 Roads for the Pioneers To the settlers of Salt Lake Valley, the surrounding canyons were gateways to the mountains, with their riches of game and timber. However, early church and civil authorities didn't have the funds to build roads into these canyons; therefore, they began a practice of awarding franchises to private individuals, who would develop the roads and then charge tolls to people using them.12 One of the first franchises went to Parley P. Pratt. In 1848, Pratt had explored east u p Emigration Canyon, down into Big Kanyon (since renamed Parleys Canyon in his honor), over the summit, down 126 HISTORY OF SUMMIT COUNTY In 1997, a group of modern-day "pioneers" celebrated the sesquicentennial of the original Mormon wagon train by following the same route from east­ern Nebraska to northern Utah. (Patrick Cone) TRANSPORTATION 127 into a meadow that became known as Parley's Park, and east as far as the head of Silver Creek Canyon. When he r e t u r n e d to Great Salt Lake City, he told Mormon authorities that "a wagon road may be made in that direction, so as to intersect the present emigrant road in the neighborhood of Bear River, and be much nearer while at the same time it avoids all the mountains and canyons."13 Impressed by Pratt's report, church authorities sent Pratt and two other men back into Parley's Park in luly. But this time, instead of taking Emigration Canyon, they traveled the length of Big Kanyon. Upon reaching Parley's Park, they headed south, along the route now followed by U.S. Highway 40, to the Provo River. They followed the Provo River upstream into the Kamas Valley, then crossed into the Weber River drainage and traveled downstream to the mouth of Echo Canyon. Their r e t u r n trip took t h em to the m o u t h of Silver Creek Canyon. Pratt's journal described the trip through the canyon: Thursday the 6th, passed up the Canyon of Silver Creek and home where we arrived at sundown weary and worn, and some of us without shoes, and nearly without pantaloons. The Canyon hav­ing robbed us of these in a great measure, and of much of our flesh and skin, the first morning of our ride.14 Notwithstanding the rigors of the trip, Pratt was convinced that he had found a superior route for emigrants traveling from Echo Canyon to Great Salt Lake City. Turning that route into a negotiable wagon road was another matter. The lower four or five miles of Big Kanyon, Pratt reported, were "extremely rugged, n a r r ow and brushy."15 In luly 1849, Pratt and a crew began clearing the canyon. They stopped in November for the winter, t h e n resumed work the following March. By summer the road was ready. Pratt announced the grand opening of the new road, which he christened the Golden Pass, in the Deseret News of 29 lune 1850: Travelers between the States and California are respectfully informed that a new road will be opened on and after the 4th of luly, between the Weber River and the Great Salt Lake Valley-dis­tance about 40 miles, avoiding the two great mountains, and most of the Kanyons so troublesome on the old route. The road is some­what rough and unfinished; but is being made better every day.16 128 HISTORY OF SUMMIT COUNTY According to Pratt's reports, he collected about $1,500 in tolls that first season.17 However, emigrants were slow to choose the Golden Pass over the original Mormon Trail. Part of the problem was that Pratt had been unable, or unwilling, to open a road through Silver Creek Canyon. He chose, instead, a path of less resistance through Threemile Canyon, the next canyon to the south. All told, Pratt's route from Great Salt Lake City to the mouth of Echo Canyon was about ten miles longer than the Mormon Trail, according to Albert Carrington, who traveled the route with Captain Howard Stansbury of the U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers in 1850. To reduce that disparity, Carrington urged the building of a road in Silver Creek Canyon. " [A]nd should the new road be worked down Silver Creek, as it ought by all means, if it should continue to be used, it would not probably be over about 4 miles the longest," Carrington estimated.18 Stansbury had come to Utah Territory at the request of the fed­eral government to explore the region of the Great Salt Lake, recon-noiter possible military fort sites, explore routes for roads and transcontinental railroads, and perhaps check on the Mormons. In 1858, another member of the Corps of Topographical Engineers, Captain J.H. Simpson, followed in Stansbury's footsteps but chose to take Silver Creek Canyon rather than the easier route to the south. Riding down the canyon, Simpson concluded that a road could be built through the first mile with relative ease. However, he observed that, for the remaining 5.75 miles, the canyon was "quite narrow, side hills up close to stream which is full of Beaver dams, forcing us along left slope up bank, along an Indian Trail-The route is scarcely admissable for packs, & is entirely out of the question as a wagon route-The labor to make it would be immense, & the greater part of it is rocky."19 It took government intervention to surmount this challenge. In 1860, the territorial government designated the Big Kanyon road a territorial toll road, cancelled the private franchise, and instructed the territorial road commissioner to choose a road from Salt Lake City "by way of Big Kanyon Creek to the Valley of the Weber on the most feasible route to Bridger."20 The legislature allocated $2,000 to fund the improvements, TRANSPORTATION 129 hardly an enormous sum even considering the value of dollars in 1860. But the territorial government had another card to play: the poll tax. First passed in 1852, t h e poll tax demanded that every able-bodied male over eighteen years of age donate ten hours work per year to the improvement of roads or highways or pay $1.50 in lieu of labor. In 1862 the poll tax was amended to demand two days' labor or a three-dollar payment.21 For a time, this poll tax played an impor­tant role in the construction of roads in Summit County.22 In 1860, despite Captain Simpson's warning, crews went to work in earnest on a road through Silver Creek Canyon, an effort that was apparently spurred on by the recent discovery of coal near Chalk Creek.23 Workers installed a toll gate about five miles up the canyon from where the town of Wanship now stands, giving rise to the name Toll Gate Canyon.24 When the road was finished, emigrants were apparently glad to pay the charge of one dollar per wagon; and by 1862 the Parleys Canyon-Silver Creek route was in general use.25 However, the route could be called a road by only the most lib­eral of definitions. In April 1862, Col. Robert Taylor Burton of the Utah militia, assigned to guard an eastbound passenger/mail ship­ment from Indian attacks, described the road between Parley's Park and Echo: At 5 o'clock (we) broke camp and traveled until ten o'clock and by very hard labor in lifting waggons out of the snow, mules out of the mud, succeeded in making 6 miles and camped. At the head of Silver Creek Kanyon were three large land slides that made the road almost impassable. The first one we came to we got round it very well by taking the bed of the creek for a short distance. The other two had to be passed over which, after much labor, was accomplished without any serious accidents. . . . At half past 12 rolled out again and traveled until half after 5 and camped 1/2 mile up Echo. Found the road down Weber to be very good but Silver Creek Kanyon could not be worse and got over it at all.26 The territorial government relied on private enterprise to build many of the bridges necessary where wagon roads and rivers inter­sected. In 1865, the Summit County Court (Commission) granted Henry W. Brizee and Henry S. Alexander a franchise to b u i l d a 130 HISTORY OF SUMMIT COUNTY bridge, or bridges, across the Weber River near Wanship and autho­rized them to charge a toll (one dollar for a vehicle drawn by animal; two dollars for a vehicle drawn by two animals, etc.). In Parley's Park, a similar franchise went to William H. Kimball.27 As roads improved, stage stops sprang up along the route. The first in Summit County was the Weber Stage Station, built at the mouth of Echo Canyon in 1854, when most traffic was still using the old route through East and Emigration canyons. In 1857-58, the U.S. Congress funded the Overland Mail route, which in 1860 ran through Echo Canyon up the Weber River to Rockport and then through Three Mile Canyon. By the next year, the Silver Creek route was opened; and about 1862 William Henry Kimball built his sand­stone hotel and stage stop on his ranch at the head of Silver Creek Canyon. Russell, Majors and Waddell, one of the companies that ran a stage line bringing mail and passengers from Leavenworth, Kansas, to Salt Lake City, employed local people to operate the Utah section of the line, including driving the mule-drawn mail coaches. At the same time, the fledgling communications industry was employing workers to erect telegraph lines. The Pony Express also employed local men as riders and station managers during its eighteen-month operation between 3 April 1860 and 24 October 1861. The route went down Echo Canyon, along the Weber River to Henefer, and up Big Mountain, following the Mormon Trail. Riders received $125 to $150 per month before the operation went bankrupt. However, the influence of the Pony Expess was enduring. Besides catching the imagination of the American public, the Pony Express demonstrated that the central overland route was a fast and efficient link between east and west. With the Civil War raging, this route took much of the traffic which would have otherwise used the southern Butterfield route.28 Roads in general-and the Salt Lake City to Wanship road in particular-continued to be a high priority of the territorial govern­ment between 1860 and 1870. Roughly $224,000 went to roads between 1860 and 1870, about 56 percent of all government appro­priations. And, of that amount, as much as $50,000 went to the Salt Lake City-to-Wanship road.29 Even with so many resources poured into it, the road continued to be a problem. "That road has never TRANSPORTATION 131 been so bad since the settlement of the Territory," Samuel W. Richards told his brother Franklin in a letter in December 1866. "Teams double to come down the summit through the mud, and the new toll road through Parley's Park, they say, has no bottom"30 "The road from this city, through Parley's Park to the Weber river, is the avenue through which passes the greater portions of the imports for the Territory," Governor Charles Durkee told the Utah Territorial Assembly on 10 December 1866. "The road is an extremely difficult one, and, although much labor has been expended up on it, it is still, for much of the year, almost impassable. The action . . . under the law passed at your last session, has failed to meet the requirements of the public, and some further legislation would seem desirable, either in the way of additional appropriations, or a revision of the law."31 The following lanuary, the assembly voted to double the tolls that had been specified a year earlier. The road superintendent also tapped an additional source of cheap labor by using prisoners from the ter­ritorial penitentiary to repair the road.32 Then, at the end of the decade, something happened which took the Salt Lake to Wanship road out of the headlines. The transcontinental railroad arrived in Utah. The Golden Years of the Railroad In lanuary 1869, the westbound Union Pacific transcontinental railroad forged a path down Echo Canyon en route to its historic ren­dezvous with the Central Pacific Railroad at Promontory Summit. However, rather than follow the traditional wagon route through Wanship and Parley's Park, the Union Pacific track continued down Weber Canyon, past Henefer and Morgan, to Ogden, and then around the north shore of the Great Salt Lake. The arrival of the railroad had an immediate impact on Summit County and Utah Territory. For years the construction of a transcon­tinental railroad through the territory had been discussed. With the passage of the Pacific Railroad Act by Congress in 1862, a railroad through Utah was assured. For Summit County, the railroad pro­vided improved means of shipping locally mined coal to the Great 132 HISTORY OF SUMMIT COUNTY Salt Lake Valley. It also provided paying jobs for many of the county's settlers. Indirectly, the transcontinental railroad prompted Brigham Young to promote a stronger planned social and economic system known as the cooperative movement, or United Order. The intent was to have a well-organized, centrally planned, self-sufficient econ­omy, as independent of the nation's market economy as possible. By the mid-1870s, more than two hundred united orders were func­tioning, including those established in Summit County. The construction of the railroad and the creation of railroad towns such as Corinne, Utah, together with the expansion of mining in Salt Lake, Tooele, and western Summit counties attracted more non-Mormons to Utah and prompted the establishment of a rival political party in the territory, the Liberal party. Laying track through Echo and Weber canyons presented formi­dable engineering and construction obstacles. In fact, this stretch was more difficult to build than any other faced by the Union Pacific Railroad Company. The company also was competing against the Central Pacific Railroad Company, which was pushing east from Sacramento, to lay the most track. The Union Pacific needed workers; the settlers of the territory needed hard cash. So, in May 1868, the company signed a $2,125,000 construction contract with the Mormon church. Brigham Young, act­ing on behalf of the church, agreed to do all the grading, tunneling, and bridge construction from the head of Echo Canyon through Weber Canyon to the the north shore of the Great Salt Lake, a dis­tance of about 150 miles. Each of the 5,000 Mormon workers was to be paid two dollars a day. Work was to be completed by early November 1868.33 A non-Mormon construction company, loseph F. Nounan and Company, also received a construction contract to grade fifty miles between the head of Echo Canyon and Bridger, Wyoming. During the summer of 1868, several thousand workers from the territory-including many from Summit County-and several hun­dred teams and wagons worked in Echo and Weber canyons, making cuts through the mountains, filling small canyons, building bridges, and digging tunnels. "Most of the Coalville men are at work on the railroad," a Deseret News correspondent wrote on 29 September TRANSPORTATION 133 1868.34 Work, particularly on the tunnels and bridges, continued into the winter months. Robert Bodily, who lived in Weber and Davis counties in the late 1860s, later recalled working on the railroad in Summit County: My Father bought 3 pairs of mules myself and one of the younger boys took and payed for them so Father gave one pair of them to me in the spring of 1868 the Union Pacific Railroad from the East and the Central Pacific from the west were getting close to us we put in the crop and raised a good crop and after the crop was gath­ered I took my mules and wagon and worked on the Union Pacific Railroad at the upper end of Weber Valley all winter it sure was a terrible cold place I hauled rouck down to Devils Gate and some-thimes it would be hauling lumber from the saw mill some time I was hauling anything that was landed at the mouth of Echo Canyon as that was the terminus at that time for the Chief Engineer Wm. Bates. Groceries and all manner of stuff I worked stady until the 20th day of lanuary i quit and went home having previously aranged to get married in Feb. I had cleared 600 dol­lars. 35 In luly 1868, t h e Deseret News reported that there were "some forty-five" construction camps in Echo Canyon. Some of the camps were n a m e d for subcontractors such as P.P. P r a t t , B. Driggs, and Bishop Hickenlooper. Other names revealed the origin of the work­ers; for example, the "Coalville boys," "A Daniels', Wanship," and "Coalville and Chalk Creek."36 During the railroad construction, Echo City enjoyed a brief but intense boom. Even after the railroad was completed, the town was an i m p o r t a n t location on t h e main line. Brigham Young quickly involved Echo in a plan to supply the Wasatch Front with coal from t h e canyons a r o u n d Coalville. Young decided that the Mormon church should facilitate the building of a five-mile narrow-gauge rail­road from Coalville to the Union Pacific line at Echo. From there, the Union Pacific would carry Summit County coal to Ogden. Under Young's direction, the Coalville and Echo Railroad Company was formed in the fall of 1869. The people of Summit County agreed to prepare the roadbed and supply the ties; a church-owned railroad company struck a deal w i t h the Union Pacific to 134 HISTORY OF SUMMIT COUNTY A covered wagon in Echo Canyon, early 1900s. The smoke is coming from a train on the right side of the photograph. (Brigham Young University, George Beard collection) acquire enough rails and rolling stock (cars and engines) to supply the new spur line.37 An issue of $250,000 in stock was offered. Much of that was promised to the people who worked on the project, some was offered for sale, and the rest would go to the church as payment for the rails and rolling stock.38 Work began in late October under the director of Coalville LDS bishop W W Cluff. By the middle of lanuary, the men had virtually completed the roadbed preparation, and so had held up their end of the bargain.39 However, the Union Pacific didn't; it failed to live u p to its agreement to provide iron for the tracks and work had to be sus­pended. Mormon authorities decided not to look elsewhere for the rails and rolling stock because competition to supply coal to the ter­ritory was getting tougher. Large deposits of higher-quality coal had been found on Union Pacific land near Rock Springs, Wyoming. The railroad had only to load it into its own cars for direct shipment to Ogden. As a result, work on the spur line came to a halt, leaving Cluff's Coalville crew without compensation for their work. Shortly TRANSPORTATION 135 afterwards, Cluff left for a church mission to Scandinavia. Coalville - area coal continued to travel by wagon-north to the Union Pacific line at Echo or down Parleys Canyon to Salt Lake City."40 The Union Pacific held most of the power in the competitive transportation and coal markets. And, in the eyes of Utah citizens, the UP exploited its position, manipulating its freight prices to pre­vent the Coalville mines from competing with the company's own mines. In October 1871 a letter to the Ogden function complained: "I want to know, and the people want to know the reason why they will ship coal from Rock Springs, and from Evanston for less than they will from Echo; and why they ship coal consigned to Salt Lake, for $18 to $20 per car, and charge $31 for coal consigned to Ogden."41 At around this same time, ore was starting to roll out of the silver mines at the southern end of Parley's Park. The mining companies were in desperate need of cheap transportation to haul the ore to mills in the Salt Lake City area. Thus, in 1871, plans for a local rail­road were resurrected. Joseph A. Young, son of Brigham Young, and several other Mormon businessmen formed the Summit County Railroad Company. W.W. Cluff, who was back from Scandinavia, agreed to return to the project as superintendent.42 This time the plan was more ambitious: the track would extend south from Echo through Coalville to Wanship, up Silver Creek Canyon, and on to the Parley's Park mines.43 The company acquired the old Coalville-Echo roadbed through an exchange of stock, and again recruited local citizens as laborers. By mid-June 1873 the track was complete as far as Coalville, a 2.5- mile spur had been built to reach the mines in Chalk Creek, and coal was moving from the mines to Echo.44 However, the Union Pacific still controlled the track between Echo and Ogden, and in June 1874 it increased the rate it charged to carry coal between those two points from $1.50 to $3.76 per ton. It took howls of protest from Wasatch Front citizens before the company relented, reducing the rate to $1.75.45 Those howls also encouraged two separate groups to make plans to break the Union Pacific monopoly by completing the railroad link from Salt Lake City to Coalville via Parleys Canyon and the Park City Mining District. Both filed incorporation papers in lune 1874. The 136 HISTORY OF SUMMIT COUNTY stockholders of one were primarily Mormon businessmen; the back­ers of the other railroad were primarily non-Mormons. The Mormon group was composed of George W. Thatcher, labez G. Sutherland, H i r um B. Clawson, George C. Bates, Heber P. Kimball, John N. Pike, Enoch Reese, William Clayton, H i r um B. Clawson Jr. a n d Nicholas Groesbeck. The gentile group included Hugh White, C .W Scofield, B.W. Morgan, William Welles, John W. Kerr, B.M. DuRell, Warren Hussey, Joab Lawrence, George M. Scott, Frank Fuller a n d J.M. Burkett.46 There appeared to be strong competition between the two groups. Neither group succeeded. The Mormon-owned enterprise appar­ently collapsed from the lack of capital, and the Salt Lake Tribune accused Brigham Young of interceding to prevent the non-Mormon company from building its line: "Had they not been interrupted by the Prophetic fraud, our citizens would have received coal at $5 per ton this winter, delivered at their doors."47 In February 1876 t h e Union Pacific again aroused the anger of Coalville residents by cutting off the supply of cars needed to haul coal from Echo to Ogden, t h u s forcing huge layoffs at t h e mines. "About two t h i r d s of t h e people of our city are t h r o w n out of employment, as the U.P.R.R. will not let us have any more cars to take away our coal," a Coalville resident wrote in a letter to the editor of the Deseret News. "We all feel indignant at this act on their part, but can find no remedy, only in b u i l d i n g a r a i l r o ad t h r o u g h the Park from here to Salt Lake City."48 Although this crisis ended when the Union Pacific relented a few days later and resupplied railcars to the mines, the cry for an inde­pendent railroad linking Coalville directly with Salt Lake City went up again in November when the Union Pacific once more placed lim­its o n the number of cars it would provide to move coal out of Echo. "It is not merely the difference of one, two or three dollars more in the price of a t o n of coal, but it is to a very great extent a question of how our bread and dinner shall come, and a nearly total loss to us of the hundreds of thousands of dollars we have expended in the open­ing u p of the mines," a Coalville citizen explained in an eloquent let­ter to the editor of the Deseret News. "It affects our homes, that have TRANSPORTATION 137 Men working in the coal chutes, Echo, early 1900s. The man on the left is Alfred R. lones. The man on the right is his brother, lohn S. lones. (Marguerite Wright) cost us so many years of hard labor to make. In fact it is everything, bot h socially and politically, with us."49 Then, as the year came to a close, the Salt Lake Tribune announced that the Union Pacific had acquired Brigham Young's 138 HISTORY OF SUMMIT COUNTY interest in the Summit County Railroad and bought the Mormon church-owned coal mines at Chalk Creek. According to the newspa­per: "The price paid was $30,000, which gives the Union Pacific the controlling interest in the road. This completes the monopoly which the people of Coalville have been struggling to avoid, and the beauty of it is, the final blow was dealt the little community on the Weber by their own Prophet."50 Having acquired the Summit County Railroad, the Union Pacific then coerced the area's independent mine owners into signing a con­tract by threatening to close the railroad. Under terms of that con­tract, the Union Pacific agreed to buy all the coal produced by the mines, provided that the mine owners agreed not to sell coal to any­one else. The contract also allowed the Union Pacific to further reduce coal shipments from the area. By July 1878 the independent mines were producing only about fifty tons of coal a week.51 Meanwhile, there was still no track south of Coalville, and ore from the silver mines at Park City continued to travel the time-tested way, via horse and wagon. As frustration grew, so did the call for a locally owned alternative to the Union Pacific, one that would link Coalville, Park City, and Salt Lake City. In December 1879 a group of Park City mine operators and Mormon businessmen joined forces to form the Utah Eastern Railroad. The plan was to build a narrow-gauge line from Salt Lake City to Park City and Coalville.52 In a move designed to head off a possible takeover by the Union Pacific, the stockholders decided to elect three trustees and assign them voting power over a majority of the stock for fifteen years, whether or not the stock was sold in the meantime.53 With the backing of Mormon leaders and the Salt Lake City newspapers, the Utah Eastern Railroad Company sold enough stock to begin grading the roadbed between Wanship and Coalville in May 1880. But the Union Pacific, unwilling to concede the Park City mar­ket to the new railroad, announced plans to build its own spur line by extending the tracks of the Summit County Railroad, which it controlled. About a month later, it too started preparing a roadbed south out of Coalville to Park City.54 During the summer of 1880, construction crews raced side by side through Wanship and up Silver Creek Canyon, battling each TRANSPORTATION 139 other and the calendar. However, Utah Eastern officials soon ran into a snag. They hadn't raised enough money through the sale of stock to buy sufficient rails and rolling stock. The Ontario Mining Company came to the rescue, advancing the Utah Eastern $186,000 in the form of a loan secured by mortgage bonds.55 That transaction eventually came back to haunt the Utah Eastern; however, in the short term, it allowed officials to buy rails, two engines, and ten cars from a defunct Nevada railroad company. The delays meant that the first Utah Eastern track wasn't laid until about 4 November; the first winter storm hit five days later. Crews had to clear the grade with shovels before they could lay the track. Helping supervise that portion of the project was Robert T. Burton, the same man who had described the dismal conditions on the wagon road in Silver Creek Canyon eighteen years earlier. Burton's journals tell of equally miserable conditions during the con­struction of the railroad: blowing and drifting snow and bitter cold. "Snowing and blowing hard but still continue work," said one entry. "No train through, blocked in snow," recorded another.56 Nevertheless, crews managed to lay rails past Kimball's Hotel and then turned southward toward Park City. They reached the city lim­its on 11 December 1880, a few hours ahead of their Union Pacific counterparts.57 "In honor of first getting into Park City precinct, a number of the Parkites went down and set up the beer for the Utah Eastern boys, and gave three cheers for the little road," the Salt Lake Daily Herald reported. Coal started moving into town the following day.58 Several stories in the Salt Lake City newspapers led local residents to believe that the Utah Eastern would be extending its line down Parleys Canyon in the spring. And, in fact, the Park Record reported in July 1881 that two hundred men were working in Parleys Canyon, preparing a grade for the line.59 But, much to the dismay of some Utah Eastern stockholders, laying track to Salt Lake City didn't seem to be a high priority. The Salt Lake Herald wrote: Much has been said of late in our local papers about new lines of railroads being put through this season in different parts of the ter­ritory, but the Utah Eastern, in which the inhabitants of Salt Lake 140 HISTORY OF SUMMIT COUNTY City and County, in particular, are most interested, is seldom men­tioned, and no particular effort seems to be even talked about, much less adopted, to bring that road from Kimball's to this city, a distance of twenty-five miles, and which, if completed, would give us a direct communication with three of the most reliable coal mines in Coalville.60 The little Utah Eastern Railroad held its own against the Union Pacific for almost three years. Much of the Utah Eastern's revenue came from a contract with the Ontario Mine, which burned coal to r u n its mill a n d the p u m p s used to remove water from the mines. However, t h e line to Salt Lake City r e m a i n e d unfinished beyond Kimball Junction; coal destined for the city had to be transferred to horse-drawn wagons for the remaining twenty-five miles of the trip. Then, in the summer of 1883, rumors began to circulate that the Union Pacific was trying to acquire the little local line. Within a few months, those rumors had become fact. It t u r n e d out that, in order to obtain the $186,000 needed to buy rails and rolling stock, R.C. Chambers, superintendent of the Ontario Mine, had quietly trans­ferred 2,232 shares of Utah Eastern " b o n u s " stock to the San Francisco firm of Haggin and Tevis. The transaction, apparently han­dled without the knowledge of the three trustees, had given Haggin and Tevis a controlling interest in the railroad. In the fall of 1883 the Union Pacific secretly bought those shares and, at the Utah Eastern stockholders meeting on 19 November 1883, elected its own board of directors. By t h e end of the year, the new directors had transferred t h e lucrative mine traffic to its own line a n d shut down the Utah Eastern Railroad. Some stockholders, many of w h om were Mormon church lead­ers, planned a lawsuit to challenge the Union Pacific's right to vote the bonus stock. However, at t h e same time, Utah Mormons found their attention diverted by another issue: t h e drive by the federal gov­ernment to stamp out polygamy. The suit was never pursued.61 For another three years, t h e Utah Eastern's rails and rolling stock were left to rust. Then, in February 1887, the remaining assets were sold at auction for $25,000. The only bidder was a representative of the Union Pacific. "Such is the fate of the Utah Eastern, a road built for purposes beneficial to the community in good faith, but the big TRANSPORTATION 141 During the steam-train era, Echo had a succession of coal chutes. The last ones were torn down in 1956 following the switch from coal to diesel fuel. (Summit County Historical Society) fish, the U.P., finally gobbled it up," t h e Park Record eulogized.62 By the end of the year, the Utah Eastern tracks were gone. However, the Union Pacific's monopoly in Summit County was short-lived. By the fall of 1888, work had begun on a narrow-gauge line, t h e Salt Lake & Eastern Railway, from Salt Lake City u p Parleys Canyon. The president of the new rail line was l o h n W. Young, another son of Brigham Young. In his search for financial backers, Young was put in t o u c h with a New York businessman of Spanish heritage, one E. Gorgorza, who apparently helped negotiate a $100,000 loan to help finance the railroad. In a letter dated 12 October 1889, Young expressed his appreciation. "I shall be most happy to place you in the Directory of the road as soon as possible," he wrote, "and the best station between Salt Lake and Park City will be called Gorgorza." Thus, after the line was built, a tiny locomotive refueling station on the eastern side of the summit became known as Gorgorza.63 By t h e time the new rail line reached Park City in April 1890, it 142 HISTORY OF SUMMIT COUNTY had become p a r t of t h e reorganized Utah Central Railway. Plans called for the line to extend south to Heber and east over Wolf Creek Pass into the Uinta Basin. Park City residents were delighted. Besides giving the Union Pacific some competition, the Salt Lake & Eastern Railroad cut passenger travel time to Salt Lake City in half-from four hours to two. It also sparked a brief passenger rate war between the two railroads. But, in spite of the enthusiasm in Park City, the new line struggled to make money. Within a few months it was hav­ing t r o u b l e making its payroll.64 In 1901, an i n d u s t r y analyst explained the financial woes of the Salt Lake & Eastern: It has proven an exceeding difficult and expensive line to operate, the projectors seeming to place but little value on a road built for economical operation. Besides the excessive grades, there has always been much expense in contending with the deep snows every winter. It never was a profitable line, and in 1893 went into the hands of a receiver.65 Early in 1898 t h e line became part of the Rio Grande Western Railway. The new owners managed to boost revenues, which prompted t h em to convert the line to standard gauge. Crews began work in December 1899 and finished the following July. The job involved more than simply widening the rails. In some sections on the western side of the summit, grades on the narrow-gauge railroad bed exceeded 6 percent, far too steep for standard-gauge locomotives. Engineers were forced to choose a longer, more gradual route, with a maximum grade of 4 percent. To span gulches and creekbeds, they built three new trestles between 248 and 300 feet long. At the sum­mit, t h e y carved a 1,116-foot t u n n e l t h r o u g h the m o u n t a i n , thus reducing the climb by 106 feet.66 I n 1908, t h e Rio Grande Western became t h e Denver &; Rio Grande Railroad, and the local spur became its Park City branch. For the next thirty-eight years it competed against the Union Pacific's Park City b r a n c h for passengers a n d for the p r o d u c t s of Summit County's mines and forests. The Arrival of the Automobile If the railroads could be said to have relegated wagon roads to the back seat in Utah in the 1870s, t h en certainly the rise in the popular- TRANSPORTATION 143 ity of the automobile returned the favor. The arrival of the automo­bile also forced state and local governments to place a higher priority on the maintenance of the bumpy old wagon roads. As early as 1908, Utah vehicle owners were banding together in a call for better roads. "Good roads in Utah from now on are to be demanded with a vigor heretofore little known," said the Deseret News on 9 luly 1908. "Instead of just an oratorial sentiment, every county commissioner is to have filed before him a map showing exactly where the bad bumps are and the deep chuck holes, and the poorly built stretches of highway with a boulder bottom and a cobblestone top."67 In 1909, the Utah Legislature passed a series of laws that created a state road system, created a county road commissioner in each county, and authorized county commissioners to create special dis­tricts to improve state and county roads.68 Nevertheless, auto owners and local service clubs took an active role in road construction and maintenance well into the next decade. In May 1913, members of the Automobile Club and the Salt Lake County Commission took a trip up Parleys Canyon to study a route for a new road.69 In July of that year, a national organization, the Lincoln Highway Association, was formed in Detroit to plan a route for the first transcontinental highway.70 By September, the group had announced its choice of a route. West of the Mississippi it would follow the Overland Trail route, entering Summit Count at the mouth of Echo Canyon and then taking the old wagon route through Silver Creek Canyon and Parleys Canyon to Salt Lake City.71 In Utah, service clubs and business groups took up the cry, pledging manpower to upgrade the route and plotting ways to entice travelers into their commu­nities. The Park City Commercial Club recognized the potential of hav­ing a major automobile route through the county. "A move toward getting transcontinental tourists on the Lincoln highway to come by way of this great camp, was taken at the regular meeting of the Park City Commercial club Tuesday evening, the idea being to have a large sign board built at the mouth of Echo canyon setting forth the great saving in distance and the advantages of this route," the Park Record reported. "In connection with this, W.D. Lewis suggested that some­thing should be done to protect the road in Silver Creek canyon from 144 HISTORY OF SUMMIT COUNTY the damage done by the numerous sheep herds passing through dur­ing the season."72 (Until the 1950s, Parleys and Silver Creek canyons were important sheep driveways, linking winter grazing grounds in the west desert with the summer grounds in the Uinta and Wasatch mountains.) In April 1915, an army of about 1,000 volunteers under the direc­tion of the Rotary Club's good roads committee met in Salt Lake City, then spread out east and west "to do valiant battle against hills, hol­lows, stones and other impediments in t h e way of travel over the Lincoln highway in Summit, Salt Lake a n d Tooele counties."73 In August 1915, the following sign was erected at the point where the road to Park City intersected the Lincoln Highway: ONLY SEVEN MILES TO PARK CITY, UTAH'S GREATEST SIL­VER- LEAD MINING CAMP. ELEVATION, 7,000 FEET. POPU­LATION 4,500. TOTAL MINERAL PRODUCTION $150,000,000. DIVIDENDS PAID TO STOCKHOLDERS OVER $45,000,000. SEE THE WONDERFUL MINES, BIG PRODUCTION MILLS AND A MODERN CITY.74 Its first major ski resort was still almost fifty years away, but Park City was already wooing tourists. Of course, designating a r o a d as a t r a n s c o n t i n e n t a l highway d i d n ' t magically t r a n s f o rm it i n t o h i g h - s p e e d pavement. It t o ok a n o t h e r twelve years before the first asphalt was applied to the Lincoln Highway in Summit County. The highway was paved in sec­tions over a six-year period between 1927 and 1932. During this time, the construction of the Echo D am also required in 1929 the recon­struction of the Lincoln Highway east of the new reservoir between Echo and Coalville. Railroad Use Declines As automotive use increased, t h e railroads started to feel the pinch. In lune 1925, t h e Union Pacific asked the Utah Public Utilities Commission for permission to discontinue daily passenger service between Coalville and Echo. One scheduled train, No. 223, carried only one passenger during the twelve months from 1 April 1924 to 1 April 1925, according to the Union Pacific. The other train, No. 224, earned only $404 by carrying passengers that year. The railroad told TRANSPORTATION 145 the commission that practically everybody who lived along the line was traveling by automobile.75 The commission granted the request, noting that the railroad was spending almost $30,000 a year for rev­enues of about $400. If people still wanted to ride the t r a i n , they could take the "mixed" (passenger and freight) trains r u n n i ng between Echo and Park City. Two years later, the Denver & Rio Grande Western received per­mission to combine its daily passenger and freight service into one daily t r a i n between Salt Lake City and Park City.76 As a regular service, passenger trains in Summit County were on their way out. But as a novelty they still h a d their place, as t h e Salt Lake Junior Chamber of Commerce discovered on a Sunday morning in February 1936: Nearly 500 enthusiastic outdoor sportsmen carrying all makes and manner of skis and equipment were on hand by 8:30 A.M. yester­day, when the second of two sections of Salt Lake's first snow train pulled out of the [Denver 8c Rio Grande Western] station. . . . That the train took nearly four hours to cover the few miles of super steep grade between Salt Lake and the site of the day's outing in Deer Valley was rather appreciated than deplored by the sports­men, for the sport on the train was worth the price of the outing in itself. . . . The Salt Lake contingent was joined by 200 additional skiers from Park City at the Deer Valley destination and the steep hillside suddenly looked as though a forest had sprung up by magic, as 700 skiers dotted its surface. . . . The Junior Chamber of Commerce has planned to make the snow train an annual affair, but so hearty was the response to the initial effort that it is highly possible that the excursion may be repeated one or many times this winter.77 Thus began a thirty-six-year tradition of the "Snow Trains." After the Parleys Canyon track was abandoned in 1946, the Snow Trains were routed through Ogden and Weber Canyon; however, the pas­sengers made the most of the extra time en route. In fact, the travel part became so popular that, in the mid-1960s, those who wanted to party but not ski organized a t r a in of their own-the Hootspa train from Salt Lake City to Park City. In 1989, Robert Woody, Salt Lake Tribune business editor, recalled: 146 HISTORY OF SUMMIT COUNTY Law allowed on the rails what the state of Utah did not allow on the ground, liquor by the drink. Thus, portable bars were scat­tered here and there along the length of the train. . . . In the bag­gage car, a rock band beat out Beatles and Rolling Stones tunes. Thus, by the time the train was making languid passage through Coalville, it was [a] moving, throbbing, pulsating combi­nation of Mardi Gras and Saturnalia. In Park City, t h e m o b was disgorged for an evening on a town just beginning to savor good times after so many years of b a d times.78 The last Hootspa/Snow Train rolled into Park City in February 1971. But there are some, like Woody, who still remember t h em with fondness. "Certainly, the new generation of Park City-circumspect and serious-would not happily entertain the prospect of the return of Hootspa," he wrote. "But those who took a ticket to ride can only chuckle."79 Not only did the numbers of railroad passengers decline, so also did the demand for freight service. By 1946, traffic on the Parleys Canyon line h a d dwindled to about one t r a i n a week; trucks were handling much of the freight that once traveled by rail. And the once-prosperous Park City mines were producing only a fraction of the ore that they once had. That year, t h e Denver 8c Rio Grande Western asked the Interstate Commerce Commission for permisson to aban­don the line. The commission found that the chief freight handled over [the] Park City branch is ore, outbound and coal inbound for Park City. The decline in the volume of ore shipments according to testimony at the hearing likely is to continue. As for inbound coal it can be handled by the Union Pacific or by trucks.80 In approving the railroad's request, the commission noted that the a b a n d o n m e n t would pave the way for another project in Parleys Canyon-the proposed widening of the old Lincoln Highway, U.S. 40. Trimming the Park City Branch Meanwhile, the fortunes of the Echo and Park City Railway, reor­ganized as the Park City branch of the Union Pacific, also reflected the falling fortunes of its major customers, the mines. Like the prun- TRANSPORTATION 147 "%tmm- - Union Pacific's engine no. 1178, shown here near Echo about 1900, served as a "switcher" between the main line and spur lines to the cement plant at Devil's Slide and the mines at Park City, Coalville and Grass Creek. (Summit County Historical Society) ing of a tree, the Union Pacific began to trim the ends of the branch. In 1941 the company abandoned the 5.6-mile Grass Creek spur, built in 1895-96 to carry coal from the Grass Creek area north of Coalville.81 In 1948 it abandoned the 2.6-mile spur that ran along Chalk Creek to the Weber mines.82 In 1976 it asked the Interstate Commerce Commission for permission to abandon a 1.1-mile spur running east of Park Avenue to the historic depot at the bottom of Main Street.83 And in 1977 it partially abandoned the Ontario branch, built in 1923 to take ore from the Ontario Mine drain tunnel at Keetley in Wasatch County.84 With local passenger service long gone and the spur lines aban­doned, the community depots became obsolete. However, the Union Pacific gave the Echo and Keetley depots second lives by donating them to senior citizen organizations in Coalville and Park City.85 The 1886-era Park City depot, after being heavily damaged in a 1985 fire, was restored and reopened as a restaurant.86 By the mid-1980s, the last Park City silver mine had suspended production and most other local cargo was moving by truck.87 The 148 HISTORY OF SUMMIT COUNTY Engineer Bob Woods and his son, Ed, in front of one of the Union Pacific's old steam-powered workhorses. (Summit County Historical Society) local railroad's last major customer was Chevron Chemical Corporation, which used what remained of the Ontario branch to ship p h o s p h a t e from a processing plant and loading s t a t i o n in TRANSPORTATION 149 In the early 1950s, diesel-powered engines replaced steam engines. (Summit County Historical Society) Wasatch County, just south of the Summit County line. Then, in July 1986, Chevron closed the loading station, marking an end to regular service on the line. Abandonment was inevitable.88 150 HISTORY OF SUMMIT COUNTY During a 106-year span, Echo had three train depots. The third one, pic­tured here in the 1960s, served from 1913 until 1975, when it was closed and moved to Coalville to become the new senior citizens' center. Greek immi­grant Mike Tsoukatos (left foreground) maintained a small park in front of the depot as part of his job for the Union Pacific Railroad. (Michael Richins) A group of officials from Summit and Wasatch counties con­tacted the Union Pacific about acquiring the line for a possible scenic t o u r i s t t r a i n . Variations of t h a t plan c o n t i n u e d to circulate for another two years. However, the negotiations stalled, perhaps because of Union Pacific's asking price, reported to be $11 million.89 In December 1988, Union Pacific asked the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) for permission to abandon what was left of the the line: t h e 27.6-mile Park City branch between Echo and Park City and the remaining 2.5 miles of the Ontario branch serving the phos­phate loading station in Wasatch County. In its arguments, the com­pany noted that the economy of the area depended on recreation and small business rather than on activities that typically use rail service, such as heavy industry and agriculture.90 However, r a t h e r t h a n a b a n d o n the right-of-way entirely, the Union Pacific agreed to an arrangement through which the old rail TRANSPORTATION 151 bed could be converted into a public trail. The process, known as rail banking, was authorized by Congress in 1983 through an amend­ment to the National Trails System Act. Rail banking allowed unused rail beds to be turned into public trails, with the understanding that they could be converted back to transportation corridors if the need arose.91 Historic Union Pacific Rail Trail Under the leadership of Myles Rademan, Park City public affairs director, an agreement was hammered out between the Union Pacific, the Utah Division of Parks and Recreation, and A 8c K Railroad Materials Inc., a Salt Lake City-based salvage company that had pur­chased the spur line for the ties and rails.92 The salvage company agreed to donate the right-of-way to the state after the rails and ties had been removed, and the state agreed to administer it as a public trail. However, the switch from a railroad right-of-way to a recre­ational trail was easier said than done. "What became apparent to us early on was it's a much more difficult process than we originally assumed," Rademan said in a 1989 television interview. "There's no doubt in my mind now, unless you are a Herculean personality, that you could not possibly do this alone, that it takes really a multi-dis­ciplinary team."93 Among those involved were county commission­ers, attorneys, and U.S. senators, along with state and local officials. In June 1989, crews from A & K Railroad Materials started to dis­mantle the rails, reversing the process begun by other crews more than a century before. "As they were ripping up the tracks and the ties, there were people literally running right behind where they were doing it," Rademan said in 1989. "I mean, the demand is there already." 94 The job of upgrading the bridges went to the Flame In Goes, a group of state prisoners better known for their fire-fighting activities. The 112th Engineering Company of the Utah National Guard performed the grading and earth work, and soil to cover heavy metals along the route was donated by the Bureau of Reclamation, which was building the lordanelle Reservoir in Wasatch County a few miles to the south.95 On 3 October 1992, the right-of-way was offi- 152 HISTORY OF SUMMIT COUNTY cially dedicated as a public trail for cyclists, equestrians, pedestrians, and cross-country skiers. As park facilities are developed around the lordanelle Reservoir, officials and citizens hope to see the rail-trail become part of a multi-county trail network. In lanuary 1994, the Department of Parks and Recreation sponsored a public meeting in Wasatch County to discuss the options. Among those in attendance was Steve Carpenter, man­ager of Jordanelle State Park. According to a newspaper reporter: Carpenter said the real value of Jordanelle is its potential for con­necting Rail-Trail, Deer Creek, Wasatch Mountain and other state parks in a long-distance network offering more opportunities for the recreationist. He said the proposed trail system is expected to serve multiple uses, including hiking, biking, cross country skiing and equestrian use.96 The Postwar Highways As the rails disappeared, highways grew to handle the increased automobile traffic. In the early 1940s, a six-mile stretch of U.S. 40 between Parleys Summit and Kimball lunction was expanded to four lanes.97 Among the casualties of that project was the Well Come Inn, a gathering place for skiers and others r u n by the Rasmussen family near the famed Ecker Hill ski jump. Despite the improvements to U.S. 40 in Summit County, little was done to improve the narrow, winding road in Parleys Canyon. Consequently, ore was shipped from Park City to the smelters in the Salt Lake Valley by t r u c k through Emigration Canyon. At the same time, residents at the n o r t h e r n end of Summit County were feeling the disruption caused by another highway construction project. The state h a d a n n o u n c e d plans to rebuild the Weber Canyon highway (U.S. 30-S) from Echo to Ogden, s t a r t i n g with a 4.6-mile stretch between Echo and Henefer. The state's plans called for the strip run­ning through Echo to be widened to four lanes. For this tiny roadside community, already h u r t by the change from steam engines to diesels in the early 1950s, t h e news was devastating. It meant that about a dozen homes and businesses in the heart of town had to be moved or demolished. Among t h em were the old Kozy Cafe, the Carman and Hulme mercantile store, and the Echo Garage.98 Some residents, like TRANSPORTATION 153 Mr. and Mrs. Willard Dillree of the Kozy Cafe, rebuilt their businesses out of reach of the bulldozers. Others gave up and moved away. The people who stayed faced a barrage of dust and noise. "We Echo people are fast gaining a sympathetic understanding for the folks in the dust bowl areas," lamented the town's correspondent to the Summit County Bee. "I doubt they can compare with our noise. No one complains of the trains, trucks and buses any more, they are a relief after those jerking, pounding carry-alls from 6:30 A.M. until 5 P.M. and a few cats thrown in for good measure."99 By August 1956, crews had paved the new road and, for the remaining residents of Echo, the background noise returned to its normal level of trucks and trains. But, as it turned out, the widening of U.S. 30-S was only a preview of what was to come. That same year, Congress passed the Federal-aid Highway Act, which allocated large sums for highway construction, including almost $25 billion for the "National System of Interstate and Defense Highways" over the next thirteen years.100 An east-west "superhighway" following the Lincoln Highway route through Summit County had been under discussion since 1947. However, the infusion of federal money suddenly gave the project a higher priority. In addition, on 21 October 1957, the route of the Weber Canyon highway from Echo to Ogden was added to the Interstate system at the request of local officials.101 In November 1957, a group of county citizens met with U.S. Congressman Henry A. Dixon and Francis Felch of the Utah Road Commission to discuss the route of the proposed superhighway between Echo and Wanship. They were concerned about preliminary reports that the new road would cut through the center of the valley, following the existing railroad right-of-way. Coming on the heels of the construction of Rockport Dam, the new highway threatened the loss of even more valuable agricultural land. "The group mentioned the fact that about 3,100 acres of the county's best land is now used for reservoirs-Echo and Wanship," the Summit County Bee reported. "This is a loss of taxable land to the county. The town of Rockport is now gone and its 23 families."102 The group, led by Hoytsville dairy farmer Lyle Brown, called for the highway to go through rangeland and dry farms on the west side of the Weber River instead of through the irrigated farmland in the heart of the valley. 154 HISTORY OF SUMMIT COUNTY Throughout 1958 and into 1959 Brown and other group mem­bers continued to campaign for the western route. They met with Utah governor George D. Clyde in March 1958 and heard assurances that the western route would be surveyed. In an interview with the Summit County Bee in lanuary 1959, Brown said that the middle-of-the- valley route would cut up more than twenty farms, making por­tions of them either inaccessible or so small that they could not be farmed profitably. "Right in my neighborhood, between my place and David Brown's place, there are 13 farms that will be made practically nonexistent, and unable to produce a livelihood for the families which they now support," Brown said. "Several operators of these farms will simply have to move out."103 However, when a county pub­lic hearing was held on the project in March 1959, it became clear that support for the western route was far from unanimous. A group of Coalville businessmen, represented by M.L. Patterson, pushed for the highway to pass as close to town as possible. "Varied Wishes Make Cooperative Choice of Highway Site Impossible," proclaimed the headline in the Summit County Bee.104 By early 1961, it was apparent that the Utah Highway Commission had chosen the route through the center of the valley. On 30 January state officials unveiled their "tentative" proposal at a hearing in the North Summit High School auditorium. The hearing covered both Interstate 80 from Echo to Wanship and Interstate 80-N from Echo to Morgan. The story in the Summit County Bee suggested that few area residents were enthusiastic about the route of the high­way. "Summit County farmers expressed regret at the loss of so much fertile meadow lands. Coalville business men sense a 25 percent loss in revenue from tourist trade because the highway will leave the Main Street," the Bee reported.105 Summit County Clerk Emerson Staples warned against the loss of additional taxable land coming on the heels of that lost for the construction of Rockport Lake and Echo Reservoir. Coalville Mayor D.L. Johnson pointed out the inequity of compensating landowners but not local businessmen for lost revenues. Blaine Moore of Henefer lamented the potential loss of meadowland to Interstate 80-N between Echo and Henefer. And, according to the Bee, "Willard Dillree, whose cafe and motel at Echo have already been moved once TRANSPORTATION 155 and who now faces a complete shut-out, suggested mildly that it would be nice if he could have an inlet and outlet for trucks and traffic."106 Echo, which had been devastated by the widening of the Weber Canyon highway only five years previously, braced for another blow. The new superhighway not only would bypass the town completely but would follow a different route than the old road, ripping through more homes and farms as well as the Echo flour mill, built in 1873. In the meantime, construction along other stretches of Interstate 80 was well underway. In 1959, work began on a 6.8-mile stretch between Wahsatch and Castle Rock in Echo Canyon. And, in 1960, construction began on the eastbound lanes of the highway on an 8.6- mile stretch between Silver Creek lunction and Wanship. The town of Wanship also felt the bite of the bulldozer during the highway pro­ject. In addition to the farms impacted, five homes were moved or demolished.107 By the spring of 1965, construction was in full swing on several sections of the road. "As we look around the county we see the com­pletion of several highway projects, including the one cutting a wide swath through the Hoytsville Valley," said the Summit County Bee as 1966 came to a close. "The local feeling about this project was summed up by the erection of a sign stating: 'Reason? There is no reason, it's highway policy!'"108 Even as work proceeded, the planned route of Interstate 80-N between Echo and Henefer was challenged again. Although hearings had been held seven years previously, landowners and other inter­ested citizens reopened the issue because, they said, the planned route would interfere with the Weber River channel. They asked instead for the road to be built on the benches around the valley. The debate attracted a wide audience when KSL, a Salt Lake City radio station, broadcast a "Town Meeting of the Air" from the Henefer Fire Station. As in Coalville in 1961, opposition was far from unanimous. A poll taken by the Henefer Town Board showed that fourteen of the twenty-one landowners along the route preferred the river-bottom alternative. At the same time, Ogden-area businesses were pushing for construction to proceed without delay. The Utah Road 156 HISTORY OF SUMMIT COUNTY Commission concurred, arguing that the alternate route would increase costs by about $2.8 million.109 As 1969 came to an end, the Summit County Bee wondered rhetorically what the biggest story of the 1960s had been. "Highway construction could probably be the one bringing the most long-range effect on the county. The construction of the Interstate took huge sec­tions of productive farmland and left a resentment which will take many years to relieve."110 Whatever the consequences, as the decade closed, motorists did have a completed freeway between the Wyoming state line and Silver Creek Junction, with the exception of a seven-mile section from Emory to Castle Rock. However, construction continued in Weber Canyon and through Parley's Park to Salt Lake City. On 1 October 1969, traffic t h r o u g h lower Parleys Canyon was r o u t e d through Emigration Canyon. By the following luly, work in Parleys Canyon was far enough along to allow traffic to return, not a moment too soon for Park City's fragile tourist industry. Some business owners calculated that the detour had cost t h em half their income.111 Their headaches were far from over. In the summer of 1971, work began on the link between Lamb's Canyon and Kimball lunction, a project that was expected to take about two years but ulti­mately took three. Finally, in September 1974, representatives from Park City and Salt Lake City officially opened the road. With the swing of paint rollers-dry because somebody forgot the paint-highway and civic officials symbolicly [sic] "painted" the last median stripe Monday to officially open the last segment of I- 80 in Parleys Canyon. The $7.3 million, six-mile-long segment was opened 124 years after Parley P. Pratt opened the canyon toll road. In his first year he earned $1,500. The $1,500 now would pay for 6.6 feet of the current road.112 By this time, workmen also h a d put the finishing touches on Interstate 80-N (since renamed Interstate 84) between Echo and Ogden. The only piece of interstate highway left to finish in Summit County was the seven-mile stretch between Emory and Castle Rock in Echo Canyon; it was completed in 1976. TRANSPORTATION 157 While the two-lane roads fostered tourist businesses in several Summit County towns, the interstate highways had an entirely dif­ferent impact. In bypassing the towns that had thrived on revenue from travelers, the interstates affected the very nature of those com­munities. On the other hand, tourist destinations such as Park City have clearly benefited from the easy access provided by the freeways. The Park City Chamber/Bureau continues to lure out-of-state skiers by emphasizing the easy trip from the Salt Lake International Airport. The completion of the interstate highways also has brought a new type of resident to Summit County-the individual who would rather take a quick trip down Parleys Canyon or Weber Canyon to a Wasatch Front job than live in the weather-inversion-plagued lower valley. Officials anticipated this t r e n d as early as t h e mid-1960s, as this 1966 newspaper story indicates: Some are predicting that Morgan, Summit and Wasatch are destined to become "bedroom counties" for the densely populated Wasatch front counties-Weber, Davis, Salt Lake and Utah. Pressures of population growth in the "front" counties already have stimulated considerable building activity, particularly in Morgan and Summit counties, it is pointed out by Lynn M. Thatcher, director of the Division of Environmental Health, State Health Department. . . . Mr. Thatcher believes that residential construction in the three counties east of the Wasatch will be stimulated with the com­pletion of new freeways.113 It may have taken longer t h a n Thatcher expected, but Summit County is indeed becoming a bedroom community for the Wasatch Front. By 1990, more than 26 percent of the county's labor force was traveling to work in Salt Lake County.114 ENDNOTES 1. Melvin T. Smith, National Register of Historic Places Inventory Nomination Form, 1970, Utah State Historical Society. 2. Charles Kelly, "Captain Francis Marion Bishop's lournal," Utah Historical Quarterly 15 (1947): 159. 3. Frank G. Roe, The North American Buffalo. A Critical Study of the 158 HISTORY OF SUMMIT COUNTY Species in Its Wild State (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951), 181; Peterson, Echoes of Yesterday, 10. 4. Karen D. Lupo, "The Historical Occurrence and Demise of Bison in Northern Utah," Utah Historical Quarterly 64 (Spring 1996): 168. Lupo writes that the evidence seems to indicate that buffalo were probably never very dense in northern Utah and that the introduction of horses and firearms helped drive them to extinction by 1832. 5. J. Cecil Alter, ed., "lournal of Priddy Meeks," Utah Historical Quarterly 10 (1942): 168-69. 6. See Peter H. DeLafosse, ed., Trailing the Pioneers: A Guide to Utah's Emigrant Trails, 1829-1869 (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1994). 7. Peterson, Echoes of Yesterday, 9, 22-23. Fur trappers and explorers stored their supplies in Cache Cave long before the Mormon pioneers trav­eled through the area. It became a prominent landmark on the old Mormon Trail and became known as the "register of the desert" because of the many names written on it. Perhaps the nineteenth-century equivalent of graffiti, these names speak to the number of emigrants who passed through the canyon on their way to new homes. 8. Stan Taggart, "Cache Cave Bows to Vandals, Time," Salt Lake Tribune, 5 February 1961, 5. 9. Ibid. 10. Howard W. Stansbury, Exploration and Survey of the Valley of the Great Salt Lake of Utah, (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Press, 1988), 224. Although the canyon name changed to Echo, the creek retains the original name given to it by Stansbury. The canyon was known as Red Fork Canyon as late as 1880, when it was so designated on the map of the original Geodetic Survey of Summit County. Geodetic Survey, Township 3 North, Range 5 East, Salt Lake Base and Meridian, Office of the Summit County Recorder, Coalville. 11. Stansbury, Exploration and Survey, 223. 12. Ezra C. Knowlton, History of Highway Development in Utah, (Salt Lake City: Utah Department of Highways, 1963), 25. 13. J. Roderic Korns, "The Golden Pass Road, 1848-1850," Utah Historical Quarterly (1951), 226. 14. Ibid., 228. Korns quotes from the report of the second exploration submitted by Pratt and his two companions. 15. Ibid., 226. 16. Deseret News, 29 lune 1850. 17. Parley P. Pratt, Autobiography of Parley Parker Pratt, (Chicago: Law, King 8c Law, 1888), 413. TRANSPORTATION 159 18. Albert Carrington, letter to Brigham Young, 9 September 1850, LDS Church Archives. 19. Korns, "Golden Pass Road," 230. Korns quotes exerpts from Simpson's manuscript journals in the records of the War Department, Corps of Topographical Engineers, National Archives, Washington, D.C. 20. Knowlton, History of Highway Development, 27, 57. Knowlton cites an act " . . . Appropriating Money to Locate and Open a Road from Great Salt Lake City to the Valley of the Weber," approved by the territorial legis­lature on 20 lanuary 1860. 21. Ibid., 20. 22. Peterson, Echoes of Yesterday, 43. 23. George A. Smith, letter to Amasa M. Lyman, 18 October 1860, from the History of Brigham Young (1860), 352, LDS Church Archives. 24. Echoes of Yesterday, 189-90. 25. Knowlton, History of Highway Development, 26. 26. lanet Burton Seegmiller, Be Kind to the Poor: The Life Story of Robert Taylor Burton (Robert Taylor Burton Family Organization, Inc., 1988), 207. 27. Minutes of the Summit County Court, 6 March and 8 July 1865, Summit County Courthouse, Coalville. 28. Donald L. Hardesty, The Pony Express in Central Nevada: Archeological and Documentary Perspectives (Reno, Nevada: Bureau of Land Management, 1979), 1-2. 29. Knowlton, History of Highway Development, 57. 30. Samuel W. Richards, letter to Franklin Richards, 2 December 1866, LDS Church Archives. 31. Charles Durkee, message to the legislature, 10 December 1866, Utah State Archives. 32. LeGrand Young, superintendent of Salt Lake City and Wanship wagon road, annual report to the legislature, 14 January 1869, Utah State Archives. 33. For a discussion of the construction of the transcontinental railroad in Utah see Robert G. Athearn, Union Pacific Country (Chicago: Rand McNally & Company, 1971), chapters four and five; Leonard J. Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), chap­ter nine; and Clarence J. Reeder Ir., "The History of Utah's Railroads, 1869-1883," (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Utah, 1970), chapter two. 34. Deseret News, 5 October 1868. 35. Robert Bodily lournal, typescript copy, 1937, Utah State Historical Society, 22. 36. Reeder, "History of Utah's Railroads," 34-35. 160 HISTORY OF SUMMIT COUNTY 37. Leonard J. Arrington, "Utah's Coal Road in the Age of Unregulated Competition," Utah Historical Quarterly 23 (Winter 1955): 37; Deseret News, 21 October 1869. 38. Reeder, "History of Utah's Railroads," 320. 39. Millenial Star, 32: 121, as reproduced in the lournal History of the LDS Church, 15 lanuary 1870, 3. 40. Arrington, "Utah's Coal Road," 38. 41. Ogden function, 18 October 1871. 42. Arrington, "Utah's Coal Road," 39. 43. Salt Lake Herald, 17 August 1873. 44. Reeder, "History of Utah's Railroads," 327-28; Ogden function, 18 lune 1873. 45. Deseret News, 1 luly 1874; Salt Lake Herald, 8 August 1874. 46. Reeder, "History of Utah's Railroads," 331-32. 47. Salt Lake Tribune, 10 September 1874, 31 October 1874. 48. Deseret News, 24 February 1876. 49. Deseret News, 9 December 1876. 50. Salt Lake Tribune, 30 December 1876. 51. Reeder, "History of Utah's Railroads," 338-39. 52. Deseret News, 31 December 1879. 53. Deseret News, 19 May 1880; Salt Lake Herald, 4 December 1881. 54. Reeder, "History of Utah's Railroads," 343. 55. Salt Lake Herald, 18 November 1884. 56. Seegmiller, Be Kind to the Poor, 338. 57. Leonard Arrington contends that the Union Pacific line didn't arrive in Park City until January. However, references in both the Park Record and the Salt Lake Tribune indicate that the track was in use by about the middle of December. 58. Salt Lake Herald, 16 December 1880. 59. Park Record, 23 July 1881 60. Salt Lake Herald, 28 April 1881. 61. Arrington, "Utah's Coal Road," 55-58; Salt Lake Herald, 18 November 1884, 5 February 1885. 62. Park Record, 26 February 1886. 63. Charles L. Keller, "Gorgoza and Gorgorza: Fact and Fiction," Utah Historical Quarterly 64 (Spring 1996): 181. Keller cites correspondence between John W. Young and E. Gorgorza. The author also investigates the corruption of the name "Gorgorza" into "Gorgoza" and traces it to the third TRANSPORTATION 161 edition of Origins of Utah Place Names, published in 1938 by the Works Progress Administration. That publication claimed that "Gorgoza" was named after Rodriquez Velasquez de la Gorgozada, a Spaniard who sup­posedly agreed to invest almost $ 1 million in the railroad after John Young drew a picture of a large city and offered to name it after him. That story has since been repeated in several other local histories. The name "Gorgoza" was later attached to a small local ski area, an area water company, and a street in the Jeremy Ranch subdivision. However, Keller has found nothing to support that version of the story. 64. Park Record, 5 April 1890, 7 June 1890, 6 September 1890. 65. W.P. Hardesty, "The Reconstruction of the Utah Central Railway," Engineering News and American Railway fournal 45 (17 January 1901): 44-47. 66. Ibid. The track into Park City followed the route now taken by Utah State Road 224. The depot stood on the east side of Park Avenue, just north of the site now occupied by the lower terminal of Park City Mountain Resort's Town Lift chair. A corrugated metal building once used by the rail­way still stood on the site in 1997. 67. Deseret News, 9 luly 1908. 68. Knowlton, History of Highway Development, 138-41. 69. Park Record, 13 May 1913. 70. Drake Hokanson, The Lincoln Highway (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1988), 10. 71. Salt Lake Telegram, 15 September 1913. 72. Park Record, 16 lanuary 1915. 73. Deseret News, 28 April 1915. 74. Park Record, 26 lune 1915. 75. Report of the Public Utilities Commission of Utah to the Governor, Case No. 799 (Salt Lake City: Public Utilities Commission of Utah, 1925), 281. 76. Report of the Public Utilities Commission of Utah to the Governor, Case No. 964 (Salt Lake City: Public Utilities Commission of Utah, 1927), 174. 77. Deseret News, 17 February 1936. 78. Salt Lake Tribune, 10 August 1989. 79. Ibid. 80. Salt Lake Tribune, 17 September 1946. 81. Report of the Public Utilities Commission of Utah to the Governor, Case No. 2381 (Salt Lake City: Public Utilities Commission of Utah, 1940). 162 HISTORY OF SUMMIT COUNTY 82. H.B. Durrant, Union Pacific chief engineer, letter to Michael P. Richins, 6 April 1984, copy in David Hampshire's files. 83. Salt Lake Tribune, 9 November 1976. 84. Minutes of UDOT Planning Meeting, South Summit High School, 20 October 1977, Utah Department of Transportation files, Salt Lake City. 85. Salt Lake Tribune, 8 May 1975. 86. Park Record, 25 April 1985. 87. The Newspaper (Park City), 4 February and 11 March 1982. 88. Pacific Rail News, luly 1986, 25-26. 89. Salt Lake Tribune, 1 November 1986. 90. Application before the Interstate Commerce Commission, Docket No. AB-33 (Sub-No. 55), 29 December 1988. 91. Personal interview of Peter Harnik, Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, with David Hampshire, 18 April 1994. 92. Park Record, 22 lune 1989. 93. David Hampshire, "Rail-Life Stories," Park City Lodestar (Summer 1992). 94.Ibid. 95.Ibid. 96. Summit County Bee, 21 lanuary 1994. 97. Salt Lake Tribune, 23 April 1941. 98. Salt Lake Tribune, 8 April 1955; Summit County Bee, 27 October 1955. 99. Summit County Bee, 26 April 1956. 100. Knowlton, History of Highway Development, 544. 101. Ibid., 596. 102. Summit County Bee, 14 November 1957. The number of families displaced by Rockport Reservoir has been variously enumerated as 23, 24, and 27. 103. Summit County Bee, 29 lanuary 1959. 104. Summit County Bee, 2 April 1959. 105. Summit County Bee, 2 February 1961. 106. Ibid. 107. Summit County Bee, 28 January 1960. 108. Summit County Bee, 29 December 1966. 109. Summit County Bee, 28 March 1968, 4 April 1968, 18 April 1968. 110. Summit County Bee, 25 December 1969. 111. Salt Lake Tribune, 17 July 1970. TRANSPORTATION 163_ 112. Salt Lake Tribune, 24 September 1974. 113. Salt Lake Tribune, 24 April 1966. 114. 1990 Census data, as reported in Summit County, Utah: Selected Demographic, Labor Market and Economic Characteristics, prepared by Mark S. Knold, Utah Department of Employment Security, Labor Market Information & Research, November 1994, p. 7, Utah Department of Employment Security, Salt Lake City.