St. Paul Pass Tunnel

By editor

East Portal, Mineral County, Montana

The Milwaukee Road needed a hole 23 feet high, 16 feet wide, and 1.7 miles long into Idaho. After approaches in 1906 and a faltering start in 1907, crews went to work in earnest in 1908—east and west headings, around the clock, in wet rock that made the job almost unbearable. At their best they advanced about twenty feet a day. A company official remembered that men were hard to keep.

It took roughly 750 workers—400 inside, 200 removing spoil, 150 running the power plant and yards—two and a half years to finish. A steam-driven electric plant four miles away in Taft powered both ends of the dig. Compressed air drove the shovels that loaded blasted rock into electric cars. The same town that newspapers called wicked was also the powerhouse for one of the Northwest’s hardest tunnel jobs.

In August 1910 the unfinished landscape around the tunnel became a fire refuge. Later the bore carried the Olympian Hiawatha. Today the Route of the Hiawatha trail leads visitors through the same dark. The engineering remains impressive. The human cost—of digging it, of fleeing into it—remains the part the concrete does not show.