The Route of the Hiawatha
By editor
[East Portal, Mineral County, Montana, August 1910]
The Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railway arrived late to the transcontinental party, but they made up for it by spending more money than anyone else and building their tracks where no sensible person would put them. They called it the Pacific Extension, and it survived for seventy-one colorful years, which is about seventy years longer than the people who built it expected.
They ran silk trains along this route, tearing across the mountains at breakneck speeds because raw silk was insured by the hour, and the insurance companies were not known for their patience. They ran long, rumbling troop trains full of young men heading off to wars they did not understand, and they ran the Olympian Hiawatha, a passenger train so luxurious it made you forget you were hurtling through a wilderness that wanted you dead.
But the real story of the Milwaukee Road is not the silk or the soldiers or the luxury cars. It is the story of the men who built it, the men who ran it, and the men who died trying to keep it open when the mountains decided they had had enough of the whole enterprise. In August 1910, the mountains made their opinion known in the form of a fire that consumed three million acres and made the sky look like the inside of a blast furnace.
The railroad was the only way out for the people who had built their lives along the tracks. The trains became lifeboats, and the engineers became captains of a very strange, very desperate fleet. They ran their engines through walls of flame, over burning trestles, and into tunnels that offered the only refuge from a heat so intense it could melt the glass in the windows.
Today, the tracks are gone, sold for scrap by a company that finally realized you cannot beat the Bitterroots. But the route remains, a fifteen-mile trail through the tunnels and over the trestles, where you can ride a bicycle and pretend you are outrunning a fire that has been dead for a century. It is a beautiful ride, provided you do not think too hard about what it cost to build it.
See also
- The Route of the Hiawatha at East Portal, Mineral County (Lolo National Forest, erected 2010)
- Taft, Montana, a town that existed only to build the railroad and burn down.
