The Trail Follows the Trains

East Portal, Mineral County, Montana, 1907-1980

They came in by the thousands, and when they left, they took everything with them.

The men who built the Milwaukee Road's Pacific Extension through the Bitterroot Mountains between 1907 and 1911 were the most ambitious railroad construction force in American history. They drove a line over the most rugged terrain on the continent -- through the St. Regis canyon, up the Bitterroot divide, through the St. Paul Pass Tunnel under the Montana-Idaho border -- and they did it in four years. Thousands of laborers lived in construction camps strung along the grade from Avery, Idaho to Haugan, Montana, camps with names like Taft and DeBorgia and East Portal that were, for a few years, real towns with saloons and boarding houses and post offices and all the ordinary machinery of human settlement.

The railroad they built was a wonder. The Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad -- the Milwaukee Road, as everyone called it -- electrified its mountain divisions in 1916 and 1917, running electric locomotives on overhead wire for 440 miles from Harlowton, Montana to Avery, Idaho. It was the longest electrified railroad in the world. The Olympian and the Hiawatha, the Milwaukee's flagship passenger trains, glided through the Bitterroots without a wisp of smoke, powered by the hydroelectric dams of the Clark Fork and the St. Joe. Engineers who had spent their careers nursing steam locomotives through mountain grades found themselves managing something closer to a streetcar than a locomotive, and they were not entirely sure what to make of it.

The railroad lasted sixty-nine years in these mountains. Then it was gone.

The Line Through the Bitterroots

The St. Paul Pass Tunnel, bored through the Bitterroot divide at an elevation of 4,157 feet, was the longest railroad tunnel in the United States when it was completed in 1908. It ran for 8,771 feet under the Montana-Idaho border, and the men who dug it worked from both ends simultaneously, meeting in the middle with an alignment error of less than an inch. The tunnel was numbered Tunnel 15 on the Milwaukee Road's system; the portal on the Montana side, at East Portal, gave the place its name.

The grade approaching the tunnel from the Montana side was served by a series of trestles and cuts that required constant maintenance. Barnes Creek trestle, visible in early Milwaukee Road photographs as a graceful wooden structure spanning a deep ravine, was one of the engineering achievements that made the line possible. The photographs that survive from the construction era show a hand-colored world of raw timber and fresh grading, the mountains still raw from the blasting, the trestles new and pale against the dark forest.

The 1910 fires came through here with particular fury. Elers Koch, who was Forest Supervisor of the Lolo National Forest and who would spend the rest of his career writing about what he saw that August, described the forty-eight miles of railroad between Avery and Haugan as having been swept by "a devouring blast of fire so hot that pick handles, shovels and axes were charred and blistered in the hands of the men." The towns of Taft, Saltese, DeBorgia, and Haugan all burned. The Milwaukee Road's tracks survived because the steel rails did not burn, but sixteen bridges were destroyed, and the railroad had to be rebuilt before service could resume.

The railroad rebuilt. It always rebuilt. That was the nature of the enterprise.

The Archaeology of Abandonment

When the Milwaukee Road abandoned its Pacific Extension in 1980, the salvage crews came in with the same efficiency the construction crews had shown seventy years earlier. They stripped the line of everything that had value: rails, ties, signals, switch stands, telegraph wire, the copper overhead wire of the electrification system. They took the bridges apart for the steel. They left the grade, the tunnel portals, the cuts and fills, and the small fragments that were not worth carrying out -- broken crockery, rusted cans, the footings of buildings that had been pulled down.

What the salvage crews left behind turned out to be a record.

The Route of the Hiawatha, as the old railbed is now called, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Archaeologists and Forest Service "Passport in Time" volunteers have been excavating sites along the trail for years, sifting through the debris of the construction camps and the maintenance stations and the section houses where railroad workers lived for decades. The artifacts they find -- a broken bottle, a worn-out boot sole, a fragment of a cast-iron stove -- are the remains of people who left no other record. The construction crews of 1907 to 1911 were largely immigrant laborers, Greeks and Italians and Scandinavians and men from a dozen other countries, who worked for wages and moved on when the job was done. They did not write memoirs. Their names are not in the histories. But they left things in the ground, and the archaeologists are finding them.

The marker at the East Portal trailhead makes this point directly: "Today, you may see archaeologists digging and sifting along the Route of the Hiawatha looking for clues about people and places not found in written documents." It is an unusual thing for a historical marker to say. Most markers deal in the documented, the official, the named. This one acknowledges that the most interesting history is often the history that was never written down.

What Was Left Behind

The Route of the Hiawatha is now one of the most popular rail-trail bicycle routes in the American West. Cyclists ride the old grade through the mountains, through the dark bore of the St. Paul Pass Tunnel (headlamps required), across the rebuilt trestles, past the concrete foundations of the section houses and the water towers and the signal bridges. The grade is gentle -- railroads cannot afford steep grades -- and the scenery is the same scenery the construction workers saw in 1908 and the train passengers saw in 1930 and the maintenance crews saw in 1975.

The small fragments left behind, as the marker says, are the remains of one of America's proudest railroads. The Milwaukee Road was never the largest railroad in the country, never the richest, never the most powerful. But for sixty-nine years it ran electric trains through the Bitterroot Mountains on a grade that engineers said could not be built, and it did it with a style that the other transcontinentals never quite matched. The Olympian Hiawatha, the Milwaukee's last great passenger train, made its final run in 1961. The freight trains ran until 1980. Then the salvage crews came, and then the archaeologists, and now the bicyclists.

The men who built it are gone. The trains are gone. The rails are gone. What remains is the shape of the land they altered -- the cuts and fills and tunnels that the mountains have not yet reclaimed -- and the things they dropped in the dirt, which the archaeologists are still finding.

See also

• Route of the Hiawatha Rail Trail, Idaho Panhandle National Forests (USDA Forest Service)
• St. Paul Pass Tunnel (adjacent marker at East Portal trailhead)
• Koch, Elers. "History of the 1910 Forest Fires -- Idaho and Western Montana." U.S. Forest Service, 1926. (Available via NPS History Collection)
• Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad historical records
• National Register of Historic Places listing for the Route of the Hiawatha