William Palmer: Father of American Narrow-Gauge Railroads

Will was born on September 17, 1836, on Kinsale Farm near the small coastal town of Leipsic, Delaware, the second of the four children of John and Matilda (Jackson) Palmer, devout Quakers. Will’s younger brothers were Francis and Charles and his older sister, Ellen. In 1841, the Palmers left their farm and farming and moved to Philadelphia, where John became a successful tea trader. One of his sons, Francis, would join him in the business, but not his oldest son William. Rather, William would pursue civil engineering, railroading, and empire building as his career choices.

In 1853, when he was 17 and already a dedicated railroad enthusiast studying surveying, Will joined the engineering corps of the Hempfield Railroad in Pennsylvania. Its chief engineer at the time was Charles Ellet (1810–1862), and young Palmer couldn’t have found a better mentor and technical role model. Already an American engineering icon by the time Palmer met him, Ellet had several impressive engineering projects to his credit. Two among them were the design of the first major wire-cable suspension bridge in the United States (spanning the Schuylkill River near Philadelphia) and the building of the record-breaking, world-renowned Wheeling Suspension Bridge over the Ohio River at Wheeling, West Virginia, both in the late 1840s. His other significant civil engineering accomplishments included the James River and Kanawha Canal in Virginia, Schuylkill navigation improvements in Pennsylvania, and several railroads around the country.

After only two years with Hempfield, Will was advanced to head transit man on a major rail line through the Pennsylvania mountains. He was then sent to England and France to study the latest in railroad engineering and mining and to learn about European advances in coal-fired steam engines. Palmer’s letters back home showed a growing excitement about the possibilities of using the latest railroading, iron, and coal technologies in the United States. He also made favorable note of some of the narrow-gauge rail lines effectively being used in parts of the British Isles, but he was much disgusted with the country’s mining labor practices.

After touring a deep Cornish mine, ankle deep in scalding water, the deeply religious young Quaker wrote, “Every step taken seems to be a measure of one’s life, and strangers visiting the depths of the mine very generally lose 5 or 6 lbs in one visit” (Fisher 1939). He was appalled that a typical miner’s wages averaged only 62 cents a day and that mine workers rarely lived beyond 35. Young Palmer told his parents,

“I shall return to your shores a ten-fold better American (as such) than I left it, and with fuller confidence in the principle of human equality and Republicanism generally than, I think, I should ever have felt had I never visited aristocratic England.” (Fisher 1939)

Shortly after his return to America, in addition to Hempfield, Palmer became associated with two of its sister companies, Westmoreland Coal and the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR). For the Westmoreland operation, he conducted extensive coal-burning experiments and held the coveted title of company secretary/treasurer. For PRR, the 21-year-old engineer was advanced to the lofty position of private secretary to John Edgar Thompson, the highly influential president of the company.

At the time, United States train locomotives burned wood to create steam, leading to mass deforestation. Based on his observations in Europe, Palmer suggested to and convinced Thompson that it would be to great advantage for the PRR to switch to coal, which it did, the first rail line in the United States to do so. Before the switch in fuel, Thompson’s operation was in an ecological crisis, burning more than 60,000 cords ($220,000{\mathrm{m}}^3$) of wood every year and rapidly stripping both the railroad’s right-of-way, and much area beyond, of valuable trees.

Shortly after the capture of Fort Sumter by the Confederacy in 1861 and the beginning of the Civil War, 25-year-old Palmer resigned from Thompson’s employment and joined the Union Army as a captain with the special Anderson troop of light cavalry, which distinguished itself in the Nashville and Shiloh campaigns. As reported by the Colorado Springs Gazette (Mar. 14, 1909), the newly enlisted Palmer was often responsible for

“examining and mapping out the country in advance of the Army. For this he was peculiarly fitted because of his training as a civil engineer. In this scouting service, nothing escaped his vigilant eyes: the character of the soil upon which the roads were made; their general directions; the strength of the bridges, the depth of the streams, all were carefully noted and sketched, and were absolutely reliable. Every officer in the regiment was directed, yea compelled, to be thus observing.”

In addition to being an expert scout and fighter and a highly skilled horseman, Palmer was also an effective military recruiter and organizer for the Union cause. At the request of his superiors, he founded an elite cavalry corps, the 15th Pennsylvania Volunteer Cavalry, which among other notable actions helped to turn back the Confederate invasion of Maryland at Antietam in 1862.

The Palmer-recruited and-trained Pennsylvania 15th Regiment regularly moved in advance of Union armies, scouting, spying, crashing through enemy camps, and engaging in guerrilla fighting. A day after the Battle of Antietam, Palmer was sent on a special assignment behind enemy lines, which resulted in his being captured by the Confederate Army, tried as a spy, imprisoned, and nearly executed. At the last minute, he was exchanged for several key Confederate prisoners. Upon his release in January 1863 and advancement to the rank of colonel, Palmer immediately rejoined his regiment and returned to active service in Tennessee, where he led the 15th Cavalry to decisive victories at Chickamauga and Missionary Ridge.

It was during General William Sherman’s drive to Atlanta campaign, however, that Palmer made his most brilliant record as a soldier. Starting from Lookout Mountain in pursuit of General John Hood’s army, he burned the headquarters’ pontoon train; destroyed a supply train near Aberdeen, Mississippi; and then routed two powerful Confederate cavalry forces, both considered at the time to be among the South’s best horseback fighters.

In recognition of these services and his bravery, Palmer was made a brigadier general. At 29 he was one of the youngest Union generals in the War. After his involvement in the surrender of General Joseph Johnston of the South, Palmer was placed in command of cavalry troops sent in pursuit of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy. The pursuit ended when Davis was driven into the hands of General James Wilson.

Palmer was awarded the Medal of Honor for his action against the enemy at Red Hill, Alabama, in January 1865. His citation for the Medal read as follows: “With less than 200 men, he attacked and defeated a superior force of the enemy, capturing their fieldpiece and about 100 prisoners without losing a man.” Concerning Palmer’s overall performance as a member of the Union Army, General George Thomas (whose nickname was “the Rock of Chickamauga”) said,

“There is no officer in the regular or volunteer service who has performed the duties which have devolved upon him with more intelligence, zeal or energy than General Palmer, whose uniform distinguished success throughout the war places his reputation beyond controversy.” (Smiley 1901)

Right after Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union General Ulysses Grant at Appomattox, Virginia, on April 9, 1865, Palmer declined enticing offers to remain in the Army, instead electing to return to civilian life to resume his railroad career. By then, though, the 29-year-old engineer’s sights were set quite high, far beyond the state of Pennsylvania, toward the Wild West. In addition to the nation’s plans under way for building the world’s first transcontinental railroad, which would permanently link America by rail east to west, countless other lines into and through the western frontier were being considered.

Immediately after leaving the military, Palmer was employed by his old boss John Thompson to make an extensive survey and map a route for the Kansas Pacific Railroad (controlled by officers and owners of PRR) from Kansas to California. The assignment took Palmer through rugged unchartered sections of the Rocky Mountains and the dry near-lunar deserts of Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and California all the way to the Pacific Ocean. In addition to having to deal with the demanding landscape along the way, Palmer’s party encountered several bands of hostile Indians, mostly without major incident.

Before setting out on this mission, Palmer let it be known that he wanted a photographer for his team. William Bell, a young doctor from England, who knew nothing about photography, answered the call. He quickly took basic lessons on how to operate a camera, and Palmer hired him. The two became lifelong friends and confidants, with Bell frequently serving as an officer or partner in whatever enterprise Palmer was putting together at the time. Bell would often be second in command or serve as vice president with Palmer being president.

Upon his return from his grueling overland trek in 1867, Palmer was made an officer and put in charge of engineering and construction for the Kansas Pacific Railroad from Kansas City, Missouri, to Denver, Colorado. The line ran south of and parallel to the Union Pacific link of the Transcontinental Railroad, construction of which was well under way by then. The Union Pacific line, moving west from Omaha, Nebraska, was being led by civil engineer General Grenville Dodge (1831–1916), an ambitious fellow Civil War hero of Palmer’s, while the Central Pacific Railroad, coming east from Sacramento, California, had been instigated the visionary New York civil engineer Ted Judah (1826–1863). Unfortunately, the scrappy Judah died early, long before much construction work had transpired and well before Palmer got involved in the Kansas Pacific venture, and the two extraordinary railroaders never met or worked together.

As Palmer’s construction crews were rapidly making their way through the unsettled Central Plains of western Kansas and eastern Colorado, they regularly encountered not only deadly bands of marauding Indians but also the illustrious William (“Buffalo Bill”) Cody (1846–1917). At the time, Cody was employed both as a U.S. Army scout helping hunt down renegade warriors off the reservation and as a crack-shot buffalo hunter providing large quantities of buffalo meat for Kansas Pacific construction workers. His contract, which required killing 12 buffalo per day, provided him a hefty income of $500 per month. Said Cody, “During my engagement as hunter for the company, I killed 4,280 buffaloes [in period of less than a year]” (Russell 1960). The feat helped establish him as one of the greatest sharpshooters of the western frontier, a talent he later dramatized in his Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show as he took it around the world.

On August 15, 1870, a little over a year after Transcontinental’s Promontory Summit celebration, Palmer had a mini-golden spike ceremony of his own. His two Kansas Pacific lines—one out of Denver eastward, and the other out of Kansas City westward—joined together at the tiny town of Strasburg (originally called Comanche Crossing) on the barren eastern plains of Colorado, 35 miles from Denver. This historic “joining of the rails” was in actuality the last link in a coast-to-coast railroad network, finally giving the U.S. the first continuously connected continental railroad on the world.

After completing the Kansas Pacific into Denver, Palmer finalized plans for his own railroad, the D&RG, which he had visions of extending from Denver all the way to Mexico City. As would be the case with many of his grand ventures, one of Palmer’s main partners would be his close lifelong friend William Bell, doctor turned photographer, adventurer, then empire builder.

Incorporated on October 27, 1870, with a capital stock investment of $2,500,000, Palmer served as D&RG’s first president while Bell was second in command, one of the company’s innermost vice presidents. Palmer’s soon-to-be father-in-law, William Mellen, was the initial chairman of the board. To begin, the first important section of the new railroad was constructed from Denver south to Pikes Peak (the Colorado Springs area).

As originally announced, the D&RG planned to begin in Denver, travel southward past Pueblo, Colorado, to El Paso, Texas, and the Rio Grande River, then on to Mexico City. However, a rival railroad, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe (AT&SF) Railroad, proved a roadblock to the aggressive scheme, with its claims for some of the right-of-way paths the D&RG was considering. Their bitter fight for similar routes would become warlike and would ultimately cause Palmer’s group to greatly alter their grandiose plans. Instead of going all the way to Mexico via Raton Pass, D&RG would mainly stay in Colorado and concentrate on crisscrossing the state with lucrative connections to most of its booming mining communities.

To do so and to reach Colorado’s most remote locations through the imposing Rocky Mountains required D&RG’s unique employment of the latest and greatest in narrow-gauge railroad design and construction. Although narrow-gauge trains travel at slower speeds, the track requires less materials and manpower to build and can make sharper turns and climb steeper grades—all advantages for building in jagged, mountainous terrain. Plus, narrow-gauge construction and equipment costs at the time were much more affordable than those of the prevailing standard-gauge railways.

The heated competition between D&RG and AT&SF for crucial right-of-ways provoked a virtual war lasting from 1877 to 1880. Both rivals hired gunslingers and bought unscrupulous politicians, while courts were called on to intervene in deadlocked conflicts. Illustrative of one of the more colorful clashes was one in June 1879 in which AT&SF brought in armed Dodge City toughs, led by the legendary lawman/gunfighter Bat Masterson, to defend its roundhouse in Pueblo. The fever-pitched incident was ultimately settled without gunfire, to the relief of the local citizenry.

A landmark court settlement significantly affecting both railroads occurred in March 1880, when the Boston Supreme Court granted the AT&SF the rights to Raton Pass while giving the D&RG the go-ahead to extend its line through the Arkansas River’s Royal Gorge Canyon, over which the famous Royal Gorge Suspension Bridge (Fig. 4) crosses. One of the more favorable aspects of the “Treaty of Boston” for the D&RG was that the Arkansas River route allowed Palmer quick access to the booming silver mining district of Leadville, Colorado, and other new mining settlements along the way. It also set the stage for future expansion westward into Utah.

By the time Palmer sold his railroad for a hefty profit at the beginning of the 20th century, its western extremity extended from Grand Junction, Colorado, to Salt Lake City, Utah, and its most northern point from Denver to Cheyenne, Wyoming. To the south it reached into New Mexico, while to the east it penetrated into Kansas. By far, though, most of the towns and cities the D&RG served were concentrated in Colorado (Fig. 5). Eventually, key lines of the railroad had a third rail added and ties beefed up and extended to service standard-gauge rail equipment.

When Palmer was 32 and still a bachelor, he had the good fortune to meet William Mellen, a well-to-do New Yorker with strong ties to money people in his homeland of England. The pair met on a train traveling through Colorado while Mellen was on vacation and exploring opportunities in western America. It would not be long before he and Palmer would engage in a number of lucrative business ventures, both as investors and as fellow officers. (Most important of these would be building of the D&RG corporation.) But Palmer and Mellen’s chance encounter had much more significance for Palmer than just running into a future business partner.

Traveling with Mellen was his attractive 19-year-old daughter Mary, whom he had given the nickname “Queen” as a child. Her charming and outgoing but sophisticated personality fit the moniker perfectly. More than a dozen years her senior, the proper and reserved general took an immediate liking to her and was totally smitten. Queen and her father were very close, and as he and Palmer became more and more involved with the formation of D&RG, Palmer took every opportunity to be with Queen. Their romance soon became a serious courtship, and talk of marriage eventually surfaced.

The Mellens were a prominent family living in New York at the time. They had provided Queen with a good education and a somewhat pampered lifestyle, and she was used to all the conveniences of modern society. She had a beautiful singing voice and was used to being the center of attention, often singing at special events. She was as modern a young woman as 19th-century America could produce, and her frequent accompaniment of her father allowed her much opportunity to experience many adventures. When she met Palmer, with his dreams of creating a special new resort town and a unique new railroad with her father’s involvement, she was interested.

On November 7, 1870, William J. Palmer and Mary “Queen” Mellen were fashionably married in Flushing, Long Island, New York. For their honeymoon, they sailed to England, where both had many friends and acquaintances, she more than him. For much of their time in Britain, they stayed with the family of his business partner Dr. Bell.

Back in the United States, the newlyweds quickly busied themselves, he establishing his railroad empire and laying out his dream city, initially nicknamed “Little London,” before taking on its permanent name “Colorado Springs.” Queen established the first school in the area and supported Palmer’s activities, serving as hostess to their neighbors and other dignitaries traveling through and living in the region. In due course, the Palmers would have three daughters, Elsie, Dorothy, and Marjory.

As was the case with many contemporary empire builders of the era, Palmer’s dream home was a castle, designed for fine living and entertaining—and for posterity, eventually becoming a museum. Palmer’s enormous English Tudor-style palace, named “Glen Eyrie” (Fig. 6), Scottish for “valley of the eagle’s nest,” was and is very similar in size to the imposing Palm Beach, Florida, mansion (Whitehall Museum) of the iconic Henry Flagler, business partner of oil tycoon John Rockefeller. Located on an 800-acre estate and resembling an old European stone castle, Glen Eyrie has 67 rooms and 24 fireplaces. In the picturesque foothills just outside central Colorado Springs, its grounds are abundant with majestic, towering red rock formations similar to those found in the world famous Garden of the Gods Park nearby. Glen Eyrie, on the National Register of Historic Places, is today a favorite destination for countless tourists to the Colorado Springs area.

Queen died suddenly on December 28, 1894, at the age of 44, of a heart attack. The saddened Palmer, in his mid-50s at the time, never remarried.

In 1883, Palmer resigned the presidency of the D&RG and began devoting much of his time to other activities. However, he stayed much involved in railroading. In 1885, with the cooperation of the Mexican government, he helped create the Mexican National Railway in Mexico, for which he was president for seven years. His earlier troubles with the AT&SF, cutting off his routes from mid-Colorado to Mexico City, had thwarted his dream of establishing a continuous rail line from the middle of the United States deep into Mexico but not his desire to engineer and build railroads in Mexico itself. In the mid- to late 1880s, that feat he finally was able to accomplish.

Around the time he got heavily involved in Mexico, Palmer also became one of the American West’s more successful hoteliers, building and running the popular Antlers Hotel in Colorado Springs. The luxury establishment’s name derived from Palmer’s big game hunting trophies that hung in and decorated its lobby. When the original vast-turreted Victorian structure burned to the ground in a massive fire in 1898, Palmer immediately replaced it with an even bigger Italian Renaissance creation (Fig. 7) that would stand for 50 years, until its replacement by today’s Antlers (Hilton) Hotel, opened in 1966.

In addition to his railroads and hotel, Palmer invested in several other moneymaking allied businesses, such as steel manufacturing, mining, and real estate holdings. One of these was the productive Colorado Coal and Iron steel mill south of Pueblo, which merged with the Colorado Fuel Company in 1892 forming Colorado Fuel and Iron, whose sprawling industrial complex (Fig. 8) is still located in and a mainstay of the town of Pueblo. CF&I became Colorado’s largest employer and dominated industry around the state and the whole region for decades.

By 1894, the general’s beloved Colorado Springs was booming, partly due to the discovery of a rich deposit of gold in Cripple Creek three years earlier. With all his business holdings in the region as well as on the East Coast, Mexico, and England, Palmer’s many operations were making him wealthier than imagined by the day. With the money he was earning from his railroads, industrial plants, the Antlers Hotel, sales from his home lots in Colorado Springs, and activities in Mexico, plus apartment houses in London and several dozen other Colorado properties, he had a steady income of more than $30,000 per month (well over a half-million dollars in today’s money). Indeed, the New York Times estimate in 1907 of him being worth $15 million when he died was well founded, maybe even quite conservative.

The sale of the Rio Grand Western (part of the D&RG) in April 1901 at a record profit marked the end of Palmer’s active business life as a railroad builder of the West and from his personal participation in active railroad affairs. It was the end of a career that had begun with his wilderness wanderings to the Pacific coast with Dr. Bell in the late 1860s and reached a peak of adventure in 1879 when, wearing six-shooters, he commanded a small private army to fight off attempts by the AT&SF to forcibly take over D&RG routes and property. Retired to private life with an amassed fortune ranking him as one of the richest men in the Rockies, the aging empire builder intensified his charity giving activities, funding such things as public parks, libraries, schools, medical facilities including a tuberculosis sanatorium, and a school for the deaf.

A perceptive description of the slim, neat, and wiry 5 ft. 10 in. Palmer when he was 65 in 1901 was presented by historian Marshall Sprague:

“He carried himself still with military straightness, and he rode horseback with the same loose rein and long stirrup of the Fifteenth Pennsylvania days when he had chased Jeff Davis through the mutilated South in the sad spring of 1865. His graying hair was still curly, his long face tanned and weather-beaten, his large hands freckled. His characteristic expression was one of alert repose, with a hint of sadness in the gray eyes. He was more than ever the self-made aristocrat and yet his autocratic manner had great kindness about it.” (Sprague 1987)

Characteristic of that kindness was Palmer’s providing an anonymous fund of thousands of dollars to be distributed among the widows and orphans of workmen killed, several years before, in a coal mine accident at Pleasant Valley, Utah. Even more telling was his not forgetting the employees whose faithful services over the years had helped him gain great riches. When he sold his railroad for a million dollars more than he was expecting, he disbursed the full million among 104 officers and several hundred employees, to each according to his length of service. Many section hands received several thousand dollars each, and one unprepared passenger agent needed smelling salts to recover from the shock of opening his mail and finding a check for $35,000 ($750,000 in today’s dollars) from Palmer.

A terrible tragedy struck Palmer in 1906. Riding an unfamiliar horse after loaning his favorite steed to a friend, Palmer was thrown headfirst over the top of the animal when it stumbled on rocks and fell. The fall severely shattered Palmer’s spine. He never walked again and, for the rest of his life, was confined to his bed and a specially designed wheelchair. That he even survived the accident completely amazed his doctors.

Up until that time, he had never missed any of the regular reunions of the 15th Pennsylvania Cavalry, which were always held in Philadelphia. Unable to travel after his fall, the event was moved to Colorado Springs, and Palmer paid all the expenses of the 208 surviving veterans. He lavishly brought them to his vast Colorado home for a gala three-day reunion and celebration in 1907. A year later, the revered old general was dead.

A century after Palmer’s passing, Colorado Springs has mushroomed into the second largest metropolitan area in Colorado. It is home to many noteworthy international operations and globally significant entities like the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the organization that provides aerospace warning, air sovereignty, and defense for the entire North American continent, as well as the U.S. Air Force Academy (Fig. 9), the National Cowboy Hall of Fame, and the U.S. Olympic Training Center. All this was brought about by an adventurous young railroad engineer from the eastern seaboard who fell in love with America’s Rocky Mountain high country and dared to pursue the potential it held.

It’s a fitting tribute that the engineer who brought the “iron horse” (railroad) to the Rockies—and finally linked the nation by rail—is today recognized in the great city he founded as “The Man on the Iron Horse,” in large part because of the tributary statue of him on horseback (Fig. 10) erected at the intersection of two of its main downtown streets.

Palmer indeed holds a distinct place in the profession of engineering, railroading, and empire building, as well as in American history. A summary of his noteworthy contributions and attributes could justly read: William J. Palmer was truly an American icon—a gallant Civil War soldier and Union Army spy, frontier surveyor and civil engineer, railroad pioneer and founder of cities, a captain of industry and visionary hotelier, sportsman and big-game hunter, and a world-class environmentalist, philanthropist, and leader of men.