In June 1926, with the pioneer tunnel 87 percent complete, the Moffat Tunnel occupied a strange position in Colorado: nearly certain, still contested, and already marked by losses no progress report could measure.
Moffat Tunnel Construction Happenings from 100 Years Ago
By June 1926, the Moffat Tunnel was still unfinished, yet it had already become part of Colorado’s public imagination. Newspapers could measure its progress in percentages. Tourists could plan excursions to see the portals. Critics could argue over cost, competence, and whether the undertaking was being managed with sufficient economy. Meanwhile, at West Portal, 504 men were employed at the start of the month, a reminder that the project was still being advanced by individual workers, shift by shift, beneath a shoulder of James Peak.
The figures were encouraging: as of June 1, the headings of the water, or pioneer, tunnel were only 4,375 feet apart and 87 percent complete. The main headings of the railroad tunnel stood 83.5 percent complete, while the full-size railroad tunnel had reached 62.5 percent. On paper, the arithmetic looked straightforward and promising. Underground, each remaining foot still had to be earned through rock removal, water evacuation, timbering, ventilation, machinery, and human risk. It was far enough along to be expensive, visible, and politically accountable, but still unfinished enough to be judged by every delay. The task was not becoming easier simply because the public had begun anticipating the celebration.
The camps, however, had lives of their own. One of the more revealing notices from the month announced, “Big Sport Event at West Portal Camp,” where “there are going to be big doings at West Portal on Thursday night, June 10.” Sailor Danny Burns of East Portal was scheduled to meet Lew Wallace of Denver in a six-round finish fight, with “many fight fans of the western slope” expected to attend. The clipping reminds us that the Moffat Tunnel was not only a construction site; it was a community with rivalries, entertainments, reputations, and the ordinary human need to gather somewhere lively after hard work that took place deep underground.
Baseball belonged to this same world. The Denver Rock Drill Manufacturers’ team, fittingly known as the Drillers, planned to travel to East Portal on July 4 to play Hitchcock’s “team of diamond stars.” The Drillers had made the trip the previous year and returned with a victory; they expected to repeat the performance. The confidence is charming, if perhaps unsurprising from a team named after the very tools helping to open the mountain.
The tunnel had also become a destination. The annual outing and picnic of the Shorter A.M.E. Sunday School was planned for July 5 at Tolland, “on the scenic Moffat railroad,” where excursionists would have an opportunity to view “the great Moffat Tunnel” and enjoy fishing, hiking, and resting in a pavilion. Motor tourists traveling over Berthoud Pass passed near the West Portal, while passengers on the Moffat Road caught glimpses of the East Portal. People were being invited to see a tunnel that had not yet fulfilled its purpose, but had already become an attraction through the scale of the effort itself.
One article described it plainly as the “famous hole thru range,” a phrase that manages to be both inelegant and nearly perfect. The Moffat Tunnel was being drilled through the backbone of the continent to remove the burden of the high line over Rollins Pass, eliminating punishing four-percent grades and lowering the railroad’s passage from 11,676 feet to approximately 9,238 feet. The proposed benefit was not subtle. In combination with the Dotsero Cutoff, the tunnel was expected to shorten the rail distance between Denver and the Pacific coast, by way of Salt Lake City, by 173 miles.
Edward A. Vandeventer made the point in grander language, calling the tunnel “the greatest moving job ever undertaken by man.” In his telling, the tunnel was moving Denver itself: a “city of 250,000 inhabitants, skyscrapers, churches, bootleggers, bandits and all, not a few hundred feet but 173 miles to the west.” “All of which,” he continued, was being done “without interrupting the daily routine for a second of the citizens of the city that is being ‘moved,’—Denver.” The Moffat Tunnel would not physically move Denver, but it promised to shift the city’s relationship with the West. Geography had placed Denver against the mountains; the tunnel was an attempt to alter the consequences of that fact.
Not everyone was persuaded by the cost of doing so. By June, criticism had sharpened, especially over delays and the expensive surprises encountered inside the mountain. Some of that scrutiny was appropriate. The tunnel was a public undertaking, backed by the credit of a district, and public works should be answerable to the people asked to support them. Yet some criticism also carried the unrealistic expectation that the Moffat Tunnel Commissioners should have known every condition hidden thousands of feet beneath James Peak before the drills arrived.
One writer met that expectation with sarcasm, observing that Charley Leckenby and the other members of the Moffat Tunnel Commission were apparently to blame because they lacked “eyes that could see several thousand feet into the mountain on the west side, where so much soft rock has been encountered.” The error, the writer suggested, was choosing commissioners “not equipped with x-ray eyes.” Another mistake, naturally, was “not letting the Denver Post take complete charge.”
Leckenby’s own response was more formal, but no less pointed. As secretary of the Moffat Tunnel Commission and editor of the Steamboat Pilot newspaper, he did not argue that citizens had no right to ask questions. He argued the opposite: “There can be no presumption in his, or any other citizen asking any question relative to the great work.” The tunnel, he wrote, was “a public job, involving the credit of a district of great wealth.” The records were open. There were “no star chamber meetings, no secrets, nothing to conceal.” Leckenby was asking that criticism be grounded in the conditions of the work. The tunnel law had been passed by the legislature, the location followed decades of railroad surveys, and the elected commission was answerable for a public undertaking backed by district real estate. The tunnel could be scrutinized, but it could not be made simple by pretending that soft rock, water, and underground pressure were failures of imagination rather than conditions encountered in the work.
The phrase that most irritated him appears to have been “if ever,” as in whether the tunnel would be completed, “if ever.” By June 1926, Leckenby had little patience for that formulation. “The tunnel is some 80 per cent completed,” he wrote. “The money is on hand to complete it even though the remaining mile is bad ground. It will be completed approximately a year from this date.” He did not pretend the work had been easy or inexpensive. Instead, he placed cost beside consequence: “It is a big job, it has cost a lot of money, but it is going to be finished and it will be worth every dollar it has cost.” Leckenby also stated, “There have been discouragements and difficulties in plenty, but they are being overcome. The best engineering and tunnel building talent in the world has been employed and many world’s records have been made in tunnel building. Every corner and angle of the job has been watched to facilitate operations and to do the work at the least possible cost.”
His defense shows why the tunnel cannot be understood only as a railroad improvement. He connected it to northwestern Colorado coal, oil, livestock, agriculture, precious metals, and water. Denver, he reminded readers, did “not live to itself alone;” it prospered as the surrounding territory prospered. The tunnel was therefore not just a bore through the Continental Divide; it was an argument about Denver’s future orientation, the development of the Western Slope, and whether the mountain barrier would remain a limiting fact or become an engineering problem to be solved.
The same June record shows how the tunnel drew men to West Portal in the first place. Hitchcock & Tinkler advertised for laborers, drillers, and timbermen, with muckers in the tunnel earning $4.75 per eight-hour shift, drill helpers and timbermen earning $5.00, and drillers earning $5.50. The work ran three shifts, seven days a week, a schedule that says almost as much as the wage table. Board, bed, and bedding cost $1.50 per day, with two men to a room; the camp promised a hospital, hot and cold water, toilets in the living quarters, a dry room, laundry, recreation hall, pool room, and movies. It reads partly like a want ad and partly like a controlled glimpse into an industrial town built at the edge of the mountain. The Steamboat Pilot added that Hitchcock & Tinkler needed men at West Portal, were generally pleased with the workers they had drawn from that section of Colorado, and wanted more of them, with Routt and Moffat County men given preference. The tunnel was a statewide ambition, but it was also a local labor call, drawing mountain men toward a dangerous job that promised steady wages, tolerable quarters, and the chance, at least on paper, to be part of something larger than the shift ahead.
Yet June also carried loss, and the human cost cannot be treated as an afterthought simply because the public narrative was turning toward completion. On June 22, James Clinton Platter died, seven weeks after being badly crushed underground at West Portal. Born in Iowa in 1884, he had known loss early: his mother died when he was only three, and his first wife, Lena, died in Steamboat Springs during the influenza epidemic. He later remarried, became the father of two young daughters, and in January 1924 came to West Portal for steady work, presumably seeking the kind of stability grief had so often denied him. Two and a half years later, he was badly injured underground. The reports noted that no bones were broken, a clinical reassurance that now reads with terrible incompleteness; it could not measure seven weeks of suffering, Mary left widowed, Cora and Edna left fatherless, or the unmarked grave in Iowa where his body was placed beside members of the family he had lost.
James Clinton Platter’s death changes how June 1926 at the Moffat Tunnel must be understood. Without him, the undertaking can be made to appear almost orderly: feet advanced, percentages completed, dollars spent, contracts signed, and miles eventually saved. His story belongs in the same June record as the picnic notices, the boxing announcement, the baseball confidence, the tourist writing, and Leckenby’s defense of the commission because, together, they show the tunnel as it actually was: a public achievement taking shape inside a dangerous mountain, where ordinary hopes and permanent losses occupied the same ground.
By the end of June, some writers were already looking past construction and toward the future. One clipping predicted that the names of W. P. Robinson, Charles M. Willcox, W. N. W. Blayney, Chas. H. Leckenby, and Charles J. Wheeler would someday be “emblazoned on a tablet” at the tunnel entrance “as a memorial of a great work well performed.” The language was celebratory, but it was also prescient; even before the tunnel was finished, observers understood that the work would require some form of public reckoning, a way to name the men credited with carrying the undertaking through. Another clipping reached further back, imagining Berthoud, Bridger, Rollins, and “the other hardy pioneers” present in spirit at West Portal when the first train emerged from the tunnel, rejoicing at the “subjugation of the great front range,” which the writer called “their dream of the long ago.”
The phrase belongs unmistakably to its time, but the instinct behind it is powerful. In June 1926, the Moffat Tunnel was being framed not merely as a modern engineering success, but as the latest chapter in a much older Colorado story of routes sought, mountains crossed, and difficult geography gradually made negotiable. It was a workplace, a camp, a tourist curiosity, a political argument, a regional development strategy, and a hazardous underground undertaking all at once. Above the project remained the route over Rollins Pass, magnificent yet punishing, a line that had proven what could be done while also demonstrating why something different was needed. Beneath the Continental Divide, the new route was still incomplete, costly, dangerous, and contested, but increasingly difficult to dismiss. By June 1926, somewhere between promise and completion, the Moffat Tunnel had become inseparable from Colorado’s history and was already emerging as one of its greatest stories.
Summer 1926 at the East Portal. The nearest building on the left is the Mess Hall, with the Bath House farther beyond it. Centered in the background, the tallest structure is the Rock Crushing Plant. In the right mid-ground stands the large Timber Framing Shed, while the structure in the right foreground is the Change Room. Of particular interest is how close both the Bath House and the Change Room stood to the portal—a layout also mirrored at West Portal. The reason was not merely convenience, but concern over pneumonia. Contemporary engineers understood the danger well enough to design explicit countermeasures into the tunnel camps. As Clifford Allen Betts recorded in Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Paper No. 1771, the camps relied on a centralized laundry—“the central wash house, there being no tubs in camp”—equipped with stationary tubs, shower baths, toilets, and ample hot water. More tellingly, Betts stated without ambiguity that, “as a preventive of pneumonia, which at that altitude is pernicious,” purpose-built change houses were constructed at each portal so men coming off shift could pass from the tunnel into sheltered space, shower, and change into dry clothing before prolonged exposure to the cold outside. Wet garments were clipped to wire-rope hoists and raised overhead to dry, with each line secured inside the owner’s locker—an operational detail that underscores both the routine saturation of tunnel work and the deliberate effort to break the cycle of cold, dampness, and exhaustion. These were not incidental camp amenities. They were pieces of occupational health infrastructure, justified in the engineer’s own words as a defense against pneumonia and as an acknowledgment that respiratory illness was an anticipated, persistent hazard of tunnel work at altitude.
Inside a Moffat Tunnel change house, wet garments were clipped to wire-rope hoists, raised overhead to dry, and secured inside each worker’s locker. The men gathered near the stove are surrounded by evidence of a daily problem: saturated clothing, cold air, and the deliberate effort to reduce the exhaustion and pneumonia risk that followed hard work underground.
B. Travis Wright, MPS | Preserve Rollins Pass | June 21, 2026
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