Moffat Tunnel Deaths

Moffat Tunnel Deaths: Honoring the Men Who Died During Construction of Colorado’s 6.2-Mile Tunnel Through the Continental Divide

Preserve Rollins Pass has provisionally identified fifty-five people whose deaths were connected to the Moffat Tunnel during the 1923–1928 construction period. The commonly repeated figure of twenty-eight—and TIME’s interim count of twenty-seven by February 28, 1927—are historical counts, not the total supported by this person-by-person reconstruction.

Our multi-year project reconstructs the human cost of building the Moffat Tunnel. A formal 2024 search of the Colorado State Archives sought a final list of those who died during construction, possibly compiled by the Moffat Tunnel Commission in late 1927 or early 1928. The Archives could not locate such a document and found no evidence that one had ever been part of its holdings. In the absence of a known authoritative list, the project does not simply repeat previously published totals. Instead, it evaluates each individual case against contemporary evidence—including death certificates, coroner’s records, cemetery records, workers’ compensation claims filed by family members, newspapers, company documents, census records, military service records, and family sources—to identify the people whose lives became part of the tunnel’s history and document, as accurately as the surviving record allows, how they died.

An extensive historical record

This page is extensive by design; reading it from beginning to end is estimated to take nearly seven hours.

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Short on time? Begin with a few stories that capture the range of this history.

These stories offer especially revealing glimpses into the people whose lives were shaped by the construction of the Moffat Tunnel, bringing into focus the hazards of the work, the lives lost, the rare instances of survival, and the deeply personal toll borne by workers, families, and the communities that supported the project.

#43 1927 If you read only one King Francis Weston Water runs through King Francis Weston’s story in unexpected ways: he crossed the Atlantic as part of a convoy hunted by German submarines en route to France during World War I, made a winter journey to Crater Lake carrying dynamite as water poured into the Moffat Tunnel, and, in 1927, helped a friend survive as the water rose once again underground. →

Looking for someone? Explore all 60 names.

Every individual in the current mortality record is linked below. Scroll or swipe through the names to jump directly to that person’s full research entry.

Scroll or swipe to explore

Moffat Tunnel Deaths: Grave Location and Cause of Death Status

Grave location status and cause of death coverage are shown for all 60 documented individuals. The construction era and post construction cards preserve the separate breakdowns for the 55 earlier deaths and the five later cases.

60

Documented Individuals

From outside inward: overall cause status, grave location status, and era.

55

Construction Era

91.7% of all documented individuals

Cause known 46 83.6% of 55 construction era deaths

Cause unknown 9 16.4% of 55 construction era deaths

5

Post Construction

8.3% of all documented individuals

Cause known 5 100% of 5 post construction deaths

Cause unknown 0 0% of 5 post construction deaths

The outer cause ring represents all 60 documented individuals: 51 with a known cause of death and 9 with an unknown cause. The cards preserve the separate construction era and post construction breakdowns.

Post construction grave status: 5 resolved (4 monuments, 1 documented lot) · 0 approximate

Burial Location Resolved

90% of all documented individuals

The burial location has been established as far as surviving physical and documentary evidence permits.

Monument Confirmed

58.3% of all documented individuals

A monument has been located and confirmed through surviving physical or documentary evidence.

35

Documented Unmarked Lots

31.7% of all documented individuals

Cemetery records identify the lot or burial area, but without a headstone, the exact grave position cannot be discerned.

19

54

Approximate Location

6

10% of all documented individuals

The town, cemetery, or broader burial area has been identified and mapped, typically at the block level, but the precise grave position has not yet been confirmed by GPS.

Unknown

0

0% of all documented individuals

No documented individual currently remains without at least an approximate burial location.

Sixty individuals are represented. Of these, 55 deaths were connected to the 1923 through 1928 construction period, and five occurred after construction. Three rings are shown from outside inward. The outer cause ring shows 51 deaths with a known cause and 9 with an unknown cause. The grave location ring shows 54 resolved locations, including 35 confirmed monuments and 19 documented unmarked lots; 6 approximate locations; and no unknown locations. The era ring shows 55 construction era deaths and five deaths after construction. Within those groups, the 55 construction era deaths include 46 known causes and 9 unknown causes, while all five later cases have a known cause. The five later cases include five resolved burial locations, comprising four monuments and one documented lot, and no approximate locations.

In the lead-up to the 100th anniversary of the Moffat Tunnel’s completion in February 2028, we are working to restore the names of the men who lost their lives during its construction. This evolving memorial grows as research confirms individuals, ensuring that by the centennial their sacrifices will no longer be buried beneath time or rock. This is not just a historical exercise—it is a commitment to honoring the workers whose stories were left out of the spotlight for too long. As new documentation and firsthand accounts come to light, this evolving record will reflect both remembrance and recognition.

To our knowledge, there is no plaque, no single list, no formal remembrance for the men who died during construction of the Moffat Tunnel—an absence that speaks volumes. It is a striking omission, especially given that the tunnel is not merely a passage through the Continental Divide; it is, in many ways, a sepulcher of sacrifice. That such a monumental achievement lacks a public accounting of its human cost is both sobering and unjust. These were not nameless laborers lost to time—they were fathers, sons, brothers, and husbands whose lives were spent driving progress forward. This effort seeks to correct that silence.

The most commonly cited number of lives lost during construction of the Moffat Tunnel is 28; yet years of sustained research—cross-referencing contemporary newspapers, death records, cemetery records, workers’ compensation material, company documents, and family sources—have reconstructed a substantially larger construction-era mortality record. Some deaths were misreported, omitted, or left unresolved, creating gaps in the surviving record. Because historical sources did not apply a consistent definition of what constituted a Moffat Tunnel death, this research distinguishes direct occupational fatalities, probable work-related deaths, construction community deaths, and unresolved cases rather than treating every death as evidentially identical. Names and details have not only been lost over time—they have often drifted. In the absence of a centralized accounting, misinformation took root and repeated itself. For instance, Rade Lekich was the first documented fatality in newspapers, killed in May 1924. Yet by December of that same year, newspapers began reporting Harvey Lee Gilson as the first death. Then, in February 1927, articles claimed that a man named L.E. Trick was the tunnel’s first casualty—despite details that identically match Lekich’s death. It appears the name may have been passed along verbally, with “L.E. Trick” possibly originating from a misheard or misremembered phonetic pronunciation of “Lekich” or, more likely “Lekić.” This kind of confusion underscores why original source material and rigorous citation are essential. Every name we share has been carefully traced, corroborated, and contextualized to restore accuracy and dignity to the historical record.

If your family has a relative who died while working on the tunnel but was never formally recognized, we welcome your insight. Names, photos, letters, or memories could help us honor those whose stories were lost along the way. We’re working to correct the record with dignity and historical accuracy as the 100th anniversary of the tunnel’s opening approaches on Saturday, February 26, 2028.

A changing historical record

How many people died during construction of the Moffat Tunnel?

Current research by Preserve Rollins Pass has provisionally identified fifty-five people whose deaths were connected to the Moffat Tunnel during the 1923–1928 construction period. Historical sources reported markedly different totals, ranging from nine to thirty, but often used inconsistent—or unstated—definitions of whom they were counting. The familiar figure of twenty-eight, and TIME’s interim count of twenty-seven by February 28, 1927, are therefore historical counts rather than the total supported by this broader, person-by-person reconstruction.

Executive summary

Independent sources do not yield one stable historical toll. TIME reported an interim count of twenty-seven Moffat Tunnel workman deaths by February 28, 1927; Clifford Allen Betts reported twenty-eight after completion; Denver Water later reported twenty-six; Colorado’s state library history reports twenty-eight; and a Carnegie Library archival record gives nineteen. The fifty-five person figure below is therefore presented as a broader, individual level construction era reconstruction, not as a directly comparable replacement for every earlier total.

Method note: the totals below are not necessarily measuring the same population. Some sources referred to accident deaths, others to tunnel workmen or men who died “during construction,” and many stated no definition at all. Each bar therefore represents a historical claim on the same numerical scale, not a standardized measurement, an evidentiary score, or a cumulative toll rising and falling through time.

Source and claim Reported deaths on a 0–60 scale Total

0 15 30 45 60

Independent accounts published before the tunnel opened

February 28, 1927 TIME

Reported that death had come to a Moffat Tunnel workman “for the 27th time.”

Contemporary interim report

27 interim count
Feb. 1927

Source details and evidentiary assessment

Attribution or wording

TIME stated that death had come to a Moffat Tunnel workman “for the 27th time,” in reporting the death of King F. Weston.

Method disclosed?

No

Evidentiary assessment

TIME’s statement provides strong contemporary evidence that an interim count of twenty-seven Moffat Tunnel workman deaths was circulating by February 28, 1927. Because construction continued into 1928 and TIME supplied neither a roster nor a definition of whom it counted, the figure should not be read as a final construction-era death toll.

January 18, 1928 The Craig Empire

Reported that “only 19 lives had been lost through accident during its construction.”

Primary newspaper · interim report · page verified

19 interim count
Jan. 1928

Source details and evidentiary assessment

Source and wording

The Craig Empire, no. 48, January 18, 1928, p. 1: “Only 19 lives had been lost through accident during its construction.”

Method disclosed?

No—scope stated

Evidentiary assessment

“Through accident” appears to define the category being reported, but it does not explain how the nineteen were identified. That distinction is important: stating a scope is not the same as disclosing a counting method. Its total also conflicts with the twenty-seven workman deaths reported by TIME almost a year earlier.

Independent accounts published after completion

January 1931 Clifford Allen Betts · ASCE

Betts wrote that “twenty-eight men made the supreme sacrifice” in putting through the Moffat Tunnel.

Post completion engineering account

28 reported

Source details and evidentiary assessment

Attribution or wording

“In all, twenty-eight men made the supreme sacrifice in putting through the Moffat Tunnel.”

Method disclosed?

No roster

Evidentiary assessment

Betts was not merely a later historian. History Colorado identifies him as Office Engineer for the Moffat Tunnel Commission from 1923 through 1928. His post completion total therefore carries substantial project era weight and became a widely repeated historical benchmark. The published statement nevertheless supplies no roster or counting rule and should not be described as a demonstrated official Commission casualty list. History Colorado biographical record

1962 Edward T. Bollinger and Frederick Bauer

The Moffat Road, page 211, referred to “nineteen lives lost.”

Published historical account

19 reported

Source details and evidentiary assessment

Source and wording

Edward T. Bollinger and Frederick Bauer, The Moffat Road (1962), p. 211: “nineteen lives lost.”

Method disclosed?

No roster

Evidentiary assessment

The published passage documents a nineteen person historical tradition by 1962. It does not identify the people included or explain how the figure was calculated.

October 14, 1976 Edward T. Bollinger · speaking notes

Speaking notes prepared for the Colorado Midland Chapter, National Railway Historical Society, state: “Twelve lives were lost before the construction was finished.”

Archival manuscript · conflicts with 1962 book

12 reported

Source details and evidentiary assessment

Source and wording

Edward T. Bollinger, speaking notes for the Colorado Midland Chapter, National Railway Historical Society, October 14, 1976: “Twelve lives were lost before the construction was finished.” Edward T. Bollinger Papers, 1900–1979, C MSS WH660, no. 5, Denver Public Library Special Collections and Archives.

Method disclosed?

No roster

Evidentiary assessment

These archival speaking notes provide an independent manuscript occurrence of twelve. Their principal historiographical value is the conflict with the nineteen person figure printed in the book Bollinger coauthored fourteen years earlier. The notes do not explain why the total changed.

February 26, 1978 Rocky Mountain News

In “Hundreds Gather for Moffat Tunnel Fete,” Frederick Bauer was quoted as saying that nine men were killed building the tunnel.

Primary newspaper · identified article

9 reported

Source details and evidentiary assessment

Source and attribution

Al Gordon, “Hundreds Gather for Moffat Tunnel Fete,” Rocky Mountain News (Daily), vol. 119, no. 310, February 26, 1978, p. 5. Frederick Bauer was quoted as saying that nine men were killed building the tunnel.

Method disclosed?

No

Evidentiary assessment

This source is particularly revealing because the nine person figure is attributed directly to Bauer, yet Bauer had coauthored The Moffat Road in 1962, where the published figure was nineteen. The February 26, 1978 article appeared exactly fifty years after the tunnel formally opened. Nothing in the stated figure explains the ten person difference.

January 19, 1998 Rocky Mountain News

Deborah Frazier’s “Tunnel Vision” reported that thirty people died during construction.

Primary newspaper · identified article

30 reported

Source details and evidentiary assessment

Source and wording

Deborah Frazier, “Tunnel Vision,” Rocky Mountain News (Daily), vol. 139, no. 269, January 19, 1998, p. 8: “Thirty people died during construction.”

Method disclosed?

No

Evidentiary assessment

The article supplies a clear thirty person historical total but provides neither a roster nor a derivation for the figure. It is therefore useful evidence for the existence of the thirty person historical tradition, not by itself proof of the underlying count.

2015 Denver Water

States that “Twenty-six men died during the construction.”

Institutional secondary account

26 reported

Source details and evidentiary assessment

Attribution or wording

“Twenty-six men died during the construction.”

Method disclosed?

No

Evidentiary assessment

This independently confirms Denver Water’s use of twenty-six as an institutional historical figure. The webpage provides neither names nor a derivation, so the number should not be represented as an audited Denver Water construction record unless underlying records are separately identified.

Additional authoritative institutional references

2017 Colorado Virtual Library

Colorado’s state library history says construction occurred “with 28 lives lost.”

Colorado state library account

28 reported

Source details and evidentiary assessment

Attribution or wording

The Colorado Virtual Library account states that the tunnel took nearly six years to construct and was built “with 28 lives lost.”

Method disclosed?

No roster

Evidentiary assessment

This is useful independent evidence that twenty-eight had become an institutionalized Colorado public history figure. It is a secondary account, not a newly assembled casualty list.

Archival catalog record Carnegie Library for Local History

The archival description of the A. A. Paddock Moffat Tunnel photographic set says the project cost “19 lives.”

Archival institutional description

19 reported

Source details and evidentiary assessment

Attribution or wording

The collection history describes the tunnel as having been constructed at a cost of approximately $18 million “and 19 lives.”

Method disclosed?

No

Evidentiary assessment

This provides an additional institutional occurrence of the nineteen person tradition, independent of Preserve Rollins Pass. Because it is archival cataloging rather than a contemporary casualty register, it establishes use of the figure, not the underlying arithmetic.

Reading the chart: equal length bars do not imply independent investigations, and different length bars do not prove that one author was simply “wrong.” The source universes may differ. The February 1927 TIME report was necessarily interim, and the January 18, 1928 The Craig Empire account also preceded the tunnel’s formal opening on February 26, 1928. Later accounts frequently omit their scope, roster, or derivation.

Primary government evidence

Official Colorado Bureau of Mines records

The Bureau’s annual reports provide a different evidentiary layer: year specific government mining records that can be used to test individual cases. Reports survive for several years of Moffat Tunnel construction, but the Colorado Geological Survey specifically identifies both 1925 and 1928 among the missing annual report years. Those gaps matter when evaluating the construction era record and should not be mistaken for years in which no fatalities occurred.

1923

Annual report available · limited tunnel data

The 1923 Bureau of Mines report survives, but review of the report has not identified meaningful Moffat Tunnel fatality data for 1923. Its value here is primarily chronological: it establishes the beginning of the surviving annual report sequence during the tunnel’s construction period and provides context for the later gaps in 1925 and 1928.

View the Colorado Geological Survey compilation

1924

Annual report available

The official 1924 report is available through the Colorado State Publications Library and is an appropriate primary government source for checking individual 1924 occupational fatality entries associated with Moffat Tunnel work.

Open the official 1924 PDF

1925

Annual report gap · funding limitation documented

The Colorado Geological Survey identifies 1925 among the years missing from the Colorado Bureau of Mines annual report collection because funding did not permit the necessary annual mine inspections or publication. The absence of a 1925 report therefore limits the surviving government record and should not be interpreted as evidence that no Moffat Tunnel fatality occurred during that year.

View the Colorado Geological Survey compilation

1926

Annual report available

The 1926 report is a key primary record for testing that year’s individual occupational fatalities against contemporary state reporting, including cases involving East and West Portal workers and the catastrophic July 1926 collapse. Names and page references should be tied directly to the report when cited individually.

Open the official 1926 PDF

1927

Annual report available

The 1927 report supplies another primary state checkpoint for individual occupational deaths during the later phase of construction. It should be used alongside contemporary newspapers and other records rather than assumed to be a complete cumulative project roster.

Open the official 1927 PDF

1928

Annual report gap · funding limitation documented

The Colorado Geological Survey also identifies 1928 among the missing Bureau of Mines annual report years because funding did not permit the necessary annual mine inspections or publication. This gap is especially relevant to the Moffat Tunnel record because 1928 falls within the construction period examined here and includes the final phase before the tunnel’s formal opening. The missing report therefore removes a potential government checkpoint for that portion of the construction era mortality record.

View the Colorado Geological Survey compilation

Documentary context: the Colorado Geological Survey’s MIN-1965-01 Compilation of Colorado Bureau of Mines Annual Reports 1897–1965 identifies both 1925 and 1928 among the years missing from the collection because funding did not permit the necessary annual mine inspections or publication. These are documented gaps in the government reporting sequence, not evidence of an absence of construction deaths during those years. Colorado Geological Survey compilation.

Research stage and claim Reported deaths on a 0–60 scale Total

0 15 30 45 60

Preserve Rollins Pass research history

2018 Preserve Rollins Pass

Earlier work repeated the twenty-eight person total published by Betts rather than reconstructing a new roster.

Prior research position · not independent corroboration

28 repeated

Source details and evidentiary assessment

Basis

The 2018 work relied on Betts’ historical twenty-eight person total.

Method disclosed?

Secondary reliance

Evidentiary assessment

This belongs in the research history rather than among independent sources. It documents the earlier state of the authors’ understanding but is not a second independent vote for twenty-eight.

2019–2026 Preserve Rollins Pass

Current research provisionally identifies fifty-five people whose deaths were connected to the 1923–1928 construction period.

Individual level construction era reconstruction

55 provisional

Method, scope, and comparability

Current finding

Fifty-five people are provisionally included in the present 1923–1928 construction era mortality record. The figure remains subject to revision as records are added, corrected, or reclassified.

Method disclosed?

Yes

Method and comparability

Preserve Rollins Pass includes individuals whose deaths are supported by surviving evidence as directly connected to Moffat Tunnel construction during the 1923–1928 construction period. The reconstruction is broader than a count limited solely to immediate on site occupational accidents and may include deaths occurring away from the immediate work face, or after an injury or event, when the documentary record establishes a direct causal connection to tunnel construction or the construction communities. Each case is evaluated individually using available newspapers, death certificates, coroner records, cemetery records, family information, government records, and other historical sources. Confidence is assessed from the quality, independence, proximity, and consistency of the surviving evidence rather than from repetition of a name or inherited aggregate totals. Because these inclusion criteria may encompass a broader construction era universe than sources counting only occupational accidents, immediate on site deaths, or another unstated subset, fifty-five should not be read as a like-for-like replacement for every historical total.

Why this section is separate: Preserve Rollins Pass’s earlier and current figures document the evolution of this research project. Keeping them apart from the independent accounts prevents circular corroboration and makes the change in methodology visible to the reader.

Source comparison at a glance

Comparison of historical sources reporting Moffat Tunnel construction death totals

Source	Date	Total	Apparent scope	Research status
TIME	Feb. 28, 1927	27	Moffat Tunnel workmen; interim	Independently verified
The Craig Empire	Jan. 18, 1928	19	Deaths “through accident”	No. 48, p. 1; primary newspaper verified
Clifford A. Betts · ASCE	Jan. 1931	28	Men who “made the supreme sacrifice”	Paper and project role independently verified
Bollinger & Bauer	1962	19	“Lives lost”	Published book, p. 211
Bollinger speaking notes	Oct. 14, 1976	12	Lives lost before construction finished	DPL, C MSS WH660, no. 5
Rocky Mountain News	Feb. 26, 1978	9	Men killed building tunnel	Al Gordon, “Hundreds Gather for Moffat Tunnel Fete,” p. 5
Rocky Mountain News	Jan. 19, 1998	30	People who died during construction	Deborah Frazier, “Tunnel Vision,” p. 8
Denver Water	2015	26	Men who died during construction	Independently verified; no roster
Colorado Virtual Library	2017	28	Lives lost in construction	Independently verified state library account
Carnegie Library for Local History	Catalog record	19	Lives lost	Independently verified archival description
Preserve Rollins Pass	2018	28	Betts total repeated	Prior research position; not independent corroboration
Preserve Rollins Pass	2019–2026	55	Broader construction era mortality record	Provisional individual level reconstruction

Selected sources and verification notes

These references document the strongest sources used to test the changing historical totals and the provenance of particular claims. Each source is used only for what it actually establishes; repetition of a number is not treated as evidence that a new casualty investigation occurred.

• TIME, “National Affairs: Moffat Tunnel,” February 28, 1927

  The strongest readily accessible contemporary cumulative statement identified here: twenty-seven Moffat Tunnel workman deaths by February 28, 1927. The article does not provide a roster or define the full universe being counted.

• The Craig Empire, no. 48, January 18, 1928, p. 1

  Reports that “only 19 lives had been lost through accident during its construction.” Because the wording specifies accident deaths, this may represent a narrower category than some later cumulative claims.

• Clifford Allen Betts, “Completion of Moffat Tunnel of Colorado,” ASCE, 1931

  Betts’ post completion engineering paper reports twenty-eight deaths. The ASCE record independently establishes the paper and its publication in Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, volume 95.

• History Colorado, Clifford Allen Betts biographical record

  Independently corroborates Betts’ unusually close connection to the project by identifying him as Office Engineer for the Moffat Tunnel Commission from 1923 through 1928.

• Edward T. Bollinger and Frederick Bauer, The Moffat Road (1962), p. 211

  Gives the figure “nineteen lives lost.” The passage supplies no roster or explanation of how that total was calculated.

• Edward T. Bollinger Papers, 1900–1979

  Bollinger’s October 14, 1976 speaking notes for the Colorado Midland Chapter, National Railway Historical Society, state: “Twelve lives were lost before the construction was finished.” Denver Public Library Special Collections and Archives, C MSS WH660, no. 5.

• Al Gordon, “Hundreds Gather for Moffat Tunnel Fete,” Rocky Mountain News (Daily), vol. 119, no. 310, February 26, 1978, p. 5

  Frederick Bauer was quoted as saying that nine men were killed building the tunnel. The statement is particularly significant because Bauer had coauthored the 1962 book that reported nineteen lives lost.

• Deborah Frazier, “Tunnel Vision,” Rocky Mountain News (Daily), vol. 139, no. 269, January 19, 1998, p. 8

  Reports that “Thirty people died during construction.” The article provides no roster or derivation for that total, making it evidence of the thirty person historical tradition rather than, by itself, a documented reconstruction of those thirty individuals.

• Denver Water, “Back to Moffat Tunnel, eight decades later”

  The institutional history states, “Twenty-six men died during the construction.” It supplies no roster or derivation, so the statement establishes Denver Water’s use of the figure rather than an independently auditable casualty list.

• Colorado Virtual Library, “Time Machine Tuesday: The Moffat Tunnel”

  A Colorado State Library institutional account reporting twenty-eight lives lost, useful as evidence of the continued public history transmission of that figure rather than as a new casualty reconstruction.

• Carnegie Library for Local History, A. A. Paddock Moffat Tunnel photographic collection

  The archival description gives nineteen lives as part of the project’s construction cost. That establishes an institutional occurrence of the nineteen person tradition, but not the underlying method used to reach it.

• Colorado State Publications Library, Colorado Bureau of Mines annual report series

  The surviving official series provides year specific Bureau of Mines reports that can be used to check individual occupational fatalities during portions of the Moffat Tunnel construction period. The 1923 report survives but has yielded little useful Moffat Tunnel fatality information for this inquiry; the series is also incomplete and should not be treated as a continuous project wide casualty register.

• Colorado Geological Survey, MIN-1965-01 Compilation of Colorado Bureau of Mines Annual Reports 1897–1965

  The compilation specifically identifies both 1925 and 1928 among the years missing from the collection because funding did not permit the necessary annual mine inspections or publication. Both years fall within the Moffat Tunnel construction period examined here, making these gaps important limitations on the surviving government record.

• ASCE Historic Civil Engineering Landmark, Moffat Tunnel

  Context only. ASCE describes the scale and multiyear nature of the undertaking, including roughly 800 men working on the project, but its current landmark page does not state a fatality figure. That omission is preserved rather than filled by inference.

No consistently documented, universally defined historical count has yet emerged. Independent sources support several competing traditions: nineteen, twenty-six, twenty-seven, and twenty-eight all appear outside this research project, while other historical accounts report twelve, nine, and thirty. Betts’ twenty-eight became a widely repeated benchmark, but even his post completion account supplies no roster or counting rule. The disagreement within the historical record is underscored by Edward Bollinger and Frederick Bauer themselves: their 1962 book reported nineteen, Bollinger’s 1976 speaking notes reported twelve, and Bauer was quoted in 1978 as reporting nine.

The present fifty-five person figure addresses a different evidentiary problem. Rather than beginning with an inherited total, Preserve Rollins Pass reconstructs the broader construction era mortality record person by person under stated criteria and evaluates each case against the surviving documentary evidence. That approach does not require every earlier author to have been simply “wrong.” It recognizes that historical writers may have counted different categories, such as immediate occupational accidents, deaths at the work site, workmen only, or some other unstated subset, without leaving later readers enough information to determine where those boundaries lay.

The absence of a known consolidated casualty list in the surviving state archival record is also significant. In email correspondence with Preserve Rollins Pass, the Colorado State Archives wrote, in part:

“We cannot find the records you requested and we can find no record of them ever being a part of this collection. We have some records concerning the Moffat Tunnel, but did not find a list of individuals who lost their lives during the tunnel’s construction.”

That correspondence does not establish that no such list was ever created or preserved elsewhere. It does, however, underscore why the present reconstruction must proceed from individual records and multiple independent sources rather than from an assumed surviving master roster. The documented Bureau of Mines gaps for 1925 and 1928 further limit the surviving government record for the construction period.

WHAT THE CONTEMPORARY RECORD COUNTED

The surviving historical record does not function as a dependable running ledger of Moffat Tunnel deaths. Instead, it preserves partial and sometimes contradictory snapshots, shaped by hurried reporting, inconsistent spellings, changing initials, and the absence of any centralized contemporaneous roster located through this research. The July 1926 article reported eight deaths and anticipated thirteen; the February 1927 article claimed twenty-seven; Clifford Allen Betts later placed the completed construction toll at twenty-eight. The totals grew more definite even as the names supporting them remained incomplete.

JULY 31, 1926: EIGHT NAMED, FIVE LEFT UNNAMED

On July 31, 1926, The Rocky Mountain News reported that the death of H. T. Thompson had brought the construction toll to eight. The article added that the total would increase to thirteen if the five men still buried beneath the July 30 cave-in were not found alive. They were not, yet the article did not identify those five workers by name. The eight entries printed in the July article were: "L. E. Trick [sic], Joe Gresser [sic], W. W. Wilson, G. E. Beegle, F. W. Snow [sic], W. M. Ginner [sic], Ralph McClellan, H. T. Thompson".

FEBRUARY 19, 1927: EIGHTEEN ENTRIES PRESENTED AS TWENTY-SEVEN DEATHS

Nearly seven months later, The Rocky Mountain News published a retrospective roster after the electrocution of King Francis Weston. The article described Weston as the twenty-seventh person killed during construction, but the accompanying list contained only eighteen named entries. All eight names from the July article reappeared in February, although several were printed with changed initials or altered spellings. No entry from the July roster disappeared entirely. Instead, the later article repeated those eight and added ten more: "William Geimer [sic], Pete Giaconelli [sic], Dan Metroff, John Adams, Pat Gasaway [sic], W. E. Pierson, Henry Ferguson, John Prosek [sic], George Thores [sic], King F. Weston". Five of the added names—John Adams, Park A. Gasaway, William E. Pierson, Henry Ferguson, and John Parosek—correspond to the workers who remained unnamed beneath the cave-in in the July article. The February roster therefore supplied identities that the earlier account had counted only conditionally.

More revealingly, the February list included deaths that had occurred before the July article’s stated total of eight. Peter Giacomelli and Dan Metroff had died months earlier, yet neither appeared in the July roster. The entry printed as William Gimer also concerned a pre-July death. These men did not die during the interval between the articles; they were simply absent from the earlier accounting and restored to the record later. The February article’s arithmetic still did not work. Its roster contained eighteen entries while its text claimed twenty-seven construction deaths, leaving nine places in the stated total unexplained.

1931: BETTS RAISED THE TOTAL TO TWENTY-EIGHT

In his 1931 engineering account of the completed tunnel, Clifford Allen Betts wrote, “In all, twenty-eight men made the supreme sacrifice in putting through the Moffat Tunnel.” He did not provide the twenty-eight names underlying that figure. His account also dated the six-fatality cave-in to July 30, 1925, although the disaster occurred on July 30, 1926. The error does not invalidate Betts’s accounting, but it demonstrates why even an authoritative technical source must be tested against independent evidence.

THE ARITHMETIC

The progression from eight to thirteen, twenty-seven, and twenty-eight might appear to reflect an increasingly complete accounting. The underlying record shows otherwise. Names were omitted, added retrospectively, altered through spelling or transcription, and preserved in forms that do not always correspond cleanly with civil, burial, or family records. The discrepancy does not prove that nine unknown workers died between July 1926 and February 1927. It demonstrates that the contemporary totals were not supported by a stable public roster. Some deaths entered the published record only months later. Others appeared under distorted names or initials. Betts supplied the most enduring traditional total, but not the identities necessary to verify it. For that reason, the Moffat Tunnel death record must be reconstructed person by person. Each claimed mortality requires comparison against newspapers, death certificates, coroner records, cemetery evidence, company documents, census records, military files, and family sources. Historical totals such as eight, thirteen, twenty-seven, and twenty-eight remain valuable because they show how the human cost was publicly represented at particular moments. Standing alone, however, none establishes a complete or defensible final accounting.

EVEN NARROWER COUNTS CHALLENGE THE TRADITIONAL 28

The conclusion that the traditional figure of 28 did not capture the full construction-era mortality record does not depend upon accepting every case in the present 55-person research corpus as occupationally caused. Removing all deaths attributed to pneumonia or other respiratory illness, diabetes, cases in which the precise medical cause remains unresolved, and the complicated case of James Guthrie King leaves 34 documented deaths. That figure is itself broader than a strict industrial accident count. It includes several men whose deaths were meaningfully connected to Moffat Tunnel construction, employment, authorized project activity, or the construction communities that existed to support the work, even though the surviving evidence does not establish occupational causation with the same certainty as a cave-in, explosion, electrocution, machinery accident, or other documented workplace event. These cases are therefore retained within the research record but identified separately rather than treated as evidentially equivalent. The result is not a single number pretending to possess more certainty than the surviving record allows. Instead, the evidence supports a broader construction-era mortality record within which different degrees and types of connection to the project can be distinguished and tested.

METHODOLOGY: HOW WE COUNT THE LIVES LOST BUILDING THE MOFFAT TUNNEL

When we remember the men who built the Moffat Tunnel between 1923 and 1928, we also recognize those whose deaths form part of its construction-era toll.

The project unfolded under substantial political and financial pressure. The Moffat Tunnel Improvement District was empowered to assess real estate and issue bonds to finance construction, and the legality of that arrangement was challenged before ultimately being upheld by the United States Supreme Court. By completion, the project carried $15.47 million in outstanding bonds, while contemporary engineering accounts placed its overall cost, including other revenues and interest during construction, at roughly $18 million. Those stakes make it reasonable to ask whether an accumulating death toll could have complicated public confidence in a project promoted as essential to Colorado’s transportation and economic future. They do not, however, establish that the Moffat Tunnel Commission deliberately concealed individual deaths. What the surviving record does reveal is the absence of a systematic, comprehensive public accounting of construction mortality. Whether that resulted from institutional pressure, fragmented reporting, recordkeeping practices of the period, or some combination of factors must remain an open historical question unless additional evidence establishes otherwise.

The resulting mortality record must also be understood more broadly than traumatic accidents alone. Respiratory illness formed part of the environmental disease burden of construction and therefore belongs within the same historical inquiry. Other monumental infrastructure projects offer useful comparisons, although not exact medical equivalents. At the Panama Canal, for example, yellow fever and malaria are inseparable from the history of construction mortality; at the Moffat Tunnel, pneumonia, tuberculosis or “consumption,” and potentially other occupational respiratory diseases likewise must be examined alongside blasting, rockfall, machinery, water, and other immediately recognizable hazards.

Even a century later, no definitive contemporary list of everyone who died in connection with Moffat Tunnel construction has been identified. Surviving records are dispersed and sometimes incomplete or inconsistent, and the 1920s had no nationwide occupational fatality reporting framework comparable to the systems that exist today. To honor these men without overstating what the evidence can prove, this research uses a structured classification method that distinguishes documented fact from probability and speculation.

The first category consists of confirmed fatalities: workers killed at the construction site or whose subsequent deaths are directly attributable to a documented tunnel accident or injury. A second category encompasses documented work-related deaths, including workers injured during tunnel employment who died later in a hospital, residence, or other location. Physical distance from the portal at the moment of death does not sever the occupational connection when contemporary records establish the chain from injury to death.

A third category consists of probable occupational illnesses. These cases are included only where the surviving evidence provides a meaningful connection between the fatal illness and Moffat Tunnel employment or working conditions, and where modern occupational-health knowledge establishes a medically plausible pathway for that connection. Pneumonia, tuberculosis, silicosis, and other respiratory conditions are not treated as interchangeable diagnoses, nor is a historical death certificate rewritten simply because a worker labored underground. Instead, each case is evaluated individually using contemporary medical records, death certificates, newspaper accounts, employment circumstances, timing, and other available evidence. Where the occupational connection is probable rather than established, the classification says so. This approach recognizes the environmental hazards of tunnel construction without converting possibility into proof.

A separate probable fatality classification is used in rare cases where contemporaneous sources document catastrophic injuries together with an explicit expectation of death, but no subsequent record confirming either death or survival has been located after a reasonable search. Such cases are included in the research total only with the evidentiary gap plainly identified, along with the records and time periods examined. This guards against a structural undercount created by gaps in 1920s documentation while preserving the ability to correct the record immediately if evidence of survival or another outcome emerges.

Finally, some reported deaths remain unconfirmed or speculative. These may originate in oral history, family recollection, later retellings, ambiguous newspaper references, or other evidence that suggests a connection to Moffat Tunnel construction but does not yet establish one reliably. These individuals are not included in the research total. Their stories are nevertheless preserved as leads rather than discarded, because uncertain evidence can sometimes become verifiable when additional records surface.

The purpose of these categories is not to enlarge the death toll. It is to prevent the opposite error: allowing the limitations of surviving records to erase people whose connection to the work can be demonstrated, while refusing to count those for whom the evidence remains insufficient. The standard is therefore neither inclusion nor exclusion by default, but evidence—clearly labeled according to what it can, and cannot, establish.

Industrial Commission of Colorado

State Compensation Insurance Fund, now Pinnacol Assurance

The Moffat Tunnel project also represented a significant undertaking for Colorado’s State Compensation Insurance Fund. In its Seventh Report, covering December 1, 1922, through December 1, 1923, the Industrial Commission of Colorado reported that the Fund had successfully written the workers’ compensation insurance for employees of both the Moffat Tunnel Commission and the project’s principal contractor, Hitchcock & Tinkler, Inc. The Commission described the resulting coverage as undoubtedly the largest workmen’s compensation insurance contract written in this state for the past seven years. Because the insurance had only recently taken effect when the report was prepared, its financial impact was not yet reflected in the Fund’s reported premium income. The account establishes that, from the outset of construction, workers employed directly by the Moffat Tunnel Commission as well as those working for Hitchcock & Tinkler were brought within the State Compensation Insurance Fund’s coverage, providing important primary-source evidence for understanding Moffat Tunnel workers’ compensation, injuries, and deaths during construction.

Today, the State Compensation Insurance Fund continues as Pinnacol Assurance, providing a direct institutional link between Colorado’s modern workers’ compensation system and the coverage written for the Moffat Tunnel project more than a century ago.

Seventh Report of the Industrial Commission of Colorado, December 1, 1922 to December 1, 1923, p. 12.

WHY DEATHS FROM ILLNESSES ARE COUNTED

The scale and risk of Moffat Tunnel construction required continuous on-site medical care at both portals. Contemporary records identify Dr. Roderick J. McDonald, stationed at the West Portal, and Dr. Ray Sunderland, serving the East Portal. The contractor’s own account went further, documenting a six-bed hospital at each portal, complete with an operating room and X-ray equipment, with “a doctor and nurse in constant attendance.” Their presence underscores that these were not ordinary work camps, but remote industrial communities in which injury and illness had to be anticipated and treated where the work occurred. It also helps explain why this record includes deaths from pneumonia and related illnesses. Although such deaths were not caused by blasting or rockfall, the surviving evidence requires asking whether the conditions of employment materially contributed to the illnesses that proved fatal.

Contemporary engineers understood the risk well enough to design explicit countermeasures. As Clifford Allen Betts recorded in Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Paper No. 1771, the tunnel 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 telling still, and stated without ambiguity, “as a preventive of pneumonia, which at that altitude is pernicious,” purpose-built change houses were constructed at each portal so that men coming off shift could transition 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 nature of saturation and the deliberate attempt to interrupt repeated cycles of cold, dampness, and exhaustion. This was not incidental camp convenience. It was infrastructure explicitly justified, in the engineer’s own words, as a defense against pneumonia—an acknowledgment that respiratory illness was an anticipated occupational hazard of tunnel work at altitude.

The death record bears this out. Fatal pneumonia and related illnesses appear throughout the construction period and across seasons: Pumphrey in February 1924; Bonham in September 1924; Schaaf in December 1924; Markham in May 1925; Nicholls in August 1925; Billings in December 1926; Engleman in April 1927; Davis later that same month; and Watt in March 1928, just weeks after completion. The distribution is important: these deaths did not cluster solely in the depths of winter, nor did they disappear during summer months. Instead, they recur across the construction period and through markedly different seasons, demonstrating that fatal respiratory illness was not confined to winter alone. That pattern gives added significance to the conditions Betts described—altitude, wet clothing, cold exposure, and the need for purpose-built preventive infrastructure—without requiring those factors to be assigned retrospectively as the medical cause of every death.

Moffat Tunnel construction crews implemented substantial ventilation systems to manage smoke, gases, heat, and air quality as the headings advanced. The contractors described the system as successful, reporting that high-pressure air cleared smoke and gases after blasting sufficiently for work generally to resume within twenty to thirty minutes. Yet ventilation designed to remove visible blasting products is not evidence that respirable dust exposures were harmless; no surviving industrial-hygiene measurements yet identified establish what concentrations of respirable silica or other contaminants workers actually inhaled over the course of their shifts. Altitude imposed a separate physiological burden. Although the proportion of oxygen in the atmosphere remains essentially unchanged, the lower atmospheric pressure at roughly 9,200 feet reduces the partial pressure of inspired oxygen, leaving less oxygen available with each breath—an additional strain during sustained physical labor and respiratory illness. Combined with cold, wet, and damp conditions and grueling shifts, respiratory infections could—and did—prove fatal, including among young workers, some just 20 years old.

Because intense silica exposure can produce accelerated or acute forms of silicosis, occupational lung disease remains one possible differential explanation worth investigating where surviving records describe unusual respiratory deterioration. No individual case, however, should be reclassified from pneumonia to silicosis, pneumonitis, tuberculosis, or another occupational disease without case-specific evidence. Modern occupational medicine therefore gives us additional categories with which to investigate these deaths, but not license to rewrite them: tuberculosis is an infectious disease, pneumonia commonly results from infection, while silicosis is an occupational lung disease that can increase vulnerability to tuberculosis and other respiratory infections. Period newspaper accounts frequently note that pneumonia, believed to have been contracted while working at the Moffat Tunnel, was the cause of death for not only laborers, but also superintendents and shift bosses.

One report concerning Frank Davis made that connection unusually explicit. In its April 30, 1927, issue, The Rocky Mountain News published an article under the headline “Pneumonia Proves Fatal To Moffat Shift Boss,” stating, “Pneumonia, contracted while working at the Moffat tunnel is believed to have caused the death of Frank Davis of East Portal, at St. Anthony’s hospital Thursday.” It concluded simply, “Davis was a shift boss.” The wording is significant because the account does not merely place Davis at the Moffat Tunnel and separately report pneumonia; it expressly states the contemporary belief that he contracted the illness while working there. That newspaper account is not, by itself, a medical determination that a particular environmental exposure caused his pneumonia, but it provides unusually direct period evidence connecting his fatal illness with his employment at the tunnel. Its evidentiary value is heightened by the fact that this occupational connection was made at the time of Davis’s death, rather than imposed retrospectively through modern interpretations of workplace health. Read alongside the engineers’ deliberate construction of change houses “as a preventive of pneumonia,” it substantially strengthens the conclusion that pneumonia was understood at the time not merely as an unrelated community illness, but as a recognized risk associated with the conditions under which Moffat Tunnel crews worked—one that contemporaries themselves associated with fatal illness among the workforce. Supervisory rank did not necessarily insulate these men from the tunnel environment; superintendents and shift bosses responsible for underground operations could share many of the same exposures encountered by the crews they supervised. Their deaths illustrate that serious respiratory illness crossed occupational ranks rather than affecting laborers alone.

Dust presented a different, and less visible, respiratory hazard. In an August 2026 discussion of the Moffat Tunnel deaths, Gilpin County Coroner Zane Laubhan drew an analogy to the “black lung” associated with coal mining, referring to the dust-related disease of hard-rock workers as “white lung.” The term is colloquial rather than a precise modern diagnosis, but the underlying occupational hazard is well established: drilling, tunneling, and breaking rock can generate respirable crystalline silica, and sufficient exposure can cause silicosis, an inflammatory and fibrotic disease of the lungs. Modern occupational research also recognizes an important connection between silica exposure and pulmonary tuberculosis. Workers exposed to respirable crystalline silica, particularly those who develop silicosis, face an increased risk of tuberculosis; tuberculosis itself, historically called “consumption,” spreads through the air and is more readily transmitted in enclosed spaces with poor air circulation. That relationship does not establish that a worker whose death certificate reads “pneumonia” actually died of silicosis or tuberculosis, nor does it justify rewriting a historical diagnosis without additional evidence. It does, however, broaden the occupational-health context in which those diagnoses should be evaluated. At the Moffat Tunnel, men drilled and blasted enormous quantities of rock: Betts calculated approximately 700 miles of drill holes and 2.5 million pounds of dynamite during construction. The contractors themselves installed high-pressure blowers and low-pressure fans, and reported using forced air after blasts so that smoke and gases could be cleared before workers returned, generally within twenty to thirty minutes. The existence of those systems demonstrates both serious engineering attention to ventilation and the recurring presence of airborne contaminants that had to be removed.

Today, many of these hazards—particularly respirable crystalline silica, blasting contaminants, and occupational exposure to airborne particulates—would be subject to extensive workplace exposure controls and occupational-health regulation. Modern occupational medicine distinguishes the infectious cause of pneumonia from environmental conditions that may increase physiological stress or susceptibility. The historical significance here is therefore not that cold or wet clothing mechanically “caused” pneumonia, but that the Moffat Tunnel’s own engineers regarded pneumonia as sufficiently connected with the work environment to design and justify specialized preventive infrastructure around it.

Excluding these deaths would overlook not just individual stories, but a category of risk the tunnel’s own engineers recognized and attempted to control. Including them does not require pretending that every infection was caused exclusively by employment, nor does it require rewriting a death certificate. It requires something more historically disciplined: recognizing deaths in which contemporary evidence connects the fatal illness to the conditions, location, or demands of Moffat Tunnel work. At the Moffat Tunnel, pneumonia and other respiratory illnesses belonged to the occupational landscape just as surely as blasting fumes, falling rock, machinery, and water. Where the evidence establishes that connection, those men belong in the construction mortality record. They deserve to be counted.

A NOTE ON EXCLUSIONS

This record includes deaths when the surviving evidence establishes a meaningful connection to Moffat Tunnel construction, employment, authorized project activity, or the construction communities that existed to support the work. Deaths arising from unauthorized or illegal activity, or from circumstances merely incidental to the tunnel or its associated infrastructure, are excluded even when the tunnel itself was the physical setting of the death. Accordingly, deaths from “bad bootleg” alcohol during Prohibition [Patrick Flynn, March 1925; Horace E. Dudley, October 1925] and suicide arising from private marital difficulties [Francis R. Baxter, October 1926] are excluded because the surviving evidence does not establish a meaningful connection between those deaths and the tunnel enterprise. This page also excludes Stanley Barnes Sefton, age 57, who died in 1951 after illegally riding on a flatcar and falling from it inside the Moffat Tunnel, and was buried in an unmarked grave at Hot Sulphur Springs Cemetery. If new information shows that any listed death does not meet this test, the name will be respectfully removed. The goal is not to inflate numbers, but to preserve an accurate account of the human toll directly associated with the tunnel enterprise.

We have also narrowed the scope of applicable deaths to men directly associated with the tunnel project, excluding the tragic deaths of children and wives from unrelated causes. In May 1927, Moffat Tunnel worker C. D. Price lost his wife and two young children, three-year-old Thelma and four-year-old Fred, to cerebrospinal meningitis; all three died within seven days. (We have also excluded the death of Earl L. Frink, age twelve, who was killed when a small tunnel in his backyard of his Denver residence collapsed. Although his father worked at East Portal, this incident was unrelated to the Moffat Tunnel project. Additionally, we have excluded the death of Merrell Guy Green—a sixth-grader, age fourteen—who was experiencing heart attacks and valvular heart trouble. His parents were trying to get him from Craig, Colorado to Brewster, Kansas. He "rested fairly well while the train was in motion, but had great difficulty in breathing when it stopped. At West Portal a snow plow was off the track, and a long delay followed, during which time the sick boy experienced more and more difficulty in breathing, until at last he passed away, fully conscious to the end.")

The three Denver Fire Department members who died in the line of duty while fighting the fire in Tunnel No. 10 on the night of Monday, September 20, 1943—Douglas Vernon Parrish Sr., James Williams, and John Henry Kennedy—are not included in these totals. Tunnel No. 10 was a separate railroad tunnel along the Moffat Road route, not the Moffat Tunnel beneath the Continental Divide. The fire began when a small brush fire spread to the timber supports inside the approximately 1,600-foot railroad tunnel, located about twenty-seven miles west of Denver in an area without road access. Because the Moffat Road remained an important rail connection, the Denver & Salt Lake Railway requested assistance from the Denver Fire Department. Chief John F. Healy assembled a specialized crew that included Parrish, whose experience with fire pumps made him particularly valuable; Williams, who had knowledge of mines and underground conditions; Kennedy; and Captain William R. Parry. One of the department’s newer apparatuses, Engine 4, was placed aboard a railroad flatcar and dispatched from Denver with three additional cars carrying water. After the train reached Tunnel No. 10 late that night, Parrish, Williams, and Kennedy entered the bore to combat the fire. Parry reportedly escaped the same fate only because a malfunctioning gas mask caused him to leave the tunnel for a replacement. Conditions inside rapidly deteriorated as the burning timbers transformed the tunnel into an inferno and part of the structure collapsed. Parrish, age forty-seven, was found approximately 100 yards inside the tunnel on Tuesday, September 21, the day after the fire. The collapse and continuing danger delayed the recovery of the other two firefighters for two months. Kennedy, age thirty-four and identified as Chief Healy’s driver at Station 8, was recovered deep within the tunnel on Sunday, November 21. Williams, age thirty-nine and also assigned to Station 8, was recovered on Wednesday, November 24. Of particular interest, Williams was the son of John Thomas Trezise’s half-sister, Edith Noble Carter, and uncle and nephew share a family monument at Fairmount Cemetery.

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Help Preserve Their Stories

An Extra-Special Thank You and Call to Action

This memorial has grown because of the generosity of families who have shared stories, photographs, records, and fragments of family history that might otherwise have remained unknown. Every contribution brings us closer to a more complete record, ensuring that those whose lives became part of the Moffat Tunnel’s history are remembered not merely as names in an accident report or death record, but as sons, brothers, husbands, fathers, grandfathers, uncles, coworkers, friends, and individuals whose lives extended far beyond the circumstances of their deaths.

If you have information, documents, photographs, or family recollections connected to the Moffat Tunnel, we invite you to reach out. Your knowledge may be the missing piece that helps identify a burial place, restore a face to a name, clarify a life story, or reconnect a family with a chapter of its own history. Each discovery strengthens the record as the Moffat Tunnel approaches its centennial in 2028.

With Special Gratitude

We are especially grateful to the families, sextons, experts, volunteers, and researchers whose generosity, persistence, and local knowledge have already strengthened this record.

Individual and Family Research

Listed chronologically by the death date of the person whose story the contribution helped document or resolve, with the survivor entry placed by the date of her 1927 accident.

• Juan Valquez (1924): Colorado Forensic Canines : Kim Sadar, with historic human remains detection (HHRD) canines Brody and Marshall; Martha Miller, with HHRD canine Jack; Jeff Liddle, with HHRD canine Kismet; Chelsie Fleischer, Field Tech; and Gary Scott, forensic anthropologist and Case Coordinator, for bringing canine search, field, and forensic expertise to the ongoing effort to evaluate a possible burial location.
  Historic human remains detection canines in archaeological research. This is a specialized form of human remains detection used in historic and archaeological burial contexts. Published research documents specially trained HHRD canines working with nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cemeteries as well as much older archaeological burials, including documented examples ranging from several hundred years old to more than 9,000 years old. Multiple independently working canine teams can also provide an important means of cross-checking areas of interest. These canines are trained to recognize the scent associated with human decomposition in burial contexts, providing a noninvasive way to identify areas that may warrant further archaeological, historical, or forensic evaluation. A canine alert does not, by itself, confirm a burial or identify an individual, nor does the absence of an alert necessarily establish that no burial is present. Environmental conditions affect detection, and scent can move through soil away from its source, so findings must be interpreted alongside the broader body of evidence. Source: Grebenkemper, Morris, Byrd, and Engbring, “Applying Canine Detection in Support of Collaborative Archaeology,” Advances in Archaeological Practice 9, no. 3 (2021).
• Warren Weaver Wilson (1925): Susan Stein, for the Wilson family; and Katherine Lundquist, for helping locate his precise burial location.
• Gage Maxwell Beegle (1925): Cathy Moneysmith at Galion Cemetery, whose assistance supported the burial research.
• Forest Noble Snow (1926): Shannon Hance, City Clerk for the City of Moberly, Missouri, for assistance with the continuing search for his burial place.
• Charles Cecil “Charley” Decker (1926): Verna Decker Whaley, for the Decker family.
• James Clinton Platter (1926): Jan Stumbo, sexton of Pleasant Hill Cemetery, where Platter is buried.
• John Adams (1926): Jim Williams, keeper of the Masonic Cemetery sexton records.
• Park A. Gasaway (1926): Lee Creed, for assistance with the research.
• Volna Slater Brown (survivor, 1927): Anne in Melbourne, Australia, for helping confirm a distant family connection in Volna’s extended family.
• King Francis Weston (1927): Kellen Cutsforth, Archivist at Denver Public Library, for providing a high-resolution copy of a historic photograph that helps reconstruct what was likely the final week, and perhaps the final day, of Weston’s life.

Cemetery and Regional Research

• Crown Hill Cemetery, Colorado: Brooke Ritter, Angelica Molina, Rashelle Cullum, and the Grounds Crew.
• Fairmount Cemetery, Colorado: Robin Brilz, Dave, and Corey.
• Huerfano Heritage Center: Oliver Lesniak.
• Mount Olivet Cemetery, Colorado: Melody Garcia and the Grounds Crew.
• Riverside Cemetery, Block 14, Colorado: Becki, whose knowledge of the cemetery and its records aided research into the unmarked burial locations of Rade (Mike) Lekich, D. H. Davis, Elmer Alonzo Swett, Dan Metroff, George Shores, Harley Smith, Frank Davis, and John Zuzulis.

Historical and Institutional Research

• Zane Laubhan, Gilpin County Coroner, whose office helped provide access to surviving coroner records.
• Sahari McCormick, Gilpin County Clerk & Recorder, whose office has provided valuable access to historical county records.
• Kim Vincent of the Grand County Historical Association.

Each contribution has helped move this project beyond names and dates toward a fuller record of individual lives, family connections, burial places, and the circumstances preserved in surviving records.

IN MEMORIAM: MOFFAT TUNNEL DEATHS

While our original intent was to wait until the centennial of the Moffat Tunnel’s construction to publish this list—allowing it to grow through deliberate, methodical research—an increasing number of relatives have been reaching out to us. To honor those connected to the Moffat Tunnel and safeguard the historical record, we are releasing provisional information now (in late summer 2025), well ahead of the 100th anniversary. Doing so provides ample time for families, researchers, and the public to review the list, share additional details, and help ensure that every name and story is recorded accurately for the centennial. This list will continue to be refined, with more names and information added as research progresses and new contributions emerge; we also recognize that in some cases, full confirmation may never be possible.

This evolving record honors those who lost their lives connected to construction of the Moffat Tunnel (1923–1928). Each entry maps the event to BLS/MSHA-style categories (e.g., fall of ground, struck-by equipment, explosion, electrocution, asphyxiation, transportation, overexertion/physiologic, or violence) and records the manner separately (accident, homicide, suicide, natural, or undetermined). Historic phrasing—such as “fall of rock”—is retained in quotes, with the modern term in brackets. Where an earlier job injury preceded a later death, we state the causal link and cite the evidence, so the count reflects the full risk workers faced, not just on-site fatalities. Note on modern statistics: The BLS Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries (CFOI) counts traumatic injuries and generally excludes illness-related deaths unless precipitated by an injury event. This memorial includes occupational illnesses to reflect the full risk workers faced, consistent with death-certificate practice distinguishing manner from medical cause.

Note: Please note that the death numbers below are provisional and may shift forward or backward as additional deaths are validated. Abbreviations used include NLT, meaning “no later than,” and NET, meaning “no earlier than.”

#1  |  1923 Carroll M. Burch

• Age: 31
• Birth: Sunday, October 30, 1892
• Townsite Association: N/A; he transported a Moffat Tunnel Commission attorney to West Portal, Grand County
• Occupation (role/trade): chauffeur
• Date of Death: Saturday, November 10, 1923
• Mechanism (event): overexertion and exposure while attempting to free a Moffat Tunnel Commission automobile from snowdrifts on Berthoud Pass after leaving West Portal
• Medical Cause: pneumonia
• Manner: natural (occupational illness)
• Burial: Fairmount Cemetery, Denver, Colorado | Block 84, Lot 5, Grave 77
• Headstone: Monument located and confirmed.
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Yes
• Find A Grave Memorial: 92920625
• Other Information: Carroll M. Burch was employed as a chauffeur by the Moffat Tunnel Commission. On Friday, October 26, 1923, he drove the Commission’s attorney from Denver to West Portal. During the return trip, a severe storm overtook them while crossing Berthoud Pass, and the automobile became blocked by snowdrifts. Burch overexerted himself attempting to free the car. After returning to Denver, he suffered a physical breakdown, developed pneumonia, and died on Saturday, November 10, 1923. The Colorado Industrial Commission determined that the overexertion constituted an accident and had weakened Burch, making him susceptible to the pneumonia that caused his death. Compensation was awarded to his widow, Eula Burch. Although Burch was not employed in tunnel excavation, his death resulted from an assigned duty performed directly for the Moffat Tunnel Commission.
• Colorado Industrial Commission, Eighth Report of the Industrial Commission of Colorado, December 1, 1923, to December 1, 1924 (Denver: Industrial Commission of Colorado, 1924), 19, Index No. 9, Claim No. 29379: Carrol [sic] M. Burch, Deceased; Eula Burch, Widow, Dependent, Claimant, vs. Moffat Tunnel Commission, Employer, and State Compensation Insurance Fund, Insurer, Respondents. OVER-EXERTION AND EXPOSURE AS AN ACCIDENT. Decedent was employed by the Moffat Tunnel Commission as a chauffeur. Several days prior to October 26, 1923, he was instructed to drive the attorney for the Commission from Denver to West Portal. On the return trip he was caught in a severe storm in crossing Berthoud Pass, and finally became blocked in the snow drifts occasioned by the storm. In his efforts to extricate his car, he over-exerted himself and, following his return to Denver, suffered a physical breakdown and developed pneumonia. He died November 10, 1923. His condition of health prior to his trip on October 26, 1923, had been good. Held, that over-exertion constitutes an accident and that this over-exertion caused a weakened condition which made the decedent susceptible to pneumonia, from which he died. Compensation awarded to the widow.
• Other notes: Carroll is pronounced KARR-uhl
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about Carroll M. Burch, please let us know.

#2  |  1924 Jonas Wilson Pumphrey, Jr.

• Age: 58
• Birth: Wednesday, January 24, 1866 in Platte County, Missouri
• Townsite Association: East Portal, Gilpin County
• Occupation (role/trade): laborer (electric motor driver in the tunnel)
• Date of Death: Monday, February 25, 1924
• Mechanism (event): exposure/respiratory
• Medical Cause: pneumonia
• Manner: natural (occupational illness)
• Burial: Nederland Cemetery, Nederland, Colorado.
• Headstone: Monument located and confirmed.
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Yes
• Find A Grave Memorial: 35124013
• Other Information: Pumphrey’s family moved from Erie to Nederland in 1922. Jonas left behind his wife, Rose, daughter Louise (16), a son, Jonas Wilson (16), and daughter Virginia (8). Due to the “bad condition of the road between Nederland and East Portal, owing to snowdrifts, considerable difficulty was experienced by friends of the deceased and of Mrs. Rose Pumphrey… in getting the remains to Nederland.” A separate article mentioned that “Mrs. J.H. Robinson received word on Monday of the death of her brother, J.W. Pumphrey” and the article mentions “the high altitude was a contributing factor to the fatal disease.” Pumphrey was born in Platt County, Missouri on January 24, 1866. He was a “devout member of the Baptist church and of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, being a member of the LaSalle lodge.” Pumphrey is buried in Nederland, alongside Rose.
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about Jonas Wilson Pumphrey, Jr., please let us know.

#3  |  1924 Lee Rae Thurber

• Age: 21
• Birth: Friday, May 9, 1902
• Townsite Association: West Portal, Grand County
• Occupation (role/trade): driller
• Date of Death: Tuesday, April 22, 1924
• Mechanism (event): acute abdominal medical emergency
• Medical Cause: acute appendicitis, according to family testimony
• Manner: natural
• Burial: Richfield City Cemetery, Richfield, Utah | A.33.12.02
• Headstone: Monument located and confirmed.
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Not yet
• Find A Grave Memorial: 113540
• Other Information: Lee Rae Thurber was a young laborer and former Army serviceman who died on Tuesday, April 22, 1924, at age 21, during the early construction period of the Moffat Tunnel. Even the time of his death is reported differently in contemporary sources: the Richfield Reaper said he died Tuesday morning, while the Salt Lake Tribune placed his death Tuesday evening. More consequentially, the surviving reports differ over where Thurber was living immediately before his death, where his fatal illness ended his life, and how his remains began their journey to Utah.
• Those accounts cannot be reduced to a simple contest between one Colorado newspaper and one Idaho-oriented report. The evidence now consists of several different kinds of sources produced at different distances from the event: family records, Utah newspaper accounts based partly on telegrams and family information, multiple Denver mortuary notices published beginning the day after his death, a separate contemporary report describing him as living in Colorado, and two modern searches of Idaho’s statewide death-record corpus that have thus far failed to locate a death registration for him. Taken together, they strongly establish a very recent West Portal and Moffat Tunnel association and a documented Colorado mortuary role immediately after his death. They do not yet establish, with the precision of a civil death certificate or physician’s record, whether Thurber physically died in Colorado or Idaho.
• Born on Friday, May 9, 1902, in Richfield, Utah, Thurber was the son of Joseph H. Thurber and Annie Christina Christensen Thurber. His family later relocated to Manard, Idaho. Family records document his longstanding participation in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He was blessed on Sunday, March 5, 1905, baptized on Saturday, July 30, 1910, and confirmed the following day by his father, Joseph H. Thurber. He was ordained a Deacon on May 25, 1914, and on Sunday, July 13, 1919, was ordained to the office of Priest in the Aaronic Priesthood, again by his father. These records provide additional context for the distinctly church-centered funeral he later received in Richfield.
• Family material gives Thurber’s marriage to Odelia Ruby Vincent as Saturday, March 3, 1923. At present, that date comes from family material preserved on FamilySearch rather than an independently located civil marriage record. If correct, Lee and Odelia had been married a little more than thirteen months when he died.
• Thurber also served in the United States Army. A newly located military record indicates that he was honorably discharged “per ETS,” or expiration of term of service, around January 21, 1924, only about three months before his death. His Army service and Moffat Tunnel employment should be treated as separate associations. The Moffat Tunnel Commission awarded the construction contract to Hitchcock & Tinkler, Inc.; no evidence located thus far indicates that the Army furnished labor for tunnel construction. The military record is significant primarily because it further compresses the chronology of Thurber’s final months.
• The strongest surviving evidence connecting Thurber’s death to the Moffat Tunnel workforce comes from his own family. His younger brother, Albert Heber Thurber, later wrote in his autobiography: “The next relative of our family who passed away was Lee Rae who died of Acute Appendicitis while working on the Moffat Tunnel. He passed away in 1924.” A family record book kept by Lee Rae’s sister-in-law, Vera Bringhurst Thurber, is also reported to record that he was working in Colorado on the Moffat Tunnel in 1923.
• These are retrospective family sources rather than contemporary civil, employment, or medical records, and the original autobiography and family record book have not yet been examined directly. Even so, the wording is unusually specific. Albert did not simply remember that his brother died in 1924 or happened to have worked on the tunnel at some point. He remembered that Lee Rae “died of Acute Appendicitis while working on the Moffat Tunnel.” The family record therefore supplies both a reported medical cause and a direct employment association that are absent from the surviving newspaper accounts.
• There is one unresolved wrinkle in this compressed chronology. The Vera Bringhurst Thurber family record is reported to place Lee Rae on the Moffat Tunnel project in 1923, while the newly located Army record apparently carries his military service into January 1924. Until the complete military record and original family material can be compared, those dates should not be forced into a single sequence. The family date may be approximate, his military status may require further interpretation, or another explanation may emerge. What can be said more securely is that the final months of his life leave remarkably little chronological space between Army service, his West Portal association, and his death.
• Acute appendicitis was treatable in 1924, but successful treatment depended heavily on recognizing and treating the condition before it progressed to perforation, abscess, peritonitis, or widespread infection. Surgical treatment at the time meant an open appendectomy, commonly through an incision in the lower right abdomen; laparoscopic appendectomy remained decades in the future. Surgeons already understood the importance of early intervention because surgery became considerably more hazardous once infection had spread, particularly in an era before effective systemic antibiotics. The surviving record does not establish how rapidly Thurber’s illness developed, when symptoms began, when appendicitis was recognized, whether his appendix ruptured, whether surgery was attempted, or whether an evacuation was considered. None of those unknowns should be converted into established medical facts merely because later family tradition supplied a plausible reconstruction.
• Importantly, the Moffat Tunnel construction communities were not without meaningful medical care. During construction, Hitchcock & Tinkler maintained at each portal a six-bed hospital equipped with an operating room and X-ray machine, with a doctor and nurse in constant attendance. At the same time, the contractors themselves described the camps as “more or less isolated during seven months in the year.” The two facts belong together historically. The portal communities possessed substantial medical facilities for isolated construction camps, while remaining geographically distant from the larger hospitals and specialists available in Denver.
• Other construction-era deaths demonstrate both the capabilities and limitations of that system. On Sunday, May 29, 1927, Clarence Elmer McKown underwent surgery at East Portal on the morning of his death and died before he could be removed from the operating table, demonstrating that significant surgery could be attempted within a portal community. William Everette Hibbert’s illness at West Portal presents the other side of the equation: contemporary reporting stated that preparations were being made to remove him to Denver, but he died before the transfer could be accomplished. Neither case establishes what happened medically to Thurber. They demonstrate instead why the existence of portal hospitals and the continuing problem of geographic isolation are not contradictory.
• The surviving family tradition suggests that the Moffat Tunnel environment was understood as more than incidental background to Thurber’s death. Albert Heber Thurber did not simply record that his brother died of acute appendicitis; he specifically remembered that Lee Rae “died of Acute Appendicitis while working on the Moffat Tunnel.” Thurber’s grand-niece, Shauna Timpson Johnson, later made the family’s interpretation more explicit. She wrote that Lee suffered his appendix attack while working “in a remote area in the Rocky Mountains” and concluded, “If he had been in a city where medical attention was easily available, he likely would have survived.” She also described his appendix as having ruptured.
• Those later details should not be converted into medical findings that the surviving contemporary record does not establish. There is no known physician’s record confirming rupture, no documentation showing when symptoms began, no known operative record, and no proof that geographic isolation medically determined the outcome. Yet the family interpretation itself is historically significant. Across generations, the remembered story did not treat Lee Rae’s appendicitis as a natural death wholly detached from his circumstances. Rather, the family appears to have understood the isolation surrounding his Moffat Tunnel employment as an important contributing circumstance in why an otherwise treatable medical emergency became fatal. That belief does not establish medical causation, but it explains why his death remained associated within the family with the Moffat Tunnel rather than simply with appendicitis. Thurber’s case therefore belongs within the broader history of medical vulnerability surrounding the tunnel construction communities. His appendicitis was not an industrial injury, and no evidence presently establishes that tunnel work caused the disease. The distinction is between the origin of the illness and the circumstances in which it became fatal. His Moffat Tunnel employment placed him within a workforce living and working in a setting where a rapidly developing medical emergency might require diagnosis and treatment locally or, if the available facilities proved inadequate, transfer over considerable distance for higher-level care. The surviving family record strongly suggests that this remoteness was remembered as consequential to his death, even though the extent of its actual medical contribution cannot presently be measured.
• The contemporary Colorado record is considerably detailed. The earliest Denver notice located thus far appeared in the Denver Post on Wednesday, April 23, 1924, only one day after Thurber died: “THURBER—Lee Ray Thurber, late of West Portal, Colo. The remains will be forwarded by the Yeager mortuary to Richfield Utah for interment.” The Denver Public Library index had rendered his name as “Leo Ray Thurber,” but examination of the actual newspaper establishes that the notice itself says Lee Ray Thurber. The Denver Post repeated the notice on Thursday, April 24, 1924, with one particularly important addition: “THURBER—Lee Ray Thurber, late of West Portal, Colo. The remains will be forwarded today by the Yeager mortuary to Richfield, Utah, for interment.” The Rocky Mountain News carried substantially the same Yeager Mortuary notice on April 24: “THURBER—Lee Ray Thurber, late of West Portal, Colo. The remains will be forwarded by the Yeager mortuary to Richfield, Utah, for interment.” A Swedish-language Denver newspaper, Svensk-amerikanska Western, also published a brief notice on Thursday, April 24, identifying “Lee Ray Thurber, West Portal, Colo.” and stating in Swedish that he was being taken or sent to Richfield, Utah, for burial. These Denver notices should not be counted as four independent witnesses. Their timing, subject matter, and similar wording strongly suggest that at least some, and probably all, originated from the same mortuary information supplied to Denver newspapers. Their importance lies elsewhere: in their provenance, specificity, and chronology.
• By Wednesday, only one day after Thurber’s death, Yeager Mortuary was already publicly identifying him as “late of West Portal, Colo.” and announcing that it would forward his remains to Richfield. On Thursday, the Denver Post sharpened that statement by reporting that the remains would be forwarded “today.” Thus, within approximately forty-eight hours of Thurber’s death, a named Denver mortuary was publicly associating him with West Portal and assuming responsibility for forwarding his remains to Utah. That does not prove that Thurber physically died at West Portal. Nor does it prove that his body necessarily entered Yeager’s Denver mortuary building. A funeral establishment could coordinate preparation, documentation, railroad transportation, or forwarding arrangements without every stage of that process occurring on its premises. But the notices do establish something more specific than a generalized newspaper association with Colorado. Yeager Mortuary had an active role in the disposition of Thurber’s remains almost immediately after his death.
• The chronology places an important limit on how broadly “late of West Portal” can be interpreted. West Portal was not an established town in which Thurber could have lived years earlier and subsequently left behind. It was itself a newly created Moffat Tunnel construction community. Ground was broken for the Moffat Water Tunnel on Sunday, August 26, 1923; while the construction contract was still being finalized, the Moffat Tunnel Commission rushed completion of camps at both portals before winter. By the time Hitchcock & Tinkler received the contract on Thursday, September 20, 1923, the camps were under roof, with contemporary engineering history identifying West Portal as the first completed. Thus, when Denver newspapers described Thurber as “late of West Portal” in April 1924, West Portal itself had existed as a tunnel construction community for only about seven months. The newly located military evidence compresses the possible interval still further. Thurber’s Army record indicates that he was honorably discharged around January 21, 1924, only approximately three months before his death. Even if “late of West Portal” meant that he had already departed before April 22, the phrase could not describe some remote former residence. Whatever the exact chronological relationship between military service and tunnel employment, his West Portal association necessarily belonged to the immediate final months of his life.
• Another contemporary notice reinforces the Colorado connection. The Journal reported on Saturday, April 26, 1924, that Mrs. Joseph Thurber had been called to Richfield because of “the death of her son who was living Colorado.” The printed sentence appears to omit the expected word “in,” but its meaning is otherwise straightforward. This account does not establish where Thurber died, but it independently reflects a contemporary understanding that he had been living in Colorado.
• That distinction between family residence and worker residence is particularly important in a project such as the Moffat Tunnel. Men could maintain strong family ties and a family home elsewhere while temporarily living in construction camps for employment. A young worker whose parents maintained a home for him in Manard could therefore be described by one newspaper through his family’s Idaho household while another source identified the Colorado construction camp where he was actually living and working. This possibility does not resolve Thurber’s case, but it cautions against treating every historical use of “residing” as though the newspapers were applying a modern legal definition of domicile.
• The surviving Utah newspaper accounts require equally careful source criticism. The Richfield Reaper of Thursday, April 24, 1924, carried the striking headline “Lee Ray Thurber Dies in Idaho City.” That headline is important evidence that someone at the newspaper understood the death as having occurred somewhere in Idaho. The body of the article is more restrained: “Lee Ray Thurber, a Richfield boy, lately residing with his parents in Manard, Idaho, died Tuesday morning and his body will be brought to Richfield to be buried in native soil.” The article continued that Orlando Thurber, Lee’s brother, received the sad message Wednesday morning, then expressly acknowledged the limitations of that information: “Particulars are not given in the telegram.” The phrase “lately residing with his parents in Manard” deserves considerably more weight than a simple description of Thurber as “of Manard.” It indicates a recent Manard connection and permits the genuine possibility that Lee and Odelia had recently been staying with his parents. Yet the article never actually states that Thurber died in Manard. Its Idaho statement occurs in the headline, while the body identifies Manard as a residence and acknowledges that unspecified particulars were missing from the telegram. Nor can “particulars” safely be interpreted as meaning only the medical cause. Telegram cost readily explains why the original message was brief, but the newspaper does not tell us which details were omitted. Location, circumstances, medical cause, treatment, or other information could all have been among the missing particulars.
• The April 24 Reaper article also states: “Mrs. Thurber, the mother of the departed, is accompanying the body to Richfield.” That sentence is important, but it does not state where she joined the body. Standing alone, it cannot establish whether Mrs. Thurber began accompanying the remains in Idaho, Colorado, at a railroad junction, or somewhere else along the route. A subsequent Richfield Reaper account published on Thursday, May 1, 1924, provides stronger evidence for the Idaho side. It reported that Lee’s parents and wife “took the train in Manard, Idaho, Wednesday to bring the body of husband and son to Richfield for interment in native soil.” The newspaper further stated that “the mourners and body arrived here Thursday.” Read literally, that account can be understood to mean that the body accompanied the family party from the Manard area, and it is therefore meaningful circumstantial evidence favoring an Idaho transportation origin. It should not be explained away merely because it conflicts with the Colorado evidence. Yet the account still does not provide a technical chain of custody for Thurber’s remains. It does not state where he died, explain how or where the family first obtained the body, identify the station where the casket entered the railroad system, describe an undertaker or mortuary in Idaho, or explain Yeager Mortuary’s contemporaneously documented role. It is possible that the newspaper compressed the mourners’ journey and the body’s journey into a single narrative. That possibility should not be assumed as fact, but neither should a hometown newspaper’s phrase “to bring the body” automatically be treated as equivalent to a mortuary register, transit permit, or railroad shipment document.
• A separate Salt Lake Tribune report provides still another version. Describing Thurber as “a Richfield boy who has been residing at Manard, Idaho,” it reported that he “died Tuesday evening” and that “His body arrived here Friday night.” Thus, the contemporary sources disagree not only over whether Thurber died Tuesday morning or Tuesday evening, but also over whether his body arrived in Richfield on Thursday or Friday. The Tribune, like the Reaper, associates him with Manard but does not expressly state that he died there. The transportation geography cannot by itself resolve the question. In 1924, a body leaving West Portal for Richfield could not simply continue west through the route later made familiar by the completed Moffat Tunnel and Dotsero Cutoff. Neither had yet created the later direct connection. A body leaving West Portal by rail for Utah could logically travel east over the existing Moffat Road to Denver before entering the Denver & Rio Grande system toward Utah. Yeager Mortuary’s Denver involvement therefore makes geographic sense rather than representing an inexplicable detour. Nor is it necessary to assume that Thurber’s body remained in Denver for a prolonged period simply because Yeager was involved. Funeral and railroad arrangements could be coordinated rapidly by telephone or telegraph. Yeager could have arranged preparation, documentation, transfer, or forwarding without a lengthy stay at its premises. Newspaper publication time also does not necessarily equal the moment an action occurred. The Wednesday notice said that the remains “will be forwarded,” while Thursday’s Denver Post specified that they would be forwarded “today.” Those statements tell us what Yeager was publicly announcing when the notices were prepared; they do not independently identify the body’s precise location at every hour. A Colorado-to-Richfield journey between Tuesday and Thursday or Friday was feasible, just as a journey from the Manard area to Richfield was also feasible. Travel time therefore cannot determine where Thurber died. What matters more is that neither surviving newspaper narrative supplies the entire chain. The Denver evidence gives a named mortuary, a West Portal association, and a specific forwarding role. The Reaper gives the family’s Manard departure and their association with the body. A railroad shipment record, embalming or transit permit, mortuary register, or civil death certificate could reconcile those accounts in a way that the newspaper prose cannot.
• There is now another evidentiary problem for the Idaho place-of-death theory: no indexed Idaho death certificate for Thurber has been located. A statewide search of the Idaho State Death Index using the surname Thurber, with no first name or county restriction, produced several Thurber deaths from other years but no Lee Rae or Lee Ray Thurber and no Thurber death in 1924. The results included members of the wider Thurber family in other years, demonstrating that the surname itself is represented in the statewide index. A separate surname search of FamilySearch’s Idaho, Death Certificates, 1911–1937 collection likewise failed to locate Lee Rae or Lee Ray Thurber. Only one Thurber appeared in the results as the principal deceased person: Isaac Erin Thurber, who died in Boise in 1920. The other Thurber results represented relatives named on another person’s death certificate rather than additional Thurber deaths. These searches should not be treated as two completely independent historical sources because both ultimately derive from Idaho’s statewide vital record system. They are nevertheless useful as separate checks against that record corpus, particularly because the searches were conducted broadly by surname rather than relying upon the potentially troublesome variants Lee Rae, Lee Ray, or the erroneous Leo Ray appearing in one modern newspaper index. The absence is not proof that Thurber did not die in Idaho. A death could have gone unregistered, the surname could have been severely mistranscribed, or a surviving record could lie outside the indexed collections. Direct examination of the underlying 1924 death certificate series and surviving county records remains warranted. But if Thurber did die in Idaho on April 22, 1924, one would ordinarily expect a state death registration to exist. The failure thus far to locate one is therefore meaningful negative evidence, even though it cannot by itself establish a Colorado death.
• The county geography adds another complication. FamilySearch has more recently listed Thurber’s death as occurring in Manard Precinct, Blaine County, Idaho, replacing an earlier Camas County designation. For a death in 1924, however, Manard was in Camas County. Camas County had been created from part of Blaine County in 1917. Consequently, a 1924 county level search should focus principally on Camas County, while remaining alert to older or inconsistent cataloging that might place Manard material under Blaine County. This jurisdictional issue does not prove anything about where Thurber died. It does matter when evaluating the apparent precision of a modern genealogical place-of-death entry. A modern designation of “Manard Precinct, Blaine County” is not equivalent to a contemporaneous 1924 death certificate stating that location, particularly when the county attribution itself does not match the jurisdiction in existence at the time of death.
• The newspaper accounts also disagree over Thurber’s funeral location, illustrating why completed event reporting can deserve greater weight than advance announcements. The Salt Lake Tribune prospectively announced that funeral services would be held in the First Ward chapel. The Richfield Reaper’s subsequent and considerably more detailed account states that the services actually took place in the Third Ward chapel on Friday, April 25, 1924. Because the Reaper was describing the funeral after it occurred rather than announcing intended arrangements, its Third Ward account is stronger evidence of what actually happened. The Third Ward chapel reportedly filled to capacity. Bishop F. M. Ogden officiated; President John Christensen offered the opening prayer; Bishop H. J. Hansen and Bishop Ogden spoke words of consolation; the First Ward choir provided music; Peter Nelson pronounced the benediction; and John W. Ross dedicated the grave. Members of the American Legion’s Jensen-Colby Post served as pallbearers. The family later published a card of thanks expressing appreciation for the assistance, sympathy, floral offerings, and consoling words extended to them.
• His Army service and the participation of American Legion members at his funeral should not be expanded beyond what the records establish. Thurber was only sixteen when the First World War ended, and the currently located evidence supports describing him as a former Army serviceman or Army veteran, not as a World War I veteran.
• None of the contemporary newspaper coverage located thus far identifies appendicitis or otherwise explains the medical circumstances of Thurber’s death. That information survives instead through family testimony. This distinction is important. The newspapers help reconstruct residence, transportation, funeral arrangements, and the competing geographic narratives; Albert Heber Thurber supplies the reported medical cause.
• Thurber’s inclusion among the Moffat Tunnel’s construction-era deaths therefore rests on a careful distinction between cause, circumstance, and family memory. Acute appendicitis explains why he reportedly died. The tunnel did not cause the disease. Yet his brother chose to remember that he died of acute appendicitis “while working on the Moffat Tunnel,” and later family history explicitly interpreted the remoteness of that employment as consequential to the outcome. Whether that interpretation can ultimately be proven medically is a separate question. The surviving evidence does not establish rupture, delayed diagnosis, failed surgery, or an unsuccessful evacuation. Historically, however, the family’s understanding is itself evidence of how Thurber’s death was remembered by those closest to him. The Moffat Tunnel was not merely an unrelated job he once held; it remained part of the family’s explanation of the circumstances surrounding his death. The documentary record may no longer preserve every detail of Lee Rae’s final hours, but the family record preserves how those circumstances, and his connection to the Moffat Tunnel, were understood by the people who remembered him.
• Contemporary misprints (as reported in newspapers and other sources): Lee Ray Thurber, Lee Roy Thurber
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about Lee Rae Thurber, please let us know.

#4  |  1924 Juan Valquez

• Age: unknown
• Townsite Association: N/A
• Occupation (role/trade): laborer, Moffat Road section
• Date of Death: late April 1924 (reported May 2, 1924)
• Mechanism (event): electrocution from contact with snow-buried 40,000-volt transmission line above East Portal (Note: Contemporary engineering accounts confirm that 44,000-volt power supplied the Moffat Tunnel portal transformer facilities, but they do not expressly identify the operating voltage of the seven-mile line crossing the Continental Divide between the portals. A surviving warning sign reading “Danger: 13,000 Volts,” is direct physical evidence that the interportal span operated at 13,000 volts. Under that interpretation, newspaper accounts describing the line as carrying 40,000 volts likely conflated the local line with the project’s higher-voltage utility supply.)
• Medical Cause: electrical burns/electrocution
• Manner: accident
• Burial: unknown
• Headstone: Approximate location available.* (*We believe we have located Juan Valquez' monument; however, additional verification steps are underway with experts.)
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Yes
• Find A Grave Memorial: 301370357
• Other Information: On May 2, 1924, the Routt County Sentinel reported: “The body of a man burned to a crisp was found last week on the mountainside above the [E]ast [P]ortal of the Moffat [T]unnel. It was finally identified as the remains of Juan Valquez, who had been working on the section force of the Moffat [R]oad on the western slope of the range. He had started to walk over the mountains, carrying a satchel on a stick over his shoulder. The snow was very high and it is believed that his grip struck against a high tension line, carrying 40,000 volts of electricity, as he tried to pass under it.” Contemporary reporting placed Juan Valquez “on the mountainside above the east portal,” but that phrase appears to have been a broad geographic reference rather than a surveyed location. The reported circumstances, including his work with the Moffat Road section force on the western slope and his attempt to cross the mountains in deep snow, are consistent with an accident high on the Continental Divide, potentially nearer the western side of the range than East Portal itself. Clifford Allen Betts later described what likely was the same event in his 1931 paper for the Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, “Completion of Moffat Tunnel of Colorado,” 95, no. 1: 334–371 (Paper No. 1771). In discussing the electrical system and the winter maintenance problems of the seven-mile line between the portals, Betts wrote: “Comparatively few power interruptions occurred on the power line to East Portal, but the 7-mile line between portals, over the Continental Divide, required considerable maintenance during winter months. Tubes of ice formed on the wires by snowdrifts and sleet storms and then, swayed by the high gales, broke off insulators or poles. This usually occurred at the highest part of the line where iron wire replaced copper for strength. On one occasion a Mexican laborer tripped across a section of the power line that was buried in snowdrifts and was burned beyond recognition.” Betts did not name the laborer. Even so, the overlap is substantial: a laborer crossing the Divide in deep snow, an interportal power line buried in snowdrifts, catastrophic electrical injury, and an inability to identify the victim by appearance alone. The evidence therefore supports, but does not conclusively prove, that Betts was describing Valquez. The two accounts differ in a meaningful but not irreconcilable way. The Sentinel reported that Valquez’s “grip,” apparently the satchel or traveling bag carried on a shoulder-borne stick, struck the high-tension line while he attempted to pass beneath it. Betts instead wrote that the laborer “tripped across” a section of the line buried in snowdrifts. Neither source was a technical accident investigation, and each may preserve part of the sequence. A plausible reconstruction is that the conductor was visible at one point but sagged into, or became partly engulfed by, a deep wind-packed drift elsewhere. Valquez may have believed he could pass beneath it, while its lowest portion lay at or near the snow surface. His stick or satchel may have caught, contacted, or displaced the line first, upsetting his balance, while his feet or lower body encountered the concealed span. Under that reconstruction, the newspaper’s explanation that his “grip struck” the wire and Betts’s statement that he tripped across it describe successive portions of the same event. That reconstruction remains inferential. The available evidence does not establish whether the stick, satchel, hand, foot, shoulder, or some combination first contacted the conductor. Nor does the stick itself establish the electrical path. Dry wood ordinarily resists electrical current, but weathering, wetness, snow, and contamination can materially change that resistance. The stick or satchel may instead have acted chiefly as a mechanical trigger, snagging the conductor or causing Valquez to fall, while the fatal electrical contact occurred after he lost his balance. A competing explanation is that the newspaper condensed a more complicated sequence into a simple account. “His grip struck” may have been an effort to explain why he fell, while Betts preserved the operational fact most relevant to the line’s maintenance history: a conductor had become buried in snow and created a concealed hazard. The surviving record cannot resolve the sequence beyond that point. Betts’s account also permits more than one explanation for how the conductor came to lie beneath the snow. An energized span may have remained supported between poles while wind-packed snow accumulated around its low point, concealing the wire beneath an apparently ordinary drift. Yet Betts also recorded that ice forming on the wires could, when moved by high winds, break insulators or poles. The conductor involved in Valquez’s death may therefore have been a low but still-tensioned span, a line partly displaced by storm damage, or a fallen conductor that remained energized after support failure. The surviving record does not establish which condition existed that day. The presently proposed accident location lies near the midpoint between surviving pole locations, a geometry compatible with a low catenary span and snow accumulation, provided the location itself is correct. It does not prove the conductor’s height, tension, condition, or exact position on the day of the accident. Valquez was identified as a laborer with the Moffat Road section force on the western slope. The record also establishes that the fatal hazard was part of construction-era infrastructure: a power line built over the mountain “on line of tunnel” to connect the portal camps and support the tunnel works. That line supported far more than a single use. Contemporary engineering accounts describe electricity delivered to transformer stations at both camps, stepped down for tunnel and camp lighting, shop and pump motors, mucking machinery, electric locomotives, and ventilation equipment. The line therefore existed because of the Moffat Tunnel project, even if Valquez was traveling independently rather than performing tunnel work at that precise moment. Modern OSHA recordkeeping principles distinguish causation by a workplace event or exposure from the separate question of which employer must record an employee’s injury. Applied only as a modern analogy, that distinction is useful here: the connection between the fatal hazard and project infrastructure is strongly supported, while Valquez’s payroll status and any employer’s legal responsibility remain unresolved. This is not a retrospective OSHA determination. For purposes of this research, Juan Valquez is therefore included as a project-related infrastructure fatality tied to the Moffat Tunnel’s construction power system. That is an historical classification based on the documented relationship between his death and project infrastructure. It is not a claim that surviving records establish his tunnel payroll status, workers’ compensation eligibility, or an official regulatory finding. The engineering record establishes that 44,000-volt, three-phase, approximately 60-cycle power was delivered to transformer facilities at the portal camps, where it was stepped down for the project’s various uses. It does not expressly identify the operating voltage of the seven-mile interportal line across the Continental Divide. A surviving warning sign reading “Danger: 13,000 Volts,” associated with one of the relevant poles, is important physical evidence that at least that segment operated at 13,000 volts. Under that interpretation, the newspaper’s reference to “40,000 volts” may have conflated the local interportal line with the project’s higher-voltage utility supply. The newspaper may therefore have been inaccurate about the precise voltage while still accurately conveying the essential danger: Valquez encountered an energized high-voltage conductor concealed by snow. What occurred after the line was struck, snagged, or encountered beneath the snow cannot be reconstructed with certainty. The most conservative explanation is that Valquez fell into direct contact with an energized conductor while snow, wet clothing, and the ground completed a path for current. A more severe, but unproven, possibility is that his fall brought him into contact with a second energized phase. If two phases were contacted simultaneously, his body could briefly have bridged them, producing an immediate and catastrophic injury. The surviving record does not establish the conductor arrangement at the accident location, whether a storm-span configuration was present there, or whether more than one conductor was involved. The system used alternating, three-phase current at approximately 60 cycles per second. Direct contact with one energized conductor and ground, or contact between two phases, could cause violent involuntary muscle contraction, immediate loss of control, severe burns, respiratory failure, cardiac arrhythmia, or other fatal physiological disruption. Electrical arcing and burning clothing may also have contributed to the injuries described in contemporary accounts. These are medically and electrically plausible mechanisms, not findings documented for Valquez himself. If Valquez bridged two phases, the incident could have produced a fault sufficient to affect distribution or interrupt power at one or both portals, depending on the protective equipment, circuit configuration, and line conditions. If he contacted one conductor and ground, the system effect is less predictable. No surviving source yet establishes whether tunnel lights dimmed, pumps stopped, a fuse blew, or workers noticed a power interruption at the moment of his death. The precise medical sequence cannot be established from the surviving record. The following describes the most severe credible range of high-voltage and thermal injuries, not a claim that every injury occurred. At electrical contact points, skin may become blackened, dry, split, cratered, or charred through its full thickness into underlying fat and muscle. High-voltage injury can destroy tissue far below what is visible at the surface, affecting muscle, nerves, and blood vessels. An arm, hand, leg, shoulder, or other region in the current pathway could have suffered deep muscle destruction, vascular thrombosis, and nonviable tissue. In survivors, injuries of that severity sometimes require amputation. Extreme high-energy injuries can cause partial loss of a limb, although no evidence establishes that this occurred to Valquez. If an arc flash or ignited clothing affected his head and upper body, the face, scalp, upper chest, and hands could have been heavily charred. Skin can contract, darken, split, and lose recognizable contours; clothing may burn away or fuse into damaged tissue. Such injuries could make visual identification impossible without the body having been wholly consumed. Internally, an electrical pathway could leave regions of dead muscle, destroyed nerves, damaged blood vessels, and focal injury to organs it crossed. This is not “liquefaction” or melting; rather, the affected tissues would be heat-damaged, coagulated, and nonviable. If a sustained clothing fire followed death, heat could have drawn the limbs into a flexed, boxer-like position known as a pugilistic attitude. That posture is a heat effect and does not show that the person was conscious. Stripped of euphemism, the most severe credible reconstruction is that Juan Valquez may have been found as a heavily charred, partially burned body, possibly with profound destruction to one or more limbs or regions of the torso, a face no longer visually identifiable, and clothing burned away or fused into the injuries. The contemporary accounts establish that his body was recovered and ultimately identified, but they do not describe the recovery process, burial, or the condition of his remains beyond the language used to explain why visual identification was difficult. Important records have not yet been located. No known death certificate, coroner’s inquest, recovery report, burial record, contractor accident report, payroll record, or compensation file presently establishes Valquez’s exact date of death, place of recovery, employer, legal status, or medical cause of death. Those absences do not defeat the project-infrastructure connection; they define the boundary between what the evidence supports and what remains unresolved. The surviving sources do not establish the exact conductor arrangement, the line’s precise voltage, the duration of contact, the immediate medical cause of death, whether Valquez contacted one phase and ground or two phases, whether the stick or satchel initiated the accident, or the precise place where he fell. They do, however, support a sober conclusion: Juan Valquez likely died high on the Continental Divide after encountering an energized construction power line concealed beneath deep snow. The hazard was created by infrastructure built to support the Moffat Tunnel project and arose from the same severe winter conditions that made construction and operation across the Divide so hazardous.
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about Juan Valquez, please let us know.

Field Investigation • September 27, 2026

How the Juan Valquez Search Was Conducted

Search Design

On September 27, 2026, a volunteer human remains detection canine team conducted a field search in the area where historical research suggests Juan Valquez may have been buried. Four canines were deployed by three handlers.

During the initial search phase, handlers worked blind within independently assigned grids or sectors and were not directed to a suspected burial point or shown the other teams’ findings. The broader search was conducted within a predetermined GPS-bounded area. As the search progressed, teams later converged on the smaller area of interest so that it could be examined more closely by multiple canines.

Only a canine’s trained final response constituted an alert. Behavioral changes, increased interest, or other changes in search behavior could be noted by a handler, but were documented separately and were not treated as formal alerts unless the canine completed its trained response.

Observed Canine Responses

The search produced two spatially close canine behaviors of interest within approximately ten feet of one another. During one pass through the area, a handler observed what they described as a definite change of behavior from their dog in a small area of interest. Field observations indicated that the wind was moving uphill from the area where Kismet would later give a trained alert toward the location of this dog. That wind direction is relevant because airborne scent can move away from its source, but it does not establish that the two canine behaviors originated from the same source. Because the dog did not give its trained final response, the behavior was documented but was not treated as an alert.

Later in the day, a second canine worked the same general area during a structured search and gave what its handler identified as an alert. Because that dog had passed through the vicinity earlier while the team was traveling uphill, the handlers elected not to count the later alert as a formal indication. That decision preserved a deliberately conservative standard for interpreting the result rather than assigning the response greater evidentiary weight than the circumstances supported.

A third canine also searched the area but did not provide a reported indication. The dog was approximately 18 months old and relatively early in its working career, although the handlers spoke very highly of its scenting ability and described it as having an exceptionally strong nose. The absence of a response is therefore documented as part of the search record without assigning it substantial evidentiary weight.

Environmental Conditions

Environmental conditions were documented as part of the search. Soaking rain had fallen approximately two days earlier, an important consideration because moisture and other site conditions can influence how decomposition scent moves through soil and reaches the surface. Detection can also vary with temperature, wind, vegetation, burial depth, soil structure, water movement, roots, animal burrows, and other pathways through which scent may migrate.

Juan Valquez may also present an unusual detection environment if human remains are still present at the site. Contemporary reporting described his body as having been burned to a crisp, suggesting substantial thermal alteration at or near the time of death. If that description was substantially accurate, some portion of the soft tissues may already have been severely charred, thermally altered, or destroyed before decomposition began in the ground. The extent of that damage is unknown, and it cannot be assumed that the body was completely burned or cremated. Research demonstrates that dry human bone can continue to emit volatile compounds detectable by trained human remains detection canines, while burial scent may also move through surrounding soil. Whether and to what extent either process applies at this particular site after approximately 102 years and substantial thermal alteration remains unknown. Any canine response at this location must therefore be interpreted not simply in the context of a burial approximately 102 years old, but of one whose postmortem decomposition process and resulting scent history may differ considerably from those of an otherwise comparable 102-year-old burial involving an intact, unburned body.

The use of multiple independently working handlers and canines during the initial search allowed observations from different teams to be compared rather than relying on the response of a single dog. Once the smaller area of interest had emerged, multiple canines could then examine that location more closely.

Same-day known-target exercise. Near the end of the fieldwork, the team conducted an informal exercise using known human remains. Human foot bones were removed from their container and concealed from the canines. Both of the two dogs tested successfully located the hidden remains.

The exercise provided a same-day indication that those two dogs were capable of locating known human remains scent under the environmental conditions present during the search. It was not a standardized certification exercise and was not treated as evidence that the earlier area of interest contained a burial.

Experience Represented in the Canine Teams

The participating teams also brought experience extending beyond searches for recently deceased individuals. Colorado Forensic Canines works in both human remains detection and archaeological or historic human remains detection, where canines may encounter very old human decomposition scent and unusually difficult environmental conditions.

Handler-reported prior experience. During the fieldwork, handlers described prior searches illustrating the range of work undertaken by participating canines. One canine was described as having participated in a modern archaeological search at a site associated with the Coronado expedition of the sixteenth century, demonstrating the ability of trained dogs to work in contexts involving centuries-old human activity. The handlers also recounted that Kismet had previously located human-remains scent in a reservoir through approximately 50 feet of water, illustrating the challenging environments in which trained human remains detection canines may be asked to work.

These examples are included as accounts provided by participating handlers during the fieldwork. They provide context for the teams’ prior experience but are not presented here as independently verified evidence relating to the Juan Valquez search.

Independent Forensic Assessment

Following the canine work, Chelsie Fleischer, Field Tech, and forensic anthropologist and Case Coordinator Gary Scott examined the area of interest from a field, forensic, and archaeological perspective. Their assessment provided an additional professional evaluation of the location, but was not treated as independent confirmation that a burial is present.

The canine observations and the subsequent field and anthropological assessment therefore represent separate lines of inquiry that can be considered together while preserving the limitations of each.

Interpretation and Next Step

Taken together, the results do not establish that Juan Valquez is buried at this location. They do identify a narrowly defined area warranting additional investigation: two separate dogs exhibited behavior of interest within roughly ten feet of one another, including one handler-observed change of behavior and one trained alert that the team deliberately declined to count as a formal indication.

The spatial proximity of those observations is noteworthy, but it should not be interpreted as two corroborating alerts. Only one dog gave its trained final response, and that alert was itself excluded from the team’s formal count because of the circumstances of the earlier pass through the area.

A canine alert does not, by itself, establish that a burial is present or identify the person who may have been buried there. Conversely, the absence of an alert does not prove that no burial exists. Scent may migrate laterally or vertically away from its source, and detectability can change with environmental and subsurface conditions. The canine observations therefore must be interpreted alongside historical documentation, landscape evidence, forensic assessment, and any other independent investigative methods.

The canine team has offered to return after residual scent associated with the presence and movement of people and canines during the initial fieldwork has had time to dissipate. A subsequent search may help determine whether comparable canine behavior can be reproduced.

Current status: The historical and field evidence supports identifying this as the approximate monument location associated with Juan Valquez and the probable area of his death. Within that same location, the canine search identified a narrowly defined area warranting additional investigation as a possible burial site. The location itself can therefore be documented with reasonable confidence, while the presence of an actual burial remains unconfirmed.

#5  |  1924 Rade (Mike) Lekich

• Age: 38
• Townsite Association: East Portal, Gilpin County
• Occupation (role/trade): trackman
• Date of Death: Thursday, May 22, 1924
• Time of Death: 9:30pm
• Mechanism (event): transportation/struck by rail equipment (run over by switch cars within the tunnel)
• Medical Cause: blunt trauma
• Manner: accident
• Burial: Riverside Cemetery, Denver, Colorado | Block 14, Lot 10, Section 23, no headstone/unmarked
• Headstone: Documented lot; exact grave position not discernible.
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Yes
• Find A Grave Memorial: 285710055
• Other Information: Rade Lekich, a Serbian laborer living at 1902 Arapahoe Street in Denver, had been employed for about four months as a trackman at the East Portal of the Moffat Tunnel when he was killed at 9:30pm. According to information the police received from Dr. Sutherland, the tunnel’s physician, Lekich was run over by a switch car in the East Portal. A different understanding emerged from his friend I. M. Jovanovich, who said that during a recent visit Lekich had described the kind of work he was doing and that he believed Lekich was crushed by a falling rock. Lekich had no relatives in the United States and relied on Mr. and Mrs. I. M. Jovanovich, fellow Serbians at the same Denver address, as his only support network. About ten days before his death, when leaving Denver to return to the tunnel, he told them: “I have no other friends in this country. If anything happens to me, I know you will take care of me.” When a policeman notified the Jovanoviches at 10pm the night of the accident, no arrangements had been made for the care of Lekich’s body. Though recovering from pneumonia, Jovanovich resolved to go to the tunnel commissioners the next day to take responsibility for the funeral, saying: “We must take care of our friend… He has no one else.”
• Gilpin County Coroner records show that Lekich’s eyes were blue, his hair was dark brown, and his nationality was recorded as “Servia.” His cause of death was recorded as “Head crushed by car in Tunnel accidental.” In the preprinted “Verdict of Jury” field, the coroner wrote: “After making an examination of accident and talking with men that was there an inquest was deemed unnecessary. It being an accident with no one to blame the men with him was Thos Blevins and A.F. Church.”
• Contemporary misprints (as reported in newspapers and other sources): L.E. Trick. Real name was likely Rade Lekić (Anglicized as: Lekich)
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about Rade (Mike) Lekich, please let us know.

#6  |  1924 D. H. Davis

• Age: 44-45
• Townsite Association: West Portal, Grand County
• Occupation (role/trade): laborer
• Date of Death: NLT Saturday, September 13, 1924
• Mechanism (event): unknown
• Medical Cause: unknown
• Manner: undetermined
• Burial: Riverside Cemetery, Denver, Colorado | Block 14, Lot 10, Section 27, no headstone/unmarked
• Headstone: Documented lot; exact grave position not discernible.
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Yes
• Find A Grave Memorial: 154139808
• Other Information: D. H. Davis first appears in the surviving record on September 13, 1924, when a notice described him as “late of West Portal, Colo.,” identified him as a member of the Knights of Pythias lodge in Madrid, New Mexico, and stated that his remains would be received by the Yeager Mortuary in Denver. A second notice the following day confirmed that the mortuary had assumed custody of the body and would publish a subsequent funeral announcement—an announcement that has not been located in extant newspapers. No contemporary obituary, accident report, or coroner’s filing has yet surfaced to explain the circumstances of his death or the precise conditions under which it occurred. Probate records, however, resolve a key ambiguity left by the press. The inventory of Davis’ estate lists four unpaid paychecks from Hitchcock & Tinkler, Inc., each identified by number and date: Check No. 10216, dated August 5, 1924, for $48.00; Check No. 10857, dated August 20, 1924, for $43.50; Check No. 11510, dated September 5, 1924, for $52.50; and Check No. 12449, dated September 20, 1924, for $17.06. All were drawn on the First National Bank of Denver and together total $161.06, including a final paycheck dated September 20, 1924, consistent with delayed or administrative wage settlement following his death. The inventory also records $3.00 in cash, a sum likely on his person at the time of death and subsequently transferred to the mortuary for safekeeping. Taken together, these documents place Davis firmly within the Hitchcock & Tinkler tunnel workforce at West Portal in the weeks immediately preceding his death, though the probate file does not specify his job classification. They also illustrate how some men associated with the Moffat Tunnel are known today only through thin administrative traces—payroll instruments, mortuary-held funds, and brief notices—requiring their histories to be reconstructed from fragments rather than preserved in full narrative form.
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about D. H. Davis, please let us know.

#7  |  1924 Victor William Bonham

• Age: 23
• Townsite Association: West Portal, Grand County
• Occupation (role/trade): laborer
• Date of Death: NLT Sunday, September 21, 1924
• Mechanism (event): exposure/respiratory
• Medical Cause: pneumonia
• Manner: natural (occupational illness)
• Burial: Colusa Community Cemetery, Colusa, California
• Headstone: Approximate location available.
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Not yet
• Find A Grave Memorial: 60207468
• Other Information: Victor Bonham enters the documentary record through a tightly clustered series of newspaper notices published between September 21 and September 30, 1924. Together, these notices establish a consistent account of his death and disposition. Bonham is identified as a twenty-three-year-old former Colusa resident, “late of West Portal, Colo.,” who had left California about a month earlier to travel to Colorado. While at or near West Portal, he developed pneumonia and died after an illness uniformly described as lasting only two days. Word of his death was received from Denver, where the Yeager Mortuary handled the remains and arranged their return to Colusa. Funeral services were held at the J. D. McNary & Son chapel, and burial took place in the Colusa Cemetery, near the grave of his sister, Alta Vivian Bonham, who had died at age twenty-one during the influenza epidemic several years earlier. Family context further sharpens the picture. Bonham’s brothers—Clarance Leonard Bonham, who lived to age seventy-six, and Hiram Dyton Bonham, who lived to age ninety—both reached advanced age, suggesting no evident pattern of familial frailty or inherited vulnerability. Against that backdrop, Victor Bonham’s death appears less reflective of weakness than of circumstance. The record therefore supports a pattern consistent with sudden illness rather than prolonged infirmity: Bonham appears to have been present in Colorado for several weeks before becoming abruptly ill. At the same time, no obituary, employment record, accident report, or coroner’s account has yet been located to clarify the nature of his work or the reason for his presence at West Portal. He remains a documented but uncontextualized figure within the Moffat Tunnel landscape—known through the administrative traces of death, but not yet through any surviving record of labor or incident.
• Contemporary misprints (as reported in newspapers and other sources): Donham
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about Victor William Bonham, please let us know.

#8  |  1924 Ivor Williams

• Age: 37
• Townsite Association: East Portal, Gilpin County
• Occupation (role/trade): laborer
• Date of Death: NLT Thursday, October 30, 1924
• Mechanism (event): unknown
• Medical Cause: unknown
• Manner: undetermined
• Burial: Fairmount Cemetery, Denver, Colorado | Block 47, Lot 2, Section 1, no headstone/unmarked
• Headstone: Documented lot; exact grave position not discernible.
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Yes
• Find A Grave Memorial: 291554659
• Other Information: Ivor Williams first appears in the Rocky Mountain News on May 22, 1924, in a brief personal notice stating that he was “of Rollinsville, Colorado,” and married Mildred Miller of Denver—an item that places him firmly in the communities surrounding the Moffat Tunnel during its mid-construction period. Five months later, the same paper carried a starkly different entry: “Williams—At East Portal, Moffat Tunnel, Ivor Williams, beloved husband of Mrs. Mildred Williams. Notice of funeral services later. Arrangements by Bengston-Rumin.” No follow-up obituary or accident report has yet surfaced, leaving the circumstances of his death unrecorded. What the paired notices establish, however, is that a newly married man died at East Portal within months of his union, where life events and fatal outcomes often appeared side by side in the same year’s newsprint.
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about Ivor Williams, please let us know.

#9  |  1924 Ray Harman Coles

• Age: 25
• Birth: Tuesday, September 5, 1899
• Townsite Association: West Portal, Grand County
• Occupation (role/trade): laborer
• Date of Death: Thursday, November 13, 1924
• Mechanism (event): illness (diabetes)
• Medical Cause: diabetes mellitus
• Manner: natural (occupational illness)
• Burial: Fairmount Cemetery, Denver, Colorado | Block 55, Lot 49, Section 20
• Headstone: Monument located and confirmed.
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Yes
• Find A Grave Memorial: 32428798
• Other Information: Coles died at the West Portal hospital. At first glance, a death from diabetes might be dismissed as a purely natural cause, unrelated to tunnel construction. Yet records note he had been living with diabetes for about a year—a diagnosis that, in the 1920s, often meant survival was measured in months without steady insulin therapy. Even with a modern hospital on site, staffed around the clock and equipped with x-ray capability, the disease remained virtually untreatable. Insulin had only been in use since 1922 and was not reliably available in remote Colorado, and there were no tools to monitor blood sugar beyond symptoms. At just 25, he almost certainly suffered from what is now recognized as Type 1 diabetes, entirely dependent on insulin. Contemporary accounts describe men filing through the mess hall each morning to pack food for their shifts: some took sandwiches, but many carried bread, potatoes, and “five or six pieces of pie and nothing else, or perhaps as many pieces of cake.” For a diabetic, such a diet, combined with hard labor at altitude, produced dangerous blood sugar swings and heightened the risk of diabetic ketoacidosis, a crisis doctors could not reverse without reliable insulin or fluids. While classified as natural, his death was inseparable from the tunneling environment, showing the project claimed lives not only through accidents but also by straining fragile health.
• Contemporary misprints (as reported in newspapers and other sources): Ray Cole
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about Ray Harman Coles, please let us know.

#10  |  1924 George Schaaf

• Age: 22
• Townsite Association: West Portal, Grand County
• Occupation (role/trade): laborer
• Date of Death: Tuesday, December 9, 1924
• Mechanism (event): exposure/respiratory
• Medical Cause: pneumonia
• Manner: natural (occupational illness)
• Burial: Cedar Creek Cemetery, Montrose, Colorado | Section F, Block 15, Lot 3, NE 1/4.
• Headstone: Monument located and confirmed. (As of April 18, 2011, the grave was marked; sometime afterward, the name marker is now missing, leaving the site unidentifiable.)
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Yes
• Find A Grave Memorial: 27488418
• Other Information: George Schaaf, a young Moffat Tunnel worker and twin son of the late Mr. and Mrs. Fred J. Schaaf, died of pneumonia in a Denver hospital after falling ill at the tunnel several days earlier; a Tuesday telegram from Denver reached his siblings in Montrose with the news. Born in Russia twenty-two years before and brought to the United States at age seven, George and his twin brother, Oscar, had lived in the Montrose valley ever since, attending local schools and later working on the family farm. The longer obituary notes that he leaves four sisters—Mrs. John Schlich, Mrs. Phillip Schneider, and two younger sisters—and that both parents had died in Montrose several years earlier; it also records his membership in the Modern Woodmen of America. Funeral details appeared in two notices: one stating that services would be held Sunday at 2 p.m. at the German Lutheran Church with Rev. Jacob Eichorn and Rev. M. R. Bishop officiating, and another reporting that the body would arrive from Denver Wednesday with the funeral “probably” to be held Thursday at the same church with Rev. Eichhorn; both agree that interment would take place in Cedar [Creek] Cemetery.
• Contemporary misprints (as reported in newspapers and other sources): Shaff, Schaff
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about George Schaaf, please let us know.

#11  |  1924 Harvey Lee Gilson

• Age: 49
• Birth: Tuesday, December 29, 1874 in Gilson Gulch, Clear Creek County, Colorado
• Townsite Association: East Portal, Gilpin County
• Occupation (role/trade): laborer
• Date of Death: Sunday, December 28, 1924 (one day before his 50th birthday)
• Mechanism (event): fall of ground (rockfall caused lacerations and subsequent blood poisoning; incident occurred approximately three weeks prior to death)
• Medical Cause: sepsis from lacerations
• Manner: accident
• Burial: Mountain View Cemetery, Longmont, Colorado | Block 36, Lot 42, N1/2, Space 3
• Headstone: Monument located and confirmed.
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Yes
• Find A Grave Memorial: 60882306
• Other Information: Harvey Lee Gilson died at his home at 820 Concord early on a Sunday morning after five weeks of blood poisoning that began with a hand injury sustained while working at the East Portal of the Moffat Tunnel due to a rock fall. He spent nearly three weeks in the East Portal hospital before being transferred to Boulder for further treatment, but the infection continued to advance. He is survived by his wife and six children—Gail, Harley, Eva, Dorothy, and two married daughters—as well as two brothers, one living in Fort Lupton and another in Casper, and three sisters spread across Longmont, Henderson, and elsewhere in Colorado. His body was taken to the Tippett Home mortuary while the family, most of whom were in Santa Ana, California, coordinated final arrangements.
• Gilson's World War I Draft Card states that he was of medium height, stout build, with dark brown hair and brown eyes.
• Contemporary misprints (as reported in newspapers and other sources): Harry Lee Jilson, Harlow Lee Gilson. Tombstone says 'Harvy'
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about Harvey Lee Gilson, please let us know.

#12  |  1925 Joseph Grusser

• Age: 34
• Birth: Sunday, February 9, 1890 in Austria
• Townsite Association: West Portal, Grand County
• Occupation (role/trade): laborer
• Date of Death: Thursday, January 22, 1925
• Mechanism (event): fall of ground (cave in)
• Medical Cause: crush/asphyxia
• Manner: accident
• Burial: Riverside Cemetery, Denver, Colorado | Block 12, Lot 31, Section 45, no headstone/unmarked (note that Block 12 is considered a Pauper's Field)
• Headstone: Documented lot; exact grave position not discernible.
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Yes
• Find A Grave Memorial: 86908016
• Other Information: The following obituary was published in The Moffat County Bell, on February 13, 1925: "TO THE MEMORY OF JOSEPH GRUSSER As the result of the tragic death of our neighbor and companion, Joseph Grusser, it is the desire of his friends that the following article to his memory be published in your columns. The tunnel has taken its toll. The death of our neighbor and friend, tried and true, has been greatly felt by the people in this part of the county. Joe Grusser of Burned Park lost his life at 4 P.M. on Thursday, January 22, as the result of a cave-in at West Portal. His loss to us is irreparable, for a more noble and honorable character never graced our community. Joe was born about 35 years ago in Austria. He came to America in 1914 and to this community in 1919. Since then he has been one of us, loved as a brother by all. He filed on his homestead in Burned Park in August, 1920, and his patient, earnest work thereon gives strong proof of his noble character. The name of Joe was always one of respect. Even while he lived, no one could find fault with him in any way. His happy smile will be remembered by all who knew him, and his absence will be greatly felt in this part of the county. Foreign born, a true American; the laws of his adopted land were as the laws of the Almighty, to whom he now returns. He passed, we feel confident, with no fear of the hereafter, for his life was without reproach. He lived among us, setting an example of honesty and integrity that will leave a strong impression upon us all. May God give you peace, well deserved, and a reward befitting your noble life, departed friend. MASON O. BROUSE"
• Sadly, another missing data point in this reconstruction is that the Colorado Bureau of Mines did not publish an annual report for 1925. The Colorado Geological Survey attributes such gaps to periods when funding “did not permit the necessary annual mine inspections or publication.” Although some catalogs list a Colorado Bureau of Mines report as published in 1925, that entry appears to refer instead to the Annual Report for the Year 1924, issued the following year.
• Grusser’s description in the Arriving Passenger Manifest Lists for the SS President Lincoln in New York indicates that he was 5 feet 8 inches tall, with brown hair and blue eyes.
• Contemporary misprints (as reported in newspapers and other sources): Brusser, Gruesser, Gresser, Josef
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about Joseph Grusser, please let us know.

#13  |  1925 Warren Weaver Wilson

• Age: 32
• Birth: Friday, August 12, 1892 in Enterprise, Alabama
• Townsite Association: West Portal, Grand County
• Occupation (role/trade): shift boss
• Date of Death: Friday, February 27, 1925
• Mechanism (event): fall of ground (falling rock)
• Medical Cause: blunt trauma
• Manner: accident
• Burial: Damascus Church Cemetery, Enterprise, Alabama
• Headstone: Monument located and confirmed. (extra-special thank you to Katherine Lundquist for helping pinpoint this!)
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Not yet
• Find A Grave Memorial: 130141425
• Other Information: Warren Weaver “Weaver” Wilson was born in Coffee County, Alabama, one of several siblings in a close-knit Southern family that later sent two sons to the front lines of World War I. Weaver served in the U.S. Army, deployed to France, and returned home to an honorable discharge in June 1919. Like many unmarried veterans who sought steady work in the postwar West, he found his way to Colorado’s most ambitious engineering project—the Moffat Tunnel, where he became a shift boss at the West Portal. On the morning of February 27, 1925, Weaver was working just beyond Crosscut No. 4, where crews were widening wall plates along the railroad bore. A shot had been fired to break down rock on one side of the excavation, and the lights—customarily shut off during blasting—were still dark when Weaver stepped back into the heading to continue the shift’s work. In that brief interval, before illumination returned, a single large block of rock loosened by the blast detached and struck him on the head. Contemporary reports emphasized that there was no general slide, no catastrophic collapse—just one unpredictable, fatal fragment. When the lights were restored minutes later, Weaver was found dead. He was 32, though early newspaper coverage incorrectly listed his age. Of haunting note, five days earlier, on Sunday, February 22, 1925, a letter from his brother Jesse Tarver Wilson was postmarked in Delta, Colorado, and began its journey toward the West Portal camp. Mail was processed aboard trains, and because no verified Colorado winter weather event appears to explain a significant delay—conditions at Rollins Pass were cloudy but comparatively mild, with a daytime high around 50–51 degrees—it is likely the letter arrived before Weaver’s death rather than afterward. In it, Jesse wrote with the plainspoken urgency of someone who sensed the risks more clearly than distance should have allowed: “Weaver, we want you to be careful and let your conscience guide you in that dangerous work. When you see danger looking you in the face stay out if it takes your job.” That plea—arriving on the eve of the accident—underscores both how dangerous the West Portal’s work truly was and how well the family understood the stakes long before headlines confirmed them. Weaver was unmarried and left no direct descendants, but he did not die alone in a frontier sense. The fraternal networks that anchored the tunnel camps stepped forward immediately. The Elks and the Masons arranged and funded the transportation of his body from Colorado back to Alabama—a gesture typical of fraternal orders in the 1920s and a quiet measure of Weaver’s standing among the men who lived and worked with him under the Divide. Returned to his home state, he was buried among family, closing the short, hard arc of a life that carried him from rural Alabama to the trenches of France and finally to the west side of James Peak, where a single block of rock ended the service he had continued in civilian form. An extra special thank-you to the family who shared this letter and additional details with us.
• Sadly, another missing data point in this reconstruction is that the Colorado Bureau of Mines did not publish an annual report for 1925. The Colorado Geological Survey attributes such gaps to periods when funding “did not permit the necessary annual mine inspections or publication.” Although some catalogs list a Colorado Bureau of Mines report as published in 1925, that entry appears to refer instead to the Annual Report for the Year 1924, issued the following year.
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about Warren Weaver Wilson, please let us know.

#14  |  1925 Edgar Ellsworth Adams

• Age: 51
• Birth: Friday, September 26, 1873 in Monroe, Iowa
• Townsite Association: East Portal, Gilpin County
• Occupation (role/trade): engineer
• Date of Death: Monday, March 2, 1925
• Time of Death: 9:15pm
• Mechanism (event): traumatic injury complications (amputation of an arm that led to death)
• Medical Cause: amputation sequelae
• Manner: accident
• Burial: Elmwood Cemetery, Fruita, Colorado | Block 5, Row 10
• Headstone: Monument located and confirmed.
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Not yet
• Find A Grave Memorial: 75573650
• Other Information: Adams, an engineer working at the East Portal of the Moffat Tunnel, suffered a catastrophic injury when his hand was pulled into a set of moving cogs, dragging his arm nearly to the shoulder. Surgeons amputated the crushed limb in an effort to save his life, but he died on March 2 from the trauma and ensuing complications—a stark reminder of how even routine machinery work in the camps carried risks that could turn fatal in seconds.
• Sadly, another missing data point in this reconstruction is that the Colorado Bureau of Mines did not publish an annual report for 1925. The Colorado Geological Survey attributes such gaps to periods when funding “did not permit the necessary annual mine inspections or publication.” Although some catalogs list a Colorado Bureau of Mines report as published in 1925, that entry appears to refer instead to the Annual Report for the Year 1924, issued the following year.
• Gilpin County Coroner records show that Edgar Ellsworth Adams had blue eyes and light brown and gray hair. His cause of death was recorded as “surgical shock.” In the preprinted “Verdict of Jury” field, the coroner wrote: “A plain case he had his arm caught in machinery on February 23, 1925 crushing it he was taken to hospital and given attention on March 1, 1925 Dr. R. Sunderland amputated arm; he died on March 2, 1925 at 9:15 p.m. His son Chas E. Adams took body to Grand Junction for burial.”
• Adams' World War I Draft Card states that he was of medium height, medium build, with brown hair and blue eyes.
• Contemporary misprints (as reported in newspapers and other sources): A.E. Adams
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about Edgar Ellsworth Adams, please let us know.

#15  |  1925 James Guthrie King

• Age: 39
• Birth: Wednesday, August 5, 1885 in Louisville, Kentucky
• Townsite Association: unknown
• Occupation (role/trade): laborer
• Date of Death: Tuesday, April 28, 1925
• Mechanism (event): untreated trauma leading to infection and systemic failure
• Medical Cause: death certificate cites chronic endocarditis with secondary pneumonia; family recalls he was injured while working on the Moffat Tunnel, dismissed with a pink slip, and died several days later—no autopsy was performed
• Manner: accident
• Burial: Crown Hill Cemetery, Wheat Ridge, Colorado | Block 43, Plot 265, Grave 2
• Headstone: Monument located and confirmed.
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Yes
• Find A Grave Memorial: 40836786
• Other Information: James Guthrie King, age 39, is recorded as having died of “chronic endocarditis (acute exacerbation)” with secondary bronchial pneumonia. His family recalls that he had been working as a laborer on the Moffat Tunnel when an accident left him unable to continue; the company sent him home with a “pink slip,” and he died only a few days later. The medical entry warrants close examination. Chronic endocarditis severe enough to be fatal was possible in the pre-antibiotic era, but death at 39 typically occurred in individuals with identifiable underlying conditions—rheumatic valve damage, congenital defects, or a sustained bloodstream infection. Even then, the illness generally progressed over weeks or months, not days. Sudden deterioration could occur, but such events leave internal signs that cannot be confirmed without opening the body. No autopsy was performed on King. Diagnosing chronic endocarditis requires inspection of the heart valves, and confirming pneumonia requires direct visualization of infected lung tissue. Without a postmortem, the attending physician would have had to rely on clinical impressions alone. In that situation, a recorded cause of death reflects a best judgment under the constraints of the moment, not a verified mechanism. The sequence described by King’s family—a workplace accident, abrupt removal from employment, and death shortly afterward—makes it reasonable to question whether the recorded cause captures the full picture. In the 1920s, physicians working in industrial settings frequently completed death certificates without autopsy, and employers generally faced fewer obligations when deaths were attributed to illness rather than injury. That broader environment does not prove that King’s case followed that pattern, but it provides context for why the stated cause may have been more presumptive than conclusive. Taken together—his age, the atypical medical presentation, the lack of autopsy, and the family’s recollection—the officially listed cause of death is best understood as an unverified clinical opinion rather than a demonstrably established cause.
• Sadly, another missing data point in this reconstruction is that the Colorado Bureau of Mines did not publish an annual report for 1925. The Colorado Geological Survey attributes such gaps to periods when funding “did not permit the necessary annual mine inspections or publication.” Although some catalogs list a Colorado Bureau of Mines report as published in 1925, that entry appears to refer instead to the Annual Report for the Year 1924, issued the following year.
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about James Guthrie King, please let us know.

#16  |  1925 Orville Jayson Markham

• Age: 25
• Townsite Association: unknown
• Occupation (role/trade): laborer
• Date of Death: Thursday, May 14, 1925
• Mechanism (event): exposure/respiratory
• Medical Cause: pneumonia
• Manner: natural (occupational illness)
• Burial: Mountain View Cemetery, Longmont, Colorado | Block 27, Lot 30, Space 2
• Headstone: Monument located and confirmed.
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Yes
• Find A Grave Memorial: 60873346
• World War I Draft Registration Card Information: occupation, farmer; height, tall; build, slender; eyes, blue; hair, brown.
• Other Information: Orville Jayson Markham, 25, died of pneumonia at Denver’s General Hospital on Thursday night, May 14, 1925, after a brief illness connected to his work at the Moffat Tunnel. The surviving newspaper accounts agree on the essential facts of his death but conflict on a key locational detail: one account states that he contracted his fatal illness while working at the East Portal, while another reports that he had recently been employed at the West Portal, where he was taken ill. Because those accounts place the onset of his illness on opposite sides of the Continental Divide, his precise association with a specific Moffat Tunnel townsite remains unclear. Born November 27, 1899, at Highland Lake, Markham attended the Highland Lake school and later completed the short course at Colorado Agricultural College. After becoming ill, he went to Denver, where his condition deteriorated so quickly that he was taken to General Hospital before his parents, Mr. and Mrs. E. H. Markham of Mead, had even been notified of his illness. News of his death therefore reached his family as a painful shock. Remembered as genial and well liked by those who knew him, Markham was unmarried and was survived by his parents, three brothers, and one sister. Funeral services were held Saturday afternoon at the Longmont Methodist Church, with Rev. Campbell of Mead officiating, followed by burial at Mountain View Cemetery.
• Sadly, another missing data point in this reconstruction is that the Colorado Bureau of Mines did not publish an annual report for 1925. The Colorado Geological Survey attributes such gaps to periods when funding “did not permit the necessary annual mine inspections or publication.” Although some catalogs list a Colorado Bureau of Mines report as published in 1925, that entry appears to refer instead to the Annual Report for the Year 1924, issued the following year.
• Contemporary misprints (as reported in newspapers and other sources): Orval
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about Orville Jayson Markham, please let us know.

#17  |  1925 Gage Maxwell Beegle

• Age: 22
• Birth: Friday, February 13, 1903 in Kenton, Ohio
• Townsite Association: West Portal, Grand County
• Occupation (role/trade): laborer
• Date of Death: Friday, June 5, 1925
• Mechanism (event): explosion (drill hit an unexploded charge of dynamite)
• Medical Cause: blast trauma
• Manner: accident
• Burial: Fairview Cemetery, Galion, Ohio | Section 12, Lot 226A, Grave 10
• Headstone: Monument located and confirmed.
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Not yet
• Find A Grave Memorial: 110575468
• Other Information: Gage Maxwell Beegle arrived at the West Portal of the Moffat Tunnel in late May or early June 1925 with the straightforward plan shared by many Colorado School of Mines students: earn money during vacation, gain practical mining experience, and return to Golden better prepared for the academic year ahead. He was roughly ten days into that work when, in the early morning hours of June 5, a misfire buried in the tunnel face set in motion the accident that ended his life and reshaped the morning’s shift into an emergency. On the previous shift, one of the dynamite charges had failed to detonate. Misfires were common enough that crews had standard procedures for locating them. According to the miners themselves, Beegle’s shift searched for the missed shot but could not find it. Believing they would avoid it, they resumed mucking and drilling. The drill advanced about eight inches before striking the hidden dynamite. As the “chuck tender,” Beegle was positioned closest to the bit—between the machine and the tunnel face—when the explosion erupted. He absorbed the full force of the blast, killing him instantly and mangling the lower half of his body. The intensity of the detonation injured several men around him, yet their survival makes clear how decisively his position shielded the others. The initial confusion was profound. Early reports from the portal suggested catastrophic loss of life: undertakers from Olinger in Denver and another from Golden rushed to West Portal after first word claimed that six men had been killed outright and many more mortally wounded. As the facts settled, it became clear that Beegle was the only fatality, though the injury profile was severe. Olaf Nelson of Centennial, Wyoming, lost one eye and appeared likely to lose the other. A miner named Neff was badly cut but not blinded. Four or five more were treated on site for cuts and bruises. Newspapers repeatedly framed the outcome as something close to miraculous—that six or eight men standing together during a blast of this magnitude had not died instantly. The inquest convened later that day inside the tunnel did not determine blame. Reporting from the portal emphasized that investigators lacked enough information to assign responsibility. The workmen’s account remained the clearest narrative: a missed hole, efforts to locate the charge, and the decision to proceed when the powder could not be found. The uncertainty embedded in their testimony underscores a wider truth about tunneling on the Divide in these years. Even experienced crews, supported by on-site physicians and hospital facilities at both portals, could not fully eliminate the risks created by misfires, fractured ground, and rapid-fire shift turnover. This particular blast was described in multiple newspapers as the first serious accident since construction began—an acknowledgment that its violence exceeded the daily baseline of tunnel hazards. For Mines, the loss was not abstract. Beegle was a sophomore mining student, having transferred after two years at Ohio State University. He was known for his extraordinary height and for his promise on the football field, where he played tackle on the freshman squad and was expected to make the varsity team in the fall. He belonged to Mu Epsilon Tau fraternity and the Ohio Club, and by every contemporary description had quickly become one of the most popular young men on campus. His decision to spend the summer at West Portal was shaped by both financial necessity and academic ambition: he intended to work three more weeks before returning to Golden to enroll in the summer school session. Beegle was the only son of John and Mrs. John Beegle of Crestline, Ohio. Reports followed his father’s hurried journey west—first to Golden and then up to West Portal—to investigate the accident that had taken his child. Once the inquest concluded and the formalities were completed, Gage’s body was sent home to Crestline for burial. Taken together, the contemporary accounts portray a tightly bounded sequence: a missed shot, a failed search for the charge, a new shift stepping into work believed to be safe, and the moment the drill found what the eyes and hands of experienced miners could not. The undertakers’ rushed arrival on the strength of erroneous reports captures the chaos that followed; the inquest’s inability to assign fault reflects the limits of what could be reconstructed in the dark, wet confines of a heading nearly 8,000 feet from the portal. And at the center of that uncertainty stands a young man who placed himself in the closest, most dangerous position—one that, in the instant the dynamite detonated, determined not only the outcome for him but the survival of the men around him.
• Sadly, another missing data point in this reconstruction is that the Colorado Bureau of Mines did not publish an annual report for 1925. The Colorado Geological Survey attributes such gaps to periods when funding “did not permit the necessary annual mine inspections or publication.” Although some catalogs list a Colorado Bureau of Mines report as published in 1925, that entry appears to refer instead to the Annual Report for the Year 1924, issued the following year.
• Contemporary misprints (as reported in newspapers and other sources): G.M or GE, James W Beagle, CM Biegle
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about Gage Maxwell Beegle, please let us know.

#18  |  1925 Virgil Scott Hosey

• Age: 33
• Birth: Friday, February 19, 1892 in Stockton, Missouri
• Townsite Association: East Portal, Gilpin County
• Occupation (role/trade): laborer
• Date of Death: Wednesday, July 1, 1925
• Mechanism (event): unknown
• Medical Cause: unknown
• Manner: undetermined
• Burial: Elmwood Cemetery, Brighton, Colorado | Section 2, Block 42
• Headstone: Monument located and confirmed.
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Not yet
• Find A Grave Memorial: 101420071
• Other Information: Virgil Scott Hosey, born in 1892 and drawn to the demanding world of East Portal during the Moffat Tunnel era, appears in the record mostly through the quiet markers of service and family rather than through any detailed narrative. He registered for World War I, joining the many young men whose lives left only brief documentary traces. He married Mabel, two years his junior, and her choice not to remarry before her death in 1990 reflects how enduring that early bond remained. His death in 1925, coming so early in adulthood and without a documented cause, suggests that something significant occurred in a place where accidents, illness, and environmental hazards shaped daily life—even if the surviving sources offer no explanation for what, precisely, ended his story.
• Of particular interest, the obituary of Virgil’s youngest daughter, Alma Irene Davis, who died on March 29, 2017, provides unusually strong family evidence concerning the circumstances of his death: “Her father died while working on the Moffat Tunnel when she was only 9 months old.” Alma was born on September 29, 1924, and Virgil died on July 1, 1925, so the obituary’s “9 months old” detail independently matches the chronology almost exactly. Its wording is also significant: “died while working on the Moffat Tunnel” naturally suggests a death connected with his tunnel work, rather than merely a death that happened to occur during the period of his employment. The obituary still does not identify the specific injury, illness, or medical cause, but it substantially strengthens the evidence that his death was occupationally associated with the Moffat Tunnel.
• Sadly, another missing data point in this reconstruction is that the Colorado Bureau of Mines did not publish an annual report for 1925. The Colorado Geological Survey attributes such gaps to periods when funding “did not permit the necessary annual mine inspections or publication.” Although some catalogs list a Colorado Bureau of Mines report as published in 1925, that entry appears to refer instead to the Annual Report for the Year 1924, issued the following year.
• Hosey's World War I Draft Card states that he was of short height, medium build, with black hair and gray eyes.
• Contemporary misprints (as reported in newspapers and other sources): Vergil
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about Virgil Scott Hosey, please let us know.

#19  |  1925 John Henry Nicholls

• Age: 57
• Birth: Friday, October 18, 1867 in Rockland, Michigan
• Townsite Association: West Portal, Grand County
• Occupation (role/trade): West Portal superintendent
• Date of Death: Saturday, August 29, 1925
• Mechanism (event): exposure/respiratory
• Medical Cause: pneumonia
• Manner: natural (occupational illness)
• Burial: Fairmount Cemetery, Denver, Colorado | Block 80, Lot 24, Grave 4
• Headstone: Monument located and confirmed.
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Yes
• Find A Grave Memorial: 93520896
• Other Information: John Henry Nicholls’ death offers a window into a category of tunnel-related deaths that rarely receives the scrutiny afforded to dramatic accidents: respiratory illness shaped by the environment inside the bore. Contemporary accounts and surviving photographs consistently indicate that, while both ends of the Moffat Tunnel were cold and windy, the west side was substantially wetter. Workers recalled vast sections where the rock was so soft it could be excavated by hand, and period images show water streaming from the ceiling and collecting in puddles along the floor. That combination of cold and constant moisture created a damp microclimate in which respiratory ailments lingered and often worsened. The available mortality data, though incomplete, suggest that pneumonia took a meaningfully heavier toll on the west side—on the order of at least fifty percent more cases than at East Portal—a disparity fully consistent with that environmental difference. Nicholls’ experience aligns with what those conditions imply. A superintendent’s role required circulating through multiple headings, checking crews, evaluating progress, and responding to problems wherever they emerged. That mobility translated into more time underground than many laborers spent, and therefore more sustained exposure to the wettest portions of the bore. The obituary’s emphasis on a relapse of pneumonia—rather than a single acute illness—tracks closely with the kind of recurring respiratory setbacks that wet, cold air induced in workers long before antibiotics made such infections reliably survivable. Understanding Nicholls’ death through this environmental lens strengthens the broader picture of how the tunnel shaped mortality. His case demonstrates that fatal risk was not confined to explosive misfires or rockfalls; the tunnel’s interior climate posed its own slow-moving dangers, and those dangers disproportionately affected the west side. It also highlights that supervisory personnel, far from being insulated by rank, sometimes absorbed the highest cumulative exposures simply because their duties required them to move continuously through the bore. Nicholls, a veteran of thirty years in Colorado mining and superintendent at West Portal during the preceding winter, contracted his final illness while fulfilling exactly those responsibilities. Born in Detroit and brought to Colorado at age five, Nicholls received his early education in Silver Plume and Central City before embarking on a fifteen-year tenure operating the El Paso Gold Mining Company in the Cripple Creek district (1905–1920). He later managed the estate of James S. Burns of Colorado Springs with headquarters in Denver. During the winter prior to his death, he accepted the superintendent role at West Portal and worked there until roughly two months before he died at his home, 1066 Clarkson Street in Denver, on August 29, 1925, at age fifty-seven. He was survived by his wife, Ada Trevartha Nicholls, and two children, Annette Nicholls Svanteson of Chicago and Irving Henry Nicholls of Denver. Seen in full, Nicholls’ story expands the analytical frame for Moffat Tunnel mortality. It shows that environmental illness, particularly pneumonia aggravated by the west side’s wetter conditions, was an occupational hazard embedded in the construction effort itself. His death underscores that the tunnel’s human cost cannot be measured solely by sudden accidents; the climate within the bore—especially on the western end—must be treated as a consequential part of the causal landscape.
• Sadly, another missing data point in this reconstruction is that the Colorado Bureau of Mines did not publish an annual report for 1925. The Colorado Geological Survey attributes such gaps to periods when funding “did not permit the necessary annual mine inspections or publication.” Although some catalogs list a Colorado Bureau of Mines report as published in 1925, that entry appears to refer instead to the Annual Report for the Year 1924, issued the following year.
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about John Henry Nicholls, please let us know.

#20  |  1925 Elmer Alonzo Swett

• Age: 46
• Birth: Saturday, June 28, 1879 in Québec, Canada
• Townsite Association: West Portal, Grand County
• Occupation (role/trade): laborer
• Date of Death: NLT Monday, September 21, 1925
• Mechanism (event): unknown
• Medical Cause: unknown
• Manner: undetermined
• Burial: Riverside Cemetery, Denver, Colorado | Block 14, Lot 16, Section 67, no headstone/unmarked
• Headstone: Documented lot; exact grave position not discernible.
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Yes
• Find A Grave Memorial: 285710501
• Other Information: Elmer Swett remains one of the most elusive figures associated with the West Portal workforce. His only surviving public notice appears in Hofmann’s Mortuary listings, which repeatedly ran the same bare line—“SWETT—Elmer Swett, late of West Portal, Colo. Notice of funeral later.”—across multiple issues in late September (21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, and 30). Despite that unusually persistent placeholder, no funeral notice, obituary, or service announcement has yet been located in any Denver-area newspaper, a silence that strongly suggests either a delayed disposition, private handling of arrangements, or the collapse of the mortuary notice pipeline before services were ever formalized. Cemetery records confirm his burial at Riverside Cemetery, Denver, Colorado—Block 14, Lot 16, Section 67—without a headstone, reinforcing the likelihood that Swett died without local family, institutional sponsorship, or durable social ties in Colorado. What can be stated with confidence is narrow but consequential: at the time of his death, Swett was formally identified as being “of West Portal,” placing his final chapter within the operational orbit of the Moffat Tunnel project, even as the surrounding human record has nearly vanished.
• Sadly, another missing data point in this reconstruction is that the Colorado Bureau of Mines did not publish an annual report for 1925. The Colorado Geological Survey attributes such gaps to periods when funding “did not permit the necessary annual mine inspections or publication.” Although some catalogs list a Colorado Bureau of Mines report as published in 1925, that entry appears to refer instead to the Annual Report for the Year 1924, issued the following year.
• Contemporary misprints (as reported in newspapers and other sources): Elmer H. Swett
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about Elmer Alonzo Swett, please let us know.

#21  |  1925 William Marion Gimer

• Age: 34
• Birth: Friday, June 5, 1891 in Kansas
• Townsite Association: East Portal, Gilpin County
• Occupation (role/trade): scaler
• Date of Death: Sunday, September 27, 1925
• Mechanism (event): fall of ground (while scaling loose rock, a large piece gave way and crushed him)
• Medical Cause: crush trauma
• Manner: accident
• Burial: Fairmount Cemetery, Denver, Colorado | Block 48
• Headstone: Monument located and confirmed.
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Yes
• Find A Grave Memorial: 31972545
• Other Information: William Marion Gimer was killed at East Portal on Sunday, September 27, 1925, when falling rock struck him inside the Moffat Tunnel. Contemporary newspaper reports described him as a scaler whose work required him to follow the dynamiters and pry loose unstable rock from the freshly blasted tunnel roof. While he was performing that work, a large mass of rock gave way and crushed him. His Colorado death certificate conclusively identifies the victim as William Marion Gimer, born June 5, 1891, age 34, married to Minnie M. Gimer, residing at East Portal, and employed as a miner by Hitchcock & Tinkler. It records his cause of death as a fractured skull caused by falling rock in the Moffat Tunnel, classifies the death as accidental, and states that he was buried at Fairmount Cemetery on October 1, 1925. His wife, Mrs. W. M. Gimer of East Portal, served as the informant. Contemporary accounts further reported that he was survived by his wife and three small children living at East Portal.
• Sadly, another missing data point in this reconstruction is that the Colorado Bureau of Mines did not publish an annual report for 1925. The Colorado Geological Survey attributes such gaps to periods when funding “did not permit the necessary annual mine inspections or publication.” Although some catalogs list a Colorado Bureau of Mines report as published in 1925, that entry appears to refer instead to the Annual Report for the Year 1924, issued the following year.
• Contemporary misprints (as reported in newspapers and other sources): W. M. Ginner, Geimer. Newspapers and cemetery records rendered his surname in several forms, including Giener, Geiner, and Geimer. Those variants led earlier versions of this project to treat William M. Giener and William Marion Gimer as potentially separate men. Two retrospective newspaper fatality lists added to the confusion by publishing a separate entry for “W. M. Ginner,” reporting that he died from injuries received at East Portal on December 27, 1925. The available evidence now strongly indicates that these references describe one person rather than two. The September and December entries share the same initials, substantially the same surname, the same age, the same East Portal townsite association, the same Fairmount Cemetery burial, the same tunnel project, the same year, and the same day of the month—the twenty-seventh—while differing only in the month. The September newspaper reporting and the official death certificate also describe the same accident mechanism: falling rock inside the Moffat Tunnel after blasting. No separate December accident mechanism, death certificate, contemporaneous accident article, funeral notice, cemetery interment, family record, occupation, employer, or independently documented second worker has been located. The two retrospective newspaper lists may not represent independent corroboration, as both could have repeated the same erroneous fatality compilation. Likewise, the separate Find A Grave memorial for William Marion Gimer gives December 27, 1925, but that date conflicts with the official death certificate. It appears to derive from the same retrospective source tradition, although the memorial’s underlying source has not been independently verified. The two memorials are therefore best understood as duplicate memorial identities arising from conflicting historical spellings and dates, not as evidence of two separate burials. William M. Giener, William Marion Gimer, and the later “W. M. Ginner” listing are therefore treated here as references to the same fatality. The December 27 date remains documented because it appeared in more than one retrospective newspaper list, but it is not counted as a separate death unless new primary evidence establishes that another man died at East Portal on that date.
• Gilpin County Coroner records show that Gimer had light hair. His cause of death was recorded as “fracture of skull caused by falling rock.” In the preprinted “Verdict of Jury” field, the coroner wrote: “A plain case of accidental death. The body was taken to Denver and buried in Fairmount Cemetery by his wife Mimi M. Gimer Oct. 1. 1925.”
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about William Marion Gimer, please let us know.

#22  |  1925 Fred Sperandio

• Age: 37-38
• Townsite Association: West Portal, Grand County
• Occupation (role/trade): West Portal pool hall proprietor
• Date of Death: Sunday, December 20, 1925
• Mechanism (event): violence (murdered, bullet through the heart)
• Medical Cause: gunshot wound
• Manner: homicide
• Burial: Evergreen Cemetery, Leadville, Colorado | IOOF section
• Headstone: Monument located and confirmed.
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Yes
• Find A Grave Memorial: 192159189
• Other Information: On a winter night in late December 1925, in a settlement carved from snowdrifts and railroad ambition, Fred Sperandio opened the back door of his recreation hall to someone he appeared to recognize. A match flared briefly against cold timber. A single shot cracked through the darkness. By sunrise, the quiet community of West Portal—perched at the western mouth of the not-yet-completed Moffat Tunnel—had become the epicenter of a killing that baffled investigators, unsettled tunnel workers, and left a mystery that still lingers in the high country. Newspaper accounts from Denver, Leadville, Fraser, and Colorado Springs scrambled to reconstruct the life and death of the Italian immigrant who managed the West Portal recreation hall and was struck down in the same room where he slept. Their coverage, uneven yet earnest, reveals a man whose life blended courage with conflict—and a crime scene that raised more questions than the bloodhounds, posses, or railroad guards could resolve. Fred Sperandio was born in Tyrol, Italy, in 1887. Growing up “in the shadow of the Alps,” he later served in the Austrian army before emigrating to the United States with his brother James in 1911. He worked in the mines at Trinidad, then Leadville, where he managed the Big Four Mine with A. Seppi. In 1921, he moved west to the new industrial outpost at West Portal. There, Sperandio purchased a half interest in the recreation hall—a soft-drink and pool establishment that doubled as the social center of the tunnel camp. Friends described him as adventurous, bold, loyal to those he trusted. Others called him reckless, fiercely competitive, and a skilled gambler who could consistently win. Some insisted he had no enemies. Others quietly admitted he had made a few. Both portraits appear to be true. He could be generous and warm, but his fearlessness, his winnings at cards, and his habit of keeping large sums of cash nearby placed him in currents that did not always remain visible on the surface. By December 1925, Sperandio lived in a small room at the back of the recreation hall. He was known to keep night receipts and private winnings hidden in secret caches inside the room. He understood the risk, but risk had shaped his life from Europe’s mountains to Colorado’s mines. Confidence served him well—until the night it did not. On Saturday night, December 19, Sperandio closed the hall near midnight and went to bed. Sometime later, a sound came from the rear alley door. Every surviving account agrees on the crucial sequence: Sperandio rose, dressed at least partially, lit a match to see his way, and opened the door to someone he appeared to know. Whether words were exchanged is unknown. A .45-caliber Colt automatic fired a single shot. The bullet passed through his heart. He died where he fell. At daylight, Edward Evans—the hall’s day manager—arrived to open the business and found Sperandio on the floor. The room had been ransacked. Mattresses were slashed open. One showed signs of burning, as did parts of Sperandio’s clothing. The bed itself had been set alight. Someone had tried to burn the room, the body, or both. The cash register had been emptied of approximately $125. More significantly, the hidden money in Sperandio’s room—reported at between $1,500 and $1,800—was gone. (In 2025 dollars, that amount translates to approximately $28,000–$33,000.) Grand County Sheriff Mark E. Fletcher and Deputy Sheriff James Quinn arrived from Hot Sulphur Springs, but the facts resisted clean resolution. Initial reports floated the idea of two killers—one concealed inside the hall before closing and another waiting outside the living quarters. Within forty-eight hours, Fletcher publicly reversed course, stating that he now believed one man committed the murder and that “clues unearthed” supported the conclusion that the killer was acquainted with Sperandio. The sheriff’s reconstructed sequence—repeated in multiple Denver papers—held that Sperandio was awakened by a noise at the rear door, got up and dressed, and stepped forward with a match when the concealed robber fired. This version better fit the room’s tight layout, the single point of entry, and the precision of the shot. More importantly, it aligned with the inference that Sperandio would only open that door after midnight for someone he trusted. The conflicting portrayals of his personal life now took on sharper meaning. Some newspapers quoted locals saying he had “no enemies.” Others, drawing from Leadville acquaintances who had known him for years, acknowledged that he had made a few. Against the intimate nature of the killing and the deliberate effort to destroy evidence afterward, the latter assessment carries greater weight. This was not a random crime of opportunity. It was an act shaped by knowledge—of the man, his habits, and the money he concealed. West Portal lay buried under deep snow that week. Every report emphasizes the same constraint: roads were impassable beneath towering drifts. Fletcher declared that escape by road was impossible and stationed men on the mountain passes in case the killer attempted flight on snowshoes. The only viable route out was the railroad. Trains on the Moffat Road over Rollins Pass were guarded and passenger lists examined. One Denver story reported that a man who boarded at West Portal could not be accounted for when the train reached Denver. No surviving follow-up identified him. Recognizing that time was erasing tracks by the hour, Fletcher summoned bloodhounds from the Quillen kennels in Colorado Springs. When released at the scene on December 22, the dogs ran directly toward the railroad depot, circling and moaning when the scent failed. Another account stated they followed a trail from West Portal to Fraser—five miles away—before losing it near the tracks. Whether these reports describe the same trail or different ones cannot be resolved from surviving articles. What is consistent is the conclusion drawn at the time: the killer moved toward the railroad, and whatever trace he left dissolved at or near the line. Sperandio’s brothers, James and Charles, arrived from Denver within days. James returned with the body that evening. Charles remained at West Portal, assisting the sheriff for several days. By December 23, Fletcher announced that an arrest was “entirely probable within the next few days.” Yet by the time lengthy obituaries appeared in Leadville, no suspect had been named, no charges filed, and no trail remained. What survived instead was the image of a man shaped by mountains on two continents; of courage, charm, and intensity that drew both loyalty and resentment; and of a final moment defined by trust, surprise, and violence. The case closed not with resolution but with disappearance—whether the killer vanished over snow, rode a westbound train, or simply merged back into the transient population of workers and gamblers that passed through West Portal that winter. The newspapers ended the matter with words as stark as tracks erased by drifting snow: “No trace of the murderer has been found.” A century later, that remains the last official word. Fred Sperandio was unmarried and a member of the American Federation of Human Rights, an international co-Masonic lodge. He is buried in Evergreen Cemetery in Leadville, Colorado, in the IOOF section—a place of calm that offers a measure of closure the investigation never achieved. His death appears in the Moffat Tunnel construction-era mortality record not because he died inside the bore, but because it occurred within the West Portal settlement and arose directly from the social and economic conditions created by the tunnel project itself.
• Contemporary misprints (as reported in newspapers and other sources): Sperando, Sperendio, Sterandio, Sterando, Perendio
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about Fred Sperandio, please let us know.

#23  |  1926 Peter Giacomelli

• Age: 21
• Townsite Association: East Portal, Gilpin County
• Occupation (role/trade): track repairer
• Date of Death: Saturday, January 2, 1926
• Time of Death: 6:00am
• Mechanism (event): asphyxiation (likely gas)
• Medical Cause: anoxic injury
• Manner: accident
• Burial: Crown Hill Cemetery, Wheat Ridge, Colorado | Block 14, Plot 309, Grave 8
• Headstone: Documented lot; exact grave position not discernible.
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Yes
• Find A Grave Memorial: 209408822
• Other Information: Shortly after midnight in the opening days of January 1926, three track workers—Peter Giacomelli, Dan Metroff, and Frank Christian—were deep inside the pioneer tunnel at the East Portal of the Moffat Tunnel. A scheduled dynamite blast in the main heading detonated as expected, and the three men saw the familiar warning lights that told them the explosion was coming. Under normal conditions, a canvas bulkhead separating the pioneer bore from the main workings would hold back the blast fumes long enough for the blowers to push fresh air ahead of the men. That temporary barrier was their only protection. This time it failed. Whether “jerked aside,” “whipped by the force of the blast,” or “caught” on an obstruction, the outcome in every newspaper account is identical: the bulkhead didn’t close, and explosive gases surged through crosscut No. 8 into the pioneer tunnel. The three workers, suddenly exposed to a rising wave of toxic powder fumes, began coughing, choking, and fighting to keep their footing. All understood instantly that the bulkhead had failed. They had only one chance: reach the blowers and the cleaner air ahead. For a brief stretch they pushed forward together through the thickening fumes. Christian remained the strongest; the other two weakened first. As dizziness overtook them, Christian physically supported Giacomelli and Metroff, but eventually all three collapsed. Searchers entering the tunnel minutes later found them unconscious in the bore, overcome by the fumes the bulkhead should have held back. The men were rushed to the tunnel mouth for emergency treatment. Giacomelli, age 21, died at 6:00am. Metroff died roughly two hours later. Christian, barely alive, was slipping toward the same fate. What happened next became the subject of a medical retrospective printed about a year later. That article described how Dr. Ray Sunderland, the East Portal physician, resorted to a then-extraordinary approach: he strapped an oxygen mask to the dying man and kept him breathing pure oxygen for more than six hours. At a time when prolonged oxygen therapy was still considered experimental, Sunderland’s decision was a deliberate gamble. According to the report, the patient revived and ultimately recovered, a result framed as an emerging milestone in medical practice. The timing, the number of victims, the mechanism of injury, and the fact that only one man survived all make clear that this retrospective describes Frank Christian, the sole survivor of the Giacomelli–Metroff accident. Indeed, an article published January 5, 1926 carried the headline “tunnel gas victim on way to recovery,” while the article reported that “Frank Christian… who was overcome by gas which caused the death of his two companions in the Moffat Tunnel late Saturday night, was reported to be on the road to recovery last night.” Newspaper follow-ups attempted to locate relatives. Metroff’s family could not be found. Giacomelli's situation was more complex. Records linked him to a Denver boarding address—2134 California Street—and revealed he had married in September 1924. His wife had inexplicably vanished from the boarding house on December 29, telling her landlady she was leaving to join her husband at East Portal; four letters from him arrived afterward, suggesting he did not know she had gone. Giacomelli, who had begun tunnel work only days earlier on December 27, had spent much of his life with his aunt, Mrs. Mary Marcolina, now living with her son, Denver patrolman Otto P. Marcolina, at 2806 Clay Street. Another cousin, John P. Marcolina, worked as a mechanic for Colorado Iron and Metal and lived at 2614 West Ninth Avenue. No relatives for Metroff were identified in any of the coverage.
• Gilpin County Coroner records show that Peter Giacomelli had brown hair and his nationality was recorded as “American Italian.” His cause of death was recorded as “Gassed by power smoke accidental.” In the preprinted “Verdict of Jury” field, the coroner wrote: “An investigation was made by Coroner Hamlik and Mine Inspector T. R. Henahan and after talking with the men present decided an inquest unnecessary. Said death was accidental.”
• Newspapers reported that six workers had been killed in previous accidents prior to Giacomelli and Metroff, below.
• Contemporary misprints (as reported in newspapers and other sources): Giaconelli
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about Peter Giacomelli, please let us know.

#24  |  1926 Dan Metroff

• Age: 33
• Townsite Association: East Portal, Gilpin County
• Occupation (role/trade): laborer
• Date of Death: Saturday, January 2, 1926
• Time of Death: 8:00am
• Mechanism (event): asphyxiation (likely gas)
• Medical Cause: anoxic injury
• Manner: accident
• Burial: Riverside Cemetery, Denver, Colorado | Block 14, Lot 10, Section 136, no headstone/unmarked
• Headstone: Documented lot; exact grave position not discernible.
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Yes
• Find A Grave Memorial: 285710041
• Other Information: Shortly after midnight in the opening days of January 1926, three track workers—Peter Giacomelli, Dan Metroff, and Frank Christian—were deep inside the pioneer tunnel at the East Portal of the Moffat Tunnel. A scheduled dynamite blast in the main heading detonated as expected, and the three men saw the familiar warning lights that told them the explosion was coming. Under normal conditions, a canvas bulkhead separating the pioneer bore from the main workings would hold back the blast fumes long enough for the blowers to push fresh air ahead of the men. That temporary barrier was their only protection. This time it failed. Whether “jerked aside,” “whipped by the force of the blast,” or “caught” on an obstruction, the outcome in every newspaper account is identical: the bulkhead didn’t close, and explosive gases surged through crosscut No. 8 into the pioneer tunnel. The three workers, suddenly exposed to a rising wave of toxic powder fumes, began coughing, choking, and fighting to keep their footing. All understood instantly that the bulkhead had failed. They had only one chance: reach the blowers and the cleaner air ahead. For a brief stretch they pushed forward together through the thickening fumes. Christian remained the strongest; the other two weakened first. As dizziness overtook them, Christian physically supported Giacomelli and Metroff, but eventually all three collapsed. Searchers entering the tunnel minutes later found them unconscious in the bore, overcome by the fumes the bulkhead should have held back. The men were rushed to the tunnel mouth for emergency treatment. Giacomelli, age 21, died at 6:00am. Metroff died roughly two hours later. Christian, barely alive, was slipping toward the same fate. What happened next became the subject of a medical retrospective printed about a year later. That article described how Dr. Ray Sunderland, the East Portal physician, resorted to a then-extraordinary approach: he strapped an oxygen mask to the dying man and kept him breathing pure oxygen for more than six hours. At a time when prolonged oxygen therapy was still considered experimental, Sunderland’s decision was a deliberate gamble. According to the report, the patient revived and ultimately recovered, a result framed as an emerging milestone in medical practice. The timing, the number of victims, the mechanism of injury, and the fact that only one man survived all make clear that this retrospective describes Frank Christian, the sole survivor of the Giacomelli–Metroff accident. Indeed, an article published January 5, 1926 carried the headline “tunnel gas victim on way to recovery,” while the article reported that “Frank Christian… who was overcome by gas which caused the death of his two companions in the Moffat Tunnel late Saturday night, was reported to be on the road to recovery last night.” Newspaper follow-ups attempted to locate relatives. Metroff’s family could not be found. Giacomelli's situation was more complex. Records linked him to a Denver boarding address—2134 California Street—and revealed he had married in September 1924. His wife had inexplicably vanished from the boarding house on December 29, telling her landlady she was leaving to join her husband at East Portal; four letters from him arrived afterward, suggesting he did not know she had gone. Giacomelli, who had begun tunnel work only days earlier on December 27, had spent much of his life with his aunt, Mrs. Mary Marcolina, now living with her son, Denver patrolman Otto P. Marcolina, at 2806 Clay Street. Another cousin, John P. Marcolina, worked as a mechanic for Colorado Iron and Metal and lived at 2614 West Ninth Avenue. No relatives for Metroff were identified in any of the coverage.
• Newspapers reported that six workers had been killed in previous accidents prior to Giacomelli, above and Metroff.
• Contemporary misprints (as reported in newspapers and other sources): Daw
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about Dan Metroff, please let us know.

#25  |  1926 William Everette Hibbert

• Age: 43
• Birth: Sunday, April 9, 1882
• Townsite Association: West Portal, Grand County
• Occupation (role/trade): laborer
• Date of Death: Friday, January 15, 1926
• Mechanism (event): abscess of the stomach, progressed to sepsis and organ failure
• Medical Cause: stomach abscess
• Manner: natural (community death)
• Burial: Crown Hill Cemetery, Wheat Ridge, Colorado | Block 30, Plot 263, Grave 2
• Headstone: Monument located and confirmed.
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Yes
• Find A Grave Memorial: 169473252
• Other Information: William Everette Hibbert’s final months capture the quiet vulnerability that shadowed even the most experienced workers living at the Moffat Tunnel portals. A longtime rancher from Long Gulch—fifteen miles northwest of Steamboat Springs—he sold his machinery and chattel in the summer of 1925 before heading to West Portal to begin tunnel work. His wife, Nanette Lester Hibbert, and their five children joined him there, signaling a family fully committed to weathering the hardship of remote, high-altitude living for the promise of steady wages. Contemporary accounts note that “preparations were made to remove him to Denver… but he passed away before reaching there,” a detail that reinforces how rapidly his condition deteriorated despite efforts to secure higher-level care. Newspaper reports described his illness as an “abscess of the stomach,” a diagnosis that, in that era, almost always signaled a cascading medical emergency. An intra-abdominal abscess progressing to sepsis and organ failure aligns more closely with the abrupt decline described in the sources than the secondary claim of pneumonia, which appears to have been a reporter’s shorthand rather than a primary cause. Medical care at both West and East Portal was widely regarded as excellent for its time—with physicians, round-the-clock infirmary facilities, and rapid response to industrial injuries—but even strong care had limits when confronted with a fast-moving abdominal infection in a remote mountain camp. Hibbert died on Friday, January 15, 1926, at age forty-three, surrounded by his wife and children. His remains were transported to Denver for burial near Nanette’s family. His death, though not caused by construction hazards, reflects the broader human cost of isolation, delayed evacuation, and the medical constraints inherent to one of Colorado’s most ambitious engineering undertakings. Harry H. Lester—Hibbert's brother-in-law—was appointed administrator of the estate in mid-March of 1926 by Routt County Judge J. M. Childress, formally opening probate following Hibbert's January 15 death at West Portal.
• Contemporary misprints (as reported in newspapers and other sources): Hibbard
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about William Everette Hibbert, please let us know.

#26  |  1926 Charles Wilton

• Age: 48 or 49
• Townsite Association: West Portal, Grand County
• Occupation (role/trade): unknown
• Date of Death: Friday, January 29, 1926
• Mechanism (event): unknown
• Medical Cause: unknown
• Manner: undetermined
• Burial: Roselawn Cemetery, Pueblo, Colorado | Block 28, Plot 357, Grave 7
• Headstone: Monument located and confirmed.
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Not yet
• Find A Grave Memorial: 123003974
• Other Information: Charles Wilton was a Dutch-born laborer who spent the 1910s and early 1920s in Carson, Taos County, New Mexico, with his wife, Mabel, and their children Gertrude and Henry. Seeking work in the high-paying winter crews at the Moffat Tunnel, he traveled to West Portal, Colorado, where he died on January 29, 1926. Olinger Mortuary handled the transfer of his body to Denver, departing on the evening train of January 30, 1926, and Wilton was buried shortly thereafter in Roselawn Cemetery in Pueblo, in plot 28-357-7. No surviving record identifies how he died, and that absence is notable: while men in their forties faced greater health risks in the 1920s than they do today, an undocumented death at age forty-eight or forty-nine—especially in a remote construction environment—often signals either an accident or a sudden medical event for which formal documentation has not survived. As a result, the precise circumstances of his final day remain unknown. His wife carried on long after that winter and died March 28, 1979, reaching the age of ninety-four—a widow for more than half a century.
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about Charles Wilton, please let us know.

#27  |  1926 John Charles “Jack” Davis

• Age: 45
• Birth: April 1880 in Osborne County, Kansas
• Townsite Association: West Portal, Grand County
• Occupation (role/trade): laborer
• Date of Death: Wednesday, February 10, 1926
• Mechanism (event): struck-by/timbering accident (accident during timber inspection)
• Medical Cause: blunt trauma
• Manner: accident
• Burial: Victor Sunnyside Cemetery, Victor, Colorado. Elks Rest Section (ER), Row 8, Plot 23
• Headstone: Monument located and confirmed. (On November 29, 2010, the tombstone’s dates were still visible above ground. Over time the grave sank several inches, and by the authors’ visit on September 8, 2025, only the faint tops of the numbers could be felt just beneath the soil. Out of respect for the site, we have noted its condition without further disturbance.)
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Yes
• Find A Grave Memorial: 62059659
• Other Information: John Charles “Jack” Davis was born in April 1880 in Osborne County, Kansas, and by the mid-1920s had taken supervisory work at the west end of the Moffat Tunnel in Grand County, Colorado. He died at West Portal on February 10, 1926, at forty-five years of age. Family testimony holds that he was engaged in timber inspection inside the main bore when he was struck or otherwise injured—a struck-by or timbering accident that aligns with the hazards of winter work underground. Yet no surviving newspaper report or official record has been found that confirms the manner of death. The only contemporary public reference located to date is a brief mortuary notice—“Died—Davis, John Davis, at West Portal, Colo. Remains at Horan & Son funeral chapel. Funeral notice later.”—printed without further explanation. That silence is notable. Fatalities at the Moffat Tunnel were typically reported in at least a short article because the project’s risks, delays, and politics made each incident part of a broader public narrative. When a death appears solely in a mortuary line, the historian is left weighing several testable hypotheses: the cause may have been medical rather than industrial; the contractor may have treated the incident as routine; or the report may have circulated in an edition that has not survived. Without a death certificate, coroner’s record, or tunnel commission entry, the exact circumstances remain unverified. After his death, Horan & Son transported Davis to Denver before his burial at Sunnyside Cemetery in Victor, Teller County, Colorado. His interment in the Elks Rest section offers a consequential clue about his life. Cemeteries reserve such sections for members of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks or individuals closely tied to the lodge, making it highly likely—though still a hypothesis pending lodge records—that Davis belonged to or was supported by the Elks, almost certainly through the Victor lodge. Fraternal-order affiliation would fit a man in a supervisory role, help explain the efficient handling of his remains, and clarify why a fuller obituary may never have appeared in the press: fraternal organizations often communicated deaths internally rather than through newspapers. Taken together, the sinking marker, the sparse archival footprint, and the fraternal-order burial show how a man working on one of Colorado’s most ambitious infrastructure projects can drift toward historical obscurity unless each surviving fragment—physical, documentary, and familial—is preserved with care.
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about John Charles “Jack” Davis, please let us know.

#28  |  1926 Forest Noble Snow

• Age: 29
• Birth: Friday, July 17, 1896 in Renick, Missouri
• Townsite Association: East Portal, Gilpin County
• Occupation (role/trade): first employed in December 1925 as a 'kitchen helper' but then transferred to the night shift as a mucker (What was a mucker? A mucker operated the machinery used to clear blasted rock—known as “muck”—from the active tunnel heading. Cash Middlemist, who had worked for some time at the Moffat Tunnel operating a mucking machine, described why the position was considered especially dangerous: the operator worked at the breast of the tunnel before supporting timbers had been adjusted. “The falling of a pebble or the slightest noise,” Middlemist explained, “is the signal for the workmen to jump off his machine and get out of the way, for a cave-in may be imminent.” At the time of his account, he said, one mucking-machine operator had been killed, another had suffered a broken leg, and others had experienced “close calls.”)
• Date of Death: Wednesday, February 24, 1926
• Mechanism (event): asphyxiation (likely gas)
• Medical Cause: anoxic injury
• Manner: accident
• Burial: Moberly, Missouri, approximate. The Gilpin County coroner recorded that his body was sent to Moberly for burial at the request of his sister; the precise cemetery and grave remain unknown. Forest’s parents, Archibald G. Snow (1856–1916) and Mildred Armilda “Belle” Noble Snow (1859–1907), are buried at Oakland Cemetery. The cemetery sexton found no record that Forest was returned to Moberly, Missouri for burial near them, whether in a marked grave or, as once considered possible, an unmarked one.
• Headstone: unknown
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: N/A
• Find A Grave Memorial: N/A
• Other Information: Forest Noble Snow appears to have been orphaned before reaching legal adulthood. His mother, Mildred Armilda “Belle” Noble Snow, died when he was about ten, and his father, Archibald G. Snow, was killed in a railroad shop accident at Moberly, Missouri, in 1916, while Forest was still a minor. His adult sister, Birdie Blanche Owens of Colorado, then stepped into the legal role their parents no longer could, serving as guardian for Forest’s share of Archie’s estate until he reached majority and the guardianship was settled. That guardianship established an important Colorado connection that would continue to surface in Forest’s later records.
• Colorado and Iowa prison records, together with Snow’s surviving Colorado & Southern Railway paperwork, document a complicated sequence of incarceration, escape, railroad employment, interstate custody, and eventual release during the decade before his death.
• Snow’s first known Colorado commitment was to the Colorado State Reformatory at Buena Vista under inmate number 3795. He was sentenced in Weld County on September 28, 1915, for larceny and was received at the reformatory at 6 p.m. that day. The sheet contains an unusual identity entry: the “Name” field appears to read “Ganze F. N.”, while “Forest N. Snow” appears in the adjoining “Alias” field with the handwritten notation “Right name” above it. The wording indicates that reformatory officials regarded Forest N. Snow as his correct identity, rather than merely another alias. The same sheet identifies his father as A. B. Ganze and his mother as Belle Ganze, both deceased; because those entries appear on a record initially created under the Ganze name, however, they cannot safely be treated as Snow’s verified parentage. His nativity was recorded as Renick, Missouri. Officials gave his age as twenty, although he would have been nineteen if the July 17, 1896, birth date supported by other evidence is correct. He weighed 153 pounds and was described as having a light complexion, gray eyes, and light brown hair. The sheet records seven years of schooling, seventh grade standing, his trade as cook, and his religion as Protestant. It also states that he used intoxicants and tobacco, did not use “dope,” and smoked cigarettes. He was unmarried, and no previous convictions were recorded.
• In his own brief account of the offense, Snow wrote that he had been walking along the street when he saw a bicycle and stole it; he stated that he did not try to sell it, that the bicycle was returned to its owner, and that he pleaded guilty. He was paroled on May 4, 1916. Front and profile identification photographs survive on the reformatory sheet.
• Within months of that parole, Snow was pursuing railroad work. His Colorado & Southern Railway file shows him applying for service in Denver in January 1917. The paperwork identifies him as F. N. Snow, and separate personnel records show that he qualified for work as a locomotive fireman on the South Park Division. His qualification and first-trip paperwork are dated January 16; the following day, January 17, the railroad recorded that he had resigned, suggesting that his service as a qualified C&S fireman may have lasted only a single day. A January 26 letter returning his application states simply, “This man has resigned.”
• The Colorado & Southern paperwork provides unusually strong independent confirmation of his identity. Snow gave his birthplace as Renick, Missouri, his birthday as July 17, and identified a brother, Lester, in Moberly, Missouri. He reported both parents deceased and listed a sister at 671 S. Clarkson Street in Denver. The residence had been built in 1905, well before Snow supplied the address in 1917, and the same address is independently associated with his sister and former guardian, Birdie Blanche Owens, and later with Forest himself. Although one filing annotation renders his middle name as “Nobly,” Snow’s own signatures read Forest Noble Snow.
• The railroad file also preserves two notable inconsistencies. During his January 1917 physical examination, Snow’s age was recorded as twenty-four, although the July 17, 1896, birth date supported by other records would have made him twenty. He also claimed previous employment as a locomotive fireman for the Wabash Railway from approximately September 1914 to May 1916. When Colorado & Southern sought verification, Wabash replied that its records did not indicate that Snow had been employed as stated. The newly located Buena Vista record makes that discrepancy more significant: Snow was confined at the Colorado State Reformatory from September 28, 1915, until his parole on May 4, 1916, so he could not have been continuously employed by Wabash throughout the period he claimed. That does not establish that every part of the Wabash history was false—he may conceivably have worked there before his Colorado incarceration—but the full employment period cannot be reconciled with the prison chronology. Whether Snow overstated his age or railroad experience to obtain employment, or whether some discrepancies resulted from clerical or incomplete records, cannot presently be determined.
• Snow’s Colorado & Southern medical examination also preserves a physical detail that may explain scarring documented several years later. When asked whether he had ever received an injury, Snow wrote “no except back scalded with hot water about 5 yrs ago.” Because the examination dates from early 1917, his estimate would place the accident at approximately 1912, when he was about fifteen or sixteen if the 1896 birth date is correct. Colorado penitentiary officials later documented a prominent burn scar near his right armpit and extending along the right side of his back. The nature and location of the two descriptions are strongly compatible, making the earlier hot water scald a plausible explanation for the later scarring, although neither document explicitly states that they describe the same injury.
• Only a few months after leaving Colorado & Southern, Snow returned to the Colorado State Reformatory as inmate 4136. He was sentenced in Boulder County on June 25, 1917, for grand larceny and was received at Buena Vista the following evening at 7 p.m. This time officials entered him directly as Forest N. Snow, leaving the alias field blank, further supporting the interpretation that Forest N. Snow had been established as his correct identity during the earlier commitment. The second sheet preserves another set of front and profile photographs and gives his weight as 151 pounds, although most of its other descriptive fields were left blank.
• The warden’s comments then document two escapes. On July 18, 1917, Snow “escaped from town” at approximately 11 p.m. He was returned on October 12 by a parole officer whose surname appears to be Wagner, with the notation indicating that he was brought back from Denver. On October 21, Snow escaped again, this time in an entry that appears to read “escaped from inside 6 PM.” Because the clerk did not explain what “inside” meant, the phrase is best preserved rather than expanded into a specific place the document itself does not establish. A later notation on the same sheet states, “Is in the Iowa State Reformatory 8-25-18,” demonstrating that Colorado officials had subsequently located Snow in Iowa custody.
• Less than two months after the October escape, Snow entered the Iowa reformatory at Anamosa on December 18, 1917, as inmate 8338, following a December 13 sentence in Wapello County for breaking and entering. The register identifies the judge as D. M. Anderson and records a maximum term of ten years. Officials described Snow as twenty-two years old, standing five feet nine and one-half inches tall and weighing 148 pounds, with a fair complexion, slate eyes, and brown hair. His nationality was listed as American and his religion as Christian. The clerk rated his education as “Poor” and entered “Int.” under “Temperate or Intemperate,” a classification associated with drinking habits rather than personality. Those brief assessments provide neither a completed grade level nor an explanation of the extent of his alcohol use. His nativity was recorded as “Iowa,” conflicting with the Renick, Missouri birthplace recorded on his 1915 Colorado reformatory sheet and later supplied in his railroad paperwork. The Colorado notation placing him in the Iowa State Reformatory on August 25, 1918, together with the Anamosa inmate number later incorporated into his Colorado prison history, independently connects the records to the same man.
• The ages attributed to Snow shift repeatedly. If the July 17, 1896, birth date is correct, he was nineteen when the 1915 Colorado reformatory sheet called him twenty, twenty when his January 1917 railroad examination reportedly called him twenty-four, twenty-one when the Iowa register described him as twenty-two, and twenty-three when a later Colorado penitentiary record gave his age as twenty-five. The discrepancies are small in some records and substantial in another, making the institutional ages better understood as reported information rather than independent evidence of his birth year.
• On March 8, 1920, Snow entered the Colorado State Penitentiary as inmate 10930, received from Denver County to serve three to six years for burglary, larceny, and receiving stolen goods. Officials recorded his height as five feet nine inches and his weight as 154 pounds, with a medium build and complexion, blue eyes, and brown hair. His occupations were listed as cook, railroad fireman, and hospital orderly. He was unmarried, could read and write, and used tobacco, although the register does not distinguish smoking from other forms of consumption. The clerk entered “No” under “Temperate,” broadly echoing the earlier Iowa assessment without explaining the frequency or degree of his drinking. His parents were recorded as deceased, and his sister was identified as “Mrs. Bertie [sic] Owens,” care of the St. James Hotel in Denver. The accompanying identification card documented two scars on the back of his head, a vaccination mark on his left arm, and the prominent burn scar near his right armpit and along the right side of his back that may correspond with the hot water scald Snow had reported to Colorado & Southern in 1917. Front and profile photographs survive with the penitentiary record.
• Colorado records show Snow paroled on November 7, 1921, with a later discharge dated May 28, 1924. Those separate administrative events should not be read as evidence that he remained continuously confined in Colorado until the latter date. His Anamosa entry also notes a parole and subsequent return, although the surviving paperwork does not explain when or why he came back into Iowa custody. On October 26, 1922, he was transferred from Anamosa to the Iowa State Penitentiary at Fort Madison and assigned inmate number 12324. Both Iowa registers cross-reference the numbers, establishing that the Fort Madison admission represented a transfer rather than a new conviction. The surviving documents therefore leave an unresolved interstate custody question: Snow had been paroled from the Colorado penitentiary in 1921 yet was again in Iowa custody by 1922, suggesting that the two states’ obligations were being administered in sequence, although precisely how that arrangement worked has not yet been established.
• The Fort Madison register finally records “9/18/25 Exp. Sent.”—the expiration of Snow’s sentence on September 18, 1925. Only a few months later, he was working at the Moffat Tunnel where he was a kitchen helper before joining the night shift on the mucking force.
• In February 1926 inside the East Portal, a blasting round went off ahead of Snow and his partner, Tom Burke. According to the first reports filed from the tunnel, the two men returned toward the heading too soon after the blast and walked back through the main railroad bore rather than using a crosscut into the pioneer bore, where fresh air was being forced. They apparently believed the fumes would have dissipated by the distance they had traveled. The decision reflected a dangerous misjudgment of post-blast conditions—the kind of hazard tunnel safety rules were specifically intended to prevent. Instead, they entered lingering gas and smoke. Snow was overcome by the fumes and collapsed inside the tunnel. Burke, who was less affected, attempted to get him out but was unable to move him the long distance to fresh air and summoned help. Snow died before he could be removed.
• The contemporaneous accounts were consistent and explicit about the circumstances. Officials stated that Snow and Burke had violated standing safety orders by failing to use a crosscut into the pioneer bore and instead returning through the main bore under the mistaken belief that the fumes would have cleared. The surviving evidence therefore points to a hazardous error in judgment, not an act of self-harm.
• The Colorado Bureau of Mines investigated the death immediately, with access to testimony, the circumstances inside the tunnel, and the applicable safety rules. Its 1926 investigation classified Snow’s death as accidental asphyxiation caused in connection with a deliberate violation of safety procedures. In that context, the Bureau’s use of “deliberately” referred to the men’s conscious decision to disregard the prescribed route, not to an intention to die. Only in April 1928, during retrospective coverage associated with the opening of the tunnel, did a single newspaper recast Snow’s death as suicide. That later assertion stands alone and conflicts with the evidence closest to the event: Burke was present and survived, the alleged method offered no certainty of death, the men had an identifiable reason for choosing the main bore, and the official investigation conducted immediately afterward found accidental asphyxiation rather than self-harm. When those details are weighed together, Snow’s death resolves back into what the contemporaneous sources recorded—a tragic industrial accident later distorted in retrospective reporting.
• The circumstances following Snow’s death help explain why contemporary reporting initially described his body as unclaimed. The address associated with him was 671 S. Clarkson Street in Denver—the same address his sister and former guardian, Birdie Blanche Owens, had used approximately a decade earlier and that Forest himself supplied to the Colorado & Southern Railway in 1917. The residence had been built in 1905, well before Forest gave the address to the railroad, supporting its identification as an established family residence rather than an address created for his employment application. By 1926, however, it may no longer have provided officials with a reliable route to his next of kin.
• Birdie’s later trail remains uncertain. A 1919 Pueblo item reported that a “Birdie Owens,” formerly of Pueblo, was gravely ill in Sacramento, California, while Pueblo police were unable to locate her relatives. If that woman was Forest’s sister—an identification that still requires confirmation—Birdie may already have been unreachable, deceased, or otherwise removed from the family’s Colorado network by the time Forest died. In that context, describing his body as “unclaimed” does not establish that he had no surviving relatives. Rather, it suggests that the initial chain of contact may have been disrupted by death, distance, outdated addresses, and lost communication.
• Snow’s remains were taken to the C. C. Young Mortuary in Denver, where contemporary reporting described the body as unclaimed. That description appears to have captured only an early stage of the effort to locate his family. Additional searches by Preserve Rollins Pass of the surviving William P. Horan Mortuary and Rogers & Nash Mortuary records covering the period of Snow’s death produced no record of him. Those negative searches once left his ultimate disposition uncertain; they now make greater sense in light of the original 1926 Gilpin County coroner record located in the Gilpin County Clerk & Recorder’s office. That record states that “the body was sent to Moberly MO for burial at the request of his sister.”
• The coroner record therefore resolves an important part of Snow’s postmortem story. He was not ultimately abandoned or left indefinitely at a Denver mortuary: a sister was eventually reached, and his remains were returned to the Missouri community closely associated with his family. The contemporary description of the body as unclaimed should consequently be understood as an interim condition rather than his final disposition. What remains unknown is no longer where his body was sent, but where in or around Moberly it was actually buried.
• The coroner did not identify the sister by name. Ruby Lee Snow Crow is presently a strong candidate, because she was Forest’s sister and survived him, whereas Birdie Blanche Owens’ whereabouts after 1919 remain uncertain. That identification should nevertheless remain provisional until another document directly identifies the woman who made the request. The surviving evidence now establishes three separate facts that should not be conflated: Snow’s body was initially described as unclaimed in Denver; a sister subsequently arranged for it to be sent to Moberly; and his precise cemetery and grave have not yet been identified.
• Taken together, the surviving material transforms a handful of disconnected references into a substantially more coherent life history. Snow entered the Colorado reformatory in 1915 under a sheet that initially carried the apparent name “Ganze F. N.” but identified Forest N. Snow as his “Right name”; was paroled in May 1916; briefly worked for the Colorado & Southern Railway in January 1917; returned to Buena Vista that June; escaped twice during his second commitment; entered Iowa custody after the October escape; was known by Colorado officials to be in the Iowa State Reformatory by August 1918; entered the Colorado State Penitentiary in 1920; returned to Iowa custody before his 1922 transfer to Fort Madison; completed the Iowa sentence in September 1925; and, only months later, died from blasting fumes inside the Moffat Tunnel. His body was initially reported unclaimed in Denver, but the Gilpin County coroner’s original record now establishes that it was subsequently sent to Moberly, Missouri, for burial at the request of his sister.
• Several questions remain open rather than contradictory: why Snow initially appeared as “Ganze F. N.”; whether the Ganze parent information was genuine, invented, or attached only to that assumed identity; whether any portion of his claimed Wabash employment was real; what occurred between his October 21, 1917 escape and his December conviction in Iowa; how Colorado and Iowa reconciled their competing custodial claims; which sister arranged the return of his body in 1926; and, finally, where in or around Moberly Forest Noble Snow was buried. The surviving records now carry his story considerably farther than before—but they stop just short of the grave where Forest Noble Snow now rests.
• Following his death, Snow’s remains were held at the C. C. Young Mortuary in Denver, where contemporary reporting described the body as unclaimed. Additional searches of the surviving William P. Horan Mortuary and Rogers & Nash Mortuary records covering the period of Snow’s 1926 death produced no record of him.
• Contemporary misprints (as reported in newspapers and other sources): F. M. or F. W., Forrest, Forrist. An archival filing notation in his Colorado & Southern Railway personnel record renders his middle name as “Nobly,” although Snow’s own signatures read “Forest Noble Snow.” Alias: Ganze
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about Forest Noble Snow, please let us know.

#29  |  1926 Charles Cecil “Charley” Decker

• Age: 18
• Birth: Tuesday, December 3, 1907 in Yampa, Colorado
• Townsite Association: West Portal, Grand County
• Occupation (role/trade): mucker
• Date of Death: Friday, March 19, 1926
• Mechanism (event): fall of ground (fall of rock)
• Medical Cause: crush trauma
• Manner: accident
• Burial: South Routt Cemetery, Yampa, Colorado | Section 4, Lot 78, Plot 4
• Headstone: Monument located and confirmed.
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Yes
• Find A Grave Memorial: 57299320
• Other Information: Charles Cecil “Charley” Decker—almost certainly eighteen years old, despite several newspapers mistakenly reporting his age as twenty-two—was the next-to-youngest of the five Decker brothers from the Yampa–Toponas area. In early March 1926, after working only about a month as a mucker in the Moffat Tunnel’s West Portal heading, he was critically injured when a slab of roof rock fell following a blasting round. He had gone into the heading after the shot before the regular scaling crew had removed the loose rock, and the slab dropped without warning from the roof, striking him across the chest and knocking him backward onto an iron rail. His leg and pelvic bone were fractured, his ribs and back were injured, and the internal trauma was so severe that hospital staff at the West Portal camp regarded his condition as hopeless from the outset. Decker survived for nearly a day—long enough for his parents to reach the camp hospital and remain with him at the end—but he died from his injuries shortly afterward. His body was returned to Yampa, where funeral services were held at the Congregational Church, drawing a large gathering of relatives, neighbors, and lifelong friends. Six local young men who had grown up with him served as pallbearers, and multiple musical tributes were offered. He was buried in the Yampa Cemetery, mourned by his parents, four surviving brothers, and his grandmother, Phoebe Decker; he was also remembered as the nephew of Mrs. A. H. Chivington of Yampa. The obituary and community memorials written after his death spoke with unusual clarity about the kind of young man he had been. Friends and elders alike described him as physically strong yet unfailingly cheerful, steady in conduct, and “morally clean,” a boy who “stood out from among boys.” One tribute stated plainly that although he was gone, “his smile will always remain with us.” Newspapers said that his death cast “a deep gloom” across southern Routt County, not only because he had been taken so suddenly, but because he was just entering early manhood and held in universal esteem. Historically, Decker’s death reflects a well-recognized hazard in early twentieth-century tunneling work: post-blast roof falls before headings were fully made safe. In this case, that systemic risk converged with the inexperience and vulnerability of a very young worker who had been on the job only a short time. Yet the record that survives does more than document an industrial fatality. It preserves the memory of a bright, cheerful, and decent young man whose loss was felt keenly by his family and community—evidence that the human cost of the Moffat Tunnel project cannot be measured in statistics alone.
• Contemporary misprints (as reported in newspapers and other sources): Charlie
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about Charles Cecil “Charley” Decker, please let us know.

#30  |  1926 James Clinton Platter

• Age: 41
• Birth: Thursday, September 11, 1884 in Iowa
• Townsite Association: West Portal, Grand County
• Occupation (role/trade): timber laborer
• Date of Death: Tuesday, June 22, 1926
• Mechanism (event): jammed between a passing motor and timbers while working in the tunnel
• Medical Cause: crushing injuries to the hips and abdomen (per “seriously bruised about the hips”)
• Manner: accident
• Burial: Pleasant Hill Cemetery, Boone, Iowa | no headstone/unmarked
• Headstone: Documented lot; exact grave position not discernible. (His burial site lies east of the headstone for Walton and Hazel Stumbo and west of the headstone for Clifford and Anna Platter. Facing south toward the church, his unmarked grave rests approximately midway between those two markers.)
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Not yet
• Find A Grave Memorial: 23099110
• Other Information: James Clinton Platter was born on Thursday, September 11, 1884, in Marcy Township, Boone County, Iowa, the son of Jonathan Tibet and Susan (Weyer) Platter. When he was only three years old, his mother died. James helped his father as a laborer on the family farm until about age thirteen, then went to live with his sister Clara in Montana. At sixteen he returned to Iowa to be near relatives. In February 1907, he married Lena Leona Longfellow in Iowa. The couple had no children. Around 1910, James and Lena moved to Steamboat Springs, Colorado, where he farmed for the next fourteen years. Lena died there on Friday, April 25, 1919, a victim of the influenza epidemic that swept across Colorado. Her body was returned to Bonner Springs, Kansas, for burial near her parents, Jacob William and Sarah (Davis) Longfellow. On Monday, March 20, 1922, James married Mary L. Stanko in Steamboat Springs. They had two daughters, Cora Elnore and Edna Laurent. Seeking steady work to support his young family, James traveled in January 1924 to the West Portal construction camp of the Moffat Tunnel project in Grand County, Colorado. Two and a half years later, on Sunday, May 2, 1926, James was badly crushed while working underground but no bones were broken. Despite the severity of his injuries, he survived for seven more weeks before dying on Tuesday, June 22, 1926, at the age of 41. His body was returned to Ogden, Iowa, where he was buried in an unmarked grave in Pleasant Hill Cemetery alongside his parents, brother Andrew, and sister Susan.
• Contemporary misprints (as reported in newspapers and other sources): Clint
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about James Clinton Platter, please let us know.

#31  |  1926 Ralph McClellan

• Age: 33
• Townsite Association: West Portal, Grand County
• Occupation (role/trade): miner
• Date of Death: Thursday, July 22, 1926
• Mechanism (event): fall of ground (fall of rock)
• Medical Cause: crush trauma
• Manner: accident
• Burial: Fairmount Cemetery, Denver, Colorado | Block 84, Lot 1, Section 64, no headstone/unmarked
• Headstone: Documented lot; exact grave position not discernible.
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Yes
• Find A Grave Memorial: 124652690
• Other Information: Ralph McClellan, thirty-three, had been working at the West Portal of the Moffat Tunnel since January 1926, serving as a benchman—a role that placed him in the immediate fall zone beneath freshly blasted or newly scaled rock. On Tuesday afternoon, July 20, 1926, he was struck and crushed by a falling boulder. Contemporary sources frame the injury as a “broken neck,” a detail that aligns with the mechanism one would expect when a benchman is hit by a descending mass of rock: a sudden, high-energy impact from above that allows little margin for evasive action. McClellan lingered for roughly two days, dying on Thursday, July 22, 1926, before he could be transported to Denver for more complete care. Other sources stated that he “died last week from injuries sustained in the Moffat tunnel, when he was caught under a falling rock”—a compressed version of the same event. He was a Denver native who attended Manuel Training High School, and his death reverberated through an extended family network: his wife, named either Elsie or Pearl (living with her mother, Mrs. P. Nielson, at 4892 Knox Court), his half-brother F. H. Evans of Denver, and a sister, Mrs. J. E. Shryark of Genoa. The decision to bury him at Fairmount Cemetery reflects the family’s Denver roots and the impulse to return tunnel workers home whenever possible—a theme that threads through many of the 1926 fatalities and underscores the human cost borne far from public view.
• Contemporary misprints (as reported in newspapers and other sources): M'Clellan
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about Ralph McClellan, please let us know.

In Memoriam

Friday, July 30, 1926

John Adams

Henry Bennett Ferguson

Park A. Gasaway

William E. Pierson

John Parosek

Hartzel T. Thompson

There also were days of great physical and mental stress, when men worked tight-lipped and taciturn, while swift death hung like the sword of Damocles over their devoted heads. Thus it was on the evening of July 30, 1926, when one hundred twenty-five tons of rock fell without warning from the roof in the main heading of the railroad tunnel, just east of Cross-cut Nine, West Portal. The ground was of the character known as “blocky.” Ages ago an earthquake had shattered the solid rock here, breaking the granite mass into fragments large and small. Seams and faults ran in every direction. Sometimes these seams were vertical or oblique, plainly visible to the men toiling amid the chaotic material. Sometimes they were horizontal, and tons of rock hung by the slightest bond, ready to drop at the first vibration; yet the seam was invisible to the men below and they could take no precaution.

In such ground, beneath just such a concealed deadfall, a timber crew of six men was working on the day of the tragedy. An eyewitness, some distance away, saw a huge section of the roof fall. There was no warning, no preliminary sound, no dribbling and rattling of small fragments. The mass came down as a hawk swoops, swiftly and silently. A terrific crash echoed and re-echoed thru the tunnel. The six timbermen disappeared. A little rock dust floated in the dim light. A gaping hole, twenty-five feet in depth, appeared in the roof as the dust settled. Men popped from cross-cuts as rabbits from a warren; men swarmed from nowhere, running at full speed to the scene of disaster. Amid the shadows of the great cavity above the wings of death flapped ominously.

News of the accident was telephoned to West Portal, and superintendents quickly assembled all the men in camp. The situation was stated and volunteers requested. To the last man every worker crowded forward and offered his services, each well aware that not one chance in a million remained for the entombed crew; knowing, too, that the slightest jar might bring down a second rock-fall upon the rescuers.

For seventy-two hours rescue parties worked without cessation, the thought constantly in mind of a death peculiarly shocking and repulsive to any normal-minded man. The first step was to erect a false roof to support the faulted mass above. Crown-bars were lifted carefully into the cavity, cross-timbers hoisted into place. All this had to be accomplished with the nicety one employs in handling nitroglycerine. A heavy timber scraping against ceiling or sides, a careless slip, and tons of rock might be dislodged. The men worked almost in total silence, as tho fearing that undue noise might unleash an avalanche. The only comments were necessary orders, passed from man to man in low tones. Now and then a worker gave out under the excessive labor and the strain and was ordered out of the tunnel by one of those in authority. Invariably, the exhausted miner squared his shoulders and refused point-blank to go. Finally, when the order was made imperative, he would withdraw, bitterly complaining because he was not allowed to remain under the shadow of death. When the last debris was cleared away the crushed and mangled bodies lay revealed upon the floor of the tunnel, one man still firmly grasping a shovel, one holding a pick, struck down before they could sense the danger.

Scenes of heroism such as this accompanied each fatal accident in the tunnel. We have the word of James Cohig, resident engineer at West Portal, that it was almost impossible to induce men to carry on necessary work in other parts of the tunnel while rescue work was progressing. Each wanted to be at the point of danger. There were no plaudits to spur the men onward to superhuman feats in moments like these, no hope of fame or riches or honor, such as buoys up the aviator winging his way across the fog-obscured ocean. The risk was taken simply and bravely. It was all part of the day’s work. Here, too, we like to believe, the spirit of Dave Moffat, drawn by the dominant dream of his life, filled the hearts of these humble miners with the grim courage of the frontier.

—Edgar C. McMechen

#32  |  1926 John Adams

• Age: 50
• Birth: 1875 (exact date unknown; if the reported age of 50 is accurate, likely July 31–December 31, 1875)
• Townsite Association: West Portal, Grand County
• Occupation (role/trade): shift boss
• Date of Death: Friday, July 30, 1926; time of death: 11:25am Mountain Time
• Mechanism (event): fall of ground (fall of rock)
• Medical Cause: instantaneous crush trauma
• Manner: accident
• Burial: Walsenburg Masonic Cemetery, Walsenburg, Colorado (cemetery ledger records “John Adams, born 1875, died 1925”—the year of death is almost certainly a clerical error for 1926) | Block 6, Plot 31
• Headstone: Approximate location available.
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Not yet
• Find A Grave Memorial: 89010736
• Other Information: Contemporary reporting strongly supports the identification of the Walsenburg burial as that of Moffat Tunnel victim John Adams. Newspapers identified Adams as a shift boss from the Walsenburg area; a July 31, 1926 report, published one day after the cave-in, stated more specifically that he had lived at Solar, Colorado, three miles west of Walsenburg, for twelve years before leaving several months earlier to work at the tunnel. His son, John Adams, Jr., was also working there, while Adams’s wife remained at Solar. An August 1 report independently described him as “of Walsenburg, Colo.,” and Colorado’s official mining record identified the victim as John Adams, age fifty, a shift boss.
• While “John Adams” is a common name, the remaining evidence converges unusually well. Searches of Denver’s principal cemeteries that frequently received Moffat Tunnel fatalities—including Crown Hill, Riverside, and Fairmount—located no matching burial. By contrast, an online transcription of Walsenburg Masonic Cemetery records lists a John Adams born in 1875, a birth year fully consistent with a man reported as fifty years old in July 1926, but gives his death year as 1925. The transcription itself contains demonstrable date errors, making a one-year clerical or transcription mistake considerably more plausible than the alternative: that another John Adams of essentially the same age lived in the same small community while the tunnel victim, independently documented as a long-term Walsenburg-area resident, left no corresponding local burial record. Although absolute confirmation would still benefit from the original burial register, a headstone inscription, burial deed, obituary, or death certificate, the convergence of name, age, occupation, long-term residence, family information, contemporary reporting, and the absence of a matching Denver burial strongly supports the conclusion that John Adams, killed in the July 30, 1926 Moffat Tunnel collapse, is buried in Walsenburg Masonic Cemetery and that the transcribed 1925 death year is an error for 1926.
• Just before noon, the inside jumbo crew was installing temporary timbering in the widened bench of the main bore, forty-three feet from the tunnel heading and roughly 12,000 feet inside the mountain. The heading at that point had been driven at the usual eight-by-eight-foot dimension, and crews were performing the regular enlargement process—first widening it to sixteen feet and then heightening it to twenty-four. According to Martin Green, assistant superintendent, this enlarging process had loosened a large mass of rock above the tunnel. He had inspected the timber set minutes earlier and noticed one side sagging; under his direction, that side had been hastily repaired. But as crews turned to reinforce the opposite side, the remaining overhead mass gave way “with a roar,” sending more than 100-125 tons of rock and splintered timbers down onto the men on their scaffolding. Witnesses confirmed the crew had no warning: the rock crashed through the timbers that had been set to protect them, burying the five men “like mice in a trap.” The last shift rotation before the collapse adds an element of tragic contingency. William E. Pierson, one of the victims, had originally refused a reassignment earlier that morning; he wanted to stay beside his friend Jim. Green eventually persuaded him to change crews only after assuring him that the companion arrangement would be restored the next day. Pierson agreed—without knowing that the decision would place him inside the doomed jumbo set. In contrast, John Adams, Jr., the locomotive operator and son of the shift boss, narrowly escaped. He had been standing several yards behind the crew, operating an electric engine that had been backed into the tunnel but not yet pushed close enough for muckers to fill the cars. When the roof caved, he caught a final glimpse of his father in the swirl of falling debris before the rock obliterated the timbering. He was unhurt solely because his engine had not yet advanced to the working face. Rescue efforts intensified as the scale of the collapse became evident. Workers feared there might even be additional victims—perhaps one or two men not officially on shift—though this possibility was never confirmed. Inside the tunnel, picked crews of forty men tore at the rock pile in short, frantic shifts, returning to the surface exhausted. Their task was complicated by tons of rock still hanging overhead, requiring careful additional timbering before each advance. Yet many rescuers, like Martin Green, Troy Brannigan, and Robert Lall, repeatedly crawled into unstable voids despite the danger. Green himself had just completed an inspection of the Clear Creek district and was headed for Denver by train when he received the news; he arrived at West Portal immediately by automobile and entered the bore almost continuously thereafter. Within minutes of the collapse, Green, Brannigan, and Lall burrowed through shattered timbers to reach Hartzel T. Thompson, the only man pulled alive from the debris. Thompson had been pinned under several boulders closer to the tunnel entrance and remained conscious into the evening, telling Dr. McDonald that he heard someone yell “look out,” saw a companion fall at his feet, and then felt everything go black. His leg was twisted at a right angle. Despite rescue, he died later that night, his father and brother at his bedside. As the digging progressed, the first grim signs of proximity—fragments of two pencils and a garter—spurred workers to greater efforts. Assistant superintendent Charles Miller eventually forced his way past a narrow section of debris and located the first bodies: Park Gasaway lying slightly in advance of the others, followed by pairs of legs and an arm protruding from broken timbers several feet apart. Gasaway's head and body had been crushed so completely that death was unquestionably instantaneous. Each body was removed under extreme hazard. Gasaway's was brought to the portal around 11pm, greeted by a silent crowd that had gathered continuously at the entrance. The little schoolhouse at West Portal continued to serve as a temporary morgue, where Dr. Susan Anderson (Doc Susie) and state mine inspector Thomas R. Henahen examined each victim. Identification was complicated by crushed features and missing brass tags; one man was identified only by a paycheck found in his pocket. Pierson had a wife believed to be living in Denver. Parosek had arrived at the tunnel only the day before and worked just one and one-half shifts before being killed; his nearest relative was Frank Poceal of Denver. Ferguson’s mother lived in Vivian, Louisiana; he had been at the tunnel only four days. Gasaway had come to Denver from the Oklahoma oil fields and had lived for several years in Salt Lake City; his family was believed to reside in Indianapolis. Local police telegraphed Indianapolis authorities in an effort to reach his parents. Thompson, the lone survivor who later died, was from Fort Collins, and his entire family—father, brother, and sisters—were notified and came to his bedside. Throughout the night and into the following days, state and federal officials converged on West Portal. Commissioner of Mines J. T. Joyce, District Engineer E. H. Cenny of the Federal Bureau of Mines, and Coroner Anderson all assessed the conditions, and Joyce announced that his office would conduct a rigid investigation. All three assistant superintendents stated that every possible precaution to protect the workers had been taken and that nothing more could reasonably have been done to prevent the accident. Correspondingly, state commissioner Joyce described the slide as an “unavoidable accident,” noting that all the timbers possible had been put into the jumbo set. The directing officials—Hitchcock, Tinkler, Kauffman, Cohig, Betts, and others—remained on site continuously to supervise the rescue, ensure no additional men were endangered, and maintain careful timbering before each renewed digging effort.
• Betts' official report of the accident to the tunnel commission: “Cavein at 9 east, 150 feet of crosscut nine, which is 12,000 feet in. Three operations there and enlargement above and below wall plate; were just building a jumbo. They had rock all braced up. One big piece of rock broke loose and fell on the jumbo set, and broke the braces that were holding the rock. One hundred cars of very hard, slabby rock fell down. They caught six men; all men with families as near as can be determined. One man has been taken out, and five are under the muck pile. Impossible to tell whether they are dead or not; they may be protected by timber. They have the best picked men they can get in there, and doing everything possible. Man taken out is getting along and may recover. Accident unavoidable. The rock was braced so that they thought it was safe but big chunk gave way. F. C. Hitchcock, one of the contractors is there. With V. A. Kauffman, superintendent, is directing the work. C. C. Tinkler, contractor, is on his way over from the east side.”
• Adams was the last to be recovered on Monday, August 2, 1926 at 4pm.
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about John Adams, please let us know.

#33  |  1926 Henry Bennett Ferguson

• Age: 48
• Birth: Friday, May 24, 1878
• Townsite Association: West Portal, Grand County
• Occupation (role/trade): laborer
• Date of Death: Friday, July 30, 1926; time of death: 11:25am Mountain Time
• Mechanism (event): fall of ground (fall of rock)
• Medical Cause: instantaneous crush trauma
• Manner: accident
• Burial: Vivian Cemetery, Vivian, Louisiana
• Headstone: Approximate location available.
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Not yet
• Find A Grave Memorial: 291554588
• Other Information: Just before noon, the inside jumbo crew was installing temporary timbering in the widened bench of the main bore, forty-three feet from the tunnel heading and roughly 12,000 feet inside the mountain. The heading at that point had been driven at the usual eight-by-eight-foot dimension, and crews were performing the regular enlargement process—first widening it to sixteen feet and then heightening it to twenty-four. According to Martin Green, assistant superintendent, this enlarging process had loosened a large mass of rock above the tunnel. He had inspected the timber set minutes earlier and noticed one side sagging; under his direction, that side had been hastily repaired. But as crews turned to reinforce the opposite side, the remaining overhead mass gave way “with a roar,” sending more than 100-125 tons of rock and splintered timbers down onto the men on their scaffolding. Witnesses confirmed the crew had no warning: the rock crashed through the timbers that had been set to protect them, burying the five men “like mice in a trap.” The last shift rotation before the collapse adds an element of tragic contingency. William E. Pierson, one of the victims, had originally refused a reassignment earlier that morning; he wanted to stay beside his friend Jim. Green eventually persuaded him to change crews only after assuring him that the companion arrangement would be restored the next day. Pierson agreed—without knowing that the decision would place him inside the doomed jumbo set. In contrast, John Adams, Jr., the locomotive operator and son of the shift boss, narrowly escaped. He had been standing several yards behind the crew, operating an electric engine that had been backed into the tunnel but not yet pushed close enough for muckers to fill the cars. When the roof caved, he caught a final glimpse of his father in the swirl of falling debris before the rock obliterated the timbering. He was unhurt solely because his engine had not yet advanced to the working face. Rescue efforts intensified as the scale of the collapse became evident. Workers feared there might even be additional victims—perhaps one or two men not officially on shift—though this possibility was never confirmed. Inside the tunnel, picked crews of forty men tore at the rock pile in short, frantic shifts, returning to the surface exhausted. Their task was complicated by tons of rock still hanging overhead, requiring careful additional timbering before each advance. Yet many rescuers, like Martin Green, Troy Brannigan, and Robert Lall, repeatedly crawled into unstable voids despite the danger. Green himself had just completed an inspection of the Clear Creek district and was headed for Denver by train when he received the news; he arrived at West Portal immediately by automobile and entered the bore almost continuously thereafter. Within minutes of the collapse, Green, Brannigan, and Lall burrowed through shattered timbers to reach Hartzel T. Thompson, the only man pulled alive from the debris. Thompson had been pinned under several boulders closer to the tunnel entrance and remained conscious into the evening, telling Dr. McDonald that he heard someone yell “look out,” saw a companion fall at his feet, and then felt everything go black. His leg was twisted at a right angle. Despite rescue, he died later that night, his father and brother at his bedside. As the digging progressed, the first grim signs of proximity—fragments of two pencils and a garter—spurred workers to greater efforts. Assistant superintendent Charles Miller eventually forced his way past a narrow section of debris and located the first bodies: Park Gasaway lying slightly in advance of the others, followed by pairs of legs and an arm protruding from broken timbers several feet apart. Gasaway's head and body had been crushed so completely that death was unquestionably instantaneous. Each body was removed under extreme hazard. Gasaway's was brought to the portal around 11pm, greeted by a silent crowd that had gathered continuously at the entrance. The little schoolhouse at West Portal continued to serve as a temporary morgue, where Dr. Susan Anderson (Doc Susie) and state mine inspector Thomas R. Henahen examined each victim. Identification was complicated by crushed features and missing brass tags; one man was identified only by a paycheck found in his pocket. Pierson had a wife believed to be living in Denver. Parosek had arrived at the tunnel only the day before and worked just one and one-half shifts before being killed; his nearest relative was Frank Poceal of Denver. Ferguson’s mother lived in Vivian, Louisiana; he had been at the tunnel only four days. Gasaway had come to Denver from the Oklahoma oil fields and had lived for several years in Salt Lake City; his family was believed to reside in Indianapolis. Local police telegraphed Indianapolis authorities in an effort to reach his parents. Thompson, the lone survivor who later died, was from Fort Collins, and his entire family—father, brother, and sisters—were notified and came to his bedside. Throughout the night and into the following days, state and federal officials converged on West Portal. Commissioner of Mines J. T. Joyce, District Engineer E. H. Cenny of the Federal Bureau of Mines, and Coroner Anderson all assessed the conditions, and Joyce announced that his office would conduct a rigid investigation. All three assistant superintendents stated that every possible precaution to protect the workers had been taken and that nothing more could reasonably have been done to prevent the accident. Correspondingly, state commissioner Joyce described the slide as an “unavoidable accident,” noting that all the timbers possible had been put into the jumbo set. The directing officials—Hitchcock, Tinkler, Kauffman, Cohig, Betts, and others—remained on site continuously to supervise the rescue, ensure no additional men were endangered, and maintain careful timbering before each renewed digging effort.
• Betts' official report of the accident to the tunnel commission: “Cavein at 9 east, 150 feet of crosscut nine, which is 12,000 feet in. Three operations there and enlargement above and below wall plate; were just building a jumbo. They had rock all braced up. One big piece of rock broke loose and fell on the jumbo set, and broke the braces that were holding the rock. One hundred cars of very hard, slabby rock fell down. They caught six men; all men with families as near as can be determined. One man has been taken out, and five are under the muck pile. Impossible to tell whether they are dead or not; they may be protected by timber. They have the best picked men they can get in there, and doing everything possible. Man taken out is getting along and may recover. Accident unavoidable. The rock was braced so that they thought it was safe but big chunk gave way. F. C. Hitchcock, one of the contractors is there. With V. A. Kauffman, superintendent, is directing the work. C. C. Tinkler, contractor, is on his way over from the east side.”
• Ferguson's body was recovered on Sunday, August 1, 1926 at 2:30pm.
• Contemporary misprints (as reported in newspapers and other sources): Harry
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about Henry Bennett Ferguson, please let us know.

#34  |  1926 Park A. Gasaway

• Age: 42
• Birth: Monday, March 24, 1884 in Rockville, Indiana
• Townsite Association: West Portal, Grand County
• Occupation (role/trade): laborer
• Date of Death: Friday, July 30, 1926; time of death: 11:25am Mountain Time
• Mechanism (event): fall of ground (fall of rock)
• Medical Cause: instantaneous crush trauma
• Manner: accident
• Burial: Vinzant Cemetery, Indiana | Jackson Township, Section 26
• Headstone: Monument located and confirmed. (On Saturday, January 11, 2025, the headstone was winched upright and reset more deeply to correct its lean.)
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Not yet
• Find A Grave Memorial: 35020829
• Other Information: Just before noon, the inside jumbo crew was installing temporary timbering in the widened bench of the main bore, forty-three feet from the tunnel heading and roughly 12,000 feet inside the mountain. The heading at that point had been driven at the usual eight-by-eight-foot dimension, and crews were performing the regular enlargement process—first widening it to sixteen feet and then heightening it to twenty-four. According to Martin Green, assistant superintendent, this enlarging process had loosened a large mass of rock above the tunnel. He had inspected the timber set minutes earlier and noticed one side sagging; under his direction, that side had been hastily repaired. But as crews turned to reinforce the opposite side, the remaining overhead mass gave way “with a roar,” sending more than 100-125 tons of rock and splintered timbers down onto the men on their scaffolding. Witnesses confirmed the crew had no warning: the rock crashed through the timbers that had been set to protect them, burying the five men “like mice in a trap.” The last shift rotation before the collapse adds an element of tragic contingency. William E. Pierson, one of the victims, had originally refused a reassignment earlier that morning; he wanted to stay beside his friend Jim. Green eventually persuaded him to change crews only after assuring him that the companion arrangement would be restored the next day. Pierson agreed—without knowing that the decision would place him inside the doomed jumbo set. In contrast, John Adams, Jr., the locomotive operator and son of the shift boss, narrowly escaped. He had been standing several yards behind the crew, operating an electric engine that had been backed into the tunnel but not yet pushed close enough for muckers to fill the cars. When the roof caved, he caught a final glimpse of his father in the swirl of falling debris before the rock obliterated the timbering. He was unhurt solely because his engine had not yet advanced to the working face. Rescue efforts intensified as the scale of the collapse became evident. Workers feared there might even be additional victims—perhaps one or two men not officially on shift—though this possibility was never confirmed. Inside the tunnel, picked crews of forty men tore at the rock pile in short, frantic shifts, returning to the surface exhausted. Their task was complicated by tons of rock still hanging overhead, requiring careful additional timbering before each advance. Yet many rescuers, like Martin Green, Troy Brannigan, and Robert Lall, repeatedly crawled into unstable voids despite the danger. Green himself had just completed an inspection of the Clear Creek district and was headed for Denver by train when he received the news; he arrived at West Portal immediately by automobile and entered the bore almost continuously thereafter. Within minutes of the collapse, Green, Brannigan, and Lall burrowed through shattered timbers to reach Hartzel T. Thompson, the only man pulled alive from the debris. Thompson had been pinned under several boulders closer to the tunnel entrance and remained conscious into the evening, telling Dr. McDonald that he heard someone yell “look out,” saw a companion fall at his feet, and then felt everything go black. His leg was twisted at a right angle. Despite rescue, he died later that night, his father and brother at his bedside. As the digging progressed, the first grim signs of proximity—fragments of two pencils and a garter—spurred workers to greater efforts. Assistant superintendent Charles Miller eventually forced his way past a narrow section of debris and located the first bodies: Park Gasaway lying slightly in advance of the others, followed by pairs of legs and an arm protruding from broken timbers several feet apart. Gasaway's head and body had been crushed so completely that death was unquestionably instantaneous. Each body was removed under extreme hazard. Gasaway's was brought to the portal around 11pm, greeted by a silent crowd that had gathered continuously at the entrance. The little schoolhouse at West Portal continued to serve as a temporary morgue, where Dr. Susan Anderson (Doc Susie) and state mine inspector Thomas R. Henahen examined each victim. Identification was complicated by crushed features and missing brass tags; one man was identified only by a paycheck found in his pocket. Pierson had a wife believed to be living in Denver. Parosek had arrived at the tunnel only the day before and worked just one and one-half shifts before being killed; his nearest relative was Frank Poceal of Denver. Ferguson’s mother lived in Vivian, Louisiana; he had been at the tunnel only four days. Gasaway had come to Denver from the Oklahoma oil fields and had lived for several years in Salt Lake City; his family was believed to reside in Indianapolis. Local police telegraphed Indianapolis authorities in an effort to reach his parents. Thompson, the lone survivor who later died, was from Fort Collins, and his entire family—father, brother, and sisters—were notified and came to his bedside. Throughout the night and into the following days, state and Federal officials converged on West Portal. Commissioner of Mines J. T. Joyce, District Engineer E. H. Cenny of the federal Bureau of Mines, and Coroner Anderson all assessed the conditions, and Joyce announced that his office would conduct a rigid investigation. All three assistant superintendents stated that every possible precaution to protect the workers had been taken and that nothing more could reasonably have been done to prevent the accident. Correspondingly, state commissioner Joyce described the slide as an “unavoidable accident,” noting that all the timbers possible had been put into the jumbo set. The directing officials—Hitchcock, Tinkler, Kauffman, Cohig, Betts, and others—remained on site continuously to supervise the rescue, ensure no additional men were endangered, and maintain careful timbering before each renewed digging effort.
• Betts' official report of the accident to the tunnel commission: “Cavein at 9 east, 150 feet of crosscut nine, which is 12,000 feet in. Three operations there and enlargement above and below wall plate; were just building a jumbo. They had rock all braced up. One big piece of rock broke loose and fell on the jumbo set, and broke the braces that were holding the rock. One hundred cars of very hard, slabby rock fell down. They caught six men; all men with families as near as can be determined. One man has been taken out, and five are under the muck pile. Impossible to tell whether they are dead or not; they may be protected by timber. They have the best picked men they can get in there, and doing everything possible. Man taken out is getting along and may recover. Accident unavoidable. The rock was braced so that they thought it was safe but big chunk gave way. F. C. Hitchcock, one of the contractors is there. With V. A. Kauffman, superintendent, is directing the work. C. C. Tinkler, contractor, is on his way over from the east side.”
• Gasaway's body was recovered on Saturday, July 31, 1926 at 11pm
• Contemporary misprints (as reported in newspapers and other sources): Gassoway, Gasoway, Josaway, Parke, Pat, Patrick, or Peter
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about Park A. Gasaway, please let us know.

#35  |  1926 William E. Pierson

• Age: 39
• Townsite Association: West Portal, Grand County
• Occupation (role/trade): laborer
• Date of Death: Friday, July 30, 1926; time of death: 11:25am Mountain Time
• Mechanism (event): fall of ground (fall of rock)
• Medical Cause: instantaneous crush trauma
• Manner: accident
• Burial: Westlawn-Hillcrest Memorial Park, Omaha, Nebraska | Section 23, Lot 158-A, Space 3
• Headstone: Monument located and confirmed.
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Not yet
• Find A Grave Memorial: 291554225
• Other Information: Heartbreakingly, William Pierson’s first day on the job was also his last. Just before noon, the inside jumbo crew was installing temporary timbering in the widened bench of the main bore, forty-three feet from the tunnel heading and roughly 12,000 feet inside the mountain. The heading at that point had been driven at the usual eight-by-eight-foot dimension, and crews were performing the regular enlargement process—first widening it to sixteen feet and then heightening it to twenty-four. According to Martin Green, assistant superintendent, this enlarging process had loosened a large mass of rock above the tunnel. He had inspected the timber set minutes earlier and noticed one side sagging; under his direction, that side had been hastily repaired. But as crews turned to reinforce the opposite side, the remaining overhead mass gave way “with a roar,” sending more than 100-125 tons of rock and splintered timbers down onto the men on their scaffolding. Witnesses confirmed the crew had no warning: the rock crashed through the timbers that had been set to protect them, burying the five men “like mice in a trap.” The last shift rotation before the collapse adds an element of tragic contingency. William E. Pierson, one of the victims, had originally refused a reassignment earlier that morning; he wanted to stay beside his friend Jim. Green eventually persuaded him to change crews only after assuring him that the companion arrangement would be restored the next day. Pierson agreed—without knowing that the decision would place him inside the doomed jumbo set. In contrast, John Adams, Jr., the locomotive operator and son of the shift boss, narrowly escaped. He had been standing several yards behind the crew, operating an electric engine that had been backed into the tunnel but not yet pushed close enough for muckers to fill the cars. When the roof caved, he caught a final glimpse of his father in the swirl of falling debris before the rock obliterated the timbering. He was unhurt solely because his engine had not yet advanced to the working face. Rescue efforts intensified as the scale of the collapse became evident. Workers feared there might even be additional victims—perhaps one or two men not officially on shift—though this possibility was never confirmed. Inside the tunnel, picked crews of forty men tore at the rock pile in short, frantic shifts, returning to the surface exhausted. Their task was complicated by tons of rock still hanging overhead, requiring careful additional timbering before each advance. Yet many rescuers, like Martin Green, Troy Brannigan, and Robert Lall, repeatedly crawled into unstable voids despite the danger. Green himself had just completed an inspection of the Clear Creek district and was headed for Denver by train when he received the news; he arrived at West Portal immediately by automobile and entered the bore almost continuously thereafter. Within minutes of the collapse, Green, Brannigan, and Lall burrowed through shattered timbers to reach Hartzel T. Thompson, the only man pulled alive from the debris. Thompson had been pinned under several boulders closer to the tunnel entrance and remained conscious into the evening, telling Dr. McDonald that he heard someone yell “look out,” saw a companion fall at his feet, and then felt everything go black. His leg was twisted at a right angle. Despite rescue, he died later that night, his father and brother at his bedside. As the digging progressed, the first grim signs of proximity—fragments of two pencils and a garter—spurred workers to greater efforts. Assistant superintendent Charles Miller eventually forced his way past a narrow section of debris and located the first bodies: Park Gasaway lying slightly in advance of the others, followed by pairs of legs and an arm protruding from broken timbers several feet apart. Gasaway's head and body had been crushed so completely that death was unquestionably instantaneous. Each body was removed under extreme hazard. Gasaway's was brought to the portal around 11pm, greeted by a silent crowd that had gathered continuously at the entrance. The little schoolhouse at West Portal continued to serve as a temporary morgue, where Dr. Susan Anderson (Doc Susie) and state mine inspector Thomas R. Henahen examined each victim. Identification was complicated by crushed features and missing brass tags; one man was identified only by a paycheck found in his pocket. Pierson had a wife believed to be living in Denver. Parosek had arrived at the tunnel only the day before and worked just one and one-half shifts before being killed; his nearest relative was Frank Poceal of Denver. Ferguson’s mother lived in Vivian, Louisiana; he had been at the tunnel only four days. Gasaway had come to Denver from the Oklahoma oil fields and had lived for several years in Salt Lake City; his family was believed to reside in Indianapolis. Local police telegraphed Indianapolis authorities in an effort to reach his parents. Thompson, the lone survivor who later died, was from Fort Collins, and his entire family—father, brother, and sisters—were notified and came to his bedside. Throughout the night and into the following days, state and federal officials converged on West Portal. Commissioner of Mines J. T. Joyce, District Engineer E. H. Cenny of the Federal Bureau of Mines, and Coroner Anderson all assessed the conditions, and Joyce announced that his office would conduct a rigid investigation. All three assistant superintendents stated that every possible precaution to protect the workers had been taken and that nothing more could reasonably have been done to prevent the accident. Correspondingly, state commissioner Joyce described the slide as an “unavoidable accident,” noting that all the timbers possible had been put into the jumbo set. The directing officials—Hitchcock, Tinkler, Kauffman, Cohig, Betts, and others—remained on site continuously to supervise the rescue, ensure no additional men were endangered, and maintain careful timbering before each renewed digging effort.
• Betts' official report of the accident to the tunnel commission: “Cavein at 9 east, 150 feet of crosscut nine, which is 12,000 feet in. Three operations there and enlargement above and below wall plate; were just building a jumbo. They had rock all braced up. One big piece of rock broke loose and fell on the jumbo set, and broke the braces that were holding the rock. One hundred cars of very hard, slabby rock fell down. They caught six men; all men with families as near as can be determined. One man has been taken out, and five are under the muck pile. Impossible to tell whether they are dead or not; they may be protected by timber. They have the best picked men they can get in there, and doing everything possible. Man taken out is getting along and may recover. Accident unavoidable. The rock was braced so that they thought it was safe but big chunk gave way. F. C. Hitchcock, one of the contractors is there. With V. A. Kauffman, superintendent, is directing the work. C. C. Tinkler, contractor, is on his way over from the east side.”
• Pierson's body was recovered on Sunday, August 1, 1926 at 6am.
• Next of Kin: Susan Pierson
• Contemporary misprints (as reported in newspapers and other sources): William Pearson, Piersn, W. T. Pierson
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about William E. Pierson, please let us know.

#36  |  1926 John Parosek

• Age: 48
• Townsite Association: West Portal, Grand County
• Occupation (role/trade): laborer
• Date of Death: Friday, July 30, 1926; time of death: 11:25am Mountain Time
• Mechanism (event): fall of ground (fall of rock)
• Medical Cause: instantaneous crush trauma
• Manner: accident
• Burial: Mount Olivet Catholic Cemetery, Wheat Ridge, Colorado | 12-7-20 (in between Iva P. Beidler's tombstone and Thomas Kenny's tombstone).
• Headstone: Documented lot; exact grave position not discernible.
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Yes
• Find A Grave Memorial: 283629530
• Other Information: Just before noon, the inside jumbo crew was installing temporary timbering in the widened bench of the main bore, forty-three feet from the tunnel heading and roughly 12,000 feet inside the mountain. The heading at that point had been driven at the usual eight-by-eight-foot dimension, and crews were performing the regular enlargement process—first widening it to sixteen feet and then heightening it to twenty-four. According to Martin Green, assistant superintendent, this enlarging process had loosened a large mass of rock above the tunnel. He had inspected the timber set minutes earlier and noticed one side sagging; under his direction, that side had been hastily repaired. But as crews turned to reinforce the opposite side, the remaining overhead mass gave way “with a roar,” sending more than 100-125 tons of rock and splintered timbers down onto the men on their scaffolding. Witnesses confirmed the crew had no warning: the rock crashed through the timbers that had been set to protect them, burying the five men “like mice in a trap.” The last shift rotation before the collapse adds an element of tragic contingency. William E. Pierson, one of the victims, had originally refused a reassignment earlier that morning; he wanted to stay beside his friend Jim. Green eventually persuaded him to change crews only after assuring him that the companion arrangement would be restored the next day. Pierson agreed—without knowing that the decision would place him inside the doomed jumbo set. In contrast, John Adams, Jr., the locomotive operator and son of the shift boss, narrowly escaped. He had been standing several yards behind the crew, operating an electric engine that had been backed into the tunnel but not yet pushed close enough for muckers to fill the cars. When the roof caved, he caught a final glimpse of his father in the swirl of falling debris before the rock obliterated the timbering. He was unhurt solely because his engine had not yet advanced to the working face. Rescue efforts intensified as the scale of the collapse became evident. Workers feared there might even be additional victims—perhaps one or two men not officially on shift—though this possibility was never confirmed. Inside the tunnel, picked crews of forty men tore at the rock pile in short, frantic shifts, returning to the surface exhausted. Their task was complicated by tons of rock still hanging overhead, requiring careful additional timbering before each advance. Yet many rescuers, like Martin Green, Troy Brannigan, and Robert Lall, repeatedly crawled into unstable voids despite the danger. Green himself had just completed an inspection of the Clear Creek district and was headed for Denver by train when he received the news; he arrived at West Portal immediately by automobile and entered the bore almost continuously thereafter. Within minutes of the collapse, Green, Brannigan, and Lall burrowed through shattered timbers to reach Hartzel T. Thompson, the only man pulled alive from the debris. Thompson had been pinned under several boulders closer to the tunnel entrance and remained conscious into the evening, telling Dr. McDonald that he heard someone yell “look out,” saw a companion fall at his feet, and then felt everything go black. His leg was twisted at a right angle. Despite rescue, he died later that night, his father and brother at his bedside. As the digging progressed, the first grim signs of proximity—fragments of two pencils and a garter—spurred workers to greater efforts. Assistant superintendent Charles Miller eventually forced his way past a narrow section of debris and located the first bodies: Park Gasaway lying slightly in advance of the others, followed by pairs of legs and an arm protruding from broken timbers several feet apart. Gasaway's head and body had been crushed so completely that death was unquestionably instantaneous. Each body was removed under extreme hazard. Gasaway's was brought to the portal around 11pm, greeted by a silent crowd that had gathered continuously at the entrance. The little schoolhouse at West Portal continued to serve as a temporary morgue, where Dr. Susan Anderson (Doc Susie) and state mine inspector Thomas R. Henahen examined each victim. Identification was complicated by crushed features and missing brass tags; one man was identified only by a paycheck found in his pocket. Pierson had a wife believed to be living in Denver. Parosek had arrived at the tunnel only the day before and worked just one and one-half shifts before being killed; his nearest relative was Frank Poceal of Denver. Ferguson’s mother lived in Vivian, Louisiana; he had been at the tunnel only four days. Gasaway had come to Denver from the Oklahoma oil fields and had lived for several years in Salt Lake City; his family was believed to reside in Indianapolis. Local police telegraphed Indianapolis authorities in an effort to reach his parents. Thompson, the lone survivor who later died, was from Fort Collins, and his entire family—father, brother, and sisters—were notified and came to his bedside. Throughout the night and into the following days, state and federal officials converged on West Portal. Commissioner of Mines J. T. Joyce, District Engineer E. H. Cenny of the Federal Bureau of Mines, and Coroner Anderson all assessed the conditions, and Joyce announced that his office would conduct a rigid investigation. All three assistant superintendents stated that every possible precaution to protect the workers had been taken and that nothing more could reasonably have been done to prevent the accident. Correspondingly, state commissioner Joyce described the slide as an “unavoidable accident,” noting that all the timbers possible had been put into the jumbo set. The directing officials—Hitchcock, Tinkler, Kauffman, Cohig, Betts, and others—remained on site continuously to supervise the rescue, ensure no additional men were endangered, and maintain careful timbering before each renewed digging effort.
• Betts' official report of the accident to the tunnel commission: “Cavein at 9 east, 150 feet of crosscut nine, which is 12,000 feet in. Three operations there and enlargement above and below wall plate; were just building a jumbo. They had rock all braced up. One big piece of rock broke loose and fell on the jumbo set, and broke the braces that were holding the rock. One hundred cars of very hard, slabby rock fell down. They caught six men; all men with families as near as can be determined. One man has been taken out, and five are under the muck pile. Impossible to tell whether they are dead or not; they may be protected by timber. They have the best picked men they can get in there, and doing everything possible. Man taken out is getting along and may recover. Accident unavoidable. The rock was braced so that they thought it was safe but big chunk gave way. F. C. Hitchcock, one of the contractors is there. With V. A. Kauffman, superintendent, is directing the work. C. C. Tinkler, contractor, is on his way over from the east side.”
• Parosek's body was recovered on Sunday, August 1, 1926 at 2pm.
• Contemporary misprints (as reported in newspapers and other sources): John Prosek, John Rosek, or John Proske, Parasek
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about John Parosek, please let us know.

#37  |  1926 Hartzel T. Thompson

• Age: 20-21
• Birth: 1905 in Meeker, Colorado
• Townsite Association: West Portal, Grand County
• Occupation (role/trade): mucker
• Date of Death: Friday, July 30, 1926; time of death: 10:10pm Mountain Time
• Mechanism (event): fall of ground (fall of rock)
• Medical Cause: crush trauma
• Manner: accident
• Burial: Meeker Highland Cemetery, Meeker, Colorado | Highland C, West 22 (internment was originally slated for Fort Collins, Colorado)
• Headstone: Monument located and confirmed.
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Yes
• Find A Grave Memorial: 57627998
• Other Information: Just before noon, the inside jumbo crew was installing temporary timbering in the widened bench of the main bore, forty-three feet from the tunnel heading and roughly 12,000 feet inside the mountain. The heading at that point had been driven at the usual eight-by-eight-foot dimension, and crews were performing the regular enlargement process—first widening it to sixteen feet and then heightening it to twenty-four. According to Martin Green, assistant superintendent, this enlarging process had loosened a large mass of rock above the tunnel. He had inspected the timber set minutes earlier and noticed one side sagging; under his direction, that side had been hastily repaired. But as crews turned to reinforce the opposite side, the remaining overhead mass gave way “with a roar,” sending more than 100-125 tons of rock and splintered timbers down onto the men on their scaffolding. Witnesses confirmed the crew had no warning: the rock crashed through the timbers that had been set to protect them, burying the five men “like mice in a trap.” The last shift rotation before the collapse adds an element of tragic contingency. William E. Pierson, one of the victims, had originally refused a reassignment earlier that morning; he wanted to stay beside his friend Jim. Green eventually persuaded him to change crews only after assuring him that the companion arrangement would be restored the next day. Pierson agreed—without knowing that the decision would place him inside the doomed jumbo set. In contrast, John Adams, Jr., the locomotive operator and son of the shift boss, narrowly escaped. He had been standing several yards behind the crew, operating an electric engine that had been backed into the tunnel but not yet pushed close enough for muckers to fill the cars. When the roof caved, he caught a final glimpse of his father in the swirl of falling debris before the rock obliterated the timbering. He was unhurt solely because his engine had not yet advanced to the working face. Rescue efforts intensified as the scale of the collapse became evident. Workers feared there might even be additional victims—perhaps one or two men not officially on shift—though this possibility was never confirmed. Inside the tunnel, picked crews of forty men tore at the rock pile in short, frantic shifts, returning to the surface exhausted. Their task was complicated by tons of rock still hanging overhead, requiring careful additional timbering before each advance. Yet many rescuers, like Martin Green, Troy Brannigan, and Robert Lall, repeatedly crawled into unstable voids despite the danger. Green himself had just completed an inspection of the Clear Creek district and was headed for Denver by train when he received the news; he arrived at West Portal immediately by automobile and entered the bore almost continuously thereafter. Within minutes of the collapse, Green, Brannigan, and Lall burrowed through shattered timbers to reach Hartzel T. Thompson, the only man pulled alive from the debris. Thompson had been pinned under several boulders closer to the tunnel entrance and remained conscious into the evening, telling Dr. McDonald that he heard someone yell “look out,” saw a companion fall at his feet, and then felt everything go black. His leg was twisted at a right angle. Despite rescue, he died later that night, his father and brother at his bedside. As the digging progressed, the first grim signs of proximity—fragments of two pencils and a garter—spurred workers to greater efforts. Assistant superintendent Charles Miller eventually forced his way past a narrow section of debris and located the first bodies: Park Gasaway lying slightly in advance of the others, followed by pairs of legs and an arm protruding from broken timbers several feet apart. Gasaway's head and body had been crushed so completely that death was unquestionably instantaneous. Each body was removed under extreme hazard. Gasaway's was brought to the portal around 11pm, greeted by a silent crowd that had gathered continuously at the entrance. The little schoolhouse at West Portal continued to serve as a temporary morgue, where Dr. Susan Anderson (Doc Susie) and state mine inspector Thomas R. Henahen examined each victim. Identification was complicated by crushed features and missing brass tags; one man was identified only by a paycheck found in his pocket. Pierson had a wife believed to be living in Denver. Parosek had arrived at the tunnel only the day before and worked just one and one-half shifts before being killed; his nearest relative was Frank Poceal of Denver. Ferguson’s mother lived in Vivian, Louisiana; he had been at the tunnel only four days. Gasaway had come to Denver from the Oklahoma oil fields and had lived for several years in Salt Lake City; his family was believed to reside in Indianapolis. Local police telegraphed Indianapolis authorities in an effort to reach his parents. Thompson, the lone survivor who later died, was from Fort Collins, and his entire family—father, brother, and sisters—were notified and came to his bedside. Throughout the night and into the following days, state and federal officials converged on West Portal. Commissioner of Mines J. T. Joyce, District Engineer E. H. Cenny of the Federal Bureau of Mines, and Coroner Anderson all assessed the conditions, and Joyce announced that his office would conduct a rigid investigation. All three assistant superintendents stated that every possible precaution to protect the workers had been taken and that nothing more could reasonably have been done to prevent the accident. Correspondingly, state commissioner Joyce described the slide as an “unavoidable accident,” noting that all the timbers possible had been put into the jumbo set. The directing officials—Hitchcock, Tinkler, Kauffman, Cohig, Betts, and others—remained on site continuously to supervise the rescue, ensure no additional men were endangered, and maintain careful timbering before each renewed digging effort.
• Betts' official report of the accident to the tunnel commission: “Cavein at 9 east, 150 feet of crosscut nine, which is 12,000 feet in. Three operations there and enlargement above and below wall plate; were just building a jumbo. They had rock all braced up. One big piece of rock broke loose and fell on the jumbo set, and broke the braces that were holding the rock. One hundred cars of very hard, slabby rock fell down. They caught six men; all men with families as near as can be determined. One man has been taken out, and five are under the muck pile. Impossible to tell whether they are dead or not; they may be protected by timber. They have the best picked men they can get in there, and doing everything possible. Man taken out is getting along and may recover. Accident unavoidable. The rock was braced so that they thought it was safe but big chunk gave way. F. C. Hitchcock, one of the contractors is there. With V. A. Kauffman, superintendent, is directing the work. C. C. Tinkler, contractor, is on his way over from the east side.”
• Hartzel Thompson’s final recorded plea concerned the men still buried beneath the cave-in. Rescuers heard Thompson’s faint call from within the mass of rock and shattered timber. Assistant Superintendent Martin Green and Troy Banigan worked toward the sound despite further falls of stone, eventually reaching him behind a massive slab. “Thank God!” Thompson whispered when they were able to touch him. They brought him alive from the collapse and rushed him by electric car to the camp hospital. Thompson remained conscious until within two hours of his death. In describing the cave-in to Dr. McDonald, he said: “I heard someone yell to look out and I jumped. A big rock came down right where I was standing and then everything went black for a minute. I can’t remember anything that happened but I looked around me and saw that my leg was twisted at a right angle to my body. I wondered what happened. I think I called. I don’t remember anything until they came in the cave after me. One of the other men fell at my feet; I remember seeing him.” When Thompson’s recollection reached the workers underground, rescuers immediately returned to the opening Green and Banigan had made during his rescue. They found no trace of the man Thompson had described. His final reported words were for the others still trapped beneath the debris: “One of the boys was near me when the rock fell in. You ought to get him soon. Don’t give up, boys. There may be a chance all of them are alive.”
• Regarding Thompson's rescue: "HERO FORMER LEADVILLEITE—According to Denver dispatches, one of the heroes at the Moffat Tunnel, where five [six] men were killed in a cave-in, was Martin [Richard] Green, assistant superintendent. Green is a former Leadvillite, having at one time worked at the Penrose mine. He married Iona Schupp, a local girl. Green and Brannigan risked their own lives to get him (Thompson) out of the wreckage,” the story has it, “by crawling into a crevice of the slide. A huge boulder—almost as big as a piano—slipped from the pile and almost caught them, for a time it shut off their retreat, but they managed to drag Thompson out. Despite his injuries, Thompson was conscious, but later he died.”
• Contemporary misprints (as reported in newspapers and other sources): Hartsell, Hartsel, Hartzell Compson, C. M. Thompson
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about Hartzel T. Thompson, please let us know.

July 30, 1926 Cave-In

Members of the crew who escaped the tunnel cave-in on July 30, 1926:

• Orville Capehart Age 18 Neosho, Missouri
• John Prant Age 21 831 Larimer Street, Denver
• Joe Dubois Age 24 831 Larimer Street, Denver
• F. H. Benton Age 37 Fraser, Colorado
• Ora Skidmore Age 22 West Portal
• John Adams, Jr. Age 21 West Portal
• S. A. Mayberry Age 27 2124 Franklin Street, Denver

#38  |  1926 George Shores

• Age: 21
• Townsite Association: East Portal, Gilpin County
• Occupation (role/trade): brakeman
• Date of Death: Thursday, October 14, 1926
• Mechanism (event): fall from moving equipment (fell from an electric motor/tunnel car)
• Medical Cause: multiple trauma
• Manner: accident
• Burial: Riverside Cemetery, Denver, Colorado | Block 14, Lot 9, Section 31, no headstone/unmarked
• Headstone: Documented lot; exact grave position not discernible.
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Yes
• Find A Grave Memorial: 285709990
• Other Information: George Shores, 21, a Denver brakeman who had been working at the Moffat Tunnel for several months, was killed almost instantly at the East Portal when he fell from a swaying electric tunnel car as it entered the bore. Coworkers reported that he had stood up on the moving car just as it lurched, lost his balance, and fell—his head striking the rocks with enough force to fracture his skull. The crew stopped the car and ran back to him, but he died as they reached him.
• Contemporary misprints (as reported in newspapers and other sources): George Fhores, Foers, Forest, Phores
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about George Shores, please let us know.

#39  |  1926 George Dewey Fortune

• Age: 29
• Townsite Association: West Portal, Grand County
• Occupation (role/trade): chuck tender
• Date of Death: Monday, November 1, 1926
• Mechanism (event): fall of ground (fall of rock)
• Medical Cause: crush trauma
• Manner: accident
• Burial: Crown Hill Cemetery, Wheat Ridge, Colorado | Block 15, Plot 66, Grave 27
• Headstone: Documented lot; exact grave position not discernible.
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Yes
• Find A Grave Memorial: 291554109
• Other Information: George Fortune was a twenty-nine-year-old chuck tender working with the drill crew at West Portal when a sudden fall of rock ended his life on November 1, 1926. According to the Colorado Bureau of Mines’ annual report for that year, the crew had nearly completed drilling a round of holes at the tunnel breast when a slab detached without warning, crushing Fortune beneath it. He survived the initial blow but died within hours. Investigators concluded there was “no reason to suspect that the ground was unsafe,” and therefore classified the event as unavoidable. That phrasing—common in early twentieth-century mine-safety reporting—signals not that conditions were demonstrably safe, but that no contemporaneous evidence documented visible instability. In a heading where vibration, natural fracturing, and incremental stress could destabilize rock invisibly, “unavoidable” reflects the limits of what inspectors believed they could assess, not a definitive statement about geology. Fortune lived at 2928 Arapahoe Street in Denver and was married to Sadie Fortune, whose life changed abruptly with the news from West Portal. His death notices in the metropolitan papers carried a date of November 3. That discrepancy, when compared to the Mines report’s November 1, likely reflects the routine lag between a remote industrial fatality, formal notification, transport, and the timing of obituary submission. In contrast to many other accident deaths at the Moffat Tunnel—where newspapers described circumstances, named witnesses, or reproduced statements—no surviving article has been located that reports the details of Fortune’s accident itself. Only the brief obituary items appear in the press. That silence is crucial: when typical journalistic traces are missing, the official record assumes even greater evidentiary weight, while also reminding us how fragile the documentary landscape can be. What we know about his final day rests almost entirely on the Mines report’s concise account. Fortune’s death fits a broader pattern that year: well-trained crews working in a highly disciplined environment could still be overtaken by small, sudden geological failures. The drill crew had nearly finished their task, and nothing in the record suggests visible danger. Yet a single slab falling from the breast dictated the outcome. For historians reconstructing the full human cost of the Moffat Tunnel project, the sparseness of coverage in this case underscores an uncomfortable truth—some tragedies left only skeletal traces. In documenting them, precision requires acknowledging both the facts we can confirm and the contours of what has disappeared from view.
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about George Dewey Fortune, please let us know.

#40  |  1926 Frank Bird Pierce

• Age: 48
• Birth: Saturday, August 17, 1878 in Bentonville, Arkansas
• Townsite Association: West Portal, Grand County
• Occupation (role/trade): laborer
• Date of Death: Saturday, November 20, 1926
• Mechanism (event): engine fell from a [dump] trestle that was weakened by precipitation
• Medical Cause: crush trauma
• Manner: accident
• Burial: Crown Hill Cemetery, Wheat Ridge, Colorado | Block 22, Plot 121, Grave 1
• Headstone: Monument located and confirmed.
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Yes
• Find A Grave Memorial: 57806604
• Other Information: Frank Bird Pierce, son of Samuel Vinton Pierce and Clara Isadore Guss, built a life marked by reinvention and quiet resilience. At twenty-two he was already working as a “railroad man” in Waco’s Ward 3, and that same city is where he married Grace Marie Herndon on September 1, 1900. Their first two sons arrived in 1901 and 1906, and by 1910—now thirty-two—Frank had shifted into running a furniture store, even as the couple endured the loss of their one-year-old son, Frank B. Jr., in 1911. In the years that followed, two more sons—Robert Prescott and Elbert Isadore—joined the family. By the time of the 1920 census, Frank was working as a checker in a laundry while raising four surviving boys. Sometime after that count, the family left Texas for Colorado, where Frank returned to railroad work as a brakeman. Given the timing and the location, that assignment almost certainly placed him within the sprawling industrial plant surrounding the west side of the Moffat Tunnel construction project—a landscape of temporary sidings, dump trestles, spoil tracks, and light industrial locomotives (the Moffat Tunnel team called these 'dinkys') distinct from the established Denver & Salt Lake Railroad mainline that already served West Portal via Rollins Pass. On November 20, 1926, one of the small construction locomotives used in that work went down when a dump trestle failed, and the falling engine killed Frank. Contemporary reports do not specify whether he was riding the locomotive or working alongside it when the structure collapsed, only that the engine’s fall proved fatal. A collapse of this type was not unprecedented during the tunnel era: at East Portal, a similar failure of temporary construction trackage occurred earlier in the project, underscoring how vulnerable these provisional structures were to the kinds of construction stresses—variable ground conditions, freeze–thaw cycles, and heavy localized loads—that routinely challenged tunnel-camp infrastructure. Frank’s death on the west side fits that same pattern of construction hazards rather than anything involving the permanent railroad. He was only forty-eight. Grace lived until 1972 and never remarried.
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about Frank Bird Pierce, please let us know.

#41  |  1926 Harley Smith

• Age: 27-28
• Townsite Association: West Portal, Grand County
• Occupation (role/trade): laborer
• Date of Death: NLT Wednesday, December 8, 1926; burial Thursday, December 9, 1926
• Mechanism (event): unknown
• Medical Cause: unknown
• Manner: undetermined
• Burial: Riverside Cemetery, Denver, Colorado | Block 14, Lot 9, Section 33, no headstone/unmarked
• Headstone: Documented lot; exact grave position not discernible.
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Yes
• Find A Grave Memorial: 285709991
• Other Information: Harley Smith died in early December 1926 at West Portal, Colorado, at approximately twenty-eight years of age. His death was publicly noted in The Rocky Mountain News on December 9, 1926, which identified him as the beloved husband of Alma Smith and announced that funeral services would be held that same day at Thompson’s Chapel at 10 a.m., followed by burial at Riverside Cemetery. Riverside’s interment ledger precisely corroborates that notice, recording his burial on December 9, 1926, in Block 14, Lot 9. No surviving newspaper coverage or cemetery documentation expands on the cause or circumstances of his death, which—given his young age and the hazardous context of West Portal employment—leaves a critical gap in the historical record.
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about Harley Smith, please let us know.

#42  |  1926 Charles Frederick Billings

• Age: 52
• Birth: Monday, July 6, 1874 in Golden, Colorado
• Townsite Association: West Portal, Grand County
• Occupation (role/trade): laborer
• Date of Death: Monday, December 13, 1926
• Mechanism (event): exposure/respiratory
• Medical Cause: pneumonia
• Manner: natural (occupational illness)
• Burial: Fairmount Cemetery, Denver, Colorado | Block 22, Lot 39, Grave 4
• Headstone: Monument located and confirmed.
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Yes
• Find A Grave Memorial: 32429817
• Other Information: Charles Frederick Billings—listed in contemporary newspapers as Charles F. Billings—was born in 1874 in Golden, Colorado, to Samuel and Mary Billings. By the late 1890s he was working as a miner and living in Telluride, where his musical life intersected with his personal one: he played violin in an orchestra and met Bessie Estelle Songer while she attended a performance. The two were married on October 12, 1898, in Telluride, and raised three children—Freda, Frederick, and Myrtle. Family tradition preserves unusually vivid details of Billings’s physical presence and character, describing him as five feet eight inches tall and 160 pounds in 1914, an image grounded in the measurements recorded in his own diary rather than later recollection. By the mid-1920s, Billings was again engaged in hard labor, this time in connection with construction of the Moffat Tunnel. During this period he stayed at West Portal with his sister, Carrie Gallagher, and her husband, Joe Gallagher, the tunnel’s superintendent—a relationship independently confirmed by his 1926 funeral notice, which lists Mrs. J. H. Gallagher of West Portal as his surviving sister. Family accounts further record that Billings commuted between Denver and the tunnel site by motorcycle, and that during one such trip he severely burned his leg. He soon fell ill with pneumonia and died on December 13, 1926, at the age of fifty-two. His funeral was held at Rogers Mortuary in Denver on December 17, 1926, with interment at Fairmount Cemetery. The Rocky Mountain News identified his residence as 1128 Cherokee, named his wife Bessie, his daughters Freda and Myrtle, and noted the extended family ties that tied him directly to the West Portal tunnel community. What the newspaper did not record—but the family preserved—is the full arc of a life that moved between mining camps, orchestral music, early motorcycle travel, and finally the winter dangers surrounding one of Colorado’s most ambitious engineering projects. Together, those strands resolve into a coherent historical profile: not merely a tunnel worker who died in 1926, but a man whose working life bridged extraction, construction, and mobility at the very moment Colorado’s high-country infrastructure was being forced into existence.
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about Charles Frederick Billings, please let us know.

#43  |  1927 King Francis Weston

• Age: 30
• Birth: Monday, September 21, 1896 in Springfield, Ohio
• Townsite Association: East Portal, Gilpin County
• Occupation (role/trade): chief electrician
• Date of Death: Wednesday, February 16, 1927
• Time of Death: 2:30am
• Mechanism (event): electrocution (touched a wire carrying 2,300 volts in order to save the life of his friend)
• Medical Cause: cardiac/thermal injury
• Manner: accident
• Burial: Crown Hill Cemetery, Wheat Ridge, Colorado | Block 34, Plot 307, Grave 2
• Headstone: Monument located and confirmed.
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Yes
• Find A Grave Memorial: 43516010
• Other Information: Contemporary newspaper accounts identifying King F. Weston as the twenty-seventh fatality of the Moffat Tunnel project reveal that the oft-repeated total of twenty-eight deaths is inaccurate—several additional fatalities and serious accidents occurred afterward. Additional information about Weston:
  • World War I service: In June 1918, Weston sailed from Newport News, Virginia, for France aboard the Italian troop transport Duca d’Aosta with Company D, 112th Engineers, 37th Division. During the crossing, USS Susquehanna, traveling in the same convoy, reported a submarine attack on July 2 at approximately 41° N, 41° W; no damage or casualties are documented, and Weston’s unit arrived at Brest on July 5. Weston rose from enlisted engineer ranks to a commissioned Army officer during World War I, served with the AEF in France in major campaigns including Ypres-Lys and Meuse-Argonne, and likely applied the same technical skill that later made him chief electrician on the Moffat Tunnel—supporting combat engineering and infrastructure work under wartime conditions.
  • Records describe a pivotal incident during construction: on February 15, 1925, tunneling progress halted roughly 1,100 feet beneath Crater Lake when an estimated 1,800 gallons per minute of water began pouring into the bore. At the suggestion of an electrician recorded as K.S. Weston, crews cut through three feet of lake ice and poured in ten pounds of chloride of lime. When traces of the chemical appeared inside the tunnel, a stick of dynamite was thrown into the lake to seal the fissure—reducing the inflow to 150 gallons per minute, and soon after, to a trickle. Based on cross-referenced documentation, we're nearly certain the “K.S.” attribution was a typographical or auditory error and that the individual was in fact K.F. Weston, the same King Weston who later perished during the project. It seems improbable that two electricians with the initials K. Weston would have been working on the Moffat Tunnel simultaneously, making it highly likely this was the same man—first identified in connection with the Crater Lake incident and later lost just days before the tunnel’s holing-through. Indeed, contemporary articles describing Weston's passing refer to him as King S. Weston. Weston likely knew the area well; his home in Jenkinsville lay southwest of the Moffat Tunnel’s East Portal, giving him familiarity with routes to Crater Lakes.
  • A news story from the Associated Press mentioned, "Weston was attempting to save the life of his helper, E. J. Shepard, when he was killed. The accident occurred when a motor which they were attempting to adjust slipped and fell on Shepard’s leg, pinning him in the water on the floor of the tunnel. Weston, fearing the current would pas[s] through the water and injure Shepard tried to cut off the power and touched the switch knife. Shepard suffered painful injuries about the legs and lower body." It's clear: Weston made the ultimate sacrifice. Shepard was pinned in rising water with live current nearby, and if nothing changed, the electricity would find him. Weston understood that instantly. The only way to break the circuit was to grasp the bare metal knife switch itself, and reaching for it meant accepting the same danger himself. Deep in the tunnel where someone was almost certainly going to die, Weston consciously made the choice of who it wouldn’t be. That deep courage, that immediate sense of selflessness that it was Shepard's story that should continue, that's old-fashioned heroism. Weston was an experienced electrician who had been with the project from the beginning; a man with that depth of skill doesn’t simply blunder into a live switch. If he touched it, it was because he knew exactly what he was risking and chose to do it anyway. Indeed, a newspaper headline from the Albuquerque Journal on February 17, 1927 states, "MOFFAT TUNNEL WORKER KILLED SAVING FRIEND." Other headlines carried the same unmistakable conclusion: “Electrician Loses Life Trying to Save Another” and “Electrician Dies In Trying to Save Life of Helper.”
    • Note: Contemporary newspaper accounts appear to have misspelled the surname as “Shepard.” The individual was likely Eugene Jack Shepherd, who was in his early twenties at the time of the accident, married two years later, and died in 1966. Shepherd is buried at Fairmount Cemetery.
  • Weston’s death occurred amid renewed efforts to control underground water as final preparations for the holing-through ceremony accelerated. He had served as the project’s chief electrician for three years. The motor powering the pumps broke on the preceding Thursday and was eventually removed; workers then spent all of Wednesday night repairing it so it could be reinstalled, as the motors drove the pumps that removed roughly 1,000 gallons of water each minute. Weston was electrocuted early Wednesday morning. The pump’s week-long outage had already intensified the pressure to complete repairs before the long-planned ceremony.
  • The date of the holing-through had been postponed multiple times—from February 16, to February 17, and finally to February 18, 1927—a date described as “mutually agreeable to Governor William H. Adams of Colorado and President Calvin Coolidge.” Given that two previous changes had already been coordinated with the White House, it is reasonable to infer that the Moffat Tunnel Commission was reluctant to request another postponement. That likely contributed to a sense of “go-fever”—a determination to meet the fixed date regardless of the accumulating risks underground. When Coolidge touched the golden telegraph key from Washington, D.C., symbolically detonating the final blast that joined the east and west headings, newspapers reported that Weston “falls victim as preparations for Moffat Celebration are rushed.” After Weston's electrocution, water started rising rapidly. The Associated Press reported that Moffat Tunnel crews were forced to work in water “up to their necks” after pumps on the east side of the pioneer bore were knocked out of commission earlier that morning by an accident that killed an electrician, allowing a lake to form near cross cut No. 12; with the crucial breakthrough scheduled for Friday night, men waded shoulder-deep to boost pump efficiency while engineers estimated that, once operations stabilized, the flooded section could be drained within four to five hours.
  • Tunnel co-workers took up a collection to send a wreath of flowers to his widow, Mrs. Kathryn M. Weston, and a Saturday night dance at the tunnel was postponed out of respect. Weston, described as one of the largest men in the camp at 6 feet 2 inches tall, was remembered as careful, conscientious, and widely liked among the crew. As contractor F. D. Hitchcock stated directly, “Weston was one of the most careful and conscientious men in the crew.”
  • Of interesting note is that Edgar McMechen describes Weston’s death in two separate sections of his book, yet the accounts diverge in ways that are difficult to reconcile. On page 213, the incident is presented in compressed form: Weston, “after three years connection with the work,” was electrocuted while repairing a pump when he “leaned against a high voltage wire carrying two thousand three hundred volts,” because he “had not turned off the switch.” In this telling, the fatal cause is framed as a procedural failure, and no broader context is supplied. The later account on page 257 situates Weston’s death within an unfolding emergency. Power failures caused by “high wind and snow” had shut down the pumps, flooding the tunnel until the water “stood waist deep.” Here, McMechen states explicitly that Weston “could not have turned off the switch within the tunnel without shutting down both pumps” and that, rather than returning to the portal controls, “he voluntarily ran the risk of electrocution.” The fatal moment is attributed not merely to contact with a live wire, but to compounded conditions: water overflowing “the tops of his rubber boots,” the establishment of “perfect conditions for a current,” and a slip into a deep hole immediately before he leaned against a wire carrying “twenty-three hundred volts.” Read together, the passages point to the same individual—same task, same voltage range, same outcome—yet they assign causation differently. One emphasizes omission (“had not turned off the switch”); the other emphasizes constraint (“could not have turned off the switch”) and situational necessity. That McMechen advances both explanations within his own narrative matters, because it shifts the interpretive burden from individual error to systemic risk and emergency conditions. The internal tension between these accounts underscores the need to treat any single passage cautiously and to corroborate Weston’s death against independent contemporaneous sources rather than relying on a lone narrative strand.
  • King Francis Weston was not unfamiliar with danger. As an electrician at the Moffat Tunnel, he regularly worked around 44,000 volts at the power house, a setting where survival depended on discipline, training, and a precise respect for consequences. Yet the State of Colorado Bureau of Mines’ Annual Report for the Year 1927 reduced his death to a terse official entry: “February 16, King F. Weston, American, age 31, electrician at Moffat Tunnel, was instantly electrocuted at the East Portal while starting a 2300-voltage motor. In some manner the commutator shorted, killing him instantly. Careless on his part.” That final judgment, “careless on his part,” sits uneasily beside period accounts that described Weston as “most careful and conscientious,” and even more uneasily beside headlines stating that he died while trying to save another man. In that tension is the question worth asking: what does heroism look like when the official record calls it carelessness? Perhaps, in this case, it looked like a conscientious decision to be careless, not from ignorance of the danger, but from the split-second moral calculation of a man who saw another life in danger and stepped toward the current anyway, a choice that closed the circuit and the story of his life.
  • Newly located Gilpin County Coroner records provide the official determination of Weston’s death. The cause was recorded as “Electric Shock accidentally rec’d.” In the preprinted “Verdict of Jury” field, the coroner instead entered “No inquest deemed necessary,” indicating that the circumstances were considered sufficiently clear that no formal inquest was convened.
  • In the end, the same man whose quick thinking in 1925 helped seal a leak beneath Crater Lake appears again two years later at the center of another water-related emergency, this time at the end of the tunnel’s holing-through rather than its beginning. His life effectively brackets that milestone—a reminder that even monumental engineering achievements are measured not just by cubic yards of rock removed, but by the people who gave everything to see them joined.
• Contemporary misprints (as reported in newspapers and other sources): King S. Weston
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about King Francis Weston, please let us know.

#44  |  1927 James Gerald Engleman

• Age: 20
• Birth: Tuesday, November 27, 1906 in Litchfield, Nebraska
• Townsite Association: West Portal, Grand County
• Occupation (role/trade): laborer
• Date of Death: Wednesday, April 20, 1927
• Mechanism (event): exposure/respiratory
• Medical Cause: pneumonia
• Manner: natural (occupational illness)
• Burial: Craig Cemetery, Craig, Colorado | Section Fairview 28, Plot 6
• Headstone: Monument located and confirmed.
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Yes
• Find A Grave Memorial: 28612372
• Other Information: James Gerald Engleman, born November 27, 1906, in Litchfield, Nebraska, died at his family’s home in Craig, Colorado, on April 20, 1927, following several weeks of illness caused by measles complicated by pneumonia. Contemporary newspapers state explicitly that his fatal illness was “contracted while working at West Portal” of the Moffat Tunnel, removing any ambiguity about where the disease originated. He fell ill while employed at the tunnel, was hospitalized for approximately eight days, and was released before returning home—so weakened that, unaware his parents had not been notified, he reportedly walked from the railroad station to his house through a snowstorm. His condition worsened rapidly, and he died roughly one week after being confined to bed by his physician. Engleman was the eldest of seven children of Mr. and Mrs. Ed (A. E.) Engleman of the Great Divide district near Craig. A 1926 graduate of Craig High School, he entered the University of Colorado at Boulder in the fall of that year, where he earned unusual scholastic honors during his first quarter and was pledged to the Beta Gamma fraternity. Owing solely to financial necessity—not academic standing—he withdrew from the university and took employment at the Moffat Tunnel with the express purpose of saving money to return to school. Multiple accounts describe him as a talented musician, prominent in school activities, dramatics, athletics, and music, and widely regarded as one of the most promising young men Craig had produced. Engleman’s funeral was held at the Craig Armory and was attended by a standing-room-only crowd, a reflection of his standing in the community. A military funeral with full honors was conducted, with Company A, 157th Infantry, serving as escort of honor, and the Craig High School Boys’ Glee Club providing the music. He was survived by his parents; one brother, Marvin E. Engleman; and five sisters—Ella Ruth, Avis Louise, and the twins Ardeth Fay and Edith May—with another sibling having died previously and been buried in Litchfield. Although one article mistakenly stated that he was “approaching his 21st birthday,” his documented birthdate confirms he was 20 years old at the time of death.
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about James Gerald Engleman, please let us know.

#45  |  1927 Frank Davis

• Age: 39-40
• Townsite Association: East Portal, Gilpin County
• Occupation (role/trade): shift boss
• Date of Death: Thursday, April 28, 1927
• Mechanism (event): exposure/respiratory
• Medical Cause: pneumonia
• Manner: natural (occupational illness)
• Burial: Riverside Cemetery, Denver, Colorado | Block 14, Lot 12, Section 80, no headstone/unmarked
• Headstone: Documented lot; exact grave position not discernible.
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Yes
• Find A Grave Memorial: 154191344
• Other Information: Frank Davis, a shift boss stationed at the East Portal of the Moffat Tunnel, died at St. Anthony’s Hospital in Denver after developing pneumonia that the newspaper expressly states was “contracted while working at the Moffat tunnel.” As a shift boss, Davis’s duties placed him consistently inside the active bore, overseeing extended underground operations rather than rotating through shorter task-based assignments. In that context, the illness is not framed by the press as coincidental with his employment but as arising directly from it—an explicit occupational attribution by contemporary reporting. Funeral arrangements were placed in the care of Spillane’s mortuary. Davis was laid to rest at Riverside Cemetery in Denver—Block 14, Lot 12, Section 80—without a headstone, his name fading quietly into the ground even as the tunnel he helped drive forward became one of the great engineering monuments of the American West.
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about Frank Davis, please let us know.

#46  |  1927 Clarence Elmer McKown

• Age: 51
• Birth: Monday, May 15, 1876 in Iowa
• Townsite Association: East Portal, Gilpin County
• Occupation (role/trade): laborer
• Date of Death: Sunday, May 29, 1927
• Mechanism (event): overexertion/physiologic
• Medical Cause: severe rupture while lifting a heavy object
• Manner: accident
• Burial: Hendley Cemetery, Hendley, Nebraska
• Headstone: Monument located and confirmed.
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Not yet
• Find A Grave Memorial: 235294540
• Other Information: Clarence Elmer McKown, the eldest son of Thomas Jefferson McKown and Sarah McKown—later Mrs. J. W. Childers of Hendley, Nebraska—was born near Villisca, Iowa, on May 15, 1876. His family relocated to Nebraska in 1879, and he married Della Ellis on November 28, 1902. The sons named in the obituary record are Laurel McKown, Ellis McKown, Lyle Jefferson McKown, and Danie Banning McKown, along with the youngest, Dale Banning McKown, who died on April 25, 1917. During Clarence’s final illness, Kenneth McKown and Lyle McKown were reported at his bedside, while Laurel McKown was in Michigan and unable to attend the funeral—an internal naming inconsistency that originates within the historical source itself. Clarence was preceded in death by his father in 1913, an unnamed brother in 1898, and his sister Mrs. Myrtle C. Myers in 1912. He was survived by his mother, his brother J. A. McKown, his sister Mrs. Ella Smith of Hendley, and his surviving sons. McKown died on May 29, 1927, at East Portal, Colorado, at the age of fifty-one following what contemporary reporting described as a short illness. He underwent surgery on the morning of his death and passed away before he could be removed from the operating table, establishing his death as medical and perioperative rather than industrial or accidental in nature. Although the location of death places him within the hazardous geographic context of the Moffat Tunnel’s construction environment, the surviving record draws a clear distinction between proximity and cause. A man of faith and civic involvement, McKown confessed his belief in Christ in 1917 at Beaver City and later united with both the Church of Christ and the Community Presbyterian Church at Lebanon, Nebraska. He was a member of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, the Modern Woodmen of America, and the Lebanon Rebekah Lodge. His body was returned to Hendley, where funeral services were held at the Christian church on Wednesday afternoon, and he was laid to rest in the Hendley Cemetery beside the grave of his youngest son.
• McKown's World War I Draft Card states that he was of medium height, stout build, with brown hair and brown eyes.
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about Clarence Elmer McKown, please let us know.

#47  |  1927 Charles “Charlie” L. Rice

• Age: 26
• Birth: Sunday, February 3, 1901 in Marble Rock, Iowa
• Townsite Association: West Portal, Grand County
• Occupation (role/trade): driller
• Date of Death: Thursday, July 14, 1927
• Mechanism (event): explosion
• Medical Cause: blast trauma
• Manner: accident
• Burial: Pleasant Valley Township Cemetery, Swaledale, Iowa
• Headstone: Approximate location available.
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Not yet
• Find A Grave Memorial: 78819024
• Other Information: Charles "Charlie" L. Rice (also reported contemporaneously as C. L. Wright), reported as age 27 but was really 26, a driller employed at the West Portal of the Moffat Tunnel, was critically injured in a premature dynamite explosion at Crosscut No. 10 on the night of June 24, 1927, and succumbed to those injuries on July 14, 1927. Multiple newspapers reported that while boring through a wall of rock, Rice struck an unfired charge left from a previous blast, triggering an explosion that sent flying rock and broken timbers through the heading. He sustained a severely crushed and lacerated face, a broken jaw, and massive trauma and blood loss, and was rushed in critical condition to the West Portal hospital, where physicians stated that he “might not recover.” The same explosion also injured Roy Johnson, 20, a mucker on his first day of tunnel duty, who suffered a fractured leg but was expected to survive. Rice’s death notice appeared July 14, 1927, at West Portal. Although no surviving article explicitly restates that his death resulted from the June 24 explosion, the convergence of age, occupation, location, initials, timing, and the documented prognosis of likely non-recovery, combined with the absence of any independent record for a surviving “C. L. Wright,” establishes with overwhelming confidence that the two names refer to the same individual, and that the discrepancy reflects a phonetic or wire-service transmission error rather than separate persons. Rice’s death therefore converts the June 24, 1927 West Portal dynamite explosion from a near-fatal accident into a confirmed fatal industrial casualty.
• After decades without a confirmed identity, Charles L. Rice was identified through a layered investigation that combined official records, cemetery documentation, military records, historical newspapers, and family history. The breakthrough began with a War Department application for a government headstone, filed by his mother, Mary A. Rice of Swaledale, Iowa, confirming Charlie L. Rice's death on July 14, 1927, burial in Pleasant Valley Cemetery, and prior service as a Private First Class in the U.S. Army. That evidence led to an early family history, Cutting Kin (ca. 1939–1940), which identified Warren Lewis Rice and Mary A. Lewis Rice and their three sons. Its entry for Charlie states simply but decisively: "Charlie b. at Marble Rock, Iowa, d. at West Portal, Colo., buried at Swaledale, Iowa." Together with Colorado records documenting the July 14, 1927, death of Moffat Tunnel worker Charles L. Rice following the June 24 West Portal explosion, these independent sources converged to establish his identity with a high degree of historical confidence, finally restoring his name, family, and hometown to the story of the Moffat Tunnel.
• Contemporary misprints (as reported in newspapers and other sources): C. L. Wright
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about Charles L. Rice, please let us know.

#48  |  1927 Michael Tomavsky

• Age: 38
• Townsite Association: West Portal, Grand County
• Occupation (role/trade): laborer
• Date of Death: NLT Sunday, July 31, 1927, likely Friday, July 29, 1927
• Mechanism (event): unknown
• Medical Cause: unknown
• Manner: undetermined
• Burial: Riverside Cemetery, Denver, Colorado | Block 19, Lot SMP, no headstone/unmarked
• Headstone: Documented lot; exact grave position not discernible.
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Yes
• Find A Grave Memorial: 287923919
• Other Information: Michael “Mike” Tomaskey died at West Portal in late July 1927 and was buried at Riverside Cemetery in Denver on July 31 of that year. His funeral notice, published in The Rocky Mountain News on July 31, records that he was formerly of 2204 Larimer Street and that services were held first at the Hartford Mortuary and then at the Russian Orthodox Church of Globeville before interment at Riverside. In the cemetery ledger, however, he appears under the name Michael Tomavsky, buried the same day in Block 38, Lot 19, SMP. This is not a separate individual but a routine case of Slavic surname transliteration drift—an artifact of how Eastern European names were frequently heard, recorded, and Anglicized differently across newspapers, church records, and cemetery books. The convergence of the burial date, the Russian Orthodox funeral services, the West Portal work location, and the Riverside interment establishes a single, coherent identity beyond reasonable dispute. Accordingly, he is correctly documented as Michael “Mike” Tomaskey (a.k.a. Tomavsky)—another example of how the administrative friction of early-twentieth-century recordkeeping can fracture a worker’s name even as his life and death remain singular.
• Contemporary misprints (as reported in newspapers and other sources): Mike, Tomaskey
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about Michael Tomavsky, please let us know.

#49  |  1927 Thomas T. Williams

• Age: 43
• Townsite Association: West Portal, Grand County
• Occupation (role/trade): superintendent
• Date of Death: Saturday, September 3, 1927
• Mechanism (event): struck-by equipment (motor dropped and threw him against tunnel; fractured skull)
• Medical Cause: skull fracture
• Manner: accident
• Burial: Crown Hill Cemetery, Wheat Ridge, Colorado | Block 34, Plot 314, Grave 2
• Headstone: Monument located and confirmed.
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Yes
• Find A Grave Memorial: 274240446
• Other Information: Thomas T. Williams served as the West Portal superintendent during construction of the Moffat Tunnel. On Sunday, August 28, while riding through the tunnel in an electric tram car, the drive shaft suddenly snapped, throwing Williams head first from the car. He was violently hurled into the ceiling of the tunnel and suffered severe injuries to his head and spine. The driver, Thornton Waller, was thrown clear and escaped with only minor scratches. Williams was taken to the West Portal hospital, where he remained under care until he later died from the injuries sustained in the wreck. Funeral services for Williams were held at the Olinger Mortuary in Denver, with burial at Crown Hill Cemetery. In recognition of his leadership and the loss to the operation, work at the tunnel halted for five minutes on the day of his services, allowing approximately 800 men to pay tribute to his memory. His death stands among the mechanically documented fatalities of the project, caused by failure of the electric tram car’s drive shaft rather than by rockfall, gas, or structural collapse.
• Contemporary misprints (as reported in newspapers and other sources): Thomas G. Williams, Tom
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about Thomas T. Williams, please let us know.

#50  |  1927 Frank M. Myers

• Age: 47
• Birth: Friday, June 25, 1880 in Haddam, Kansas
• Townsite Association: East Portal, Gilpin County
• Occupation (role/trade): miner
• Date of Death: Tuesday, September 20, 1927
• Mechanism (event): fall from scaffold while repairing timbers (backward fall with fatal neck impact)
• Medical Cause: neck trauma
• Manner: accident
• Burial: Crown Hill Cemetery, Wheat Ridge, Colorado | Block 18, Plot 312, Grave 2
• Headstone: Monument located and confirmed.
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Yes
• Find A Grave Memorial: 62724372
• Other Information: Frank M. Myers was fatally injured at the East Portal of the Moffat Tunnel on September 19, 1927, while working on a scaffold repairing tunnel timbers. The 1927 Colorado Bureau of Mines records that Myers, an American miner, age forty-seven, fell in an unexplained manner, striking the back of his neck and sustaining internal injuries, and died the following day, September 20, 1927. The accident was formally classified as “clearly accidental and unavoidable.” A contemporaneous notice in the Rocky Mountain News dated September 22, 1927, misspelled his surname as “Meyer,” but correctly identified him as late of East Portal, Colorado, and named his wife, Ruth Myers. Funeral services were held at Olinger Mortuary in Denver, with interment at Crown Hill Cemetery. The burial register’s confirmation of “Frank M. Myers” establishes the correct spelling of the surname and conclusively links the newspaper notice and the Bureau of Mines fatality record to the same individual.
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about Frank M. Myers, please let us know.

#51  |  1927 John J. Hawley

• Age: unknown
• Townsite Association: West Portal, Grand County
• Occupation (role/trade): laborer
• Date of Death: Wednesday, October 12, 1927
• Mechanism (event): unknown
• Medical Cause: unknown
• Manner: undetermined
• Burial: Crown Hill Cemetery, Wheat Ridge, Colorado | Block 14, Plot 44, Grave 8
• Headstone: Monument located and confirmed.
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Yes
• Find A Grave Memorial: 141098550
• Other Information: The only surviving contemporary notice located to date is the brief mortuary line: “Hawley—John Hawley, October 12, at West Portal, Colo.... Interment at Crown Hill.” No obituary, accident description, or coroner’s report has yet been found, and no Colorado Bureau of Mines annual report for 1927 attributes a death on that date to a named individual matching Hawley. That silence matters precisely because most tunnel fatalities—particularly accidental ones—triggered either a Bureau investigation, a newspaper item, or both. The absence of such documentation leaves open multiple possibilities: he may have been a tunnel employee whose death was not reported publicly; he may have died from natural causes or a sudden medical event in the construction camp; or he may have been working in a supporting capacity whose death fell outside the period’s reporting norms. Each of these is only a hypothesis until supported by a primary record. Crown Hill Cemetery in Wheat Ridge confirms that an individual named John Hawley was interred there following a death at West Portal on October 12, 1927, but the cemetery file contains no additional biographical or occupational detail. Without a death certificate, probate file, military record, or family obituary, his age, nationality, employment status, and the circumstances of his final day all remain unknown. In a project aiming to reconstruct the full human cost of Moffat Tunnel construction, Hawley’s case underscores why archival gaps—rather than diminishing the significance of a worker—often heighten it. An unelaborated death record at a remote industrial site in 1927 is itself a signal that more may once have existed, whether in a lost coroner’s ledger, a missing camp log, or an unpreserved local paper. His inclusion marks a commitment to documenting every death associated with the tunnel, even when the historical record resists easy recovery.
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about John J. Hawley, please let us know.

#52  |  1927 Peter Medich

• Age: 38 (most sources say age 38; others say 40)
• Townsite Association: East Portal, Gilpin County
• Occupation (role/trade): mucker
• Date of Death: Tuesday, October 18, 1927
• Mechanism (event): struck-by timber
• Medical Cause: blunt trauma
• Manner: accident
• Burial: Riverside Cemetery, Denver, Colorado | Block 19, Lot SMP, Section 269, no headstone/unmarked
• Headstone: Documented lot; exact grave position not discernible.
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Yes
• Find A Grave Memorial: 287923961
• Other Information: The 1927 Colorado Bureau of Mines report documents the accident in plain, mechanical terms: “October 17, Pete Nadich, nationality unknown, age 38, mucker, was fatally injured in the Moffat Tunnel. He was standing on one side of the tunnel close to a concrete invert, when the wheels of a truck which was pushed forward by an electric motor, struck a piece of 6x6 timber and raised one end suddenly, which struck him on the left leg, breaking it in several places from ankle to thigh. He died the following day.” A separate contemporary newspaper account supplied a more immediate and harrowing version, although it identified the victim as “Peter Nabich,” reporting that he “was fatally injured last night when struck by a piece of timber which was lying across the track in the water tunnel. The motor car on which he was riding struck the timber, hurling it into the air. He was unable to dodge and his leg was crushed. He died from shock and loss of blood. There are no known relatives to survive the deceased.” A brief Denver mortuary notice likewise recorded his death at West Portal on October 18 and announced services at the Russian Church at 47th and Logan, though it offered no detail about the accident itself—a striking reminder that even severe construction injuries sometimes received only the briefest public mention. Riverside Cemetery’s interment ledger resolves the name discrepancy: no “Nadich” was buried there in 1927, but Peter Medich, age 40, was interred on October 22, 1927, in Block 19, Lot SMP. The alignment of dates, age, and location strongly indicates a single individual whose surname was rendered inconsistently across sources, a common distortion for Slavic names in 1920s Colorado. This convergence of evidence—Mines report, newspaper accounts, mortuary notice, and burial record—makes clear that Medich should be counted among the confirmed Moffat Tunnel fatalities. The case also illustrates why the project’s broader reconstruction requires treating every variant spelling as a hypothesis to be tested; otherwise, workers lost to transcription error risk disappearing from the historical record entirely.
• Contemporary misprints (as reported in newspapers and other sources): Pete, Nadich, Nabich
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about Peter Medich, please let us know.

#53  |  1928 John Zuzulis

• Age: 39-40
• Townsite Association: West Portal, Grand County
• Date of Death: Sunday, February 26, 1928
• Occupation (role/trade): laborer
• Mechanism (event): unknown
• Medical Cause: unknown
• Manner: unspecified
• Burial: Riverside Cemetery, Denver, Colorado | Block 14, Lot 2, Section 133, no headstone/unmarked
• Headstone: Documented lot; exact grave position not discernible.
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Yes
• Find A Grave Memorial: 141851625
• Other Information: John Zuzulis died at West Portal on February 26, 1928—the same day the Moffat Tunnel formally opened—and his death passed almost without public comment. The only contemporary notice located to date is a brief line in the Rocky Mountain News on March 1, 1928: “Zuzulis—John Zuzulis, Feb 26, at West Portal, Colo. Arrangements later.” No follow-up article has been found, and no account has surfaced that explains the circumstances of his final day. That silence is notable precisely because many tunnel-phase fatalities, sudden illnesses, and serious injuries produced at least some measure of press or official documentation. When all that survives in the current research record is a single mortuary listing, it highlights an evidentiary gap rather than supporting any conclusion about the nature of the death. The burial data add only a few fixed points. Zuzulis was interred at Riverside Cemetery in Denver on March 7, 1928, recorded as age forty and placed in Block 14, Lot 2, Section 133. The grave today is unmarked. To date, no cemetery file, newspaper report, coroner’s record, or other official documentation has been located that expands on his cause of death, his role or activities at West Portal in the hours preceding it, or whether medical care was attempted. Given the volume of material still dispersed across regional archives, it remains entirely possible that additional records exist but have not yet been identified. Because his death coincided with the tunnel’s inauguration, Zuzulis’ case illustrates how easily an individual loss could be overshadowed at the precise moment public attention shifted toward celebration. For a centennial accounting that seeks to recover every worker’s story, the incompleteness surrounding his final day becomes part of the historical truth: the record’s silences are themselves indicators of whose experiences were preserved—and whose were eclipsed—during one of Colorado’s most heralded engineering milestones.
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about John Zuzulis, please let us know.

#54  |  1928 Frederick Stanley Watt

• Age: 52
• Birth: Tuesday, November 2, 1875 in Newcastle, New Brunswick, Canada
• Townsite Association: West Portal, Grand County
• Occupation (role/trade): laborer
• Date of Death: Tuesday, March 13, 1928
• Mechanism (event): exposure/respiratory
• Medical Cause: pneumonia (persisting from roughly opening day through March 13th)
• Manner: natural (occupational illness)
• Burial: Fairmount Cemetery, Denver, Colorado | Block 88, Lot 106, Section 5
• Headstone: Monument located and confirmed.
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Yes
• Find A Grave Memorial: 291554806
• Other Information: Frederick Stanley Watt became ill at the West Portal of the Moffat Tunnel in February 1928 while performing his regular duties for the Tunnel Commission. His wife immediately brought him to Denver, where physicians at Mercy Hospital diagnosed a serious respiratory infection—described variously in contemporary reporting as pneumonia, typhoid pneumonia, or pneumonia that developed into typhoid fever. After a temporary improvement that allowed discharge to his home at 1452 Elizabeth Street, his condition rapidly worsened, and he died there at 7:00 p.m. on March 13, 1928, following a weeks-long illness. As with Fred Sperandio (above)—whose death also occurred at West Portal but not inside the tunnel—the surviving documentation shows only that Watt’s illness began during his service there; no source identifies a specific cause or links his condition to interior tunnel operations. His death is included here because his fatal illness began while he was assigned to West Portal in the course of supporting tunnel operations. Watt was born in Newcastle, New Brunswick (reported as 1874 in one obituary and 1877 in the other), spent part of his youth in Boston, and came to Colorado in the early 1890s. He worked for more than thirty years in the mining industry—especially around Aspen and Marble—and held a respected position with the Yule Marble Company until operations ceased around 1925. He then joined the Moffat Tunnel Commission, where he served in a senior administrative capacity: one obituary identifies him as head of the Supply Department, while the other calls him the Commission’s cost accountant and private secretary to Chief Engineer George Lewis. Taken together, the descriptions point to a trusted managerial role within the project’s financial and logistical operations. He was active in several fraternal organizations, including Maroon Camp No. 14 of the Woodmen of the World, Aspen Lodge No. 224 of the B.P.O. Elks, and Hiram Lodge No. 98, A.F. & A.M., where he had been a past master. Survivors included his wife; four children—Kenneth of El Centro, California; Margaret of Paradox, Colorado; Dorothy; and Frederick of Denver—as well as his mother and sister in British Columbia. Contemporaries remembered him in strikingly personal terms: “a true and loyal friend; a loving husband and father; a splendid citizen; a home-builder.” In the idiom of 1920s Colorado obituary writing, such language signals not mere sentiment but a community’s recognition of character and civic standing—an additional reason his death drew detailed notices in multiple newspapers. Funeral services were held at Olinger Mortuary, and burial followed at Fairmount Cemetery.
• Watt's World War I Draft Card states that he was of medium height, slender build, with black hair and dark brown eyes.
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about Frederick Stanley Watt, please let us know.

#55  |  1928 Theodore Leo Smith

• Age: 25
• Townsite Association: death occurred outside of the Moffat Tunnel or associated townsite; original townsite association is unknown
• Occupation (role/trade): laborer
• Date of Death: Monday, April 9, 1928
• Mechanism (event): poisoning
• Medical Cause: gas inhalation
• Manner: suicide
• Burial: Crown Hill Cemetery, Wheat Ridge, Colorado | Block 18, Plot 326, Grave 8
• Headstone: Documented lot; exact grave position not discernible.
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Yes
• Find A Grave Memorial: 281264427
• Other Information: Newspaper accounts from Denver and Boulder on the day following his death agree on the central facts: Theodore Leo Smith, twenty-five, a former University of Colorado student and member of Phi Kappa Psi, died by suicide at his family’s home at 551 Colorado Boulevard after inhaling illuminating gas. Police Surgeon Sickafoose attributed his despondency to ill health, and relatives told investigators that the decline began after an unspecified injury sustained while working at the Moffat Tunnel two years earlier. None of the articles identify the nature of that injury, the circumstances in which it occurred, or whether it directly impaired him at the time. The only verifiable point is that family members themselves linked his chronic condition to that earlier event. The timeline presented in the press is consistent across sources: Smith had recently taken a job with the Public Service Company and had worked there for two months. On the morning of his death he reported to work but became too ill to remain and was sent home. After returning, he went to bed to rest; his mother then went downtown to seek a physician’s guidance. The evidence suggests he waited until she had left before opening the gas jets. His father discovered his body roughly an hour after death. What matters for the historical record is the precision of the causal chain. The clippings do not document what happened inside—or near—the Moffat Tunnel, and they do not identify a diagnosable medical condition. They merely report that his long illness followed an injury incurred while working there, and that his relatives believed this lingering decline contributed to his state of mind in 1928. Because the accounts are second-hand and framed through family belief rather than medical diagnosis, they highlight a limitation in reconstructing past workplace injuries: when records of the underlying incident do not survive, historians must treat claims of causation probabilistically rather than conclusively. Even with that constraint, Smith’s case bears significance for the broader centennial study. It demonstrates that the tunnel’s human toll extended beyond the well-documented construction-phase fatalities. Some workers carried injuries—and their consequences—long after leaving the project, and at least in this instance, a family perceived that protracted aftermath as contributing to the loss of a young man who had never fully recovered.
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about Theodore Leo Smith, please let us know.

CONSTRUCTION YEAR SUBTOTALS

Construction-era record

The Human Toll, Year by Year

This provisional timeline summarizes the construction-era deaths currently documented in connection with the Moffat Tunnel project. The record will be updated as additional evidence emerges.

55 currently documented construction-era deaths

34 associated with West Portal

15 associated with East Portal

6 listed as unknown or not applicable

1923

1 life

1924

10 lives

1925

11 lives

1926

20 lives

1927

10 lives

1928

3 lives

Cumulative toll across the construction years

1 by 1923

11 by 1924

22 by 1925

42 by 1926

52 by 1927

55 by 1928

The annual totals show when documented deaths occurred; the cumulative line shows how the known toll mounted across the construction era.

Month-by-month pattern by year

This matrix preserves the construction chronology by separating each month within each year.

Year	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec	Total
1923											1		1
1924		1		2	1				2	1	1	2	10
1925	1	1	1	1	1	1	1	1	2			1	11
1926	4	2	1			1	7			1	2	2	20
1927		1		2	1		2		2	2			10
1928		1	1	1									3
Total	5	6	3	6	3	2	10	1	6	4	4	5	55

Darker-to-lighter gold cells indicate increasing month-year concentrations. Hatched gray cells indicate months outside the active construction-period record.

Research note: These figures are provisional and reflect the current Preserve Rollins Pass memorial record.

This comprehensive memorial is the result of original, ongoing research. Each name added to this list has been carefully vetted through primary sources and corroborated across multiple records. Because much of this information has never before been compiled or published in a single location, we ask that any reuse or citation of this work properly credit the researchers (B. Travis Wright and Kate Wright of Preserve Rollins Pass) and our project. Attribution ensures the integrity of the record and honors the effort that has gone into reconstructing these long-overlooked histories.

WHY THE MOFFAT TUNNEL NEEDS A CENOTAPH

Given that the final resting places of many who died during the construction of the Moffat Tunnel remain unknown, or are located in distant cemeteries far from the site, it is time to consider establishing a cenotaph to be unveiled during the tunnel’s 100th anniversary weekend in February 2028. This memorial would serve as a permanent and solemn acknowledgment of the laborers whose lives made the tunnel possible, regardless of where they are buried. Some were never given headstones. Others were misidentified, their names lost to clerical error or the passage of time. A cenotaph near the tunnel would offer families, historians, and the public a place to reflect, to mourn, and to remember. It would anchor their sacrifice to the very landscape they helped shape and ensure that their legacy is not forgotten.

BEYOND THE WORKERS: UNCOUNTED LOSSES AT THE MOFFAT TUNNEL CAMPS

Workers were not the only ones who died during the construction of the Moffat Tunnel—tragedy extended to their families as well. Life in the remote tunnel camps was unforgiving, and the toll included wives and children who lived alongside the laborers. As one example, The Steamboat Pilot reported on January 6, 1926: “Mrs. W.C. Dell died at West Portal on Christmas Day. Her husband is a driller in the Moffat Tunnel. She leaves a 4-year-old son.” While these deaths are not included in our construction-era research total, they bear mentioning nonetheless. Their losses, though quieter and less often recorded, are part of the broader human cost of this project and deserve remembrance.

A FOOTNOTE: THE TUNNEL THAT TOOK—AND GAVE

We also track unique stories where the existence of the Moffat Tunnel—prior to its official opening to rail traffic in 1928—may have repaid, in part, some of the lives it had taken. These instances, though rare, reflect moments where the partially completed tunnel was used in ways that offered life-saving utility or emergency access:

1927 Volna Slater Brown

• Age: 2 years, 6 months
• Townsite Association: West Portal
• Date of Birth: Tuesday, August 19, 1924
• Mechanism (event): While playing in her home in West Portal on Wednesday, February 23, 1927, the "little girl was seriously burned when clothing caught fire after her mother had thrown gasoline into a smoldering fire. Her body was a mass of burns before the fire could be extinguished."
• Medical Cause: burn trauma
• Burial: Fairview Cemetery, Colorado Springs, Colorado | Block 6ADD1 000600
• Headstone: Monument located and confirmed.
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Not yet
• Find A Grave Memorial: 208869819
• Other Information: "No medical aid being near at hand, it was necessary that the child be brought to Denver, but the road to Denver over Berthoud [P]ass was closed by snow and it was decided that the only way to save the life of the little girl was to carry her thru the tunnel to East Portal, where she could be put into an automobile and brought to Denver. Wrapped in soft clothes, Volna rode six miles thru the tunnel in one of the small electric muck cars and Thursday morning arrived in Denver in an automobile. She was taken to the Children’s hospital, where it was said she would live." Volna is credited as the first person to travel through the length of the Moffat Tunnel (pioneer bore). Of interesting note is this happened just days after President Coolidge connected both sides of the pioneer bore.
• Our research now strongly identifies “Volla” as Volna Valera Slater, daughter of Elmer Floyd Slater and Birdie Slater. Volna was born in Sterling, Colorado, on August 19, 1924, making her exactly two years old at the time of the accident. The contemporary identification of her mother as Mrs. E. F. Slater provides an especially strong link: Volna’s father was Elmer Floyd Slater. Taken together—the exceptionally uncommon first name, matching surname, precise age, parental initials, and documented Colorado family—the evidence strongly indicates that “Volla” was a newspaper error for “Volna.” Most importantly, Volna survived. She later married Vinton E. Brown Jr. on Wednesday, December 17, 1941, raised a family, and lived for many years in Colorado Springs. She died on Friday, March 16, 2018, at the age of 93—more than 91 years after the accident at West Portal. Her identification resolves what had previously been an unanswered question in this research. Rather than disappearing from the historical record after being rushed from the tunnel for emergency treatment, the little girl from West Portal survived into the twenty first century. The surviving evidence does not yet independently establish her father’s specific job with the Moffat Tunnel project, but the 1927 account clearly places Mrs. E. F. Slater and her daughter in their home at West Portal, directly connecting the family to the tunnel construction community.
• Contemporary misprints (as reported in newspapers and other sources): Volla Slater
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share, please let us know.

DEATHS AFTER THE 1923-1928 CONSTRUCTION PERIOD

Even after the completion of the Moffat Tunnel in 1928, the danger did not end. The tunnel and its surrounding infrastructure continued to claim lives in the years that followed—through accidents, maintenance incidents, and railway-related fatalities. These post-construction deaths are not included in our tally of lives lost during the tunnel’s building phase, but they are part of the tunnel’s extended legacy. From workers struck during improvement work to those involved in derailments or caught in mechanical failures, these later losses serve as a sobering reminder that the cost of such monumental infrastructure is not confined to its construction alone. The tunnel has long symbolized engineering triumph—but it also carries a quieter, enduring human toll.

Post-construction record

The Human Toll After Construction

These post-construction deaths are not included in the 55 documented construction-era deaths, but they remain part of the Moffat Tunnel’s extended human record, showing how the risks of the tunnel continued through water-bore work, improvement projects, and rail operations.

1932

1 life

1935

2 lives

1937

2 lives

Incident pattern

3 explosive or missed-charge incidents during water-bore or diversion-related work

2 rail-operation deaths from the 1937 helper-engine derailment

5 classified here as accidents in the current memorial record

Research note: These post-construction cases are presented separately from the 1923–1928 construction-era total to avoid inflating the original building-phase count while still preserving the tunnel’s broader record of loss.

Moffat Tunnel Deaths: In Memoriam—The Lives Lost After Building Colorado’s Historic Tunnel

#1  |  1932 Ralph Colin Poucher

• Age: 42
• Birth: Monday, March 31, 1890 in Michigan
• Project/Incident: moving large boulders within the Moffat Water Tunnel, preliminary construction for the Denver Trans-Mountain Fraser River Diversion Project
• Date of Death: Sunday, October 16, 1932
• Mechanism (event): high compression drill struck a stick of dynamite that was in the bore unexploded for ~six years from the original construction period
• Manner: accident
• Burial: Crown Hill Cemetery, Wheat Ridge, Colorado | Block 40, Plot 105, Grave 8
• Headstone: Monument located and confirmed.
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Yes
• Find A Grave Memorial: 170631643
• Other Information: Ralph Colin Poucher, 42, employed at West Portal and identified in contemporary reporting as a former Denver policeman, was killed instantly on October 16, 1932, in a dynamite explosion inside the Moffat Tunnel water-bore workings. Newspaper accounts consistently place the accident several miles within the bore and describe the decisive moment in plain terms: the air drill Poucher was operating struck a concealed, unexploded remnant of earlier blasting, detonating with catastrophic force and ending his life immediately. The Colorado Bureau of Mines’ 1932 report supplies the technical clarity—and the authoritative causation judgment—that the press could only approximate. The Bureau recorded that on October 16 Poucher “was drilling a down hole when he came in contact with a missed hole killing him instantly,” specifying that the missed hole was a lifter that had been present “since the tunnel was first driven.” The report classified the incident bluntly as an “Unavoidable accident.” That phrasing confirms the hazard was not a fresh act of mishandling, but a latent, embedded remnant from earlier driving—a missed shot sealed within hard rock that could persist undetected until intersected by later drilling. Poucher’s coworker, Edward Ledford, 23, was critically injured in the same blast. Press accounts reported that Ledford suffered severe injuries, was rendered unconscious, and was transported to St. Joseph’s Hospital in Denver, where early descriptions emphasized the seriousness of his condition. Multiple reports add a stark illustration of chance at work: at least three other men in close proximity escaped injury because a large boulder shielded them from the brunt of flying debris. In the confined geometry of the bore, where rock fragments could become lethal projectiles, that boulder marked the difference between survival and death. Investigators treated the event as accidental rather than negligent. Newspapers noted review by local authorities and a state mine inspector and reported that no negligence by tunnel authorities was found and that no inquest would be held—an assessment fully aligned with the Bureau of Mines’ later official classification. The combined record, therefore, preserves both the human immediacy of the tragedy and the institutional conclusion: Poucher died not because work was carelessly conducted that day, but because hidden remnants of blasting could remain in the rock for years, waiting for one drill line to intersect them. The incident was also framed within the broader accounting of risk that followed the tunnel’s construction. One report stated that Poucher’s death marked the first fatality or injury since March 1, 1928, when water-bore work began, and that it brought the total reported death toll associated with the Moffat Tunnel project to 33. His body was taken to Olinger Mortuary, funeral services were held at Olinger’s (16th and Boulder) at 3:30 p.m., and burial followed at Crown Hill Cemetery, moving the tragedy quickly from the depths of the bore to Denver’s civic and mortuary landscape. Newspapers identified Poucher’s widow as Addie—his second wife—and named his surviving children as Frank, 18, and Mrs. Evelyn Osborn of Denver, along with his mother, sister, and two brothers living in Boulder. Family reconstruction confirms that Poucher’s first wife, Ava A., died in Denver on July 7, 1928, at age 37, after seventeen years of marriage, and that he remarried in Denver on July 1, 1931, to Addie Ethel Hylton. The children—Evelyn (born August 1912) and Frank (born October 1914)—were therefore from the first marriage, and family recollection holds that after Poucher’s death Addie soon left Colorado for Florida, effectively abandoning the two children. Taken together, the documentary and family record preserves both halves of the story: a death officially recorded as an unavoidable industrial accident caused by a missed lifter hole dating to the tunnel’s earliest driving, and a household that—already reshaped by loss in 1928—was forced to absorb a second, final rupture in 1932.
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about Ralph Colin Poucher, please let us know.

#2  |  1935 Joseph Oscar McCloskey

• Age: 27
• Project/Incident: relining the Moffat Water Tunnel, construction for the Denver Trans-Mountain Fraser River Diversion Project
• Date of Death: Thursday, July 11, 1935
• Mechanism (event): injured when a jack hammer he was operating exploded a charge of powder which had not ignited during blasting operations a few minutes before. The explosion drove the handle of the heavy hammer into his abdomen
• Manner: accident
• Burial: Fairmount Cemetery, Denver, Colorado | Block 48, Lot 151, Section 1, no headstone/unmarked
• Headstone: Documented lot; exact grave position not discernible.
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Yes
• Find A Grave Memorial: 124697562
• Other Information: Joseph Oscar McCloskey enters the record through a cluster of closely aligned newspaper accounts that leave little doubt about the cause and sequence of events. McCloskey—age twenty-seven, and identified variously as a Fraser man and a former Golden/Denver resident—was employed by a construction firm working inside the Moffat Tunnel, specifically on relining the tunnel’s water bore (also described as the “pioneer bore”). Late Tuesday, July 9, while operating a jackhammer in the bore, his work intersected fatally with the hidden residue of prior blasting: the tool struck, or otherwise ignited, an unexploded charge that had failed to detonate only minutes earlier. The resulting explosion drove the handle of the heavy hammer through his abdomen, with at least one account adding severe cuts from flying rock—an injury mechanism consistent with both a confined-space blast and close proximity to the work face. The aftermath was equally consistent across accounts and underscores the physical remoteness of the incident. Three nearby workmen escaped injury and carried McCloskey roughly four miles through the tunnel to West Portal, where he received emergency treatment from Dr. G. D. Houschere, described as attached to the construction company. When it became apparent that his condition was critical, he was transferred by ambulance to Denver. Most reports place his death at St. Joseph’s Hospital on Thursday, July 11th. Family notices add important identifying detail that anchors McCloskey beyond the tunnel. He was born and reared in Denver, later living near Golden, and had moved to Fraser about four years before his death, with one report stating he had been working in the tunnel for five months. He was survived by his wife, Mrs. Mabel McCloskey, and a daughter, Geraldine, age six; another account names his father as Clarence McCloskey of Golden Hill, adjoining Golden, and notes four brothers and four sisters living in Colorado. Funeral services were handled by Olinger Mortuary, followed by interment at Fairmount Cemetery. A published “Card of Thanks,” signed by “C. O. McCloskey and Family,” reinforces both the suddenness of the loss and the role of the West Portal camp community, offering specific thanks to friends, neighbors, Coors’ Porcelain company, and “those boys from West Portal” who served as pallbearers—an understated but revealing glimpse of how quickly tunnel crews could shift from coworkers to caretakers when the mountain turned lethal.
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about Joseph Oscar McCloskey, please let us know.

#3  |  1935 Henry Daniel Greening

• Age: 35
• Project/Incident: relining the Moffat Water Tunnel, construction for the Denver Trans-Mountain Fraser River Diversion Project
• Date of Death: Tuesday, August 6, 1935
• Mechanism (event): on Monday, August 5th, an air drill exploded an old dynamite charge from construction efforts from a decade prior
• Manner: accident
• Burial: Crown Hill Cemetery, Wheat Ridge, Colorado | Block 14, Plot 231, Grave 7
• Headstone: Monument located and confirmed.
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Yes
• Find A Grave Memorial: 291555276
• Other Information: Early Monday morning in August 1935, three Denver men working deep inside the Moffat Tunnel pioneer bore near West Portal were severely injured when an air drill detonated an old charge of dynamite believed to have been left in the tunnel wall since the original bore work was completed nearly ten years earlier. The men—Henry Greening, 35, John J. Parko, 29, and Frank Stonich, 51—were employed on the Fraser River water diversion project and were reportedly engaged in relining the pioneer bore when the accident occurred roughly three miles from the West Portal base. Contemporary reporting treated the explosion as the second such mishap in recent weeks, noting that a similar accident on July 11 had killed James O. McClosky, a rock drill operator formerly of Denver. Greening, who was operating the drill at the time of the blast, was described as the most severely injured. Newspapers reported that he was struck in the face by hundreds of tiny particles of granite, with slivers driven into both eyes and his face; both legs were broken, and his right hand was badly mangled. Early accounts characterized his condition as critical and warned that he might lose his sight. Other workers placed the three men on a dump car and took them to the tunnel mouth, where a waiting automobile carried them to St. Anthony’s Hospital in Denver for emergency treatment. Despite medical care, Greening died Tuesday night at St. Anthony’s Hospital from the injuries sustained in the explosion. He was survived by his wife, Mrs. Maurice Greening, and two sons, Gene, 11, and Robert, 8. The papers’ emphasis on his wounds—particularly the granite fragments driven into his eyes and face—underscored how drilling work inside the bore could expose men not only to the force of explosives, but to the lethal secondary effects of flying rock. Parko and Stonich were reported to have survived, though both suffered serious injuries. A rock chip penetrated Parko’s right eye and was said to threaten loss of sight; he also suffered a severe injury to his right hip. Stonich’s right hand was broken, and he sustained back injuries; one account explained that he was working on the opposite side of a muck car from the others and did not receive the full force of the blast. In Stonich’s case, the reporting also noted a separate family tragedy: he was identified as the father of George Stonich, a 27-year-old railroad section worker whose mangled body was found July 19 near Eaton after he had been struck by a train.
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about Henry Daniel Greening, please let us know.

#4  |  1937 Martin Callahan

• Age: 56
• Birth: Saturday, September 18, 1880 in Minnesota
• Project/Incident: pushing a train over the apex from West Portal, (rail operations)
• Date of Death: Saturday, February 13, 1937
• Mechanism (event): crushed and scalded to death by a helper engine that derailed in the tunnel; first rail accident in the tunnel and "died instantly"
• Manner: accident
• Burial: Mount Olivet Catholic Cemetery, Wheat Ridge, Colorado | Section 13, Block 6, Lot 12, Grave 1
• Headstone: Monument located and confirmed.
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Yes
• Find A Grave Memorial: 183279597
• Other Information: Martin was an engineer on the second section of the first train to run on schedule through the tunnel on opening day in February 1928.
  • The Moffat Tunnel’s early operating years were not only a triumph of engineering—they were also a reminder that, inside a confined mountain bore, even a single mechanical failure could turn instantly catastrophic. One of the most sobering examples occurred when a Moffat helper engine derailed within the tunnel, killing engineer Martin Callahan and inflicting fatal injuries on fireman Charles Lee Root. Reports describe the locomotive leaving the rails and slamming into the tunnel’s hard wall, releasing scalding steam in an environment where there was nowhere to run, little room to maneuver, and no easy way for help to reach the scene. Callahan’s death was immediate and violent. He was described as crushed and scalded to death when the engine jumped the track inside the bore. Root, however, lived long enough to embody the tunnel’s stark reality: rescue depended on someone getting word out. Despite being severely scalded, Root forced himself through the darkness—variously described as a mile to a mile and a half—to reach West Portal and report the wreck. The act is difficult to overstate. Inside the tunnel, injury did not simply mean pain and trauma; it meant heat, steam, disorientation, and distance—conditions that made survival hinge on sheer endurance. Root was transported from West Portal to St. Luke’s Hospital in Denver, where he later died of his injuries. He was 47 years old, lived at 3328 Bryant Street, and was described as a native of Colorado, born in Wheat Ridge. He left behind his wife, Grace Root, and six children. Callahan, described as a Moffat Road engineer associated with Tabernash and formerly an Arvada resident, had been employed on the railroad since 1915—a seasoned man whose death underscored how experience could not fully insulate workers from the tunnel’s hazards. The incident also revealed something structural about the Moffat Tunnel’s role in Colorado life: a derailment inside the bore was not merely an industrial accident—it could disrupt the entire line. The wreck blocked tunnel traffic long enough to delay at least one scheduled train, illustrating how the tunnel functioned as both a marvel and a choke point. In that sense, the story of Callahan and Root belongs to the broader history of the tunnel itself: a modern transportation corridor built on courage, routine labor, and the ever-present risk that, in a place as unforgiving as a mountain tunnel, the margin for error was vanishingly thin.
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about Martin Callahan, please let us know.

#5  |  1937 Charles Lee Root

• Age: 47
• Birth: Thursday, October 3, 1889
• Project/Incident: pushing a train over the apex from West Portal, (rail operations)
• Date of Death: Tuesday, February 16, 1937
• Mechanism (event): severely scalded on Saturday, February 13 and died several days later; staggered through 1.5 miles to carry the news about the engineer (see above)
• Manner: accident
• Burial: Crown Hill Cemetery, Wheat Ridge, Colorado | Block 55, Plot 73, Grave C-3
• Headstone: Monument located and confirmed.
• Personally Visited by the Researchers: Yes
• Find A Grave Memorial: 291555011
• Other Information: The Moffat Tunnel’s early operating years were not only a triumph of engineering—they were also a reminder that, inside a confined mountain bore, even a single mechanical failure could turn instantly catastrophic. One of the most sobering examples occurred when a Moffat helper engine derailed within the tunnel, killing engineer Martin Callahan and inflicting fatal injuries on fireman Charles Lee Root. Reports describe the locomotive leaving the rails and slamming into the tunnel’s hard wall, releasing scalding steam in an environment where there was nowhere to run, little room to maneuver, and no easy way for help to reach the scene. Callahan’s death was immediate and violent. He was described as crushed and scalded to death when the engine jumped the track inside the bore. Root, however, lived long enough to embody the tunnel’s stark reality: rescue depended on someone getting word out. Despite being severely scalded, Root forced himself through the darkness—variously described as a mile to a mile and a half—to reach West Portal and report the wreck. The act is difficult to overstate. Inside the tunnel, injury did not simply mean pain and trauma; it meant heat, steam, disorientation, and distance—conditions that made survival hinge on sheer endurance. Root was transported from West Portal to St. Luke’s Hospital in Denver, where he later died of his injuries. He was 47 years old, lived at 3328 Bryant Street, and was described as a native of Colorado, born in Wheat Ridge. He left behind his wife, Grace Root, and six children. Callahan, described as a Moffat Road engineer associated with Tabernash and formerly an Arvada resident, had been employed on the railroad since 1915—a seasoned man whose death underscored how experience could not fully insulate workers from the tunnel’s hazards. The incident also revealed something structural about the Moffat Tunnel’s role in Colorado life: a derailment inside the bore was not merely an industrial accident—it could disrupt the entire line. The wreck blocked tunnel traffic long enough to delay at least one scheduled train, illustrating how the tunnel functioned as both a marvel and a choke point. In that sense, the story of Callahan and Root belongs to the broader history of the tunnel itself: a modern transportation corridor built on courage, routine labor, and the ever-present risk that, in a place as unforgiving as a mountain tunnel, the margin for error was vanishingly thin.
• Community or family contributions welcome: if you have information to share about Charles Lee Root, please let us know.

BRINGING THEM HOME

In the end, these men weren’t chasing fame or glory. They were building something that would outlast them, trusting that someone, someday, would remember the price that was paid. That’s what drives me—to name who they were and to find where they are laid to rest. If their names are lost, the mountain wins twice.

Each discovery, each name, is a promise that their work, their story, their courage, and their sacrifice will not fade. To me, these men are not figures in a ledger or faded ink on brittle paper—or even a line in this digital archive. In a sense, they’re my boys, and I have to bring them home—not to a cemetery, but to the recognition they were denied, and to remind us what their work still means and why it still matters a century later. Every fragment I uncover restores their place in the story of the tunnel and in the history they helped build.

They gave everything so that others could pass through that mountain in safety and speed. The least I can do is make sure their names are remembered for what they built and what it cost.

B. Travis Wright, MPS

Memorial ledger

Every Name in the Current Moffat Tunnel Mortality Record

This wall gathers the currently counted construction-era and post-construction deaths into one readable memorial index. The construction-era count remains distinct from the later post-construction record, preserving the methodology while allowing every documented name to be seen together.

60 currently counted names shown in this memorial index

55 construction-era deaths, 1923–1928

5 post-construction deaths, 1932–1937

Provisional subject to refinement as additional records are verified

Construction-era deaths, 1923–1928

1923 1 life

1. 1Carroll M. BurchNov. 10, 1923 · Off-siteExposure/respiratory

1924 10 lives

2. 2Jonas Wilson Pumphrey, Jr.Feb. 25, 1924 · East PortalExposure/respiratory
3. 3Lee Rae ThurberApr. 22, 1924 · West PortalMedical/community
4. 4Juan ValquezLate Apr. 1924 · Tunnel power lineElectrocution
5. 5Rade (Mike) LekichMay 22, 1924 · East PortalTransportation
6. 6D. H. DavisNLT Sep. 13, 1924 · West PortalUnknown
7. 7Victor William BonhamNLT Sep. 21, 1924 · West PortalExposure/respiratory
8. 8Ivor WilliamsNLT Oct. 30, 1924 · East PortalUnknown
9. 9Ray Harman ColesNov. 13, 1924 · West PortalMedical/community
10. 10George SchaafDec. 9, 1924 · West PortalExposure/respiratory
11. 11Harvey Lee GilsonDec. 28, 1924 · East PortalFall of ground

1925 11 lives

12. 12Joseph GrusserJan. 22, 1925 · West PortalFall of ground
13. 13Warren Weaver WilsonFeb. 27, 1925 · West PortalFall of ground
14. 14Edgar Ellsworth AdamsMar. 2, 1925 · East PortalMachinery
15. 15James Guthrie KingApr. 28, 1925 · UnknownTrauma/infection
16. 16Orville Jayson MarkhamMay 14, 1925 · UnknownExposure/respiratory
17. 17Gage Maxwell BeegleJun. 5, 1925 · West PortalExplosion
18. 18Virgil Scott HoseyJul. 1, 1925 · East PortalUnknown
19. 19John Henry NichollsAug. 29, 1925 · West PortalExposure/respiratory
20. 20Elmer Alonzo SwettNLT Sep. 21, 1925 · West PortalUnknown
21. 21William Marion GimerSep. 27, 1925 · East PortalFall of ground
22. 22Fred SperandioDec. 20, 1925 · West PortalViolence

1926 20 lives

23. 23Peter GiacomelliJan. 2, 1926 · East PortalAsphyxiation
24. 24Dan MetroffJan. 2, 1926 · East PortalAsphyxiation
25. 25William Everette HibbertJan. 15, 1926 · West PortalMedical/community
26. 26Charles WiltonJan. 29, 1926 · West PortalUnknown
27. 27John Charles “Jack” DavisFeb. 10, 1926 · West PortalStruck-by/timbering
28. 28Forest Noble SnowFeb. 24, 1926 · East PortalAsphyxiation
29. 29Charles Cecil “Charley” DeckerMar. 19, 1926 · West PortalFall of ground
30. 30James Clinton PlatterJun. 22, 1926 · West PortalStruck-by equipment
31. 31Ralph McClellanJul. 22, 1926 · West PortalFall of ground
32. 32John AdamsJul. 30, 1926 · West PortalFall of ground
33. 33Henry Bennett FergusonJul. 30, 1926 · West PortalFall of ground
34. 34Park A. GasawayJul. 30, 1926 · West PortalFall of ground
35. 35William E. PiersonJul. 30, 1926 · West PortalFall of ground
36. 36John ParosekJul. 30, 1926 · West PortalFall of ground
37. 37Hartzel T. ThompsonJul. 30, 1926 · West PortalFall of ground
38. 38George ShoresOct. 14, 1926 · East PortalTransportation
39. 39George Dewey FortuneNov. 1, 1926 · West PortalFall of ground
40. 40Frank Bird PierceNov. 20, 1926 · West PortalTransportation
41. 41Harley SmithNLT Dec. 8, 1926 · West PortalUnknown
42. 42Charles Frederick BillingsDec. 13, 1926 · West PortalExposure/respiratory

1927 10 lives

43. 43King Francis WestonFeb. 16, 1927 · East PortalElectrocution
44. 44James Gerald EnglemanApr. 20, 1927 · West PortalExposure/respiratory
45. 45Frank DavisApr. 28, 1927 · East PortalExposure/respiratory
46. 46Clarence Elmer McKownMay 29, 1927 · East PortalOverexertion
47. 47Charles L. RiceJul. 14, 1927 · West PortalExplosion
48. 48Michael TomavskyNLT Jul. 31, 1927 · West PortalUnknown
49. 49Thomas T. WilliamsSep. 3, 1927 · West PortalStruck-by equipment
50. 50Frank M. MyersSep. 20, 1927 · East PortalFall
51. 51John J. HawleyOct. 12, 1927 · West PortalUnknown
52. 52Peter MedichOct. 18, 1927 · East PortalStruck-by timber

1928 3 lives

53. 53John ZuzulisFeb. 26, 1928 · West PortalUnknown
54. 54Frederick Stanley WattMar. 13, 1928 · West PortalExposure/respiratory
55. 55Theodore Leo SmithApr. 9, 1928 · Off-sitePoisoning/suicide

Post-construction deaths, 1932–1937

1932 1 life

1. P1Ralph Colin PoucherOct. 16, 1932 · Moffat Water TunnelPost-constructionMissed charge

1935 2 lives

1. P2Joseph Oscar McCloskeyJul. 11, 1935 · Moffat Water TunnelPost-constructionExplosive charge
2. P3Henry Daniel GreeningAug. 6, 1935 · Moffat Water TunnelPost-constructionOld charge

1937 2 lives

1. P4Martin CallahanFeb. 13, 1937 · Moffat TunnelPost-constructionRail derailment
2. P5Charles Lee RootFeb. 16, 1937 · Moffat TunnelPost-constructionScalding injuries

Research note: This memorial wall is an index, not a replacement for the full research entries. Construction-era and post-construction deaths are shown together for remembrance, but kept methodologically separate to avoid changing the 55-person construction-era count.

Reading the Historical Record

Fraternal Orders & Their Symbols

Fraternal organizations were a familiar part of American community life during the years the Moffat Tunnel was constructed. Membership could connect a person with fellowship, mutual aid, charitable work, insurance benefits, or traditions surrounding illness, death, burial, and remembrance. Lodge affiliations may therefore survive in obituaries, cemetery records, archival documents, membership material, and grave markers. Recognizing these clues can reveal another documented part of a worker’s life beyond his employment in the tunnel.

Independent Order of Odd Fellows

I.O.O.F. · Organized in North America in 1819

Odd Fellowship predates its American organization. The Independent Order of Odd Fellows was formally organized in North America at Baltimore in 1819. Its best-known emblem is the three-link chain, commonly bearing the letters F, L, and T for Friendship, Love, and Truth. Traditional Odd Fellowship also emphasized visiting the sick, relieving distress, burying the dead, and educating the orphan.

Cemetery & Record Clue Look for three connected links, particularly when marked F, L, and T. The emblem may appear on a grave marker, lodge record, membership item, obituary, pin, or memorial object. The complete three-link emblem is a strong indicator of an Odd Fellows association.

Odd Fellows history · Smithsonian three-link emblem

Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks

B.P.O.E. · Established in 1868

The Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks developed from a New York City social group known as the Jolly Corks. In 1868, the group became the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks. Historic Elks imagery commonly combines an elk, the initials B.P.O.E., and a clock associated with eleven o’clock, the traditional Hour of Recollection for absent members.

Cemetery & Record Clue Elks cemetery imagery may include an elk, the letters B.P.O.E., or a clock face set to eleven. Some lodges also established lodge-owned cemetery plots known as Elks Rests. The Elks History Project identifies Colorado examples associated with lodges in Denver, Colorado Springs, Leadville, Cripple Creek, and Ouray.

Elks history · Elks Rests

Freemasons

Masonic Lodges · Square & Compasses

Freemasonry is organized through local lodges operating within larger Grand Lodge jurisdictions. Among its most recognizable symbols are the square and compasses, tools of the stonemason’s trade used symbolically within Freemasonry. The Grand Lodge of Colorado explains the square as a reminder of honest and fair dealing and the compasses as a symbol of moderation and restraint.

Cemetery & Record Clue The square and compasses are frequently encountered on Masonic grave markers. American examples may also include a prominent G. The emblem can provide a useful lead toward lodge affiliation, but by itself does not establish a particular office, degree, or level of participation.

Grand Lodge of Colorado

Woodmen of the World

W.O.W. · Founded in Omaha in 1890

Joseph Cullen Root founded the organization now known as WoodmenLife in Omaha in 1890. Life insurance protection was central to its original purpose, and the organization developed as a fraternal benefit society. During the Moffat Tunnel era, it was known as Woodmen of the World.

Cemetery & Record Clue Woodmen memorials may resemble a cut tree, stump, or stack of logs. More specific Woodmen imagery can include organizational lettering, axes, a splitting maul or hammer, a wedge, or the phrase Dum Tacet Clamat, commonly translated as “though silent, he speaks.” A tree-shaped monument alone is not conclusive because tree and stump forms were also used outside the organization.

WoodmenLife history · Cemetery identification guide

A note on interpretation: fraternal symbols are historical evidence, but they should not be asked to say more than the surviving record supports. An emblem, obituary reference, lodge record, membership card, cemetery section, or grave marker may establish or strongly suggest an affiliation without revealing how active a person was within the organization. Where possible, affiliations presented in this research are corroborated against additional documentary evidence.

Burial Locations

Where the Moffat Tunnel Men Were Laid to Rest

This map shades each state by the number of listed burial locations associated with the 60 names currently represented in the memorial. Colorado carries the largest share, while the remaining men were laid to rest across a wide geographic range extending from California to Ohio.

Map note: shaded states show burial-state distribution, not exact cemetery coordinates.

The primary purpose of our work is to inform the public.

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