Optimism, obituaries, settlers, and lawsuits marked September 1925, as the tunnel was cast as Colorado’s gateway to prosperity even while danger stalked the portals
Moffat Tunnel Construction Happenings from 100 Years Ago
In September of 1925, life at West Portal looked deceptively ordinary. The local papers carried advertisements for Harry Credille’s services as a notary public, directing readers to the Recreation Hall—a single building that was equal parts post office, barber shop, store, and social hub. On the surface, it was civic life at its most routine. But just outside its doors, the month’s events revealed how precarious, and how ambitious, this community really was.
Recruitment notices shouted for attention in the same columns that carried Credille’s ads. They didn’t read like simple help-wanted ads; they had the urgency of a call to arms: “The Moffat Tunnel commission right now needs a hundred men, machine men, timber men, and muckers. Good wages are being offered with splendid working conditions.” Machine men could count on $5.50 a day, plus a footage-based bonus that reached $133 at West Portal in July, and $159 at East Portal. The fine print mattered: preference went to taxpayers in the district, a reminder that the tunnel was not just a public works project, but a political promise made tangible. By September, eight hundred men wore the Commission’s badge—five hundred at West Portal, three hundred at East Portal—two crews grinding toward one another through the granite heart of the Divide.
That many men in one place meant constant reminders of risk. Early in the month, superintendent John Henry Nicholls, fifty-seven, died of pneumonia after serving since “last winter” and working until “two months ago.” Soon after, a scaler, reported as William Geimer, age thirty-two, was crushed instantly when a ton of rock fell in the main railroad bore. His task had been to follow the dynamiters, prying loose any fragments still clinging to the roof. Burial records quietly corrected the newspaper account: his name was William M. Giener, thirty-three, survived by his wife and three small children at East Portal. Those discrepancies—Geimer versus Giener, thirty-two versus thirty-three—show how easily the record could slip when tragedy outran accuracy, and why it has taken long, patient research, line by line and record by record, to restore each man’s name and return him to his rightful place in history.
While funerals were held, headlines in Denver painted a different picture. “The Future of Colorado As Seen Thru [sic] the Moffat Tunnel.” “N.W. Colorado Has Dairy Future.” “Future of Colorado is Rosy.” At the Chamber of Commerce, more than a hundred realtors cheered the tunnel as a gateway to prosperity. At a manufacturers’ convention, two hundred delegates from “practically every city in Colorado” predicted a fifty percent surge in exports and suggested the state might rival Wisconsin in dairying. The Routt County Sentinel focused on the local harvest: sheep, vegetables, potatoes—all poised to reach markets once freight rates dropped. To read the papers that September was to believe that the tunnel’s concrete lining would harden into an economic revolution.
The optimism found its theater at fairs across Colorado’s northwest. Booths bore the emblem “Northwestern Colorado, the Land of Opportunity,” complete with a miniature oil derrick spraying crude and thousands of tiny bottles handed out as souvenirs. On September 22, fifty women from the Colorado-Made Goods Club became the first all-female group to inspect the West Portal, a symbolic nod to the tunnel’s role in reshaping the state’s future. And colonization drives promised more than wages; they also promised land. Prospective settlers were offered round-trip tickets from Missouri River towns for one fare plus two dollars, to view farms advertised as the tunnel’s inheritance. “More settlers for the Moffat Tunnel territory!” the headlines declared, as if the bore itself were plowing the frontier.
Then came the stories of water, flowing as inevitably into the conversation as it would through the mountain. On September 28, the federal government filed suit against the Fraser Sources Irrigation and Power Company, accusing it of sitting idle on rights first granted in 1909. The goal was clear: clear the path for Denver to claim Fraser River water and send it through the pioneer bore to the eastern slope. Newspapers reminded readers of Colorado’s Constitution, Article XVI, Section 6: “The right to divert the unappropriated waters of any natural stream to beneficial uses shall never be denied.” What had begun as a railroad project was already being recast as a lifeline for a growing city.
Progress reports told a story of momentum, but geology refused to play along. By September, both the main heading and the water tunnel were said to be two-thirds complete, while the railroad bore stretched to thirty-six percent of its final length. Some speculated about finishing early. But the West Portal team continued to be in “treacherous rock,” alternating between firm stretches and talc streaks that collapsed into broken zones, requiring heavy timbering and grinding progress nearly to a halt. The newspapers carried boosterism; the miners carried timbers.
Even the tunnel’s memory was being engineered. It was announced that Edgar C. McMechen had begun work on the project’s official history, a tome meant to knit together David H. Moffat’s dream, the pioneers who first broke the high-country trails, and the crews whose sweat and lives were buying each forward foot.
And still, amid all the speeches and lawsuits and projections of prosperity, the place could feel like a frontier camp. One night, a masked bandit walked into the West Portal Recreation Hall, leveled his pistol, and ordered seventeen men to line up against the wall. Here is how The Steamboat Pilot told the story:
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HARRY CREDILLE FOILED ROBBER AT WEST PORTAL
According to reports appearing in the Denver papers, Harry Credille, manager of the recreation hall at West Portal for Hitchcock & Tinkler, is a quick thinking and quick acting boy. According to the story a solitary masked bandit walked into the crowded recreation hall at West Portal Wednesday night, lined 17 men against the wall at the point of a gun, searched them individually, and while he was engrossed in frisking his victims Harry Credille, manager of the department, scooped up the day’s cash, ducked thru [sic] a door leading to the commissary and saved several hundred dollars from the robber.
Credille, who also is justice of the peace at the camp, secreted the money on the outside of the building and hastened to summon officers to the scene, but before their arrival the lone stick-up had finished his work and disappeared. A cursory search of the camp Wednesday night failed to disclose any trace of him, and a rigid investigation was in progress Thursday.
The rude frame building which houses the recreation hall, post office, store and barber shop was the scene of wild excitement following the stickup, and the 17 near-victims armed themselves with all manner of weapons to go in search of the bandit. The usual crowd of tunnel workers was in the recreation room before the bandit entered. Men were gathered about the card tables of the big room, and the click of billiard balls was heard frequently from the area occupied by the pool and billiard tables. A straggler or two stood at the bar behind which was Credille. A pall of tobacco smoke enveloped the scene.
The outer door near the southwest corner of the room opened and a gust of fresh air sent the smoke eddying about the room. No one paid any attention, for the pool players were busily engaged in their games, and those at the card tables were occupied. “Stick ’em up!” came the terse command from the newcomer. Card players at the nearest table looked up in surprise, then, after some confusion, complied with the order.
“Line up against that wall with your backs to the room,” the intruder ordered, brandishing his gun to indicate the wall near the door. A hush fell as the men shuffled to the wall and stood with their hands high above their heads. Credille, standing near the cash register, dropped from sight behind the counter, unseen by the bandit. Then, with one eye on the door by which he entered, the stickup man started a systematic search of the recreation seekers, going thru [sic] the pockets of [each] as cooly as tho[ugh] he were doing some ordinary daily routine task.
Credille, finding the bandit’s back turned to him began stealthily to remove currency and silver from the cash register and the drawer beneath the counter. Then, silently, he eased his way from the recreation hall into the storeroom beyond the adjacent partition. His task of searching the men completed, the bandit backed away from them, still pointing his gun in their direction, and found to his dismay that the cash register was devoid of money!
“A hell of a fine crowd, this is!” he grumbled as he started toward the door by which he had entered. “Now all of you face to your right, and be sure you keep your hands up and high, too, because I’m in about the right humor after this to plug somebody.”
Then, as the seventeen men faced from him, he yanked open the door and disappeared into the night.
***
That tableau: billiard balls clicking, tobacco smoke hanging thick, and a notary’s cash drawer whisked away under a gunman’s nose, tells September 1925 more clearly than any headline ever could. The headlines promised a Colorado built on dairies and potatoes, booming exports, and the lifeblood of water carried through the mountains. But at the portals, life still meant funerals and pneumonia, men battling treacherous rock, and the occasional stick-up in a smoke-stained wooden hall. In the end, the month reads like the tunnel itself: one end promising daylight, the other still deep in shadow.
B. Travis Wright, MPS | Preserve Rollins Pass | September 29, 2025
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