February 1926 was the month the Moffat Tunnel clawed its way deeper under the Divide; the mountain reminded everyone it wasn’t giving up the fight for free.
Moffat Tunnel Construction Happenings from 100 Years Ago
By February 1926, the Moffat Tunnel had advanced to a threshold moment that felt both triumphant and unfinished. The Commission’s progress report dated February 1 stated that the main headings of both the railroad tunnel and the parallel water tunnel were now roughly four-fifths driven under James Peak. Nearly 26,000 feet of heading had been excavated from the two portals combined, leaving about 6,500 feet before the mountain would finally give way and the headings meet. Yet this was progress measured in narrow terms. Enlargement of the railroad bore—shaping the heading into a full-size operational tunnel—lagged far behind. Just over 17,000 feet had been widened to final dimensions, slightly more than half the length of the bore. The project’s two ends told different stories: excessive water that had plagued the East Portal was finally under control, while firmer rock in the west allowed the work to proceed with less timbering at daily rates as high as twenty to twenty-five feet. Engineers sounded cautiously confident that holing through could occur later in the year. Still, everyone understood that “holing through” was only one milestone on a much longer road to completion.
Even as miners carved into the heart of the mountain, the West Portal continued to function as an established community rather than a temporary work camp. Newspaper accounts describe active fraternal life at the site, including Elks initiations held in a recreation hall large enough for ritual ceremonies and a banquet space capable of feeding nearly ninety people. The lodge itself counted at least forty-five members. Corporate leadership did not stand apart from this social world. George Lewis, identified as the tunnel’s general manager, presided as toastmaster, a detail that illustrates how fully management and community overlapped at West Portal. The gatherings stretched late into the night, with attendees not departing until after 2:40 a.m.—a small but telling marker of stability, continuity, and infrastructure rooted firmly in a place that outsiders might otherwise mistake for a remote construction front.
That social fabric was punctured on February 10, when John Charles “Jack” Davis died at the West Portal. Born in April 1880 in Osborne County, Kansas, Davis had taken supervisory work at the western end of the tunnel. Family testimony holds that he was inspecting timbering inside the bore when he was struck or injured. That scenario fits the known hazards of underground work, yet the contemporary record is nearly silent. No detailed news report has surfaced to confirm the mechanism of death. Instead, all that appears publicly is a sparse mortuary line, “Died—Davis, John Davis, at West Portal, Colo. Remains at Horan & Son funeral chapel. Funeral notice later.” For a project whose accidents had become part of a statewide conversation about cost, risk, and delay, that silence stands out. The historian must therefore treat each possible explanation as a hypothesis rather than a conclusion: the cause could have been medical rather than industrial; the contractor may have categorized the event as routine; or notice of the incident may survive only in lost or inaccessible newspapers. What we do know with reasonable confidence is that Horan & Son transported Davis to Denver before he was buried in the Elks Rest section of Sunnyside Cemetery in Victor, Colorado. Interment there strongly implies—though it does not conclusively prove—Elks affiliation, likely through the Victor lodge. Fraternal networks often handled death logistics internally, which may explain the absence of fuller obituary treatment in the press. His sinking grave marker, the thin archival footprint, and the weight of family memory together reveal how easily the life of a man working beneath the Continental Divide can drift toward the margins unless someone insists on preserving the fragments. (More on Davis and many other fatalities related to the Moffat Tunnel project can be viewed on our website.)
Two newspapers dated February 12 and 19 described major Elks events at the West Portal almost immediately after Davis’s burial in the Elks Rest section. Those reports record a large initiation and banquet, nearly ninety attendees, and the use of the local recreation hall for ceremonies. Whether the events were scheduled in advance or continued out of necessity, they unfolded only days after a death tied to the same workplace. The proximity is striking. Rather than pausing in the wake of loss, fraternal ritual continued openly, almost defiantly, at the logistical center of the project. Work, risk, grief, and social life had become tightly braided threads.
Another death in February 1926 tested the limits of institutional safety and later memory. Forest N. Snow was working inside the East Portal when a blast went off ahead of him. Both early reports and the Colorado Bureau of Mines investigation state that Snow and his partner, Tom Burke, returned toward the heading too soon and chose to walk back through the main bore rather than use the crosscut into the pioneer bore where fresh air was being forced. Snow collapsed after entering the gas-filled zone; Burke, though affected, survived and attempted rescue. The Bureau classified the incident as accidental asphyxiation caused by a violation of standing safety orders. In doing so, investigators wrote that the men had “deliberately” ignored the rule requiring use of the pioneer bore—language that, read in context, referred to a conscious decision to disregard instructions, not intent to die. That interpretation held at the time. Only in April 1928, well after the tunnel opened, did a lone retrospective account recast the event as suicide. That late claim collapses under scrutiny. Snow had a partner with him, the method offered no certainty of death, and the official investigation—conducted with immediate access to witnesses and tunnel rules—found no evidence of self-harm. Snow’s body went unclaimed at the morgue, and its final disposition remains unknown, but the historical record, when weighed by both proximity and evidentiary strength, resolves firmly back to accidental death.
Even in the midst of tragedy, the tunnel entered the national imagination. The film In the Heart of the Rockies included images of men working in and around the East Portal, placing the project within a larger visual story about the modern West. A radio broadcast that reflected on the construction effort used the line, “There were giants in those days,” signaling how the project was being mythologized even while the work remained incomplete.
That same narrative impulse soon reached print at a national scale. In June 1926, Sunset Magazine managing editor Edward A. Vandeventer published “Boring Through the Backbone of the American Continent,” a feature-length account of the tunnel as it neared completion. He framed the project as both an engineering feat and a geographic correction to the intractable reality of the Front Range, where for more than two hundred miles no river had cut a natural rail route through the Continental Divide. Vandeventer wrote that the tunnel would eliminate dozens of miles of four-percent grade over Rollins Pass. He understood Rollins Pass not as a fiasco, but as a costly proof-of-concept showing that winter made the mountain unconquerable from above, forcing the solution beneath it. His reporting was not abstract. Newspapers recorded his presence in Colorado, his time underground at the active headings, and his travel with resident engineer C. A. Betts. The tunnel in his account is not inevitable; it is precarious, still controversial, and financially strained. He emphasized that pairing the Moffat Tunnel with the proposed Dotsero cut-off would shorten the Denver–Salt Lake City line by 173 miles, possibly cutting six hours from schedules while recentering Denver on the national rail map. Even minor inconsistencies—such as variations in the spelling of his name in newspaper columns—hint at the urgency with which the story was being told. Two tunneling crews advanced toward each other through millions of tons of rock, with success to be measured, ultimately, not in miles gained, but inches missed.
February 1926 therefore exists at the intersection of progress reports, lived community, industrial hazard, and emerging myth. At West Portal, Elks ceremonies continued beneath winter sky and managerial oversight even as the men who worked below ground absorbed the risk. At East Portal, a split-second safety decision killed a worker and later invited distortion from a distance of years. And across the broader West, the tunnel increasingly appeared not merely as infrastructure but as a narrative—an audacious effort to correct geography itself. Contemporary rail reporting captured the practical benefit in stark terms. From Tabernash, three miles west of the tunnel, trains had previously needed fourteen to sixteen hours to reach Denver ninety miles away, requiring four locomotives to haul just twenty-two freight cars over the Divide. Once the tunnel opened, a single locomotive was expected to haul twenty-four cars from Tabernash to Denver in less than half that time. The promise was as concrete as it was transformative.
Taken together, the month reveals a paradox that defined the project at this stage. Under the mountain, the headings advanced methodically, supported by evolving safety systems that nevertheless failed at tragic moments. Outside the mountain, social bonds and fraternal ritual worked to stabilize a community living with constant risk. And beyond the mountain, the country began to imagine new maps made possible by a line bored straight through the Continental Divide. February 1926 was not yet a story of completion. It was the story of a gamble progressing toward resolution—its human cost increasingly visible, its technical achievement increasingly celebrated, and its ultimate meaning still being negotiated in real time.
Caption: This view shows the railroad bore at the East Portal of the Moffat Tunnel. The muck-train dumping track and pedestrian dock over accumulating icy water are visible, along with the chimney above the entrance, placed to vent fumes.
B. Travis Wright, MPS | Preserve Rollins Pass | February 4, 2026
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