< PREVIOUS ] [ 2002 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >
One problem with the past is that it's not a simple realm with valiant heroes and despicable villains. It's more complicated than that.
Usually this comes up at Columbus Day. It seems entirely possible to me that Christopher Columbus was both a great mariner and a vain, brutal and inept colonial administrator -- but so many people insist on seeing him as entirely one or the other.
Move into Colorado's history, and we have men like John
Chivington, a courageous abolitionist who saved Colorado's
gold for the Union with his brilliant attack on the
Confederate supply train at La Glorieta Pass in 1862. But
he also issued the brutal orders at Sand Creek in 1864,
commanding that even the Cheyenne and Arapahoe children be
killed because nits make lice.
This comes to mind now on account of David Halliday Moffat, Jr., namesake of the Moffat Tunnel and Moffat County. Moffat, who came to Denver from Omaha in 1860, was primarily a financier. He ran the First National Bank of Denver, and held major investments in mines and railroads.
A couple of weeks ago, I cited from what Durango historian Duane Smith had recently uncovered about some of Moffat's mining ventures -- Moffat and his colleague Jerome Chaffee had touted the stock to investors while they were dumping their own shares.
The column provoked a letter that appeared in Sunday's Post. It correctly pointed out that Moffat exhausted his fortune in an effort to give Denver a direct rail route west.
Even now, Moffat's motives aren't totally clear. My view is that he was a Denver man, and he feared that Pueblo might overtake Denver to the detriment of Moffat's bank and real-estate holdings in the capital. In 1900, Pueblo was the portal of the main line into the mountains through the Royal Gorge and it had an immense industrial complex of smelters and steel mills. It was the second-largest city in the state. It was an ethnic Democratic stronghold in what Denver bankers thought should be a WASP Republican state.
Whatever Moffat's motives, this is the centennial year. On July 18, 1902, he announced the Denver, Northwestern & Pacific Railway. As proposed, it would tunnel under the Continental Divide west of Denver, drop into Middle Park, then climb another divide for the Yampa River and a shorter route to Salt Lake City.
Construction commenced immediately. Moffat had a fortune of about $10 million. That enough money to dig the tunnel, but if he did that, the rails would stop in Middle Park, well short of the Yampa coal fields that would provide profitable traffic to finance westward extension.
The other option was to forego the expensive tunnel with a cheap line over 11,660-foot Rollins Pass, use the savings to reach the Yampa, and hope there would be enough revenue for big tunnel -- with its snow and steep grades, Rollins Pass was expensive to operate even if it was cheap to construct.
Moffat took the latter course. On account of the costs of operating over Rollins Pass, his railroad seldom showed profits, so it was difficult to attract other investors. Adding to that difficulty was the opposition of Edward H. Harriman, who controlled the Union Pacific and the Southern Pacific railroads, and did not want competition.
Much of the Moffat railroad's financing came from loans from the First National Bank of Denver -- he owned 72 percent of its stock. The bank would lend money to the railroad, and it got bonds in return.
By 1911, according Tom Noel and Steve Leonard's history
of Denver, From Mining Camp to Metropolis,
it was
obvious the railroad bonds were worthless and Bank
examiners ... were growing alarmed. To save his bank, his
railroad, and himself, Moffat again tried to raise money in
the East. He failed.
To this day, no one knows whether Moffat died of natural causes or by his own hand. He was found dead in a New York hotel room on March 18, 1911. To prevent a collapse of the First National that would have devastated Colorado's economy, other Denver financiers poured money into Moffat's bank to keep it solvent.
The tunnel under the Continental Divide, named for Moffat, was eventually built with public money and it opened to traffic in 1927. His old railroad, re-organized as the Denver & Salt Lake, extended only to Craig; in 1934 the Dotsero Cutoff connected it to the Denver & Rio Grande Western's line through Glenwood Canyon to points west, and the two railroads merged in 1947.
So Moffat's dream, a direct route west under local control, eventually came to fruition.
Was he a visionary with a great dream for Colorado and the city he cherished? Or a sharper who swindled investors until the day he died? Or some of both? Or does it even matter today, since the Moffat Tunnel is now part of the Union Pacific, Moffat's old enemy?
The past really is strange territory, and it's not a black-and-white realm. It's a murky and gray zone, where the heroes and villains are often the same people.
< PREVIOUS ] [ 2002 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >