Some Gave All: Ft. Fred Steele, Carbon County Wyoming

Some Gave All: Ft. Fred Steele, Carbon County Wyoming:

In the past, I haven't tended to post fort entries here, but for net related technical reasons, I'm going to, even though these arguably belong on one of my other blogs.  I'll probably cross link this thread
in.

These are photographs of Ft. Fred Steele, a location that I've sometimes thought is the bleakest historical site in Wyoming.

One of the few remaining structures at Ft. Steele, the powder magazine.  It no doubt is still there as it is a stone structure.

The reason that the post was built, the Union Pacific, is still there.

Ft. Steele is what I'd regard as fitting into the Fourth Generation of Wyoming frontier forts, although I've never seen it described that way, or anyone other than me use that term.   By my way of defining them, the First Generation are those very early, pre Civil War, frontier post that very much predated the railroads, such as Ft. Laramie.  The Second Generation would be those established during the Civil War in an effort to protect the trail and telegraph system during that period during which the Regular Army was largely withdrawn from the Frontier and state units took over. The Third Generation would be those posts like Ft. Phil Kearney that were built immediately after the Civil War for the same purpose.  Contemporaneously with those were posts like Ft. Steele that were built to protect the Union Pacific Railroad.  As they were in rail contact with the rest of the United States they can't really be compared to posts like Ft. Phil Kearney, Ft. C. F. Smith or Ft. Caspar, as they were built for a different purpose and much less remote by their nature.

What the post was like, when it was active.

A number of well known Wyoming figures spent time at Ft. Saunders.

Ft. Sanders, after it was abandoned, remained a significant railhead and therefore the area became the center of a huge sheep industry. Quite a few markers at the post commemorate the ranching history of the area, rather than the military history.

One of the current denizens of the post.

Suttlers store, from a distance.

Union Pacific Bridge Tenders House at the post.

Current Union Pacific bridge.

Some structure from the post, but I don't know what it is.

The main part of the post's grounds.

Soldiers from this post are most famously associated with an action against the Utes in Utah, rather than an action in Wyoming.  This shows the high mobility of the Frontier Army as Utah is quite a distance away, although not so much by rail.

This
1914 vintage highway marker was on the old Lincoln Highway, which
apparently ran north of the tracks rather than considerably south of
them, like the current Interstate Highway does today.

About 88 people or so were buried at this post, however only 60 some graves were later relocated when the Army undertook to remove and consolidate frontier graves.  Logic would dictate, therefore, that some graves likely remain.

Unusual civilian headstone noting that this individual had served with a provisional Confederate unit at some point that had been raised in California.  I'm not aware of any such unit, although it must have existed.  The marker must be quite recent.

Ames Monument, Albany County Wyoming

This monument, Ames Monument, is one of the oddest in Wyoming.  It's so odd that I wasn't quite sure whether to post it here, reflecting the railroad nature of the theme of the monument, and the origin of its construction, or whether to place it on Some Gave All, our blog that's dedicated generally to monuments.  Or maybe even someplace else.

Ames Monument is a pyramid, yes a pyramid, in Albany County Wyoming that was built by the Union Pacific Railroad Company.   It's dedicated to Oakes and Oliver Ames, to figures associated with the construction of the Union Pacific Railroad, and not really in a terrible happy way.

Oakes Ames was a Congressman who was hugely influential in getting the transcontinental line constructed.  His brother Oliver became president of the Union Pacific Railroad.  That's fine, of course, but Oakes' efforts were associated with claims of fraud and Oakes was censured in Congress due to his actions in connection with the railroad's construction 

After Oakes died in 1873, and after the controversy had died down a bit, the Union Pacific independently took action to memorialize the brothers, who had been successful in getting the transcontinental line built where others had failed. So, this was built as a privately funded memorial near a high altitude town in sparsely populated Wyoming  between Cheyenne and Laramie.

The town has since passed away, with Buford Wyoming being the nearest town of any kind, and it's hardly a town, although a rural subdivision of sorts has somewhat sprung up generally in the area.  

And the Union Pacific moved its line several miles, so the railroad no longer runs by here.  Indeed, nothing really runs by here, and the Union Pacific itself donated the odd, and truly massive, monument to the State of Wyoming, which administered it as a rarely visited remote monument.

The scale of the monument is difficult to appreciate without seeing it.  It's huge.  Images of both brothers are on the monument, but as I didn't appreciate that at the time, I only photographed one of them.  The noses of both brothers have fallen off their images, or perhaps been shot off, giving perhaps one final insult to their memorial.

Wyoming's Interstate 80 is just a few miles away, but few turn off to visit this monument built in 1880.  Indeed, I've known of its existence for years and years, but just stopped off to see it for the first time myself the other day.

Some Gave All: Tie Hack Memorial, Shoshone National Forest, Wyoming

Some Gave All: Tie Hack Memorial, Shoshone National Forest, Wyoming

This memorial to tie hacks is located about twelve miles north of Dubois Wyoming along the state highway. The scenery nearby is quite spectacular. The memorial commemorates the men whose labor provided ties for the construction of the Chicago and Northwestern.

Union Station, Denver Colorado

Union Station as viewed from in front of Denver's Oxford Hotel.

 

This is Denver's Union Station.  This large railroad station was built in 1914 and was called Union Station as a predecessor station connected  the Union Pacific, the Denver & Rio Grande Western, the Denver, South Park & Pacific, and the Colorado Central.  This 1914 terminal connected the Atchison, Topeka, & Santa Fe, the Chicago, Burlington, & Quincy, the Chicago, Rock Island, & Pacific, the Colorado & Southern, the Union Pacific, and the Denver & Rio Grande Western.  The new 1914 station incorporated part of the previous 1881 depot.  Today the station serves Amtrak and Denver's local RTD area commuter rail.

Construction is ongoing at the terminal as RTD is expanding and a substantial hotel is being added to the terminal.

I recently was in downtown Denver and had the opportunity to take some additional photographs of the now rebuilt station.  It's pretty impressive.

 

Quite impressive and very well done.

Lex Anteinternet: What Are You Reading?

Over on our most active blog, Lex Anteinternet: What are you reading?:

What are you reading?

A new trailing thread, dedicated to what we're currently reading.

And. . . we hope. . . with participation from you.

What are you reading right  now? Add it down in the commentary section
__________________________________________________________________________________

June 21, 2016

Give Me Eighty Men

I'm presently reading Give Me Eighty Men by Shannon Smith. It's a history of the Fetterman Fight, and a history of the history of the Fetterman Fight. I'll review it when I'm done, but I'll note that the favorable mention of the book by the authors of The Heart of All That Is caused me to pick it up, even though I'd been inclined to previously avoid it.

So far, I'm enjoying it, and its certainly raising a lot questions in my mind about the Fetterman battle, although I'm reserving my judgment on various things so far.

Stop over and let us know what you're reading!

That thread:  What Are You Reading?

Fantasy worlds and rail transportation. . . limiting conveyance by rail.

Of our various blogs, this one has been, by far, the least likely to see a commentary post.  Indeed, this appears to be the very first one.  But as this one involves rail transportation, I'm going to post it here.

Readers of the blog where I typically post commentary, Lex Anteinternet, know that I've posted a lot of comments on the hard times in the petroleum and coal industries, particularly in Wyoming.  As part of those, I've categorically rejected the popular thesis in Wyoming that the Federal government is engaged in a "war" on the energy industry, or that there's some gigantic conspiracy to do the energy industries in.  In this post, however, I will comment on a type of "not in my backyard" effort that's really shortsighted, and which give credence to those who feel ignored and oppressed in this area.

Recently there was a big derailment in Mosier, Oregon. That occurrence has lead to an effort, centered in the Pacific Northwest but focused nationally, to ban the transportation of petroleum oil by rail.

Sometimes, things go wrong.  Derailed train, Minnesota, 1986.

That's just flat out absurd.

I guess its obvious that I'm a railroad fan, why else, after all, would a person have a blog dedicated to railroad features, so perhaps I'm partisan.  But campaigns of this type strike me as very ill informed in some ways. The concept seems to be that, because all of the cars are on a single train, a train purposes a unique danger that other  means of transportation do not.  That's simply not correct.  The other means are truck and pipeline.  The hundreds of trucks that replace a single train pose a danger as well, and arguably a much greater one as the risk would have be assessed for each single truck, not just one as if it were a train.  Pipelines are probably safer, although pipeline spills do occur, and the are basically permanent. Rail lines have other uses for other types of trains.

I suspect that much of this movement doesn't even directly relate to safety, but rather is part of an environmental movement on the Pacific Coast that has been pretty successful in shutting down the loading of coal by sea.  Given the current economics of coal, I'm not nearly as convinced, however, that this has been that detrimental to coal.  It's the low price and declining use that has been.  But I suspect there's a poorly thought out concept that if the shipping of oil by rail is stopped, people quit using it.

Not hardly.

This view, I'd note, is supported by some comments from a Pacific Coast environmental activists, who is quoted as saying in a newspaper as follows:

On the evening of June 6, more than a hundred climate activists met at the First Unitarian Church in downtown Portland to discuss their response to the oil train derailment in the Columbia River Gorge three days earlier, said 350PDX director Adriana Voss-Andreae. 

“The call for a temporary moratorium on oil trains is a call for a shred of decency for the Mosier community, but it does nothing to meet the magnitude of the problem,” she said. “If the government won’t stop the bomb trains, then we must do so ourselves. There will be a mass direct action in the coming two weeks. We encourage all to join.”

Climate activists claiming its a "bomb train"?  Well, I'm skeptical. Either they simply oppose the shipping of all fossil fuels by any means, or their activism is unfocused.

Well, whatever a person might think about climate change, pretending that preventing shipping by rail is going to have some impact on the use of fossil fuels is just fooling yourself.  And, ironically, trains are by far the most efficient, and hence the most "green", of any means of transportation we have.  Putting the same oil on the road in trucks is at least as dangerous and a lot dirtier.  And that's probably what would happen if the oil wasn't shipped by rail.

Started thinking about the new Denver RTD A Line. . . Accidental?