Review by Ed Quillen
Local History – October 1996 – Colorado Central Magazine
The D&RG’s Calumet Branch and the Turret Mining Are
Trails among the Columbine: A Colorado High-Country Chronicle
by Dick Dixon
Published in 1996 by Sundance Publications
ISBN 091358262X
Little boys were toting guns, and there were public complaints that the laws against selling tobacco to minors were not being enforced. The local mining industry was moribund, railroad abandonment loomed after years of wretched local service, and the civic leaders were promoting scenery and tourism as a way to keep the place alive.
Such were the issues in Turret ninety years ago — things have sure changed since the “good old days,” haven’t they?
Salida author and teacher Dick Dixon resurrects these concerns, and much more, in 320 large pages of copious research and exquisite photography.
Turret sits about a dozen miles northeast of Salida in the Arkansas Hills. In the bigger sweep of things, Turret was typical of hundreds of camps that dotted the Rocky Mountains.
Its mines were promising, but seldom profitable. Turret hosted the usual frontier enterprises: hotels and saloons, a small cemetery, a smithy, a meat market, etc. Turret also boasted some suburbs; the largest went through three names — Klondike, South Turret, and finally, Minneapolis after some Twin Cities investors bought into the mines.
Dixon devotes considerable attention to community institutions. Turret was never incorporated, so there were no mayors or town boards. Social life revolved around the Yeomen, a fraternal order. There were schools; Pete Schlosser, who served on the school board, pretty much held the settlement together.
The town also boasted a newspaper, the Turret Gold Belt. Its editor and publisher, Alba Robertson, was a booster who seldom printed “bad news” about Turret. When things looked promising, the Gold Belt was full of mining news, but if a mine laid off a crew, failed to meet a payroll, or otherwise ran into trouble, folks had to look elsewhere for the information.
And why did the mines run into trouble? Despite a few pockets of high-grade stuff, their ore was generally low grade. If it could be transported economically to the mills and smelters, it might have paid.
But transportation wasn’t economical from Turret, even though a D&RG branch line passed within a mile or so of town.
The book starts there, with operations between Hecla, on the main line at the mouth of Brown’s Canyon, and Calumet, the site of a big iron mine that fed the blast furnaces in Pueblo.
Seven miles of narrow-gauge track were laid in 1881. The line passed through scenic but narrow Box Canyon. Curves were tight, but the grade was the worst part–5.61 miles of 7 percent, followed by 6 percent.
(A 7 percent grade means that for every 100 feet of track, there’s an elevation change of 7 feet. Marshall Pass was 4 percent grade, and the west side of Tennessee Pass, the steepest through line in current use, is 3 percent).
It was the steepest line on the D&RG system. Locomotives could push only a few cars upgrade, and slowly at that — Calumet was an 11-hour round trip from Salida. Downgrade, runaways were always a possibility, especially in that era before air brakes, and every loaded car had its own brakeman.
Surprisingly, there were few accidents. Even so, tall tales abounded: “They call it carrying hod out there when you hire out to run on the Calamut branch, for it’s about as near climbing a ladder as anything you ever saw… the hand brake didn’t seem to answer the twist. From then on, a streak of lightning couldn’t have caught on behind.”
The Calumet branch thrived while Colorado Coal & Iron (ancestor of CF&I) operated the immense Calumet Mine. But the mine closed in 1899 as production shifted to the Orient Mine east of Villa Grove.
The rails remained, although the line suffered considerable damage in a 1901 flash flood. Shortly thereafter, promising quantities of gold were found at Turret, and the Vivandiere Mine was producing gold ore that exceeded many producers in Cripple Creek.
Despite the pleas of Turret, the D&RG generally refused to operate trains up the Calumet Branch, which passed within a mile of Turret. Without this cheap bulk transportation, the mines’ mostly low-grade ore could not be shipped profitably, and the mines had to pay the high cost of wagon freight for their supplies and machinery.
Some remote mines got around this problem by erecting concentrating works, greatly reducing the bulk of what was shipped to smelters. But there wasn’t enough year-round water in Cat Gulch to make that work in Turret.
And so, deprived of transportation even though the railroad tracks lay so close, Turret faded and decayed, although it has never been entirely abandoned. The rails, or what was left of them, came out in 1923, fifteen years after the last train operated.
Throughout the book, Dixon argues that the railroad’s refusal to repair the line and serve eager customers in Turret led to the camp’s downfall.
His argument seems convincing, but I wish he’d connected it to the D&RG’s overall policies in those days. Turret was no exception; the D&RG’s pinch-penny directors almost always declined to extend service.
Denver capitalist David Moffat served as D&RG president in the 1890s. When the board refused to go along with his suggested improvements, he often built them himself — the Creede extension, the Florence & Cripple Creek — and, if possible, sold the line to the Rio Grande.
Moffat had also invested in surveys for a more direct route between Salida and Denver, across South Park and the Arkansas Hills, another act which irked the directors.
So he was pushed out. By 1903, when Turret could have benefited, Moffat had turned his attention to building a direct rail route west from Denver, and had no spare capital or energy for improving service to promising mineral zones.
Thus was Turret done in by corporate maneuverings in distant cities, and I wish Dixon had explored that angle more thoroughly. I also wished for an index, for more lore about nearby Whitehorn, and for more information about the stone quarries that operated in the area after Turret’s decline.
But no book can cover everything, and Dixon has done a solid, thorough, and fascinating job, telling the story of an obscure railroad branch line and of a mining camp that never amounted to much, but was still a place where people lived, died, hoped, despaired, and raised families — a mining camp that was also a community.
Such towns seldom draw much attention from historians. Thanks, Dick, for a fine piece of work, and for your persistence in unearthing all those wonderful photographs.
–Ed Quillen
