The Frontierado Holiday falls on Friday, August 1st this year. As always, this holiday celebrates the myth of the Old West, not the grinding reality.
ROYAL GORGE RAILROAD WAR – To this day I’m astonished that comparatively few people are familiar with the 1878-1880 war between William Jackson Palmer’s Denver & Rio Grande Railroad and William B. Strong’s Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway. Fighting started near Trinidad, CO in February 1878. The initial goal was to lay the first railroad lines through Raton Pass on the border between Colorado and New Mexico.
The competition grew violent and involved famous gunfighters like Doc Holliday, Texas Ben Thompson (also called Texas Thompson), Bat Masterson, Mysterious Dave Mather, John Joshua Webb, David “Prairie Dog” Morrow and Dirty Dave Rudabaugh (he was called Arkansas Dave in Young Guns II because they had used Dirty Steve Stephens in the first movie and apparently didn’t want to have another “Dirty” nickname in the sequel).
That’s more name appeal than many Range Wars of the Old West had, so you’d think there’d be at least as many movies about this situation as there’ve been about the Earps and Doc Holliday vs the Clantons and McLaurys. It’s not like Westerns have ever cared about historical accuracy so they could easily spice up the slow periods of the war involving the outcome of assorted court cases.
At any rate, gangs from each side raided the other side, stealing or destroying equipment. The mercenary gunslingers used crude stone forts (DeRemer Forts) to fire from to try driving off the other side’s saboteurs or gunmen. Both sides even killed rival construction crews via rockslides. Continue reading
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