The Personality of American Cities

by Edward Hungerford

That has worried her very much, is still a matter of grave concern to her business men. Their quarrels with the railroads have been many and varied. Denver realizes, although she rarely confesses it, that she has disadvantages of location. These same mountains that the tourist comes to love from the bottom of his heart, just as the Coloradians have loved them all these years, are a real wall hemming her in, barriers to the growth of their capital. When the Union Pacific—the first of all the transcontinental railroads—was built through to the coast it was forced, by the mountains, to carry its line far to the north—a bitter pill to the ambitious town that was just then beginning to come into its own. Denver sought reprisals by building the narrow-gauge Denver & Rio Grande, a most remarkable feat of railroad engineering; bending far to the south and then to the north and west through the narrow niches of the high mountains. But hardly had the Denver & Rio Grande assumed any real importance in a commercial fashion and the mistake of its first narrow-gauge tracks corrected, before it was joined at Pueblo by direct routes to the east and Denver was again isolated from through transcontinental traffic. She was then and still is reached by side-lines.

This was a source of constant aggravation to the man who was until his death two or three years ago, Denver's first citizen—David H. Moffat. Mr. Moffat's interest and pride in the town were surpassing. He had grown up with it—in the later years of his life he used to boast that he once had promoted its literature, for he had come to Denver when it was a mere struggling mining-camp as a peddler, selling to the miners who wanted to write home a piece of paper and a stamped envelope, for five cents.

Moffat saw that a number of important lines were making Denver their western terminal—particularly the Burlington and the Kansas stems of the Union Pacific and the Rock Island. He felt that he might pick up traffic from these roads and carry it straight over the mountains to Salt Lake City, a railroad center suffering the same disadvantages as Denver. He sent surveyors up into the deep canyons and the impasses of the Rockies. When they brought back the reports of their reconnoissances, practical railroad men laughed at Mr. Moffat.

The big bankers of the East also laughed at him when he came to them with the scheme, but the man was of the sort who is never daunted by ridicule. He had a sublime faith in his project, and when men told him that the summit of 10,000 feet above the sea level where he proposed to cross the divide was an impossibility, he would retort about the number of long miles he was going to save between the capital of Colorado and the capital of Utah and he would tell of the single Routt county stretch, a territory approximating the size of the state of Massachusetts and estimated to hold enough coal to feed the furnace fires of the United States for three hundred years. When he was refused money in New York and Chicago he would return to Denver and somehow manage to raise some there. The Moffat road was begun, despite the scoffers. Its promoter made repeated trips across the continent to secure money, and each time when he was home again he would raise the dollars in his own beloved Denver and move the terminal of his road west a few miles. He was at it until the day of his death and he lived long enough to see his railroad within short striking reach of the treasures of Routt county.

At his death it passed into the hands of a receiver, and Denver seemed to have awakened from its dream of being upon the trunk-line of a transcontinental railroad. But there were hands to take up the lines where Moffat had dropped them. Times might have been hard and loan money scarce around Colorado, but the men who were taking up what seemed to be the deathless project of Denver's own railroad were hardly daunted. Instead, they boldly revised Moffat's profile and prepared to cut two thousand feet off the backbone of the continent and shorten their line many miles by digging a tunnel six miles long and costing some four millions of dollars. Now a tunnel six miles long and costing $4,000,000 is quite an enterprise, even to a road which has boasted thirty-two of them in a single day's trip up to the divide; a particularly difficult enterprise to a road still in the shadows of bankruptcy. But the men who were directing the fortunes of the Denver & Salt Lake—as the Moffat road is now known—had a plan. Would not the city of Denver lend its credit to an enterprise so fraught with commercial possibilities for it? Would not the city of Denver arrange a bond issue for the digging of that tunnel—incidentally finding therein a good investment for its spare dollars?

Would Denver do that? Ask this man over there. He is well acquainted with the Paris of America.

"Of course it would," he answers. "If some one was to come along with a scheme to expend five million dollars in building a statue to Jupiter atop of Pikes Peak, he would find plenty of supporters and enthusiasm in Denver. The only scheme that does not succeed out there is the one that is practical."

The gentleman is sarcastic—and yet not very far from the truth. For last year when the bond issue for the railroad tunnel went to a vote it was carried—with enthusiasm. Thereafter Denver was upon the trunk-line railroad map. The mere facts that the nine miles of tunnel were yet to be bored and many additional miles of the most difficult railroad construction of the land builded to its portals were mere details. The thin air of the Mile-High city lifts its citizens well over details. And they are far too broad, far too generous to trouble with such minute things.

For in them dwells the real spirit of the West—by this time no mere gateway—and it is a rare spirit, indeed. The town, as we have already intimated, has a strong social tendency. She has sent her men and women, her sons and her daughters to the East and they have won for themselves on their own merits. The Atlantic seaboard has paid full tribute to the measure of her training—and why not? Her schools are as good as the best, her fine homes and her little homes together would be a credit to any town in the land, her big clubs would grace Fifth avenue. Her whole social organism from bottom to top is well fibered. It is charmingly exclusive in one way, warmly democratic in many others.

A girl tourist from Cleveland, a recent summer, essayed to make the ascent of the capitol dome between two connecting trains. She miscalculated distances during the hour and a half that was at her disposal and almost missed her outbound train. She surely would have missed it, if it had not been for the courtesy of a well-dressed Denver woman. The girl stood at the corner of Seventeenth street and Broadway, where a group of large hotels center, waiting for a trolley car to take her to the station. She could see its sightly tower a long way down Seventeenth street, but there were no cars in sight at that instant. She spoke to the woman, who was coming out of a drug store, and asked about the car service to the station. In the East she might have had a perfunctory answer, if she received an answer at all. The Denver woman began explaining, then she checked herself: