Motorists roar down a highway at 70 mph never giving a thought to the time and effort that went into building that road. Roads are the pathways of civilization. In the modern era, asphalt and concrete bring the bounty of the planet to us on trucks. We, in turn, travel to destinations that took weeks or even months in just a few hours or, at most, a couple of days.
It wasn’t always this way.
The marvel of modern transportation began in Wyoming in 1866 when the Union Pacific Railroad rolled west from Nebraska into Pine Bluffs. In 1906, the Chicago Northwestern reached Lander from Casper, bringing the modern world to the Wind River County. A final railroad, the Chicago Burlington and Quincy connected Bonneville and points Northwest as far as Seattle with New Orleans.
All three of these railroads ran not only on steel rails but on gravel beds and millions of eight-and-a-half-foot-long ties.
The ties for the Chicago Burlington and Quincy came down Clear Creek near Sheridan.
The Union Pacific had contractors in the Snowy Range delivering ties from Encampment and Saratoga, along with others floated down the Green River.
In Fremont County, it was the Wyoming Tie and Timber Company operating between the Wind River drainages above Dubois and the Chicago Northwestern yard in Riverton. This is their story.
The Chicago Northwestern reached Riverton in August 1906 before terminating in Lander a few months later. In those years of early construction, ties were hauled from the east and as floods and damage demanded, repair ties came the same way.
The Bonneville National Forest was established in 1908 by President Theodore Roosevelt. It became a huge national reserve of heavily forested mountain slopes and foothills covering 2.5 million acres. In 1917, it was transferred to the Washakie National Forrest and today is known as the Shoshone National Forrest.
All that timber drew the interest of the Chicago Northwestern Railroad and enterprising businessmen who saw the opportunity to supply railroad ties, and telegraph poles while also meeting the new demand for telephone and power poles.
In early June 1913, the Wyoming Tie and Timber Company incorporated with William J. McLaughlin, August Herman, Thomas Reyant, Robert Coddington, and McLaughlin’s brother Leo.
McLaughlin outlined an ambitious plan of cutting timber, hewing it into ties, and floating them on tributaries of the Wind River from the Dunoir down the main channel of the Big Wind River to a treatment plant in Riverton where the raw lumber would be treated and turned into railroad ties.
The entire trip covered 160 miles, involved 90 to 140 seasonal workers, and took six weeks to three months to complete depending on the fickle Wyoming weather.
The plan required ties to be cut in the Wind River Mountains, the Wind River cleared of boulders and other obstructions and a plant to be constructed in Riverton.
Work on the Wind River was the first step.
Wild western rivers are seasonal creatures. Levels drop to a trickle in late summer and stay that way until the spring thaw the following May or June. When the runoff occurs, untamed Wyoming rivers are infamous for excessive violent flooding. Without dams, levees, or other manmade structures to control the ebb and flow of mountain runoff, it was up to timing and creativity to get hundreds of thousands of ties to float down to Riverton.
McLaughlin estimated the main channel of the river had to be 30 feet deep and devoid of obstacles. The depth was determined by the spring floods, the obstacles had to be cleared.
As soon as the water dropped to manageable levels in August 1913, three work gangs were sent to clear the river of boulders.
Teams of men and mules used ropes and chains to pull boulders up to two-and-a-half feet in diameter out of the river and onto the bank. These were arranged on the bank to work later with boom poles used to keep logs from drifting to shore and piling up.
The larger boulders were blown out of the water by dynamite. Residents of the upper country heard periodic booms beginning in the early fall and progressing until the river was declared open by April 1914.
Another crew of 20 men, in two heavily loaded wagons drove to Lava Creek and began building the base camp for the company. English may have been the language of the land, but the conversations were primarily Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish as Scandinavian immigrants answered advertisements in their native language newspapers for logging jobs in the High Country.
Arapaho and Shoshone was also spoken in the camps and on the tie drives with as many as a third of the workers coming from the Wind River Reservation.
The first logs cut were boom logs. McLaughlin ordered 6,000 of them, all seven inches in diameter and 10 to 12 feet long. These had a dual purpose. They were used to border the banks of the Wind River around bends, sandbars, and rock outcroppings to keep ties in the main channel and they were laid out like Lincoln Logs in square structures and then filled with rocks to create anchor points for the steel cables used to block the river with temporary dams just before the tie drives began.
In February, the tie hacks switched from boom logs and log company buildings and began carving the first ties.
A standard tie is 8 ½ feet long, nine inches wide, and seven inches high.
Trees were felled with axes, limbed, and skidded by draft horses or mules to central locations at the bottom of slopes. They were cut with either a one or two-man saw to the 8 ½ foot length then carved into ties with a broadaxe. A good tie hack could carve three or more ties out of one long log, then cut it to length.
First, the log was notched every few inches with a double-bladed axe. A broadaxe has a wide cutting face and either a straight, or more often, a curved handle. A few well-placed swings of the axe in the hands of a skilled tie hack shaved one face into a straight flat surface. The tie hack rolls the log over a half turn, cutting the next face. He then rolled the log a quarter turn and peeled the green bark off one side, then the other, leaving a pile of green bark and wood chips. Repeat that half a million times between a hundred or so men and you have ties ready to float down the Wind.
An average tie hack could carve out 25 ties a day, an exceptional axman could make 50. The going rate for a completed tie was 21 cents, with bridge ties paying 31 cents. The average hand could make about five dollars a day, an exceptional hand could double that. The value of five dollars in 1937 is equivalent to about $116 today. The tie hacks made about $13 per hour in today’s money.
Wind River Mountaineer – March 13, 1914 –
HAULING TIES
Contractor Leo McLaughlin started work last week with his teams hauling ties from the woods and banking them up along Big Wind River near the tie camp.
MORE MEN ARRIVING
About 45 tie-cutters are now steadily at work at the camp of the Wind River Timber company above Dubois. More men are arriving every few days.
TRANSFER TO BONNEVILLE FORREST
Myron W. Thompson, forest examiner, now in charge of government timber reconnaissance work near Deadwood, South Dakota, has been transferred to the Bonneville Forest and will be assigned to forest service work on the Wind River sale above Dubois.
TELEPHONE LINE IN OPERATION
The Lander-Dubois telephone line is now in operation and is a great convenience to residents on the head of Wind River. Lineman Curtis of the telephone company, and Ranger
Hough of the Bonneville forest last week finished the work of connecting and overhauling the line and installing the telephone station at Dubois. Long distance talks over the line can be successfully made from Dubois to Cheyenne.
By May, 35,000 ties had been stacked in the Dunoir area, with another 35,000 power poles and fence posts. They were inspected by Forester Thompson and stamped with a USFS seal. A boom dam was placed across several of the creeks, backing up water, and the ties were slid into the pool behind the heavy steel cable holding the “check dam” in place. McLaughlin watched as the runoff turned the crystal clear water into a swirling mass of chocolate then gave the order to drop the gates. The ties tumbled down the creeks, guided by men with long poles until they reached the main channel of the Wind River.
The first tie was spotted on August 29 at Riverton. Another boom caught the ties as they floated in on the slowly dropping current of the Big Wind River.
A crew of approximately 100 men pulled the ties out of the river, dragging or carrying them up the bank to stack near the Chicago Northwestern rails on the north bank close to the double iron bridge that led to Arapaho, Hudson, and Lander.
“This drive was more of an experiment than anything else as it removes all doubt of the complete success of the undertaking,” McLaughlin said in the Riverton Review.
By 1926, 4,000,000 ties were delivered to Riverton.
The first drives from 1914 to 1920 were all completed on the natural path of the Wind River. In 1921, that changed when Diversion Dam was completed as part of a major irrigation project that led to the creation of the Midvale, Riverton, and LeClair Irrigation Districts. Water was diverted by a long, low dam into the Pilot Butte Power plant with Pilot Butte Reservoir created below the plant as an upstream storage facility for the Midvale District.
Ties still flowed down the river, but men now had to guide them over the dam and back into the channel below.
1923 was a challenging year in Wyoming. Heavy thunderstorms brought unexpected deluges of rain across the western half of the state. One monstrous storm came down from the Owl Creek Mountains with such intensity that a flash flood it created swept a rival locomotive and cars off the Chicago Burlington and Quincy tracks near Bonneville into Badwater Creek.
That same storm and flood surge ripped the moorings loose from the boom at Riverton, sending 15,000 ties down river as far as Boysen Reservoir near Shoshoni. Workmen with buckboards and horses worked all summer rounding up stray ties on both sides of the river.
At Diversion Dam, the ties backed up since most of the water was diverted into the Wyoming Canal, leaving just a few inches flowing over the dam. Men lined the top of the spillway, lifting logs over to the river below.