Antoinette Gibbons
Starting with a little known Indian Battle on top of the Cumbres, and moving rapidly forward in history, the story of “The Little Train That Would Not Die” creates a tale of the West seldom told today. While some of it was lived out in the 1800s, the major portion of this book centers around the heroic efforts of ordinary men accomplishing the impossible through ordinary means in the 1960s and 1970s.
It is a story packed with action, adventure and passion that interweaves with the lives of General William J. Palmer, Bat Masterson, and singing star, Gene Autry. But most of all it is a passionate tale of the lives of men who dared to dream big and found success even when the deck was stacked against them. They were train buffs, steam fans, senators, family men. They were men who saw a piece of Americana slipping away and they were damned if they were going to let that happen.
Like my father said, “they were the most over enthusiastic, unbusiness-like fools that ever set foot in shoe leather”, but they got the job done and the Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Railroad is their living monument of hope to future generations.
This is their story, but it’s also mine. As a 9 year old girl, I rode on the Cumbres & Toltec when it first started out. By the time I was 14 years old, I was drummed into Engine 463’s “boiler maker corps” working along side my dad and three other guys, forever losing my heart to that little engine. I remember the blisters and aching muscles, the heart ache and joy. It is my hope that a piece of that has been capture on these pages and that this train will go to future generations forever being “The Little Train That Would Not Die”.
My writing career started when I joined the Longmont Writer’s Club in Longmont, Colorado in 1991. The encouragement of those wise men and women made me grow in my writing and within two years, I was given the honor of presidency.
In 1993 I was hired by the Berthoud Recorder to cover local events, human interest stories and high school games and completed over 60 articles. From there I became a field interviewer and manager with the University of Michigan’s Social Research Institution, where for seven years I talked with hundreds of people from every walk of life in America on just about every subject imaginable.
When I met Engine 463 again in June 1994, I found myself on a whole new journey of discovery, searching for both the triumphs and the tragedies that had surrounded the years of the C&TS, resulting in this book. With every dream there is a price to be paid. As my father paid his, I have paid mine. My father died three years after the first publishing of a portion of this story in a book called “The Story of the Cumbres and Toltec Scenic Railroad and Engine 463”.
The rewriting of the book has been a five year process: A process that has helped me to find the heart behind the stories, the dreams, the disappointments, the truth of life. Every story is a reminder that dreams are the passions that drive us and that dreams are worth living.
Today I live on a 100 acre ranch on the eastern plains of Colorado with my husband, three sons and a plethora of animals, already making plans for my next book.
The lone eagle soared above the treetops, circling on winds gusting off jagged mountains peaks. His muted flight was broken only by the piercing call as he welcomed the dawn over the Cumbres. From the shadows an owl hooted eerily like an ancient prophet of doom as the brilliant colors of the sunrise gave way to the clear blue of mountain skies. Without warning, the silence was shattered by war cries and rifle fire as four hundred Jicarilla Apaches and Moache Ute clashed with the U.S. Army’s Second Regiment of Missouri Mounted Volunteers led by Major Reynolds.
Having eluded the Army for days, the Jicarilla raiding party traveled down the east side of the Sangre de Cristos, through the Raton Mountains and west across the Rio Grande Valley back into their homeland of the southern San Juans. There, joined by the Moache Ute, they made their stand on top of the Cumbres in one of the first in a series of Indian wars that would plague the Southwest for decades to come.
A week of skirmishes ensued as the two worlds collided. For the Indians, it was a fight for survival: to keep the old ways and maintain their hunting grounds. For the white man, it was a battle for progress and conquest. The end came on July 23, 1848, as the Indians met their defeat despite the fact they outnumbered Major Reynolds’ army two to one. Thirty-six Indians and two soldiers lost their lives during that little known “1848 Battle of Cumbres
Pass”.
Twenty-two years later, with the Indian wars nearly ended and the Civil War a bitter memory, a new cry echoed across the country: “Go west, young man, go west”. Fueled by land offers, the glitter of gold and the promise of a new life, homesteaders, settlers and gold-seekers poured across the prairies of Kansas into the burgeoning Colorado territory. While many men struggled to gain their wealth from the mines and farmlands, one man set out to gain his fortune through rails and steam.
