RAILROADS

In 1872 The Northern Pacific Railroad Company organized a survey party to explore a shorter route from Montana to Washington, through central Idaho. The newspapers of the day extolled the virtues of this supposedly shorter route, because they wanted a railroad through the center of the state instead of near Lake Pend Oreille.

A page two story in Lewiston's The Idaho Signal newspaper said "Col. DeLacy's survey of Salmon River has demonstrated the fact, that the construction of a railroad down that river is not an impossibility, nor even a work impracticable. The character of the route is so much better than has heretofore been supposed, that even the most difficult portions of it may be considered trifling compared with our previous conceptions."

But those who wrote for the newspapers were hardly an unbiased source, since they desperately wanted a railroad near their town. To see how wide of the mark they were, read the official summary of the survey: "This survey down the Salmon river may I think be regarded as the most difficult instrumental survey ever made in the United States. . . And when this remarkable and hazardous survey was finished and connected at the common point near the mouth of Snake River, instead of being many miles shorter, as some had anticipated, it proved to be 12 miles longer. . .and vastly inferior in every element of a railroad with a much higher summit, heavier grades, more curvature, much greater cost, and running through a region so utterly forbidding as to afford no hope of any local business, with the name. In every reasonable sense it is an impracticable route."

No railroad ever cut through the Salmon River country.