The Sea Hunters Part 20

From his position on the tracks above Kiowa Creek, Jesse Dillup stood in mute horror as he watched the big headlight of Engine #51 plunge beneath the water, still glowing for a few seconds until the front lens was smashed and the swirling water extinguished it.

Seven of the flatcars and the caboose remained on the tracks as a grim reminder of the tragedy. Dillup sagged to a sitting position, rain spattering in his face, in shock and unable to stand.

Abner Capp came running up. He stopped beside Dillup and gazed through unbelieving eyes at the black swirling water and the wreckage.

An icy nausea coursed trough his body as he saw the great empty gap in the middle of the bridge. "Did you see anybody?" he asked Dillup.

The down-and-out traveler shook his head. "Not a soul. They must all be drowned."

"The locomotive?"

"Went straight in with its headlight still shining."

"Whereabouts?"

Dillup pointed north of where the bridge once stood. "Almost to the center of the stream, over near that grove of cottonwoods."

Capp nodded solemnly, the shock of the disaster sinking into his soul. "I'm going back to the stationhouse and telegraph the company."

"What can I do?" asked Dillup.

"Nothing," Capp answered. "You best come home with me. The missus will put a good warm meal in your stomach and you can stay over until the storm lets up."

Together, the stunned men turned their backs on the disaster and walked slowly through the rainy night back to Kiowa Crossing.

After the sorry news was telegraphed by Capp to the Kansas Pacific offices in Denver, a train was dispatched with investigators and men to search for the bodies. The morning sun rose into a sky clear of rain clouds when the train braked to a stop just short of the washout.

Fifty men stood silent for several minutes as they surveyed the destruction.

Overnight, as if the flood had been an apparition, the murderous waters subsided until they were flowing calmly no more than four feet deep. The force of the flood surge was evident by the uprooted cottonwood trees half buried in the creekbed. Sand and mud had been deposited and formed at the high water mark like small levees. All that was left of the bridge spanwas one or two rails that protruded from the water. They had been twisted and corkscrewed by the weight of the locomotive as it spiraled into the rampage.

The thick wooden pilings and their trusses that once formed the bridge supports were nowhere to be seen. They had been washed far downstream, when the torrent was at its highest peak. Across the void, hanging between the remaining trusses, empty rails trailed east toward Kansas.

Seven of the cars that had fallen into the creek were still partially visible fifty feet north of the former bridge. Bits and pieces of their beds and trucks protruded from the mud and quicksand.

Engine #8, its tender, and the remaining eleven cars had completely disappeared.

After studying the situation for an hour, the Kansas Pacific superintendent, Colonel C. W. Fisher, put his hand on Capp's shoulder and pointed downstream. "Did you arrange for local help in hunting for the bodies of our men?"

Capp nodded. "Twelve ranch hands are ready to leave at your command."

"Tell them they can begin the search," Fisher said quietly. Then he turned to the locomotive engineer, who had driven the train from Denver. "Go with Mr. Capp to the stationhouse, and telegraph my office in Denver. Tell them I want a piledriver and a rail car mounted with a crane to set new pilings and lay rails. Add to that a bunk car to house and feed our crews. I want the necessary equipment p.r.o.nto to run a temporary spur across the creekbed and get traffic moving again.

This railroad is the lifeline to the West. It must be reopened quickly."

Working around the clock, Fisher's track crews had the temporary spur open for traffic less than fifty hours later. For weeks afterward, pa.s.sengers on the Kansas Pacific could view the wreckage of Train #8 as they pa.s.sed.

Frank Seldon's body was the first to be found.

Local ranchers Sam Williams and John Mitch.e.l.l were riding the west bank along the flood's high water mark when Williams pointed to a piece of debris sticking from a mound of sand.

"Looks like part of the locomotive's cab," he said.

Dropping from their saddles, the two men tied their horses to a fallen log and approached the mound. Mitch.e.l.l kicked away the damp sand around the mound with his boot. "A piece of the cab all right."

Then he nodded at an object a few feet away. "That looks like the remains of the smokestack."

Williams pulled away a pile of tree limbs embedded in the mound by the flood current. "I've got what looks like a hat," he said as he dug deeper.

Mitch.e.l.l joined him. "You might have something-" His voice abruptly died as his hand touched something soft and pliable. "Oh, G.o.d! I think we've got a body."

They were one and a half miles downstream from where Bridge 607.80 once crossed Kiowa Creek. Frank Seldon had traveled the shortest distance of the three.

Later that same day, a second group of ranchers found George Platt.

His big body was badly beaten by his death ride. He was recovered three miles downstream.

Six days after the wreck, Engineer John Bacon was finally located.

He had been carried seven miles below the shattered bridge. His body was stuck in the limbs of a cottonwood tree twelve feet high. The distance from the ground had kept the coyotes away, but the birds had visited and pecked. Bacon's face was unmercifully disfigured, and he would be buried in a closed casket.

In honor of the dead, a thirty-day period of mourning was declared by the Railroad Engineers' Union. Bacon and Seldon had been married to sisters with the maiden name of Bennett. The town of Kiowa Crossing was renamed Bennett in honor of the widowed sisters.

With the spur complete across the creekbed that was now almost dry, the railroad company decided it was time to locate the missing locomotive and salvage the cars. Recovery efforts were concentrated around the few cars that were still visible a short distance from the washed-out bridge. Cribbing was driven into the sand to prevent the soft walls from collapsing. Then salvage men began excavating. A small donkey steam engine was hooked to a pump that was kept runrung twenty-four hours a day to keep the expanding hole clear of seeping gound water.

The work was difficult. The load of sc.r.a.p rail iron carried on the cars had been wrapped around the wreckage like frozen spaghetti by the incredible force of the flood. Each rail had to be cut free before the cars could be lifted back onto the track for removal to a repair shop.

The Kansas Pacific official in charge of the salvage operation was N.

H. Nicholson. He was tall and a bit of a dandy. A thick, carefully waxed mustache graced a handsome face that was tanned a deep brown from a life spent outdoors. Sipping from a tin dipper of water, he brushed his mustache dry with the back of his hand.

"August first, and still no sign of the locomotive," he said to Johnnie Schaffer, a local ranch hand hired to a.s.sist the railroad.

"Maybe when that air pump comes we can burrow down and strike her,"

said Schaffer.

"It should be here Wednesday."

"We can sure use it." Schaffer nodded in a direction beyond Nicholson's shoulder. "Here comes Mollie with lunch."

Every man stopped what he was doing as a twelve-year-old girl approached. Katherine Mack, called Mollie by everyone in town, was followed closely by her pet deer as she walked the tracks east from Kiowa Crossing. Her arms were loaded with baskets and tin pails. Her mother had been contracted by Nicholson to feed the salvage crew their noontime meal. As Mollie stopped and set down her burden, her pet deer hung back a distance.

"That deer just doesn't seem to like us," Nicholson said to Mollie, smiling broadly.

"Maybe he's afraid we'll eat 'im," Schaffer joked.

"He only likes me," said Mollie, making a face at Schaffer. "My mother packed beefsteak, bread, potatoes, and cake today."

Nicholson motioned to Henry Nordloh, who was only a year older than Mollie.

Henry was big for his age, and his father had hired Henry and his brother Gusto work the donkey engine during their summer vacation.

Henry bashfully tipped his hat. "Afternoon, Mollie."

Mollie smiled a shy smile. "Mr. Nordloh." After pa.s.sing out the food to the men, Mollie saved the last basket for Henry and spread a napkin on a fallen tree trunk. As he began to eat, she sat alongside and stared at the huge hole, which looked like a moon crater.

"How's the progress today?"

"We'll have the last car out of the ground by the end of the week,"

answered Henry as he chewed a piece of beefsteak. "We dug up the coal tender, but we still can't find the engine. Mr. Nicholson is bringing in pumps to blow air down a pipe. He thinks that if he makes enough holes, one will hit the engine."

"You might have to help your father with the harvest before then."

"He said Gus and I can work to earn money until school starts," he said with boyish confidence.

Both children grew up, gew old, and swore to their dying day that Engine #51 was never located and dug up. They pa.s.sed on an account of their ties to the missing locomotive to their children. Yes, Henry and Mollie became childhood sweethearts and were married in 1885 and produced a family of six lovely girls and two fine boys.

The probable theory at the time was that the engine was swept miles downstream and buried in quicksand so deep it could never be found, much less recovered.

Newspaper Item in the Rocky Mountain News: May 22, 1880. Denver people all remember the accident on the Kansas Pacific two years ago last night in which Engineer John Bacon and Fireman Frank Seldon were killed. At that time the Kiowa Bridge was carried away by a flood, and when the train plunged into the torrent the engine was never seen again, although every effort has been made to find it. It is supposed to have sunk in the quicksand, as the tender was found ten feet below the bend in the creek.

Out of this disaster grew a suit for damages. The suit of Mrs.

Bacon was decided yesterday. The verdict: "We, the jury, find for the plaintiff and a.s.sess the damage at $5,000. John Best, foreman." A similar suit by Mrs. Seldon resulted in the same verdict. attorneys for the railroad, Usher and Teller, will fight these cases to the bitter end.

Over the next hundred years, newspapers and railroad journals still reported Engine #51 as missing. Haunting stories were told of a mysterious light resembling the one on a locomotive that crossed halfway over the new bridge at Kiowa Creek before suddenly blinking out. A few of the local ranchers swore they saw ghostly images of the crew wandering the creekbed.

If Engine #51 was never found, where was it?

One That Got Away May 1989 What does a train wreck on the flatlands of Colorado have to do with shipwrecks? Except for a comparable process combining research with on-site investigation, absolutely nothing. Let's just say I had a soft spot in my heart for old Engine #51. I owed her a debt of grat.i.tude.

In the May 21, 1978, Sunday Empire section of the Denver Post, Elizabeth Sagstetter wrote an article. The t.i.tle was "The Locomotive That Never Returned." It was the first time I learned of the tragedy.

At the time, I was intrigued, not so much with launching a search for the elusive engine but about working its disappearance into a concept for an adventure novel starring my hero, Dirk Pitt. Two years later, I wrote THE END on the final page of the ma.n.u.script and sent it to my literary agent, Peter Lampack. The story of a train that was thought to have gone off a bridge over the Hudson River but was later found sealed in an abandoned tunnel was published in 1981 under the t.i.tle Night Probe. Thanks to the lost locomotive of Kiowa Creek, Night Probe was one of my better plots.

My son, Dirk, and I made the sixty-mile drive from Denver to Kiowa Creek on a couple of occasions. We walked grids with the Schonstedt gradiometer under and around the modern steel-girder bridge (built in 1935) that spans the creek over the exact spot as the one that was washed away in 1878. Except for a few small contacts, we turned up no readings that remotely suggested a large iron ma.s.s under the ground.

I then put the mystery aside and went on to other projects. The story of the lost locomotive languished in my NUMA files for almost ten years before my fascination with its disappearance surfaced again, and I decided to give it another try. I was prodded by any number of friends and neighbors who thought I should look for a lost object in Colorado, especially since it was in my own backyard.

By 1988 Craig Dirgo had come aboard NUMA and was working out of a small office in Arvada, Colorado, fielding correspondence and arranging the logistics for our summer shipwreck expeditions. Craig, a fun guy who is built like a college football linebacker, also became caught up in the mystery and asked if he could pursue it. After having failed to locate the locomotive in my high-probability area, I was not optimistic. But having an antipathy to giving up a project without results, I gave Craig my blessing.

I thought it strange that during the 111 years since the old #51 had vanished in the creek, so few people had bothered to hunt for her.

One was Denver grocery-store owner Wolfe Londoner. Shortly after the salvage crew threw in the towel that summer, Londoner heavily charged a crowbar with electricity and turned it into a magnet. After tramping up and down the creekbed, he hit a hot spot that violently agitated the crowbar before it plunged into the sand, dragging Londoner with it, all to the delight and astonishment of several onlookers.

Londoner was pulled free, exhausted and soaked. He proclaimed that he had found the lost engine and demanded a reward. Colonel Fisher, representing the railroad's new owner, Jay Gould, turned him down cold-an unusual denial that much later fit the ultimate solution to the enigma.

The only other recorded search was by Professor R A. Rodgers of the geophysics department of the Colorado School of Mines. In May of 1953 he and several of his students conducted a systematic search with military-type mine detectors. An area 150 by 400 feet was explored with no results.

Craig contacted the director of the little museum in Strasburg, Colorado, only a few miles from Bennett and the Kiowa Creek bridge.

Emma Michel!, the director, turned out to be a real sweetheart of a lady, whose family had resided in the county for several generations.

A writer as well as a historian and museum curator, she had penned a book called Our Side of the Mountain, a fascinating narrative of the pioneers who settled Adams County. An incredible number of their descendants still lived in the area.

Emma mentioned she knew a brother and sister whose parents witnessed the events after the bridge washout and asked if we would like to interview them. We immediately agreed, and a meeting was set up.

The following day, Craig and I drove to Bennett and were introduced to the siblings.

Charles and Henrietta Nordloh were remarkable people. Chuck was ninety-two and Henrietta ninety-five, and they were as bright and sharp as someone half their age. Their mother was, of course, Mollie Mack, the girl with the pet deer, and their father was Henry Nordloh, the donkey-engine operator.

Chuck Nordloh displayed a devilish sense of humor. When Craig asked him if he had lived around Bennett his entire life, Nordloh winked and said, "Not yet."

When searching for something that is lost, it is always a good idea to spend time questioning the elderly who lived the events or were much closer to the actual time than we are. Most of them recall the past with amazing clarity. More than once a chance remark by an old-timer has put NUMA on the right track to a discovery. Charles and Henrietta could not provide any fresh revelations, but I can't remember a more pleasant conversation. They told the stories their mother and father had pa.s.sed on to them in vivid detail.

The Nordlohs' ranch was the closest to where the railroad crossed over Kiowa Creek, and they both distinctly recollected their parents saying that, although the crew searched the entire summer, no trace of the engine was found. At some point the cost of the salvage operation would exceed the value of the battered locomotive, so the Kansas Pacific logically ceased work. If they looked through the summer of 1878 with no luck, it stood to reason Engine #51 was still buried in the creek.

Driving back to Denver later in the afternoon, Craig looked pensive.

"A big iron ma.s.s like that should be detected by a good mag within one, maybe two hours."

"It's not near the bridge," I said. "Trust me, Dirk and I have already eliminated the easy part."

"Then it should be a piece of cake to find it further downstream."

"Cussler's search guide rule number twenty-two," I said. "If it was easy to find, someone would have got there first."

The next step in locating the engine was to organize a more extensive search. Craig threw himself into the logistics and groundwork. He met with residents of Bennett, who generously offered their community center so searchers would have a place to warm up and use the bathrooms. They also offered the use of their city backhoe if NUMA paid for the gas and any needed repairs.

By December, plans were finalized and the expedition began coming together. Over lunch one day, I asked Craig, "How many calls have you received from people offering their services?"

"Close to a hundred," Craig answered.

"There's no way that many are going to show up and tramp around frozen ground in the dead of January. We'll be lucky if we get ten."

"You're probably right," said Craig. "It'll be colder than a Popsicle in a Good Humor truck out there on the plains. Why did you pick January the twelfth anyway?"

"Fig Newtons."

He stared at me. "What do cookies have to do with anything?"

"Barbara brought home a sack an hour before I set a date."

66 So?"

"Didn't you know that excessive indulgence in Fig Newtons leads to hallucinations?"