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Published: September 18th 2014
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VIRGINIA DALE MONUMENT
From Fort Collins get out on Hwy 287 and go northwest towards Laramie. Virginia Dale Station is just below the state line. The monument claims to be about .75 miles SE of the remnants of the station but I did not find it so the plaque will have to do. AUGUST 26, 2014 The Radisson breakfast was just okay. It wore off early and I had to get a 0.25 Pounder from McDonalds in Fort Collins after getting lost for an hour in Boulder. That McDonalds place for some reason was stupid busy. I went to Boulder to locate the grave of Tom Horn, that old bullshitter. He never was the same after catching yellow fever in Cuba as chief packer. I don’t know if Tom actually killed that 14 year old kid, Willie Nickell or not, but they hung him for it. His brother, Charlie, had the carcass shipped by train from Cheyenne to Boulder and Tom is buried there in a beautiful cemetery below the Flatirons. Motor vehicles apparently are not allowed in that old cemetery. There was plenty of road construction on Hwy 36 that caused me to miss some turns. Finally got out of there and made my way to the Virginia Dale Station on the Overland Trail, and then got lost again in Fort Collins. Mr. Smarty Pants behind the wheel thought he knew a short cut. Stopped for the evening at the Super 8 in Greely. I tried the Marriott Fairfield first but their
HORSESHOE CREEK STATION
Go up I-25 until you get to Glendo, WY go into town and get on Hwy 319 headed south. There is nothing left of the station but this sign. The Mormons first built it, then they burned it down, then the Central Overland rebuilt it and became the Sweetwater Division Headquarters for 5 years, during which time it was also a Pony Express Station. rates were way too high. They wanted $160. As I was leaving they promised me that every place was about the same. The Super 8 is right next door and I got in here for $99. Greely is experiencing an oil boom. There are a thousand frackers poisoning the earth around here and it has driven the hotel prices up. Sporadic rainfall throughout the day.
VIRGINIA DALE STATION The State of California was admitted to the union in 1850, but it wasn’t until 1857 that more or less rapid passenger and mail service linked the new state to the rest of the country. The mail contract and a huge postal subsidy was granted to John Butterfield who had established a stage coach line that wound from Memphis, Tennessee down through Arkansas and Texas and then across New Mexico and Arizona to California and up to San Francisco. It was a long cumbersome route but it was accessible year around. Even with the postal subsidy Butterfield went broke in 1859 and the pieces were picked up by Wells Fargo who ran the mail contract for about a year but could not keep an honest delivery schedule and
FORT LARAMIE
There is nothing much left of the hospital where Slade was cared for except for some foundations on the hill in back of those barracks.. Fort Laramie is an amazing place to visit. lost the subsidy in 1860. When the War Between the States fetched loose in 1861 the Apaches took control of the route and nobody could pass through safely. In 1856 Brigham Young, head clerk of the idiotic Mormon cult, decided that Salt Lake City also needed mail service and built a line of relay stations to the eastward along the Mormon Trail as far as Fort Laramie. By 1857 it was determined that the Mormons could not be induced to abide by decisions of the federal court and the army was sent out to Utah to perhaps persuade them to do so. Brigham thought of it as an invasion of his “sovereignty” and destroyed his mail stations. By the time the Mormons came to their senses, if they ever have, the army was in Utah and the mail was being delivered on stage coaches belonging to the Central Overland. Operators of the Central Overland hired as superintendent a man named Ben Ficklin. One of Ficklin’s early headaches came from the Julesburg Station. It was an important station because it happened to be situated at the point where the trail split off to Denver and the Pikes Peak gold fields. Jules
OLD JULES
Go south on Hwy 85 from Torrington, WY. The sign will be on the east side of the road before you get out in the country. The station where Old Jules died and got his ears cut off is half a mile to the west in the middle of a corn field. Beni had built a small community there from a trading post and was logically made the station agent, but he was scamp. “Old Jules” as he was known, stole company livestock and destroyed company hay to his own financial gain. His antics endangered the mail contract so Ficklin hired a steely-eyed, ruthless sonuvagun named Joseph A. Slade as agent on the Sweetwater Division extending from Julesburg to South Pass. “Jack” Slade, as he was known, cleaned up his division in impressively short order supposedly leaving numerous dead bodies in his wake. Old Jules was allowed to remain on his property but was firmly enough removed as station agent. The arrangement did not sit particularly well with Old Jules and it festered in his heart. Slade went on about the business of managing his division from his headquarters at Horseshoe Creek Station above Fort Laramie. The main order of business was preparing the line for the whirlwind Pony Express. A fast moving horse would give out in about 10 miles so two additional relays for the ponies had to be crowded in between each stage coach relay. Running his division and building the extra stations was a tall order but Slade got it done. Old Jules was the furthest thing from his mind, but in Old Jules’s hateful mind Slade was at the foremost. Just before the first mail riders galloped off Old Jules caught Slade unarmed outside the eating place in Julesburg and shot him down like a dog. The first run of the Pony Express out of Julesburg was a dash up to Fort Laramie for the post surgeon. Slade miraculously survived the shooting and returned to his duty a few months later with almost God-like status and Old Jules had to slink off like coyote to the protection of friends. Slade had his hands full and was just as busy as ever but was being pressured to attend to Old Jules. The Pony Express was an amusing experiment while it lasted, but it only lasted for a year before being replaced by the telegraph. Soon as it shut down in April of 1861 the company directors decided to reroute Slade’s division down towards Denver and then through the mountains to where the town of Laramie would later be built. Slade had to build a whole new set of stations but revenge against Old Jules always lurked in back of his mind. During the summer of 1861 Slade learned that his men had captured Old Jules and were holding him at Cold Spring Station. Old Jules had been shot resisting capture and by the time Slade came up Old Jules had bled out. There wasn’t much Slade do with a carcass so he cut the ears off of Old Jules’s head and made one of them into a watch fob. He completed the new stations and in 1862 moved to the new headquarters at Virginia Dale Station. The new station was named for Slade’s firebrand wife. The company finally went broke and was bought by Wells Fargo. By then Slade had developed a serious problem with alcohol and was not retained as division agent with the new company. He drifted up to Virginia City, MT and made such a drunken nuisance of himself that vigilantes finally hung him. The firebrand wife retrieved the body, gave the vigilantes a god hard cussing then had the mortal remains packed into lead-lined casket filled with cheap whisky and shipped by wagon to Salt City. Her plan was to send the body back home to Indiana for burial, but the whole thing stunk so bad the railroad refused to carry it. Joseph A. Slade is buried somewhere in that big cemetery near University of Utah. Upon completion of transcontinental rail service stage coach transportation across country was abandoned.
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