An 1876 Colorado ‘railroad war’ climaxed with the kidnapping of a federal judge

Closeup of a United States quarter coin showing "Colorado 1876"

On the morning of August 15, 1876, Judge Amherst Stone left Golden on a northbound Colorado Central Railroad train to Boulder, where he was expected to formalize a ruling that would put the financially troubled railroad into receivership.

He never arrived. Just north of Ralston Creek, near the site that would eventually be known as Rocky Flats, the train was stopped by a pile of railroad ties that had been placed on the track.

“Twenty-five armed men took Judge Stone from the train six miles this side of Ralston; took him to the mountains,” read a frantic telegram that arrived in Denver that afternoon, according to the following day’s Rocky Mountain News.

PROMO - 64J1 Transportation - Rail Line Train Track Railroad - iStock - den-belitsky — © iStock - den-belitsky

The “railroad wars” of the Wild West were largely fought in courtrooms and bank offices, but for a brief moment in the history of the newly proclaimed state of Colorado, they carried the threat of real violence.

The Colorado Central, which ran along the northern Front Range and up Clear Creek Canyon as far as Floyd Hill, was the pride of Jefferson and Boulder counties, controlled by a board of directors made up of local businessmen and elected officials. But the company had fallen behind on interest payments in the depression that followed the Panic of 1873.

The subsequent move by “Eastern capitalists,” including railroad tycoon Jay Gould, to “steal the road from the territory,” as the Boulder Banner put it, was bitterly resented by residents there. Years after the “Golden Gang” had lost out to the “Denver Ring” in the battle over which city would be Colorado’s capital and main railroad hub, the planned appointment of Denver’s David H. Moffat as the receiver of the insolvent Colorado Central confirmed the worst fears of its longtime investors.

“The idea of a receiver has all along been violently opposed by the county stockholders,” conceded the Golden Globe. “But had a receiver been appointed less identified than is Moffat with the Union Pacific, there would have been no such disgraceful scene as that which was witnessed the other day.”

Overhead view of a magnifying glass over the word "history." — © ogichobanov - iStock-1088402018

Nearly 60 years later, longtime Golden resident Carlos Lake would confess to being one of the masked men who’d boarded the train and abducted Stone. The scheme had been hatched by several prominent locals, including two county judges, to prevent the judge “from getting to Boulder on the last day of the term of court, when the appointment was to be made.”

“When I got to where the judge was, I put my hand on his shoulder. He never had seen me until he turned around; I had a big gun and I stuck that under his nose,” Lake would write. “I reached around and grabbed him by the arm and pulled him out of the seat and away we went and got down to the platform.”

The sheriffs of both Boulder and Jefferson counties ordered deputies to pursue Stone’s kidnappers, while several irregular companies of state militia marched from Denver on Governor John Routt’s orders. But Lake and his fellow abductors eluded capture, and held Stone overnight before letting him go the next day.

Denver newspapers, close allies of Moffat and the rest of the city’s business elite, howled with outrage over the incident: “MOB LAW — Colorado Central Banditti on the Rampage,” declared the Rocky Mountain News (which had, only weeks earlier, excused the extrajudicial executions of two murder suspects by a Cañon City lynch mob).

Stone’s kidnapping reignited old tensions between Denver, which was firmly in the hands of a Republican political machine, and its more Democratic-leaning neighbors. Boulder residents denounced the kidnapping but took exception to Routt’s arrival in town at the head of 60 militiamen, “who were stationed in our streets, as if the whole town were a lawless mob.”

In Golden, the weekly Globe, Colorado’s leading Democratic newspaper, at first estimated that “probably not one-tenth” of Jefferson County residents approved of the mob’s actions.

“This very act, had it occurred in one of the southern states, would have been denounced as a Ku Klux outrage,” wrote the Globe’s editors on August 19. “It is true that the people have had every provocation for feeling outraged and trampled upon by a corporation, which seeks to obtain sanction to its robbing schemes in the courts, but this is no reason why they should resort to brute force and violence against one of the judiciary.”

In a terse addendum later in the same column, however, the Globe was forced to admit that public opinion was much more in favor of the vigilantism than it had hoped.

“Since putting the above in type, public sentiment has changed,” the editors added. “Nearly every man we meet considers the abduction a proper and expedient measure. Some say that the mob should have strung the judge to the first tree. The most intense excitement prevails.”

The fight over ownership of the Colorado Central went on for several more years. Local investors, led by William A.H. Loveland, briefly regained control of the railroad in 1877, but after further bankruptcy proceedings its tracks were acquired by the Union Pacific in 1879. The railroad reached Georgetown the same year, and part of its right-of-way survives today as the Georgetown Loop tourist attraction.

Though a grand jury was convened to investigate Stone’s kidnapping, no one was ever charged. Lake made his confession at a 1935 Elitch Gardens picnic hosted by the Society of Colorado Pioneers, while serving as the group’s vice president — and with Governor Edwin “Big Ed” Johnson, Denver Mayor Ben Stapleton and other prominent state officials in attendance.

“From the way Governor Johnson and the others received the confession of Lake, it is safe to predict that no action will be taken at this time,” reported the Golden Transcript.