Jeremiah Pike

Jeremiah Pike was born December 7, 1848, in Clearfield County, Pennsylvania, and came west following the Civil War, in which he served three years in the 148th Pennsylvania Infantry. By 1872 he was working timber contracts in Colorado Territory, first in the San Juan foothills and then, after 1876, in the Culebra Range above Huerfano County, where the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad required a continuous supply of railroad ties for its expanding narrow gauge network over La Veta Pass.

Tie cutting was hard and isolated work. A crew of four or five men would be contracted to a designated section, given a quota in board feet, and left to work until the quota was met or the season ended. Pike worked these contracts for the better part of a decade, developing a reputation as a reliable cutter who produced consistent output and did not require the supervision that younger men sometimes needed. By 1882 he was working with a small crew of his own designation, including a man named Amos Stearns of Walsenburg, who would be the last person to see him alive.

Stearns gave his account to the Huerfano County inquest in September 1886. He and Pike had separated at approximately seven o'clock in the morning to work different sections of the designated cutting area — a standard arrangement when two experienced men were working adjacent sections. Stearns's section was approximately half a mile south. He worked through the morning without incident. At approximately half past ten he crossed into Pike's section to compare progress and found the area empty.

He found Pike two hundred yards north of the established cutting boundary, in a clearing where no trees had been felled and no work had been done. Pike was upright but collapsed against the rod — which stood vertically from the earth, entering his body below the sternum and exiting above the right shoulder. The rod was iron, roughly one inch in diameter, approximately six feet in length, driven into the ground to a depth the inquest estimated at two feet. The ground around the site showed no disturbance consistent with a struggle or a fall. There were no tracks approaching the rod. The soil around its base was undisturbed.

The Denver & Rio Grande survey crews for the La Veta Pass section had completed their work in 1877, nearly a decade before Pike's death. The Bureau of Land Management survey records held at the Colorado State Archives show no survey operations in Huerfano County north of La Veta Pass between 1882 and 1886. The only active surveying contractor in the region during that period — the Southwestern Land and Survey Company of Pueblo — denied all knowledge of the rod. Their inventory records for 1886, which the archive reviewed in 1941, show no iron rod of that diameter and length among their instruments.

The rod bore no manufacturer's mark. The inquest record describes it as "an implement of uncertain origin and unknown purpose." It was taken into the custody of the Huerfano County sheriff's office following the inquest. The sheriff's evidence records from this period were largely destroyed in the La Veta courthouse fire of October 1904. Whether the rod was among the materials lost in that fire, or was disposed of before 1904, is not known.

Huerfano County Coroner Thomas Babcock conducted the inquest in Walsenburg in late September 1886, three months after the death. The delay was attributed to the difficulty of assembling witnesses and the distance from Walsenburg to the site. The jury returned a finding of death by misadventure on September 24. No further investigation was ordered. Pike had no surviving family in Colorado. The D&RG contract office in Walsenburg processed his final pay voucher and closed his file.

Amos Stearns gave his testimony, collected his pay, and departed Walsenburg by early October. He does not appear in Huerfano County records after September 1886. The archive has been unable to locate him in any Colorado census or directory after that date. He was thirty-four years old at the time of the inquest. His prior residence in Walsenburg is confirmed by the 1880 census. What he did after he left is not in the record.

La Veta Pass had been contested railroad ground for most of the preceding decade. The Royal Gorge War of 1878 to 1880 — in which the D&RG and the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe fought by armed force for control of the canyon corridors — had involved hundreds of men, disputed claims, and violence that the courts were still adjudicating in 1886. Pike had worked in this country through all of it. He left no account of what he made of it.