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By Pappy Clay - January 28th, 1969 This is the story of the wild horses and the wild parties of the Golden Spike Era of old Promontory Station. During the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries as the white man explored a new continent, he brought European horses to the New World to aid him in it's exploration and some of these horses inevitably got away and foraged for themselves and became smaller wilder generation after generation, living on wild prairie legume. On the hills of the Promontory Range, mixed with sagebrush, was much wild mountain brush-grass, which is a nutritious legume. Long before the days of the "wedding of the rails", small bands of such wild horses were already ranging on the Promontory peninsula even before the Mormon trek of 1847, so that some of these wild horses could sometimes be seen from the Central Pacific coach windows between the years 1869 and 1899 and between the station of Monument on the west and up over the Promontory divide then down to Blue Creek Water Tank on the east. Such wild horses are called Mustangs. There was, and is an occasional water hole in the hills to which the mustangs came daily, or nightly, to drink water and two such places near Promontory Station were Cedar Springs and Big-house spring. Therefore, Promontory Summit was considered by the families and associates of Central Pacific's Big Four (Huntington, Stanford, Hopkins, and Crocker) as a likely place for a wild and woolly hideout far from civilization's formalities of San Francisco and Sacramento where a man need not bother to in frock and tie and a lady could let her hair down if she wished to do so. Besides all this over the Promontory Divide the Central Pacific Railroad Corporation owned every odd section of land for 20 miles on either side of their main line and it was conceived by the Big Four that if these mustangs were so fat and sassy and hard to corral, then this should be a good country to run cattle on. So certain of the Big Four and their in-laws and associates obtained a franchise or purchased from the Central Pacific Railroad Company, thousands of acres of range land on the Promontory Peninsula and the flat lands adjacent thereto and they incorporated a subsidiary corporation called the "Promontory Land and Subsidiary Livestock Company" and, since then as now, ownership of livestock was proven by the way they were branded therefore this corporation became known as "The Bar-Em Outfit". Of course a company of these dimensions needed a fitting headquarters so (presumably with Central Pacific money) there was elaborately built what was locally known as "The Big Money House" located near the water hole springs of the same name which is located about a mile and a half east from the present Golden Spike Monument. More probably the spring was named after the house, be that as it may, close to the Big House and around there abouts were constructed spacious corrals including elaborate barns and stables and other buildings including a blacksmith shop and even an ice house. With the invigorating desert mountain air of the Pacific Coast Elite from around 1895. Many years later when the wild mustangs were seen no more and the two hard winters of 1888 and 1889 or thereabouts had decimated the thousands of Hereford cattle with which the Promontory Land and Livestock Company had grievously overstocked the range, then much of this land was sold to Browning Brothers of Ogden, Utah and a new corporation became known as the Browning Land and Livestock Company and it operated as such for a number of years until finally at the insistence of Mat Browning, all or most of the property was auctioned off to local ranchers and Denice Shoean and others (another story) since, as Mat Browning had substantially said in 1918, "Every time we try to diversify we lose money, but, as long as we stick to guns, we make money, so let us stick to guns from now on." (the above approximate quotation was repeated to this writer by John M. Browning in 1919.) Since some stories true or otherwise but true in this case, have unhappy endings, so it is with the legend of the Big House and it's wild parties. In the early spring of 1905, Charlie Woodward, Arthur Couch, Louis Padea and myself drove and led several horses from Bonneville Farm north of Hot Springs to the Bar-Em Ranch at the head of Blue Creek Valley and on the way we stopped at Kolmar section house which we found vacant, since in 1903 the Ogden-Lucin cut-off had been in operation and the old Central Pacific (now the Southern Pacific) line over Promontory Summit was only running a jerk train a week as far as Kelton so most of the section houses between Corinne and Kelton had been abandoned. We moved in for the night and stopped over for a day to shoot jackrabbits since most of the snow around Kolmar had melted and we some baled hay on our buckboard to feed the horses over night which we corralled in Kolmar stockyards. We delivered all the horses the next day as planned except the buckboard team and started home by way of the Big House and Promontory Station which was a different route since I was anxious to see the Big House once more. Great havoc had been wrought at the Big House. I imagined that this was done by the Dry Farmers of Hansel Valley and Blue Creek Valley who had completely wrecked the Big House and carried the lumber from it off for their own use. This location being about 600 feet higher than Kolmar so there was much snow on the ground, But we found shelter for the night in the rock basement of the Big House, having bed rolls along we were fairly comfortable, but the coyotes howled dismally all night. Now in 1969 the howl of the coyote is heard no more in these parts. The next morning we discovered a big old iron safe in another room of the basement, which had been blown open and many old papers from it scattered about the floor, and some of which dated back to 1888. This writer garnered a wealth of old revenue stamps from them. There were several old Central Pacific bills of Lading for carloads of ice which had been harvested from Sacramento River in the winter time then loaded in boxcars in sawdust and shipped up to Promontory Station during hot summer months and consigned to the overseer of the Big House. The loading and freight charges had been "killed" by an officer of the CP.. accounting department. This writer still has said bill of lading as a souvenir if he can find it. Yours Truly, 85 year old Pappy "Sage of the Sagebrush" Clay 1/28/1969. P.S. Soon after the Southern Pacific Company built the Ogden-Lucin cut-off in 1903 and abandoned their line over Promontory Summit as a main line, the Kolmar became the largest where shipping station in Utah. Modern farm machinery had made Blue Creek Valley and Hansel Valley and Pocatello Valley and the east slope of the Promontory Range into what at the time was called "The Bread Basket of Utah". Kolmar was then renamed Lampo and the wheat from all the above territory was shipped through elevators at Lampo. The photograph accompanying this story, the writer took of Lampo in 1924.
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