How archeologists might protect, record transcontinental railroad treasures after fires

Editor's note: This article is a part of a series reviewing Utah history for KSL.com's Historic section.

SALT LAKE CITY — As thunderstorms moved through Box Elder County’s western desert last week, lightning sparked a handful of fires that grew due to brush and invasive cheatgrass in the area. By the time the fires were extinguished, a few transcontinental railroad artifacts had been destroyed.

That’s not to say the remains of a grand achievement in U.S. history was completely wiped out. There are still many artifacts left behind out in the vast desert after the track was dismantled in the 1940s. But last week’s fires are a reminder that pieces of history are vulnerable and can disappear in a flash.

That’s exactly what happened to a pair of railroad trestles that were destroyed by the Matlin Fire last week. Both were constructed not long after the line was first completed in 1869 and had existed in the area for nearly 150 years.

"You think, that trestle was out there 80 years working as a trestle and 70 years sitting on the landscape, and it took a couple hours for it to be torched," Utah preservation officer Chris Merritt told KSL.com. "With a couple more hard rains, the charcoal will be washed away and you won’t really see what’s remaining of the trestle anymore."

Bureau of Land Management officials said they are working to stabilize a century-old wooden culvert that was also damaged by the fire so what's left of it can be preserved.

Now that the fire is out, state and federal archeologists are now looking at ways to better preserve the remaining pieces of history and catalog the land in case more fires break out near the historic railroad grade. The Bureau of Land Management oversees about 90 miles of what is now the Transcontinental Railroad Backcountry Byway found west of Golden Spike National Historic Park, where the merging of the East and West rails happened in 1869. The backcountry is also on the National Register of Historic Places.

Historians say there were about two dozen stations that existed along that stretch, and there are fragments left behind from railroad ghost towns like Matlin or Terrace every few miles. In all, there are 164 documented architectural features in the area and there are thousands upon thousands of acres of land where artifacts may remain from the historic railroad.

Archeologists started looking at the transcontinental railroad in the 1980s. BLM archaeologists Anan Raymond and Richard Fike published Rails East to Promontory: The Utah Stations during that time and revised their work in 1994.

Work to systematically document artifacts began in the past decade, Merritt said. He attributed the recent effort to the preparation of the Golden Spike's 150th anniversary, which happened last year.

Archeologists published a massive inventory of architectural features on the byway's land from the Utah-Nevada state line to the Golden Spike National Historic Park at Promontory Summit in 2018. But Matlin was one of the areas that archeologists hadn’t spent as much time documenting to this point, according to Merritt.

Experts point to cheatgrass as one of the problems that threaten other structures that remain, like a large railroad trestle that still stands between Watercress and Terrace. Cheatgrass is an invasive plant species that was introduced on North American land from contaminated grain seed, straw packing material and soils that were used as ballasts on Eurasian ships, according to Utah State University. Its introduction into the American West happened sometime between 1850 and 1900, which is about the same time railroads began connecting the U.S. from east to west.

Cheatgrass, along with sagebrush in the area, helped spread the Matlin Fire; in all, about 8,000 acres of land were scorched, including pieces of railroad history. Some areas where there were 4 or 5 feet of gravel in space weren’t touched.

"This was truly a grass fire. It’s not like we could remove trees and create defensible space," he said. "We’re really talking about cheatgrass and sagebrush and how do we create defensible space for these other wooden features out there?"

Utah BLM officials told KSL.com on Wednesday that they are developing a fuels reduction plan for vegetation that's in and around the byway. This could create a defensible space to lessen the impact of summer wildfires and also protect current historic structures from suffering a similar fate as the ones destroyed last week. That plan isn't expected to come anytime in the next few days but could be released sometime in the near future.

Merritt theorized that perhaps herbicide could be used around remaining structures to create similar space around the historical artifacts to prevent fires from spreading to them. Otherwise, he suggested another tactic might be to have volunteers go to the sites and pull the weeds surrounding the structures, either every year or every other year.

Firefighters can also wrap structures in a material that won’t catch fire but "we can’t do that 365 days a year," Merritt added. It wasn’t much of an option last week because winds fanned the flames so quickly that it expanded to 8,000 acres in a short period of time.

Meanwhile, there was one actual benefit from the recent fires. Cheatgrass and other vegetation is now gone, giving archeologists the ability to use classic techniques such as mapping and description to record areas that were burned. Archeologists might be able to use ground-penetrating radar to see if there are any subsurface structures remaining from the era.

Utah BLM officials added that there are a number of other projects planned for the area. This includes a plan to host a “Passport in Time” project for Terrace in late September, which will look further at ethnic relations inside the once-promising railroad town when it existed in the 1800s.

"It’s one of those things where we want to go every year and try to do more documentation, because every year we might run into another fire; we might run into another looting event or vandalism or who knows what," he said. "Knowing where these resources are is incredibly important. … We have a national treasure in Utah and it’s just sitting in Box Elder County."

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