The Silver Spike: Railroad and Stagecoach

For its first decades, everything that came into Chloride and everything valuable that left had to travel by wagon and stagecoach over rough desert tracks. That began to change in eighteen ninety-nine, when the Arizona and Utah Railway built a line toward Chloride from the Santa Fe main line near Kingman, dramatically cutting the cost of hauling ore out and supplies in. On the sixteenth of August, eighteen ninety-nine, the Arizona and Utah Railway was formally opened, and the honor of driving the last spike, a silver one fittingly, went to a young woman named Miss May Krider.

In nineteen ten the tracks were completed into Chloride itself. Stagecoaches still had their place, carrying passengers and mail on connecting routes into the early twentieth century. But the railroad was the lifeline that let the district's low grade ore turn a profit.

That lifeline did not last forever. As the mines slowed, the traffic dried up, and the Santa Fe abandoned the line around nineteen thirty-one. The rails were eventually pulled, but the grade they followed and the memory of that silver spike remain part of the story of how a remote mountain camp briefly joined the modern industrial world.