Monte Cristo Is Hiring: 600 Miners and the Steepest Tramway in America
F. W. Wilmans returns from the boomtown with word that the mines need hundreds more men and a 6,000-foot tramway with a grade over 45 degrees.
The story, cleaned up
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F. W. Wilmans, president of the Wilmans Mining Company and vice president of the Monte Cristo Mining Company, has just returned from a trip to Monte Cristo, and says it is the finest trip he ever made. The air was beautifully clear, and he was more than ever struck with the beauty of the scenery. He said: "Work on the road could be done faster if they could get more men; there is employment for 600 more. Work is going on well at the mines. A profile of the tramway for the Wilmans Mining Company is being made, and it will soon be ordered. It will be about 6,000 feet long, and will have the steepest grade of any tramway in the United States, having a pitch of over forty-five degrees."
“There is employment for 600 more. Work is going on well at the mines.”
Monte Cristo was a railroad-promoted mining boomtown in the Cascades; today it is a ghost town and trailhead. The 1892 call for 600 more miners—and a tramway steeper than any in the United States—captures the extractive optimism that briefly made the town famous, and the boom-and-bust cycle that emptied it.
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