CORSON COUNTY GREW UP WITH CHICAGO-MILWAUKEE RAILROAD

Corson county grew up beside the railroad tracks and the story of the Milwaukee and the development of the West River are one. The settlers came with the railroad, the towns boomed and declined when long runs and big trains were taken away.
Settlers of the early days recall the lonesome whistle of the freights crawling across the prairie in the still nights of winter, chugging up the grade to Hump Butte and picking up speed as they broke over the hump.
In almost every farm and home in the county there is evidence of the railroad-used ties for corner posts or building foundations, grain doors built into sheds. Railroad wages were a part of the life line of business in the small towns. Railroad coal kept many a family from freezing during the depressions. Young men went to the depots to catch the trains which took them to two wars and trains brought them back or the telegraph wires that ran by the tracks brought back the story of where they fell.
McIntosh was more of a railroad town than the others in the West River. It had a roundhouse, a turntable and a crew that brought $65,000 payroll to the community every month.
The Milwaukee was completed from the Missouri River to North Dakota in 1908 but a train ran from Glenham to Lemmon on October 6, 1907. The grade from Glenham to Butte, Mont. was contracted by the McIntosh brothers who let the work on sub-contracts. One of the McIntosh brothers gave his name to the county seat of Corson county.
It is hard to imagine, now, in the days of huge earth-moving machinery, how men, mules and horses built the grade across the country as rapidly as they did. How men carved cuts through the big hills and put long fills across the draws with horses and scrapers is hard to understand.
The man who built the first store in McIntosh and probably could be called the father of the city was Bill Chapin who came in as a contractor on the railroad, moving dirt with mules.
And in the beginning the Milwaukee land company, whose president was also president of the Milwaukee road, bought the land most of the towns stand on, divided it into parcels and had it sold.
The first passenger left Mobridge at 12:15 in the afternoon and arrived in Lemmon at 7:30 that evening. Enroute it stopped at settlements so long gone that even the names of some are no longer remembered. Leaving Mobridge the trains stopped first at Pontis, then Stratton, Wakpala, Jaffrey, Mahto, Cashmere, Cadillac, Inyan, Tatanka, McIntosh, Watauga, Morristown, Keldron and Thunder Hawk.
McIntosh until 1925 was a railroad town, a boom town where the pool halls never closed and cafes stayed open around the clock. In 1912 there was six stalls for engines in the yard and six being built. Three hundred houses stood south of the railroad track where railroad laborers lived. Every house in town with a spare room had a boarder.
When the First World War came three shifts went on in the yards. There was 12 stalls and a repair track where boxcars were put back in shape for the road.
Trains ran from Mobridge to McIntosh and McIntosh to Marmath, the engines being turned at McIntosh. Engines from the west were ran into the yards. They went over an ash pit where the water tanks were emptied, cleaned and refilled and machinists went over the engines. Fires were built again and the engines got up steam for the run back west. Train crews stayed at McIntosh and three call boys went out to wake the men when their time to go out came.
Even after the yards were abandoned trains stopped at McIntosh regularly for coal and water. The coal dock burned in 1917 when a lantern fell down into the pit and the second coal dock was torn down a couple of years ago.
In the thirties many people in the towns were forced to turn to the railroad for coal. They walked the tracks and picked up coal that fell from the trains. When night came a fleet of carts, wagons and trailers came out of the sheds and the nightly game of hide and seek with the railroad bulls began. Word went out when a carload of good lump coal was left in the yards. The espionage system that told when the railroad police were in town was almost perfect.
There was pride in the coal carts of those hard-up days. They were made from old coaster wagons, old buggies or old cars. Some of them had rubber tires. They were cobbled together but the bearings were kept greased and the person with the squeaking cart was a social outcast in the coal-hauling brigade.
The tedious business had its thrills and its laughs. One person got hoggish and backed his wagon under the chute where the coal was put into the engines. The spout pulled down easily but the wagon was lower than the engines and the trough would not go back up. Coal poured over the wagon and the midnight miner was forced to unhook his team and flee. Trains were held up the next day while the contents of the dock were removed from the track.
During the depression days the townspeople would go down to the depot in the early evening to watch the passenger trains pull in and go out. The shriek of the whistle at the east crossing would start kids running down the hill toward the track. Through the windows of the train they would watch people in the wonder world of good clothes eating in the dining cars or sitting by the window going from a different world somewhere to somewhere away from the heat and the dust and the grasshoppers and the meals of potato soup.
For a long time all the stock went out of the country by rail. In the fall the bawling cattle would come stringing into the towns. In the evening the sound of bellowing cattle and swearing men came across town from the stockyards as the cattle were loaded into cars. The trip of the year for the cattle owner was the fall trip with his cattle to St. Paul or Sioux City. Owners rode the cabooses and went to watch after the cattle, played poker, drank whiskey or tried to sleep in the rocking cars.
The railroads have changed now. High speed steel and diesel trains carry the big loads across the country without a stop.
Even the whistles have changed.

Note: This was taken from the Morristown World (June-1958)