Your reporter Isabel Guzman did a very good job of describing the issues surrounding the City of Englewood’s project for piping the historic City Ditch through Littleton, and offering to deed the then-surplus flume at Slaughterhouse Gulch to the City of Littleton for future preservation or demolition. Although perhaps not of any significance to the current discussion, I want to correct one error in Ms. Guzman’s otherwise excellent story and ask your readers for help in getting to the bottom of a really big issue … “How was the ditch, 4 feet deep, 6 feet wide and 26 miles long, actually dug between December 1864 and May 1867?”
The oft-repeated quote in the story is that “the City Ditch was dug by hand.” The error was not in the reporting but the research by the original historian. A more diligent scholar would have found the following clipping from the Rocky Mountain News of Dec. 7, 1864:
“Something New — A mammoth four wheel outfit, partaking partly of the appearance of a fire engine, an artillery wagon, a mowing machine and a colossal steam plow came into town last evening. We found out its appropriate use, to wit, a machine to dig the Capitol Hydraulic Ditch, that is to be. This said machine has two mammoth hind wheels and two miniature front ones, with a lot of frame and iron mechanism between …
“Suffice it to say that it is J.W. Smith’s great Rotary Canal Builder, (or as they call it elsewhere, a Railroad Excavator,) with which the Capitol Ditch is soon to be made. It cost at the manufactory, in Quincy, Illinois, $1,200* and the freight on it here cost another $1,300* more. When worked by eight or ten yoke of cattle, it will do the work of a hundred men per day. Another of these machines will shortly be received here by Mr. Smith, who has the contract for building that ditch aforesaid.” *(That is equivalent to $24,400 and $26,400 in today’s dollars. Emphasis added. ed.)
That is pretty good contemporary evidence that the ditch was dug with mammoth machines. All that is lacking is a photograph of a machine actually in action to prove it. Photography was a lively art form in 1864, witness Matthew Brady’s recording of the Civil War. But search as I might, I can find no such historic photograph. That, dear reader, is where you come in. Perhaps you remember seeing a Facebook photo or have a cousin in Quincy, Ill., who might know someone. Please help find the missing photograph which will prove that it was a “state of the art machine” which dug a large ditch 26 miles long in only two and a half years, at the time the Civil War.
Larry Borger
Littleton
The writer is a Littleton amateur historian whose essay “The Historic City Ditch” can be found on the internet by searching for Denver Public Library, City Ditch.