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Well, how could there be any coal mining in the West in 1869? There were no people in the West in 1869, save for 100,000 or so in California! But I think you're completely overlooking the fact that the first objective of every railroad in the West was a source of coal for its locomotives and to supply traffic to its on-line communities, if that was at all possible. UP built straight to Carbon as quickly as they could. D&RG built straight to the Canon City coal fields and stopped for some time. The D&RGW in Utah was built specifically to break the UP monopoly on coal transportation to the smelters, mines, and towns of the Salt Lake Valley. Santa Fe built to the Raton field long before it turned its attention toward the silver boom at Leadville, or any transcontinental aspirations. The EP&SW built all the way to Dawson, New Mexico, hundreds of miles away from its owner's copper smelters, specifically to obtain coal. And, you're overlooking that the preponderance of tonnage on the UP from the day it was completed at Promontory until the late 1880s was coal. The preponderance of traffic on the D&RG and C&S was ALWAYS coal, and still is. British Columbia and Washington State supplied large tonnages of coal into the coastwise trades and to Hawaii by the 1870s. Coal was a big business in the West by the 1870s, and grew as fast as the population would consume it. Go back into the Keystone Coal Manuals and look at the production figures. Go into Coal Age and look at the news and articles. The East had no monopoly on coal. That said, almost all of the expertise in the West came from the East -- the engineers and managers moved back and forth from East to West on frequent basis, chasing the salary. OS
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