The July 23, 1930, edition of the Craig Empire Courier carried the obituary of M. T. Streeter, “one of the greatest promoters of the West, who for many years had interests in Northwestern, CO, died Sunday in Oklahoma City, OK, … A sudden heart attack is given as the cause of his death…Mr. Streeter first came to Moffat County in 1915 when he became interested in a 32-foot coal vein located 25 miles south of Craig. He promoted a company to produce coal and spent some $750,000 in promoting and developing the property. His plan was to develop an ideal coal mining town. To this end he constructed which he named Mount Streeter. …Mr. Streeter was a genius in many respects. He succeeded in interesting large sums of capital in his various undertakings. While stockholders in his companies may have lost considerable sums of money, so far as can be learned no workman or local merchant ever lost a dollar through his enterprises.”
A few paragraphs in a newspaper just scratches the surface of a character who could have given lessons to P.T. Barnum. The coal mine was real enough. In 1917, Joe Collom owned a coal mine in the Axial Basin, just north of the Rio Blanco County line. Joe’s ranch had a modest cabin where a small crew was mining a vein of high quality coal. On Feb. 21, 1918, the Moffat Co. Courier repeated the boast that the Collom Coal mine was the largest vein in the country, 24 feet thick.
Mr. M.T. Streeter of South Bend, Indiana; S. H. Streeter of Chicago, and J. Asbury of Indianapolis bought the ranch and mine and returned East to raise capital for the newly incorporated, Axial Basin Development Co., A.B.D. for short. Morris Thayer Streeter, born April 4, 1861, in Rochester, New York, was the company president and promoter extraordinaire. M. T. Streeter understood clearly that to exploit the mine fully, railroad transportation was essential to his grand scheme. At a proposed cost of $47,000 per mile of track, neither the Moffat Railway in Craig nor the Union Pacific Railway in Wyoming were interested in that kind of investment just for one undeveloped mine.
M.T. Streeter’s solution was to build his own mining town and begin building a railroad from the mine north to Craig. He envisioned extensions to Meeker, Colorado, 22 miles to the south, another 92 miles of tracks north connecting to the Union Pacific and eventually west into Utah. The Mt. Streeter railway would service mining interests in Northwest Colorado and reach untapped resources in Utah. Flush with money from Eastern shareholders, Streeter quickly platted out a town.
The Sept. 3, 1919, issues proclaimed the A.B.D. had already completed a bank, general store, machine shop, blacksmith shop, hotel, boarding houses, and pool hall boasting modern concrete walks. The Jan. 28, 1920, Craig Empire had an extensive, two-page advertisement touting the 26 identified veins of the Collum coal mine and value of the A.B.D. They may have been an early version of the TV infomercial. By June of 1920, a barbershop, post office, and butcher shop were finished, all awaiting the railway. Dan at the Museum of Northwestern Colorado sent me a copy of a 16-page A.B.D. prospectus of the Streeter Smokeless Coal and proposed railway system. It was a slick promotion of the ideal mining town, complete with pictures of shops, concrete walkways, and a map of the railway system “under construction.”
In reality the railway seemed to be always “under construction.” There were some graded rail beds in the city of Mt. Streeter and some rail equipment, far from any rail head. This creative infomercial concluded with an invitation to invest. “DOES 8 PER CENT APPEAL TO YOU WHERE THERE IS POSITIVELY NO SPECULATIVE FEATURE? WHERE THE ASSETS are many times greater than the capitalization of the Company?”
By ED PECK
