I've Been Working on the Railroad

Children of Charles L. and Cora M.Wisemiller Butler, 1905
L-R, Back Row: Joseph, Louis Raymond, Sarah
Front Row: Edwin (Jeff), Bessie, Susie, Jesse, Ida

My father, Jesse Llewellyn Butler, was born on the shortest day of the year, December 21, 1898 at Lexington, Dawson County, Nebraska. He was the fifth of nine children born to Charles Llewellyn and Cora Melvina Wisemiller Butler. He lived on a farm near the Platte River until the family moved to Haswell, Kiowa County, Colorado when Dad was about 7. They farmed two homesteads about four miles east and one mile south of Haswell, Colorado. They sold those two tracts of land in 1920 and moved into Haswell where his father built the Highway Garage.

In his youth, Jess was a baseball pitcher for the Haswell Baseball team. His brother, Edwin Murel (known as Jeff) was his catcher. They played all of the neighboring towns in a league. In those days they were known as Mutt and Jeff, as Jess was tall and his brother was short, like the comic characters in the newspapers of that time.

Dad had a motorcycle before he got married. Shortly after he was married he was out at the ranch showing his skill at standing up on the seat while it was going, when he hit an obstacle in the road and the bike went down - and so did the rider. He was skinned up pretty bad, and he sold it that very day!

Charles L. Butler and Jesse L. Butler

My grandfather was the chute foreman for the Missouri Pacific Railroad in Haswell, and when he was about 22, Jess became the station agent and worked with him. He also worked part time in a small general store to supplement the meager wages he made from the railroad at the small station. This is what Dad was doing when he and my mother were married. Most of his young life Dad had watched the trains come through Haswell, and he looked at the engineers as having a job which he would like to have.

Dad loved the big engines and wanted to run them along the prairie at 100 miles per hour! So in 1924 he jumped at the chance to transfer to Pueblo to become an engineer for the railroad. He knew it would require doing other jobs part time for many years before he could get a regular run and work full time as an engineer. He knew that several months of the year he might not work at all. Throughout his life he loved the railroad and though there were many months each year in the beginning that he would be laid off, he always left a job and returned to the railroad when they called. After he got a job as a fireman on the train, he went through Haswell regularly on his “runs” from Pueblo to Horace, Kansas where he waited 8 hours or more to return to Pueblo.

At the railroad yard in Pueblo

This is one of the engines for which Jesse was the fireman. The fuel for the engines was coal that Dad had to shovel into the firebox that heated the water in the boiler to make steam.

Jesse was always worried because so many people would try to beat the train, crossing the tracks before the train crossed the road. He was especially worried when he was in the Haswell area, because he knew the people who were crossing the tracks.

A train wreck or derailment

Dad never had an accident with the train. His greatest fear was that he might hit a gasoline tanker truck. In such accidents the fuel would engulf the engineer and fireman, and they would not survive.

Jess was promoted to engineer in 1941 and had a regular turn, year-round with a steady, comfortable income from that time on. The war was going on in Europe, and it looked very much like we were going to be in it sooner or later and we were doing a lot of business with the Allies. Therefore the railroads were very busy and Dad was working a regular turn on the Eagle, which was a first rate passenger train.

One of Jess' greatest sources of pride was that he worked on the Colorado Eagle, the "streamliner" passenger train running from St. Louis to Denver. He loved that train, but worried that because of the speed, by the time he could be aware of anybody or anything on the track in front of him, he wouldn't have time to stop. He worked on the Eagle until it was taken out of service, and then he served on a local freight train until his retirement.


In December 1966 Jess retired from the railroad after 48 years of service. His career spanned a time of many changes and advances in the railroad industry, the most significant being the replacement of old steam-driven locomotives by diesel engines. During the days of steam locomotives about 30 or 40 cars was considered a good train. With diesels they could make better time with four times that many cars.

Another development occurred when radios were installed in the caboose and engine of the trains to provide better communications between the conductor and the engineer. Before radios were installed, during foggy weather they had to carry the signals from one end of the train to the other.

When asked what he was going to do now that he was retired, he said, "I'm going to do lots of fishing."