A narrow road called Wrights Station Road crosses Los Gatos Creek on an old bridge and runs into the trees. It keeps the name of a town that is gone. Little remains in the woods there beyond some old foundations and the buried mouth of a railroad tunnel.
A railroad through the summit
In the 1870s a toll road linked Los Gatos and Santa Cruz. Stagecoaches climbed it over the mountains. In 1877 a group of San Francisco money men led by James Fair and Alfred E. Davis began a narrow-gauge railroad from Alameda. They called it the South Pacific Coast Railroad. Its route to Santa Cruz ran straight into the summit ridge.
The answer was a tunnel. The route was set in September 1878. Digging began in October. The finished bore ran 6,157 feet. For a time it was the longest tunnel in California.
About a hundred Chinese workers came in to mine it from both ends. Their camps grew into settlements. The camp at the north portal became Wrights. The camp at the south end, above Burns Creek, became Highland. Today that spot is called Laurel.
Gas in the rock
The tunnel crossed the San Andreas fault zone. The rock was bad. Crude oil seeped from it, and there were seams of coal. On November 16, 1878, about a month into drilling, the crews found methane.
Men passed out from the gas. At first the crews tried to burn it off with candles and torches. By January 1879 they worked in the dark.
On February 14, 1879, gas ignited in the north drift. Fourteen Chinese workers died. Many others were badly burned. Work stopped for three months while engineers rigged a crude ventilation system.
The Chinese crew at Wrights refused to go back in. A Cornish crew took their place. The Cornishmen were much slower. After three months the company hired a new Chinese crew at nearly double the original wages.
That June the creosote-soaked redwood timbers caught fire. The flames spread from beam to beam and brought down part of the tunnel. That cost two more months.
November 17, 1879
Shortly before midnight, a flame used to set off a blast ignited the gas in the north drift. Rescuers ran in carrying torches. A second explosion followed. It was larger than the first. Flame blew out of the north portal and wrecked the engine house and a shed a hundred feet away.
Thirty-two Chinese workers died. Many more were hurt. The Santa Cruz Weekly Sentinel ran the story the next day.
Cornish miners from the New Almaden quicksilver mines came in to finish the Wrights side. The source of the gas was found at last. It was capped with a pipe and left burning in a lantern. Electric lights replaced open flame underground.
Most of the dead were sent home to China. For several years some of them lay in a Chinese cemetery in the mountains. Every account I found gives their number. None of them gives a name.
The historian Sandy Lydon counted forty-two miles of railroad built by Chinese crews in this region between 1875 and 1880. That total includes about two and a half miles of tunnel. By his estimate, one Chinese worker died for every mile.
Sixty years of trains
The tunnel opened to trains on May 10, 1880. For the next sixty years it carried freight and summer crowds. Lumber and fruit went north to the bay. Excursion trains brought tourists south to the Santa Cruz beaches.
The gas never fully left. Small amounts kept seeping out. A winter storm in 1893 collapsed the wooden portal on the Wrights end. It was rebuilt in concrete.
On April 18, 1906, the earthquake shifted the tunnel about five feet where it crossed the fault. The line through the mountains closed for a year. Crews bent the straight bore to line it back up. They put in new redwood timbers and widened it for standard gauge.
A storm in February 1940 sent the hillsides down onto the tracks. Southern Pacific decided repairs were not worth the cost. In 1942 the company abandoned the line. That April, Army engineers blasted the portals shut. The concrete face at Wrights fell forward. It has been sinking into the mud ever since.
Wrights did not outlast the trains. Its post office closed in 1938. The interior of the tunnel may still stand behind the collapsed entrances. Nobody knows for sure. The land belongs to the San Jose Water Company and is closed to visitors.
Why it stayed with me
I grew up in the Santa Cruz Mountains. A history teacher told me about the work done by Chinese laborers. He mentioned the tragedy but was unable to provide details. What stayed with me was the count. Thirty-two men died in one night under that ridge. The newspapers kept the number. I never found a single name. The town at the tunnel mouth is gone now too. I wanted to give one of those men a name and a life after that night.