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The Telephone Girls Who Climbed the Rockies — Colorado, 1909
In 1909, Western Union refused to run lines to the mining camps above Leadville, Colorado — too much rock, too many blizzards. Three telephone operators — Maude, Clara, and Bess — quit their jobs, bought 60 miles of wire on credit, and climbed. They carried spools on their backs, slept in abandoned mine shacks, and taught themselves to splice wire in -10°F wind. They strung lines cliff-to-cliff across the Mosquito Range using abandoned ore carts as pulleys. By December, the Cloud City Mine had a phone. The first call was to Denver: “Send doctors. Cave-in.” That line saved 11 miners. Bess later said: “The company saw mountains. We saw neighbors.”
