Idaho's 1st Railroad
Through this canyon once puffed the wood-
burning locomotives of the narrow-guage
Utah and Northern Railway
Construction, undertaken by a Mormon Co-op, came northward from
a junction with the transcontinental line, but stopped in 1874 at
Franklin on the Utah-Idaho border. Jay Gould, famous financier
of the Union Pacific, took over in 1877; trains were passing here
the next summer, and the rails reached Montana in 1880. New
life for east Idaho followed the shrieking whistles of those little
Utah and Northern trains.
