In the longest of the thirsty
stretches there were clean-picked skeletons, and they were not always
the relics of the patient pack-animals. In which event Chandler, chief
of the Red Butte Western construction, proclaimed himself Eastern-bred
and a tenderfoot by compelling the grade contractors to stop and bury
them.
Why the railroad builders, with Copah for a starting-point and Red Butte
for a terminus, had elected to pitch their head-quarters camp in the
western edge of the desert, no later comer could ever determine. Lost,
also, is the identity of the camp's sponsor who, visioning the things
that were to be, borrowed from the California pioneers and named the
halting-place on the desert's edge "Angels." But for the more material
details Chandler was responsible. It was he who laid out the division
yards on the bald plain at the foot of the first mesa, planting the
"Crow's Nest" head-quarters building on the mesa side of the gridironing
tracks, and scattering the shops and repair plant along the opposite
boundary of the wide right-of-way.
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