Alva Review-Courier -

By the mid-1880s thousands of miles of railroad tracks crisscrossed the American West, making travel somewhat easier for the people who lived there.

During the previous two decades the U.S. government had financed the building of four so-called “transcontinental” railways that connected the eastern sections of the country to western states and territories.

In addition, several smaller privately owned and operated railroads brought numerous smaller communities into the rapidly expanding American rail network.

These thoroughfares aided the country’s economy by sending western raw materials, natural resources and agricultural products to the East while transporting eastern manufactured goods and vacationers to the West.

In 1886 one group of sojourners from Massachusetts was traveling cross-country to California when they became stranded in the small southwestern Kansas town of Kinsley.

Kinsley, the county seat of Edwards County, is about 85 miles northwest of Alva as the crow flies and approximately 115 miles by car. It is located 78 miles north of the Oklahoma border on Highway 183.

In the 2010 census, 1,457 people called Kinsley home. In the 1880 census, its population was 457 but growing rapidly on its way to registering 771 citizens by 1890. So, in 1886 Kinsley had perhaps 600 to 700 people.

The passenger train from Massachusetts was carrying more than 150 travelers. Another train also got stranded in town, so that approximately 270 out-of-town visitors suddenly increased the town’s size by nearly 50 percent.

These trains did not stop at Kinsley simply because traveling farther west was impracticable but because movement was impossible! The blizzard of 1886 brought rail travel to a grinding halt. Snow drifts as high as 12 feet buried the trains.

Rails were frozen solid and the train wheels were frozen to the rails! When the tracks were finally cleared after several days, freeing the frozen cars from the rails became a daunting task.

Meanwhile, the residents of Kinsley decided to treat their unexpected visitors to some small town Great Plains hospitality – as we will see next week in part 4 of this article.