Chuck Hassler

There was a time when once a day an eastbound train would come rocketing through sleepy little Powell at 65 miles per hour, rattling windows and scaring the dickens out of anybody who was caught unaware.

The reasoning for this was simple. If a train didn’t have sufficient speed to carry it over coal-mine hill some 6 or 7 miles to the east it would stall out.

That happened the day a big boss was aboard. He made the engineer back off the throttle, the train predictably stalled out amidst the sagebrush and sandy hills, and two engines had to be dispatched from Laurel to rescue them. 

What’s delicious about the story is the big shot didn’t listen to the peon and got his just desserts. He probably didn’t get run off but I’ll bet he got chewed out by the higher-up-the-chain muckety muck.

Eventually underpowered steam engines were replaced with more powerful diesel engines and the need for speed vanished.

Some time after that a hobo hopped off a freight train in Frannie where he stayed for an indeterminate time before embarking to Powell. He found Powell to his liking and set up permanent residence. He was to become arguably Powell’s most famous or infamous personality, depending on your perspective.

I saw him frequently as a kid and he was known to everybody as Boxcar Murphy. Boxcar wore a derby and twirled a cane as he walked. I remember seeing him in front of Hank’s Cafe on Bent Street quite often, where I think they maybe fed him, but he would turn up in Cody or up the North Fork, anywhere, really, hitching rides. Lots of folks objected to his spitting tobacco juice on the floorboards of the family automobile but he always seemed to catch rides. He had a .22 rifle that he raffled off over and over again without ever declaring a winner, which was his bread and butter. I remember a kid telling me that he and some other delinquent kids were harassing Boxcar one day on Fair Street and started throwing rocks. Boxcar turned and fired off a round over their heads and they scattered like quail. Poetic justice, if a little frontiery.

Boxcar is long gone now and the trains that once brought everything and everybody to town, sometimes a family and everything they owned in one emigrant car, have largely been replaced by more efficient trucks. As a matter of fact the other morning I passed two engines and the obligatory empty caboose chugging between Cody and Powell with nary a boxcar or grain car between them. They must have delivered some cars to Cody or the grain elevator outside Ralston. A far cry from their hayday and a reminder that time marches on. 

You either get onboard or you get left behind. But I like the notion of traveling clickety clack across our expansive landscape a helluva lot more than I fancy the notion of getting crammed into an airplane with a bunch of other hapless victims, breathing stale air and alternately freezing or cooking for the duration with some kid kicking the back of your seat. That’s not romantic. That’s torture.