6. Wheels & Movement

At first glance, these wheels may seem like one of the simpler artifacts on the grounds. No locomotive. No passenger car. No polished woodwork or sleeping berths.

Just steel wheels, axles, and weight.

But wheels like these carried almost everything.

The frame you see here once supported a railroad snowplow. In the days before modern highways, keeping the rails open through Siskiyou winters was essential. Snowstorms could shut down transportation, commerce, and communication across the region.

Historian Deborah Harton describes winters when equipment like this was often the only thing keeping the railroad open.

Deborah Harton (00:13:07–00:14:23)

"The snows used to be much greater way back when. In 1915 and 1916, the snow was so bad that the railroad ran out of places to put it, so they were putting it in the river. We're talking fifteen feet of snow one week, then sixteen feet the next. Massive amounts of snow that we haven't seen here in many, many years. The plows were the only way to get through all of that."

The snowplow tells one story. But these wheels point toward a much larger one.

Railroads moved timber, livestock, produce, mail, machinery, and passengers. They connected small mountain towns to distant cities and markets. Yet they also carried something less tangible: news, culture, entertainment, and a connection to the wider world.

Deborah Harton (2:06–3:31)

"The railroad was a way to learn too. The Liberty Bell came by. I have pictures of the Liberty Bell in Mount Shasta City where they would make stops in every city so people could see the Liberty Bell. You got let out of school to see the presidents on their whistle-stop campaigns... Theodore Roosevelt came through. We have pictures of him standing in Dunsmuir in 1903."

"The railroad was of vital importance for every aspect of folks' lives. It opened up worlds."

For a small mountain town, the railroad was not simply transportation. It was a window onto a larger story. It changed how people understood distance and possibility, connecting places that had once seemed impossibly far apart.

Yet the same rails that carried presidents on whistle-stop campaigns, soldiers bound for distant assignments, and circus trains winding through the mountains also became part of a very different history for Indigenous communities throughout the West. As settlers, industries, and government institutions expanded into Native homelands, railroads extended systems of control into places that had once remained beyond their reach.

Pom, Winnemem Wintu artist and cultural practitioner:

Pom (14:45:13–14:45:45)

"One of our family members escaped the boarding school, like, multiple times, and then he would jump back on the train and come back home and just look for the mountain and then jump off."

Pom (14:45:27–14:45:40)

"It was both his escape and his capture."

That tension lives within so much of railroad history.

The train that carried one person toward adventure might have carried another away from family. The same technology that opened horizons for some communities arrived as part of profound upheaval for others. Connection and displacement, wonder and loss, movement and control often traveled together along the same rails.