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In August of 1910, Charles Davis Vail became a patient at St. Marys Hospital in Grand Junction, the result of a beating he received in Marble.

Vail later became famous as the chief engineer for the Colorado State Highway Department. Vail Pass was named for him in 1941. The nearby ski resort and ski town were given the same name after Vail died.

During his tenure at Colorados State Highway Department, Vail accomplished many things, including constructing the large arch bridge over the Eagle River near Redcliff, and overseeing improvements to the Million Dollar Highway now U.S. Highway 550 to allow automobile traffic between Ouray and Silverton.

He also developed the state highway over Wolf Creek Pass.

But Vail also made his share of enemies, including editors at The Denver Post and then-Colorado Gov. Big Ed Johnson.

And, as the information above indicates, Vail made some enemies long before he became the head of the highway department.

According to an Aug. 20, 1910, article in the Palisade Tribune, Vail was beaten by two men who had been working for him as subcontractors on a railroad spur in the mountains near Marble.

Besides other injuries, he received two fractures of the jaw and a broken nose, the Tribune reported.

Vail was taken first to the hospital in Glenwood Springs, then, because of the severity of his injuries, was sent by rail to Grand Junction and St. Marys.

His two assailants were arrested and jailed in Marble.

Charles Davis Vail was born in 1869 on a farm in Illinois, the sixth of seven children. Charlie, as he became known, taught elementary school in Henry, Illinois, while saving money to attend college.

He enrolled at the University of Illinois and worked part-time as an engineering assistant on a railroad project in South Dakota. He graduated in 1891 with a degree in civil engineering.

After graduating, Vail worked for several railroads, including the Union Pacific, and on water projects in Montana, Idaho and Canada.

He married Cincinnati native Jesse Rose Paden in 1893 in Denver, the city that would eventually become their permanent home.

But first, Charlie worked as an itinerant engineer, taking his wife and growing family to Utah, Nevada and Montana.

About 1906, Charlie was hired to build a branch of the Mexican International Railroad in northern Mexico. Jesse and the Vail children remained in Denver.

Early one morning in 1907, Charlie was visited by Pancho Villa, then a bandit who would later become famous as a Mexican revolutionary.

Villa seized all the railroad equipment and workers. He gave Charlie Vail a horse and some water, then demanded the American engineer leave Mexico and never return. Vail did just that.

Returning to Denver, Vail opened an engineering company, Vail, Wolbran & Read.

In that capacity, he worked on several projects on the Western Slope, including a municipal water system in the town of De Beque and the Price-Stubb Diversion Dam, which supplied water to the Mesa County and Palisade Irrigation Districts before the Government Highline Canal and its roller dam in De Beque Canyon were built.

He also worked for a time for the Uintah Railway, which was constructed between Mack, Colorado, and Dragon, Utah. Then he headed up construction for the Crystal River and San Juan narrow gauge railroad near Marble.

It was in that capacity that he angered two subcontractors, who claimed he had underpaid them, and ended up in St. Marys Hospital.

Exactly what he did the next few years is unclear. But, in 1917, he was appointed railway and hydraulic engineer for the recently created Colorado Public Utilities Commission.

He held that job until 1923, when he became manager of parks and improvements for the city of Denver.

During his time with Denver, Vail oversaw a tripling of the miles of paved road within the city, as well as installation of stoplights on many of those roads.

Denvers Civic Center, and the municipal park between it and the state Capitol, were constructed during Vails tenure. So was Stapleton Airport.

Additionally, he oversaw construction of municipal parks and mountain parks, including Red Rocks Park southwest of the city.

Vails reputation both for road building and controversy grew after 1930, when then Gov. Billy Adams appointed Vail as State Highway Engineer.

He received praise for paving hundreds of miles of state highways, and connecting highways to ensure there were complete routes through Colorado.

There were roughly 500 miles of paved roads when he became head of the highway department, but 4,400 when he died in early 1945.

He fought especially hard to improve highways on the Western Slope, even though the population here was small.

Mr. Vail has insisted that, if we are to have an integrated and uniform system of highways, mileage must have as much consideration as population, William Weiser, one of the Western Slopes representatives on the state highway board, wrote in The Daily Sentinel in June of 1939.

Vail also pushed for an increase in the states gasoline tax to 4 cents per gallon and repeatedly fought off attempts by the state Legislature to use that money for other purposes.

And he was perpetually arguing with federal highway authorities to get more money for the state, not an easy task in the midst of the Great Depression.

But he also made enemies, not just with Ed Johnson and the writers of The Denver Post, but with a number of businessmen.

Things came to a head in 1939, when a Denver broker named John McRoberts filed both a lawsuit and a complaint with the Civil Service Commission, seeking to have Vail removed from his job.

Among other things, McRoberts argued that Vail was too old, at age 61, to have been appointed to the top highway post in 1930, according to civil service rules at the time.

McRoberts also claimed that Vail failed to follow state bid rules when buying equipment such as trucks.

Additionally, there were accusations of wasteful spending and that Vail was hiding something in the 1939 highway budget.

But the attacks were all for naught. In 1939, the Civil Service Commission dismissed all charges against Vail, and the court case was eventually dropped as well.

A Sentinel editorial explained the papers view of the dispute: Nothing crooked, nothing out of line and nothing detrimental to the taxpayers of Colorado The only thing involved was Republican partisan politics (Vail was a staunch Democrat) and the bitter opposition of the Denver Post.

Not only were the charges against Vail dismissed, but another effort on his behalf was soon begun, led by the Eagle County commissioners.

In December of 1939, the commissioners asked the state highway board to give the name Vail Pass to the place where U.S. Highway 6 crossed the mountains east of Gore Creek. That was approved in 1941 and is today Vail Pass on Interstate 70.

Charles D. Vail died in Denver in January, 1945, while he was still chief engineer for the State Highway Department. He was 76.

Sources: Palisade Tribune and Steamboat Pilot through http://www.coloradohistoricnewspapers.org; The Daily Sentinel through http://www.newspapers.com; Palisade Historical Society; Charlie Davis Vail, The Highway Engineer Who Transformed Colorado Roads, by Thomas J. Noel, with Shelby Carr.

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Bob Silbernagels email is bobsilbernagel@gmail.com.

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Vails namesake was a controversial state highway engineer - The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel