THE GREEN LINE – CHAPTER SIX
By Kenneth Howard Smith
Produced for SDC Audiobooks, a unit of SDC Omni Media Group
The year was 1881, a time when the sky over Kansas still opened wide enough to swallow a man whole and spit him out a dreamer. Colonel Thomas Courtney Green—Tom Green to those who dared call him friend—stepped down from the gleaming steps of his new locomotive and pressed his boot into the ochre dust of South Abilene. The telegraph wire had found him that morning, a sharp rattle through the Western Union substation, snapping him from the pride of his accomplishment into a quiet, measured awe. His dream—the Green Line—had arrived.
The steam hissed around him, curling white against the black iron flank of his new train, an obsidian serpent built in Chicago’s finest yards. They said these engines could pull seventy miles an hour—faster than wind, faster than the ghosts of the plains. The private cars gleamed deep emerald, trimmed in gold lettering that spelled simply Green Line. Behind them rolled the dining cars, the sleeping cars, and forty freight flats loaded with lumber, machine parts, and the raw bones of a dozen new towns.
South Abilene was barely more than a plan sketched in dirt and dream. But the air hummed with hammer blows, shouts, and the clang of rail iron. Three hundred men were already at work raising walls, laying streets, shaping the skeleton of a town that, only months before, had been scrubland and buffalo trail.
Out past the rail yards, a well gushed muddy water into a new basin. Green’s engineers—clever young men from Boston and St. Louis—had sunk windmills with great vaned arms that spun lazily in the prairie wind, pumping the earth’s veins until the mud cleared and a lake took form. Within weeks, the pond glittered like a sapphire, grass growing thick at its edges. Children would someday skip stones across that water, never knowing it began as nothing but ambition.
Colonel Green wasn’t alone that morning. He’d shared the last leg of his journey with a man equally made of legend and controversy—General George Armstrong Custer, silver-haired now, proud as ever. He was bound west again, chasing orders to “tame” the territories. Green had argued with him over whiskey in the dining car. He believed progress didn’t need a rifle—it needed rail, water, and schools. Custer disagreed.
When the train doors opened, soldiers led their horses down the ramp into the bright morning, the iron smell of gun oil mixing with the scent of fresh-cut pine from the freight cars. South Abilene, Green’s first true hub, came alive in that hour.
From there, his rail would stretch north to Jordan, Nebraska Territory—120 miles of prairie yet to be claimed by iron.
Green’s chief engineer, Emilio Sánchez, had already begun the work. Sánchez was a master architect, born in Havana, trained in Boston under the Greens’ own company. Years ago, he’d designed Hattie Green’s streetcar lines—those same shining rails that stitched the East Coast’s great cities together. Now, he stood out on the plains again, sunburned and grinning, ready to do for Kansas what he’d once done for Boston.
Using new hydraulic systems and prefabricated track sections, his crew could lay twenty miles of line in just two days. Within three weeks, the first train rolled into the makeshift junction at Jordan, where a new city hall and a small “moving picture” theater already stood—Nickelodeons, they called them. Children gawked at the flickering shadows on the white cloth screen, not knowing they were witnessing the first whisper of a new century.
Each town along the Green Line followed the same model: a post office, a library, a courthouse, a school large enough for two hundred children, and—Colonel Green’s personal insistence—a baseball diamond.
He saw in baseball a language every man could speak, from Boston banker to Kansas farmer. The Green Line became not only a railroad, but a living artery of America’s heart, pumping out homes, schools, and fields where young boys learned to hit and run and dream.
And yes, across the tracks—because there were always tracks to cross—stood the red-light district. Saloon girls and gamblers, whiskey and piano music, a place where men could lose a week’s pay or their pride. Green didn’t judge it; he simply made sure it stayed across the line. Every town needs its shadow to know where the light begins.
The line pushed on, linking new settlements like beads on a steel string:
South Abilene → Jordan → Arrington Falls → Sagebush → Manila Gulch → Twin Hills → Ashford → Duran Pier → Point Springs → Garland Hills → Crystal Springs.
At Crystal Springs, near El Paso, the Green Line made its great U-turn—a loop so wide it formed a natural basin. Inside that circle, Green built another town, near identical to South Abilene, a mirror image of ambition. From there, his trains could roll east or west, distributing goods, people, and promise.
And soon, the map grew dense with life. New side rails branched west to towns like Acton Heights and Rosenman, where cotton fields rippled white under the sun. Northward lay Bishop Town, Griswold, Pastor, Reagan, and Los Gears—each tied into the grand circuit, forty miles apart, four towns per loop, trains running opposite directions in perfect rhythm.
Every whistle that echoed over the prairie marked another small victory for progress.
But the Green Line was more than track and timetables. It was the culmination of a legacy. It was the echo of Hannah’s son, Edwin Truman Green—the child born of scandal in a Boston house decades earlier—now a man of vision and unshakable will. He carried his father’s name and his mother’s courage, bridging two worlds that history had tried to keep apart.
And as the locomotives roared westward, slicing through the heart of the frontier, they carried with them the pulse of a nation learning how to grow—town by town, heart by heart—along the shining promise of the Green Line.
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