In 1870 the Denver Pacific Railroad was built, providing Denver with rail transport to Cheyenne, Wyoming. Tracks were rapidly being laid in southern Colorado as the Denver & Rio Grande Western and the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe fought for control of newly discovered mineral and coal deposits and ranching and farming areas. But the 1878 silver boom in Leadville changed everything, and by 1879 the rush for Leadville, 17 miles to the north of Granite, was on. With the boom, Leadville had rapidly become the third largest city in Colorado and the newly made millionaires had money and they wanted to spend it. Furthermore, they needed transport for their silver ore to the smelters in Denver or coal-rich southern Colorado, or a way to transport the coal from the southern coal mines to the upper Arkansas to fuel not only smelters, but blacksmith and machine shops, and assay offices as well. Without a local supply of coal they were using charcoal as fuel, in fact, the charcoal industry in Leadville employed an estimated 3,000 people, three times the number of those working in the mines, and the forests were being rapidly depleted.