In April 1878, as the Denver and Rio Grande and the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe raced to lay the first tracks into the Colorado Rockies, they reached the Royal Gorge at the same time and confronted each other at the mouth of the crucial portal while judges struggled to settle the right-of-way dispute. Denver and Rio Grande owner William Jackson Palmer armed his workers and had them sabotage the rival's operations, and the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe responded in kind, beginning two years of non-lethal but costly combat that ended in an 1880 settlement giving Palmer possession of the coveted gorge and all that lay beyond. Afterward, the Denver and Rio Grande spent its remaining years steaming from lode to lode in search of the next mining bonanza. Plans for a bridge across the Royal Gorge began in 1906, when Congress ceded the site to Cañon City as a public park, and local boosters envisioned it purely as a tourist attraction rather than a practical transportation link. After more than twenty years of effort to devise a feasible and cost-effective design, the 1,260-foot-long Royal Gorge Bridge opened in 1929 and quickly became one of Colorado's most visited places, an elegant span that dead-ends at the canyon's southern rim but stands as a destination in itself, 1,053 feet above the Arkansas River.