A Good Corporate Citizen: The Southern Pacific Railroad

Abstract

The historical literature on railroads in America is massive, ranging from individual corporate histories to studies on state and federal regulation. Yet surprisingly, the nation's first big business has not been studied exhaustively. A topic that has been largely overlooked involves the impact of a carrier (or carriers) on a particular region or locality. Fortunately, Richard J. Orsi, professor emeritus of history at California State University, Hayward, has helped to fill this scholarly void, producing this ambitious work on the role played by the Southern Pacific Railroad (SP) on the American West, especially California. In the process of examining such matters as land settlement, water, agriculture and conservation, he effectively challenges the age-old notion that the SP was the evil octopus of Frank Norris literary fame, namely that the railroad repeatedly committed acts of corporate arrogance and abuse. Although the company did not always perform in the public interest, the firm was much more a builder than a destroyer of California and the West. The overall philosophy of SP executives was straightforward: management that sought to unlock the region's enormous potential, creating bountiful harvests of agricultural, mineral, and timber products and profits for individuals and society alike. The story of the SP and its relationship to its far-flung service territory is complex. From the 1850s until the 1930s, the company expanded considerably, evolving from several shortline railroads into a mighty system, the result of takeovers (system building) and construction. The SP benefited directly from an amazingly successful initial core of investors-promoters-managers, the long-remembered Big Four: Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins, Collis Potter Huntington and Leland Stanford. These California visionaries made possible the Central Pacific, the western link of the nation's first transcontinental railroad, and they also built more trackage, bought additional lines and turned the Central Pacific into a vital part of a much larger concern, the SP.