Southern Pacific: Myth and Reality

Abstract

In this time of cursory intrusions upon our nearest galactic neighbors, in this time of emphasis upon the superficial in daily life, we are all too apt to take for granted the basic threads in the tapestry of our plenty and of our past. It is with this in mind, that I hope today to explore some aspects of what resulted from the union of the rails a century ago. In so doing, it is only fair to warn you that I regard myself as one who seeks to keep history from being confused with histrionics. This impels me to remark that we have not now, nor have we ever had, a truly transcontinental railroad. While I have draped myself in the historian's toga, as a beggar might borrow the purple of emperors, it seems proper to point out that I am a child of the Railroad Age ? a child of that high and far off time when any American small town worth the name could boast a town drunk, a town atheist, a town Democrat, and at least one mixed-train daily. songs of that age were the songs of my youth. They are still the songs that send a surge of toe-tapping memory through my declining arches. Songs such as Casey Jones, The Wreck of the Old 97, Wabash Cannonball, and less familiar, The Freight Wreck at Altoona, and several ribald hobo ditties. These were the songs of a young and a confident and a building nation. They reflected then, they perpetuate today the railroads' role in transforming an infinity of wilderness into the largest self-contained continental market the world yet has known. This symbolism of a vanished past intrudes into the uncertain present when Glen Campbell ? the citybilly Pied Piper for the affluent children of our Spock-marked generations ? sings about the man who leaves his sleeping bag stashed behind some woman's