Transcontinental Railroad Research Articles

Traqueros: Mexican Railroad Workers in the United States, 1870–1930 by Jeffrey Marcos Garcílazo, foreword by Vicki L. Ruiz (review)

Reviewed by: Traqueros: Mexican Railroad Workers in the United States, 1870–1930 by Jeffrey Marcos Garcílazo, foreword by Vicki L. Ruiz Marc Simon Rodriguez Traqueros: Mexican Railroad Workers in the United States, 1870–1930. By Jeffrey Marcos Garcílazo, foreword by Vicki L. Ruiz. (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2012. Pp. 244. Illustrations, map, figures, notes, bibliography, index.) Note regarding changes to the book reviews section: The publishing world is undergoing a revolution in product delivery that no longer restricts the choice in book form to cloth or paperback. Electronic and print editions in various formats each require a separate ISBN, prices vary on a frequent basis, and there are increasing opportunities for self-publication that defy traditional bibliographical organization. Consequently, with this issue the editorial board of the Southwestern Historical Quarterly has decided to streamline the headers that introduce book reviews by removing ISBN, format, and pricing information. The rest of the publication data will be provided based on the print copies from which reviews are done, and in those cases where a book appears in electronic format, the publisher’s listing will be employed. We hope the change does not produce too much inconvenience. In Traqueros, Garcilazo explores the transformation of track work in the American Southwest with attention to the preeminent role of Mexican railroad workers in the industry after the completion of the transcontinental railroad. In this [End Page 337] examination, track work is transformed from a diverse multiethnic part of the labor market that employed large numbers of Irish, Greek, Italian, and Chinese immigrant workers as well as African Americans into one that in the southwestern United States came to be dominated by Mexican workers. These workers traveled first as solo laborers then as families in a shift the railroads encouraged due to the belief by railroad companies that Mexican workers would live in homes that many others would not. The railroads understood that bringing a family along would more firmly tie the male workers to the boxcar homes and to the job. Solo workers could leave the railroads with little worry, but a husband would think twice before doing so if his wife and children were dependent on the company for housing and he did not have land of his own. These railroad camps became mobile as workers traveled across the rail lines, yet they were communities nonetheless. In several well organized chapters, Garcilazo nicely shows how the railroad industries in Mexico and the United States developed in tandem and how the transit infrastructure they developed helped move people from the interior of Mexico to the labor camps of the Southwest. In this process the railroads developed well-articulated systems of labor recruitment and constantly sought to reduce attrition. Many workers entered the United States for railroad work, yet soon abandoned railroad work for industrial work. Seen by many experienced Mexican workers as an industry for “greenhorns,” track work was often the place where Mexican immigrant workers began their foray into paid labor in the United States. Unlike many Mexican Americans, who often went from field labor to industrial labor, the Mexican-born migrants were often directly linked to the boxcar communities from El Paso to Los Angeles and Chicago. The boxcar communities, which often formed the genesis for Mexican community development in many cities across the United States, are examined in detail. Garcilazo argues that the moving camps dovetailed with the tradition of semi-mobile rancherías which emerged in northern Mexico and became the foundation for migratory labor circuits among Mexican workers. This culture of semi-permanent movement meant that Mexican workers were accustomed to labor and migration as communities of extended families or tribal groups. The railroads fought against permanent settlement for Mexican-descent peoples, as is amply detailed by the destruction of Hispano land rights in Colorado, even where other employers saw a benefit to protecting those property rights. Railroads, on the other hand, sought workers unencumbered by notions of land ownership and so did not favor Mexican Americans protected by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Despite the coercion involved in selecting workers and keeping them on the job, Mexican workers maintained and built new communities as workers...

“No Transient Spectacle”: Bayard Taylor, Wilderness Tourism, and the Re-creation of the United States

“No Transient Spectacle”:Bayard Taylor, Wilderness Tourism, and the Re-creation of the United States James Weaver (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Rocky Mountain National Bank, Central City, Colorado Territory. Signed January 14, 1875, for $500. All images accompanying this essay courtesy of Shawn Larson at the Denver Stock Exchange, Englewood, Colorado, denverstockexchange.com. The checks and certificates used during the Colorado Gold Rush often present scenes of wilderness couched in documents of economic transaction. For instance, highlighting the “wildness” and nostalgia of the western frontier, this check depicts a Native man who struggles to fend off two grizzly bears with one leg pinned beneath his horse. Such an image also provides a subtle advertisement for (as well as a clear caution against) “wilderness tourism,” reminding the check holder of the dangers and adventures still to be had in the West. However, when coupled with the images of the Independence Mine and the emerging settlement community of Denver (Colorado National Bank) which appear later in the essay, this scene also sparks a sense of urgency, as the “Old West” of rugged individuals and foreboding landscapes is being replaced by the “New West” of transcontinental railroads, corporate mining operations, and cities, prompting many to seek solace in nature—albeit as tourists rather than settlers of the wilderness. [End Page 254] “Could the pencil faithfully represent this magnificent transfiguration of Nature, it would appear utterly unreal and impossible to eyes which never beheld the reality,” Bayard Taylor writes of a sunset in Eldorado, his 1850 travel narrative about the Gold Rush boom of California. “It was no transient spectacle, fading away ere one could feel its surpassing glory,” he continues (235). “I have seen the dazzling sunsets of the Mediterranean flush the beauty of its shores, and the mellow skies which Claude used to contemplate from the Pincian Hill; but, lovely as they are in my memory, they seem cold and pale when I think of the splendor of such a scene on the Bay of San Francisco” (236). As he attempts to capture the unreal beauty he witnessed in California, Taylor suggests that this natural scene implies the “surpassing glory” of a national dream now being realized. Having recently acquired California from Mexico, the United States had confirmed that it would be “no transient spectacle.” Rather, as Taylor’s chapter title asserts, California could become “the Italy of the West,” a claim that seeks to enshrine American grandeur alongside long-established scenes of European natural wonder. His favorable contrast between the splendor of San Francisco and the “cold and pale” memories of Europe invokes a national pride, one anchored first in the land itself and second in what enterprising Americans can make of that land. Taylor’s confident pronouncements of a promising national future, however, are set against a backdrop of increasing sectional tensions within the United States—tensions that would escalate over the coming decade and result in the union’s dissolution. The fate of the nation clearly was a central concern for Bayard Taylor, and his two narratives of western travel, Eldorado: Adventures in the Path of Empire (1850) and Colorado: A Summer Trip (1867), illuminate connections among commercial development of natural spaces, sociocultural refinement of the American populace, and a concurrent extension of US imperial political power. In these works, Taylor employs his skills as a travel writer to assure his audience that they are witnessing a lasting spectacle themselves. Documenting the Gold Rush boom of California following the Mexican War and then detailing the transformations of [End Page 255] Colorado territory in the wake of the Civil War, Taylor links the surpassing glory of the nation to its magnificent transfiguration of its natural resources, insisting on the land’s capacity to restore and redirect the nation’s imperial project after the sociopolitical fractures of war. Ultimately, attending to the nuanced ways in which Taylor’s imperialist attitudes intertwine with his environmentalist sensibilities offers us a clearer understanding not just of the thematic connections between Eldorado and Colorado but also of the significant contributions Taylor made to nineteenth-century discourse about the West. During his fifty-three-year life, Taylor came to be known—to...

The Chinese Face of Jesus: Phenomenology of Truth in Sui Sin Far’s Short Fiction

As first writer of descent to be published in North America, Edith Eaton, better known as Sui Sin Far, is today considered one of most significant voices in American literary history, mainly because of her non-racialized approach to race in representing early twentieth-century diaspora. Born to an English father and a mother, Sui Sin often spoke about her burden of growing up as a Eurasian amidst racial injustice in North America. The unique space she occupied between two races also became basis of her constant pursuit to reconcile racial difference. According to her critics, her egalitarian view on race was established by her biracial experience and intense desire to forge a true understanding between and white Americans. As Elizabeth Ammons observes, Sui Sin invented herself--created her own voice--out of such deep silencing and systematic racist repression was one of triumphs of American literature at turn of (105). Many of Sui Sin Far's critics attributed her distinctive perspective to her biracial heritage by birth and her identity by choice. She identified with her mother's race not only by advocating for rights of in her writing, but also by choosing to publish under pseudonym Sui Sin Far, which means water lily in Chinese. At an early age, Sui Sin had already learned that the true fathers and mothers of world were those who battled through great trials and hardships to leave to future generations noble and inspiring truths (Sui Sin Far 290). History inevitably imposed a burden on Sui Sin Far, which was transformed into a mission to perpetuate a redemptive legacy for coming generations. During last decades of nineteenth century and a good part of twentieth century, in America suffered blatant racial discrimination and sociopolitical trauma. In 1877, during a time of economic crisis and social strife, Congress passed Exclusion Act to make it unlawful for laborers to enter United States for next ten years and denied citizenship to already there. The prohibition was broadened in 1888 to include persons of race; exemptions were provided for Chinese officials, students, tourists, and merchants (Takaki 111). Only two years before Exclusion Act, Page Law was enacted to prohibit wives and children of laborers from entering America. Upon completion of transcontinental railroad, western states launched violent raids on a broad scale to drive out population; called these raids pai hua, literally meaning to expel Chinese. One account states: At nine o'clock on morning of November 3,1885, steam whistles blew at foundries and mills across Tacoma, to announce start of purge of all people from town. Saloons closed and police stood by as five hundred men, brandishing clubs and pistols, went from house to house in downtown quarter and through tenements along city's wharf.... At midday, mob began to drag laborers from their homes, pillage their laundries, and throw their furniture into streets ... mob marched through heavy rain to a muddy railroad crossing nine miles from town. The merchants' wives, unable to walk on their bound feet, were tossed into wagons.... Two days later, Tacoma's Chinatown was destroyed by fire. (Pfaelzer xv-xvi) The Tacoma roundup was only one out of a hundred ethnic purging programs across Pacific Northwest in late nineteenth century. News about violent raids made its way into local newspapers as well as national publications such as The New York Times and Harper's Weekly. It was not uncommon knowledge among white Americans that purges were raging in California, Oregon, Washington, Wyoming, Nevada, and Colorado (Pfaelzer xix). …

Joseph Lister and His 1876 Tour of America

To explore the events and people that shaped Joseph Lister's 1876 tour of America and how the journey became a landmark episode in the history of surgery. In a little known chapter in American medical history, Joseph Lister toured the United States in 1876 in an attempt to convince physicians that they should accept his ideas about surgical antisepsis. His 2 month-long visit, which included a transcontinental railroad trip across the North American continent, sparked controversy as doctors struggled to understand the relationship between bacteria and disease. An analysis of the published medical and lay literature and unpublished documents pertaining to Lister and antisepsis for the 15-year period, from 1865 to 1880. Joseph Lister's 1876 tour of America proved a turning point in the slow process of accepting the principles of antisepsis by the nation's doctors. This visit laid the foundation for the blossoming of medical care in America and the remarkable advances that followed. Among the most debated topics in the American medical world of 1876 was whether to accept Joseph Lister's principles of surgical antisepsis. He was invited to address the issue and gave a series of lectures in Philadelphia, Boston, and New York. The presentations marked the beginning of a significant change in American physicians' awareness of the correlation between wounds, germs, and pus. Lister's visit is a crucial milestone in the history of medicine.

An Important Anniversary

One hundred fifty years ago, on 22 April 1863, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) held its first meeting. The founding of the academy was but one of an impressive array of federal actions that would prepare the United States of America for a bright future. During the dark days of 1862 and 1863, mired in a bloody and intense Civil War, Congress passed, and President Lincoln signed, the Morrill Act, creating a system of Land Grant Colleges. The Act greatly enhanced access to higher education for Americans and promoted scientific and technical research in the coming generations. In the same period, Congress authorized the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad, and President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Only a few months later, President Lincoln and Congress took another major step to advance the young nation by creating NAS, a bold way to elevate American science and to incorporate science into the U.S. future. This was a remarkable set of government actions during very tough times.

Celebrating the 150th Anniversary of the National Academy of Sciences

On March 3, 2013 the National Academy of Sciences will be 150 years old. Its creation in 1863 represents part of a dramatic series of federal actions that positioned the United States of America for a bright future. In 1862, Congress passed and President Lincoln signed the Morrill Act, creating Land Grant Colleges, providing federal land grants for the use of the new colleges and allowing the land assets to be sold to support higher education. The Morrill Act created many universities, including the University of Illinois and the University of Nebraska, and it supported some preexisting colleges such as Pennsylvania State University and the University of Wisconsin. Private colleges such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and briefly, Yale University, also gained support through the Morrill Act. The Act enabled a large increase in the capability of the United States to provide higher education for its population and for scientific and technical research in the coming generations. Also in 1862, Congress authorized the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad. On January 1, 1863, while the United States was mired in its bitter Civil War, President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Soon thereafter, President Lincoln and Congress took another major step to advance the young nation: The creation of the NAS in 1863, a bold and effective measure to elevate American science and to incorporate science into the future capabilities of the United States.∗ Ralph J. Cicerone. The painting by Albert Herter depicts President Abraham Lincoln and the signing of the Academy charter of March 3, 1863. Left to right: Benjamin Peirce, Alexander Dallas Bache, Joseph Henry, Louis Agassiz, Lincoln, Senator Henry Wilson, Charles H. Davis, and Benjamin Apthorp Gould. The NAS was given the charge to provide scientific analysis and advice to the United States government and to help … [↵][1]1E-mail: NASPresident{at}nas.edu. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1

The First U.S. Transcontinental Railroad: Expected Profits and Government Intervention

Construction of the first transcontinental railroad, financed with large federal subsidies, is an important event in American history. Were the subsidies necessary to induce private investment in the railroad? The ex-ante investment decision examined uses contemporary reports and a simulation model to show that investors expected the railroad to be profitable. Evidence also shows that the railroad created political conflicts in Congress between the North and South. The secession removed the South as a disputant in Congress, reducing short-term political conflict but not long-term conflict. Subsidies reduced political risk, rather than transport market failure, and encouraged private investment.

Field Guide to California Agriculture by Paul F. Starrs and Peter Goin (review)

Reviewed by: Field Guide to California Agriculture by Paul F. Starrs and Peter Goin Ron Davidson (bio) Field Guide to California Agriculture Paul F. Starrs and Peter Goin University of California Press, 2010 Paul F. Starrs and Peter Goin have written a lavishly informative, almost 500-page Field Guide to California Agriculture hoping to connect the state’s metropolites with its working agricultural landscapes. Their cause is noble, given the economic, culinary, and ecological importance of local agriculture to Californians and the fact that, indeed, the $37 billion agro-industry (in 2007) occupying a quarter of the state’s surface area absorbs all too little of a typical resident’s attention. Geographer James J. Parsons may find the Central Valley “the most interesting place in the world” (394), but that shows a refined intelligence indeed. For the ninety-four percent of Californians who live in urban areas, the Valley more likely seems the opposite, a plain of almost derangement-inducing monotony broken by pit stops at boisterous, air-conditioned caravanserai. Outside these havens, the Valley may seem rich in strange odors and windshield-spattering micro-life, but little of abiding interest. The Field Guide seeks to turn things around. Travelers equipped with a copy on the dashboard may begin to see the Valley—along with the state’s other agricultural regions and landscapes—as a place worthy of “exploration and discovery” (xx). To encourage this about-face, the authors provide an informative text that is brisk, enthusiastic in tone, and entertaining to read. “Peppers have a justly earned fame for their varying hotness,” they note in typical style, “judged by Scoville heat units, which range from zero (for the bell pepper) to an exotic pepper from Assam, India, that clocked in at a million SHUs” (295). To get things going, the Guide offers a seventy-page crash course on the background and context of California agriculture. Topics include climate, water issues, agricultural technologies, and economics. This introductory [End Page 179] material, along with a later chapter on agricultural regions, makes the Guide something of a stealth geography textbook. (The book is sprinkled with references to and encouragements to read Yi-Fu Tuan, John Fraser Hart, James Parsons, Paul Starrs, and other geographers). As a textbook, perhaps its most notable accomplishment is offering a geographic vision of California’s agricultural regions. This vision has the Bay Area as the state’s core, with Marin County and UC Berkeley at center stage. Citing the Marin Agricultural Land Trust, which preserves dairies and other agricultural landscapes on the county’s west side, the authors note that Marin has had a widespread influence on consumer attitudes relating to “environmental quality, philosophy, and the conservation of agricultural resources” (373). UC Berkeley, near the Oakland terminus of the nation’s first transcontinental railroad and the Golden Gate—and hence at a national and world distribution hub for the state’s agricultural products—historically led the state in innovations in soil science, equipment design, plant breeding, labor management, innovative financing, and other components of the agro-industry. The Bay Area is also ground zero of “foodie” culture and a wine-tasting mecca. By its nature, the Guide is celebratory rather than critical of its subject. It does not challenge the dominant paradigm of large-scale, fossil-fuel-intensive agriculture or the exploitation of agricultural laborers. On the contrary, the Guide was conceived to enhance appreciation of this among other working agricultural models. In addition, readers should be apprised that the text occasionally misreports information and, because of its breakneck pace, sometimes refers to material so fleetingly that it risks misrepresenting it. (The Salton Sea was not created by mistake “in the 1910s” [409], but in 1905–06; the Great Flood of 1862 was not caused solely by “weather,” as the authors imply [29], but also by erosion resulting from hydraulic mining operations in the Sierras. As for questionable representations, the authors cite Julie Guthman, a trenchant critic of how the state’s organic agricultural sector has mimicked its industrial twin, when noting almost triumphantly that “even the organic sector in California is industrializing and attaining a global reach” [13]; Donald Worster’s devastating...

The Republic of Nature: An Environmental History of the United States by Mark Fiege

 Reviews The Republic of Nature: An Environmental History of the United States by Mark Fiege University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2012. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. 600 pages. $34.95 cloth. In his opening chapter, Mark Fiege reveals why he wrote The Republic of Nature, which in turn reveals much about the content and character of thisremarkablebook.Someyearsback,while teaching American environmental history, two students asked him why the course did not cover more traditional topics in American history. Their query grabbed his imagination and held it. Indeed, many common topics in environmental history are absent or slighted in U.S. history surveys, while many traditional topics found in survey textbooks are absent or slighted in the study of environmental history. Fiegeembracedthestudents’challenge,selected nine common episodes in U.S. history surveys but uncommon in environmental history narratives ,andexplainedwhyandhownaturematteredineachepisode .Thatsimplebutingenious strategy sheds new light on familiar events.The same strategy worked well for Charles Beard in 1913 when he provided a class-based analysis of the founding of the new republic, and for Joan Scott in 1986 when she explained why gender was a useful category of analysis. Fiege seeks a similarlastingshiftwhereinhistoriansacknowledge the physical world as an inseparable and essential component shaping every important event in U.S. history. Contrary to what is implied in the subtitle, the book is not a comprehensive“environmental history of the United States.” Rather, it is a collection of artfully crafted profiles of iconic events: the witchcraft hysteria in seventeenthcentury New England, the Declaration of Independence, the antebellum rise of cotton agriculture and slavery in the South,the life and times of Abraham Lincoln,the CivilWar,building the first transcontinental railroad,building the atomic bomb,Jim Crow and Brown v.Board of Education, and the OPEC-spawned energy crisis of the 1970s. Each chapter explores the common theme: How did nature matter? The answers are richly complex, illuminating, and at times surprising. By “nature,” Fiege means the whole biophysical world: natural resources such as timber, soil, and water, of course, but also geography, climate, microorganisms, the built environment, domesticated plants and animals, and the human body — muscles (labor), alimentation, fatigue, fear, dreams, and desires. Nature in Fiege’s study includes both the material and the cultural. For the latter, he examines how conceptions of nature influenced keyAmerican religious and political ideologies, especially in the colonial era and early republic. Chapter 2 on the Enlightenment andAmerican Independence is especially strong on that topic. Readers will be surprised and delighted by how much Fiege accomplishes in each case study. Every chapter is deeply contextualized in time and place. Each provides decades of historical context leading up to the particular event being profiled and describes changing social, political, and economic conditions. Sometimes Fiege leaves nature out of the picture entirely while he elaborates on gender, class,race,religion,and politics.But the context is always useful, never excessive or redundant, a masterful and balanced blend of traditional history and environmental history. If not for a number of large chronological gaps in historical coverage, the book could suffice as an environmental history of the United States, despite its episodic structure. The most significant gap is between 1869 (where Chapter reviews  OHQ vol. 114, no. 1 6 ends) and World War II (where Chapter 7 begins). In contrast, Fiege has four chapters covering the early to mid 1800s. I expect most readers will be inclined to forgive his omission. At nearly 600 pages, it seems unreasonable to expect additional chapters. Moreover, I would not want to see any of the existing chapters reduced substantially or excised. Ideally, I would love to see Fiege in the future make this a two-volume work that corresponds with the classic two-volume U.S. history survey. A few new chapters on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would be sufficient.I would certainly assign it when teaching U.S. history survey classes, and I think many others also would profit by doing so. Gratefully,Fiege wrote for a broad audience. He is among that rare breed who can spin a tale that is accessible and satisfying to both undergraduates and academic specialists.More than that,The Republic of Nature not only...

“Verily the Road was Built with Chinaman’s Bones”: An Archaeology of Chinese Line Camps in Montana

Transcontinental railroads conveyed information and resources that fueled the Gilded Age’s quintessential financial and political corporate corruption and related social inequalities. Construction of the transcontinentals required massive numbers of laborers who lived in temporary “line camps” along the railroad grades. A sample of spatially and ethnically segregated Chinese line camps along the transcontinental Northern Pacific Railroad in the Rocky Mountains of northwestern Montana provide historical and archaeological examples of the Gilded Age’s pervasive racist mistreatment of the Chinese, culminating in Chinese exclusion laws.

State Capacity and Bureaucratic Autonomy in the Early United States: The Case of the Army Corps of Topographical Engineers

This article reconsiders early American state capacity through a close examination of the U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers. The topographical corps, a bureau in the antebellum War Department, developed a form of conditional bureaucratic autonomy far earlier than recognized in previous scholarship, giving it a central role in shaping national economic development policies, especially in the nation's periphery. Unlike robust bureaucratic autonomy, such as that described by Daniel Carpenter (2001, 2010; see footnote 4), conditional autonomy is highly contingent and can quickly fracture if the surrounding environment changes. The long-serving chief of the corps, Col. John J. Abert, shaped the opinions of his supposed principals by managing the ideas, information, and proposals directed to them. When faced with challenges, the corps proved to be a flexible organization that adapted its methods to accomplish its preferred ultimate goals using different instruments. In the end, however, the corps' autonomy was threatened when it became involved in the sectional politics surrounding the potential building of a transcontinental railroad line. Once the corps lost several of the conditions supporting its autonomy, its downfall was swift. This article thus joins a recent wave of scholarship highlighting strengths within the early American state by foregrounding the role of the armed forces in statebuilding.

Uniting the States: The First Transcontinental Railroad

One hundred fifty years ago President Abraham Lincoln signed into law the Pacific Railroad Act, launching the phenomenal construction of a 1,776 mi long railroad from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean.

The iron way: railroads, the Civil War, and the making of modern America

Beginning with Frederick Douglass' escape from slavery in 1838 on the railroad, and ending with the driving of the golden spike to link the transcontinental railroad in 1869, this book charts a critical period of American expansion and national formation, one largely dominated by the dynamic growth of railroads and telegraphs. William Thomas brings new evidence to bear on railroads, the Confederate South, slavery, and the Civil War era, based on groundbreaking research in digitized sources never available before. One of the first works to appear in the field of digital history, The Iron Way revises our ideas about the emergence of modern America and the role of the railroads in shaping the sectional conflict. Both the North and the South invested in railroads to serve their larger purposes, Thomas contends. Though railroads are often cited as a major factor in the Union's victory, he shows that they were also essential to the formation of the 'South' as a unified region. He discusses the many - and sometimes unexpected - effects of railroad expansion and proposes that America's great railroads became an important symbolic touchstone for the nation's vision of itself.

Railroad Economies of Scale, Scope, and Density Revisited

The movement of freight on railroads is subject to a number of technological characteristics that make costing of specific traffic a complex process. Among these restrictions are conditions of joint production, economies of scale, scope, and density, and a lack of data on specific expenditures related to individual freight movements. In this paper, an econometric cost model using publicly available data and methodology is developed for the examination of average and marginal costs in the industry. The model is decomposed into individual elasticity estimates for operating parameters to examine economies of scope. Finally, the size of the firm is varied through multiplying the capital stock measurements and estimating the cost behavior as firm capital stock is varied between one-quarter and two times the level of 2005. Results indicate that the railroad industry has effectively exhausted the possible economies of scale but can still gain from economies of density and scope. In addition, there appears to be little economic justification for mergers creating transcontinental railroad systems.

Nature's Northwest: The North Pacific Slope in the Twentieth Century by William G. Robbins and Katrine Barber

 OHQ vol. 113, no. 1 yes, even if the author’s pique is undisguised and his tone, often lilted with biting humor, sometimes conveys a wagging finger of reproach.The length is more justified,though, by the author’s method. It is the revelatory descriptions of individual and often quite personal actions of key actors that carry the narrative. In Railroaded, readers see the developing network of financial schemes and questionable dealings from the viewpoints of major players: Jay Gould, Collis P. Huntington, Leland Stanford, Charles Francis Adams, and many others. The information comes from a deep investigation in manuscript collections that offer personal and business correspondence that amounts to an eavesdropping wiretap on insider collusions. For readers of this journal, White’s portrait of HenryVillard,the German-born financier who controlled the Northern Pacific’s completion during the early 1880s, is especially revealing. White details Villard’s deceitful practices that scrambled railroad development in the Pacific Northwest and drove the Northern Pacific to the brink of collapse, calling him“a superhero of bad management — powerful, daring, able to destroy railroads at a single blow” (p. 217). Describing Villard’s ignominious fall in 1893, as the Northern Pacific went into receivership, White quotes E.L.Godkin’s appraisal of Villard: He has been kicked out of every enterprise he was connected with here, and is universally denounced as a visionary, if not worse, who has made money at the expense of other people. . . . The unfortunate truth is that of six companies of which he was forefront,every one has either gone to smash or depreciated enormously in value, and the losers naturally ask how it is that he has so much? How vain is human greatness! (p. 397). White’s emphasis on the financiers’ machinations keeps Railroaded from devolving into an institutional history, where faceless corporations elide responsibility. The players, White insists, used other people’s money, did so capriciously, and triangulated their deceits by selling an unfounded optimism to the public as they bought cooperation from a willing and aggrandizing political class.To better infuse the story with societal details, the author includes eleven vignettes, short biographies and scenes of social change. After mixing the personal and financial histories of creating the transcontinental railroads,White concludes that we can learn from a clear-eyed accounting of the consequences befalling a nation from unwise decisions,but we can perhaps learn more from contemplating the choices not made,the routes not taken. This account of the building of the transcontinental railroads genuinely alters a stock narrative of western and national history . More than that, it also is an eye-opening cautionary story about the corrosive effect of a co-generative relationship between the power of capital and the structure of government. William L. Lang Portland State University Nature’s Northwest: The North Pacific Slope in the Twentieth Century by William G. Robbins and Katrine Barber The University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 2011. Illustrations, maps, tables, notes, index. 312 pages. $55.00 cloth. $24.95 paper. This is an important book for several reasons. While several histories of the Pacific Northwest already exist, none of their authors concentrates mainly on the region’s twentieth-century history. Traditionally, in fact, the region’s nineteenth-century history received the most attention because it was during that time that its events were most clearly differentiated from those occurring in the rest of the nation. During the twentieth century, the two histories seemed to blend into one national narrative. But by using the Pacific Northwest’s noticeable affinity for nature as their principal organizing  Reviews theme, William G. Robbins and Katrine Barber have given the region’s twentieth-century history the full attention it has long deserved. Even better, Robbins and Barber not only have written an excellent history of Oregon, Washington,and Idaho,the usual components of Pacific Northwest history,but they also have cast a wide net that includes western Montana and British Columbia. Their inclusion of Canadian history is of especially great significance because it involves surmounting the always-challenging task of making meaningful transnational comparisons and contrasts. Hence, their concept of a North Pacific Slope encompassing both western Canada and the American...

Iron Horse and Gilded Age

[O]ne of the most distinguished historians of our time, Richard White, has written a book [ Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America ] about an epic story of the First Gilded Age: the building of the transcontinental railroads between the 1860s and the 1890s. From the moment the first of these railroads was finished at Promontory Summit, Utah, in 1869, these immense undertakings became an American obsession, eliciting both marvel and anger.

History of Ecological Sciences, Part 38B: Naturalists Explore North America, 1838–1850s

History of Ecological Sciences, Part 38B: Naturalists Explore North America, 1838–1850s

On the History of the Pony Express and Extending Its Operation into the Telegraph Era

The Pony Express was a horseback mail delivery endeavor that lasted from April 1860 until October 1861. The route extended from Saint Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California, and then on to San Francisco, California, by boat. With letters sealed in a mail pouch, riders covered the 1,966-mi route in no more than 10 days. The fast pace was sustained by exchanging horses every 10 mi and riders every 75 to 100 mi. The Pony Express ceased operations amid huge financial losses and the completion of the transcontinental telegraph. This study reviews its history and asks whether a healthy, solvent Pony Express could have survived competition from the telegraph until completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869. A trinomial logit model compares the probabilities of choosing between standard mail, Pony Express, and telegraph. Market shares of 96.5% for standard mail, 2% for telegraph, and 1.4% for Pony Express are estimated on the basis of their 1861 prices and other historical information. Lowering the Pony Express rate from $1 to $0.30 per ½ oz would have doubled the market share, and increased the annual number of letters from 104,000 to 208,000. But the $62,400 earnings would have failed to meet the operating costs, and raising the rate would have meant a loss of customers. The Pony Express, therefore, would not have withstood competition from the telegraph. It would have had to shift its service market to package delivery, probably early on, to have sustained the operation. The Pony Express is nonetheless considered responsible for advancing transportation and communication in the United States.

Lincoln Looks West: From the Mississippi to the Pacific by Richard W. Etulain

 OHQ vol. 112, no. 1 reviews Lincoln Looks West: From the Mississippi to the Pacific by Richard W. Etulain Southern Illinois Press, Carbondale, 2010. Maps, bibliography, index. 273 pages. $34.95 cloth. PresidentAbraham Lincoln’s greatness rests on his leadership of the American Union through the Civil War crucible of nationhood.As such, Lincoln is a quintessential man of the North. In Lincoln Looks West, however, Richard W. Etulain presents Lincoln’s life in politics, his foremost ideological commitments,and many of his presidential objectives differently — as emblems of a “man of the West.” Etulain makes this case forcefully in an extended introduction to nine essays by noted Lincoln scholars. Each explores a different facet of Lincoln’s political life in relationship to the U.S. West. Three of the nine essays appear here for the first time, while six were published previously. Ranging widely, the chapters examine Lincoln’s opposition to the war with Mexico (Mark Neely), the western roots of his antislavery views (Michael Green), the politics of Nevadan statehood (Earl Pomeroy ), territorial patronage (Vincent Tegeder, Deren Earl Kellogg, Robert Johannsen, and Paul Zall), Lincoln’s struggle with the territorial government of Mormon Utah (Larry Schweikart), and Indian policy (David A. Nichols). The book closes with a fine bibliographical essay. Etulain’s introductory essay is the gem of the book. In sixty-eight pages, he recounts Lincoln’s political career from the 1830s to his assassination, casting Lincoln as a western politician driven by western concerns,committed to policies aimed at developing the trans Mississippi West and integrating it into the Union. To this end, Etulain divides Lincoln’s career into three stages. In the first (from the 1830s to his 1846 election to Congress), Etulain argues, Lincoln came to identify himself self consciously as a“man of the West,”committed to the Whig party and its vigorous program of federally subsidized “internal improvements” — a transportation and communication infrastructure that would knit the West into a continental market society and people the public domain with white settlers. The second period runs from Lincoln’s entry into Congress to his inauguration as President in 1861. During these years, Lincoln added to his Whig nationalism an enduring opposition to the spread of slavery into the West. He became a national political figure through his opposition to Douglas’s 1854 Kansas-Nebraska legislation, his efforts to create the Republican Party in 1856, and most importantly, the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. All the while, Etulain holds, Lincoln’s stature as an opponent of slavery’s expansion was grounded in the future president’s Western-based vision of a continental nation based on, in the words of historian Eric Foner, “free soil, free men, and free labor.” The third stage encompassed Lincoln’s presidency. As Etulain presents it, Lincoln was a western as much as northern president, pushing for the transcontinental railroad, Morrill Act, Homestead Act, a Department of Agriculture — old Whig objectives carried to success by the wartime Republican Party. In the darkest days of the war,Etulain emphasizes, President Lincoln devoted enormous amounts of time and energy to the details of patronage appointments in western territories to the end of building an enduring Republican Party; he was, Etulain avers, the “virtual founding father of western politics”(p.31).Similarly,the President immersed himself in Indian policy in New Mexico,the Indian Territory (Oklahoma), and Minnesota even as the war reached a criti-  Reviews cal point in the fall of 1862, with the Battle of Antietam and issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation. The nine essays in Lincoln Looks West elaborate on these themes, although, not surprisingly ,individual essays sometimes disagree on specific points and sometimes are at odds with the theme of Lincoln as a self conscious “western man.” One example is found in Earl Pomeroy’s classic essay on the politics of Nevadan statehood, in which he explores whether the President pushed Nevada’s entry into the Union to shore up the Republican vote in the 1864 election (as Etulain and Tegeder argue) or (as Pomeroy holds) to establish a model and precedent for the postwar reconstruction of the South. A similarly discordant note is found in Robert Johannsen’s...

The Aesthetics of Delay: eteam and International Airport Montello

The small high-desert community of Montello in the far northeastern corner of Nevada is an unlikely site for an international airport. Once a passenger stop and operations center on the transcontinental railroad, a part of the economic and territorial expansion of the West, Montello today has little more than two bars, a small motel, and a gas station along State Highway 233. Freight trains still rumble through town but have not stopped in decades. The population of Montello, a matter of conjecture in this unincorporated community, hovers somewhere between sixty-five and several hundred. Jobs, to the extent they exist at all, come from a nearby ranching operation or from fifty-five miles away in West Wendover, an always-down-on-its-luck gambling town along Interstate 80 at the Nevada-Utah border. With little reason to exist, Montello long ago adopted the barroom motto of “the town that refuses to die.” Several years ago, perhaps as a result of this perseverance, Montello became home to the International Airport Montello, a land-use experiment begun in 2004 by eteam, the New York-based artitsts Hajoe Moderegger and Franziska Lamprecht, working in collaboration with the people of Montello.