The Great Railroad Revolution

by Christian Wolmar

  Such extravagant construction as the Hoosac Tunnel was very much the exception on American railroads, especially in the East, where consolidation became the watchword. For example, in New England, the dozens of railroads started to amalgamate, and by 1900 just six major concerns controlled all but 20 percent of the local network. In 1872, the 131-mile-long New York, New Haven & Hartford was created by merging the New York & New Haven and the Hartford & New Haven. By the turn of the century, it had become a system boasting more than 2,000 miles of track, mostly through acquisition rather than construction. Ironically, this type of consolidation arguably did more to improve the experience of passengers traveling on the railroads than the construction of so many new, disconnected, and—by now—often superfluous lines. Whereas before the Civil War there had been some measure of unification across the rail network in the East, for most passengers long journeys remained an ordeal, involving several changes between lines and overnight stays at hotels that, according to contemporary reports, were rather better than the restaurants providing lunch at the enforced stops. After the war, however, the major trunk lines of the East started to establish through services by building connecting links and taking over neighboring railroads.

  There had been no direct rail service between New York and Washington, as passengers had to change trains at Philadelphia, until the war, when at last through services to the capital started to operate. The New York Times, which had been a persistent critic of the poor service between these two major cities, complained that Philadelphia “has not entirely outgrown the village peevishness manifested at Erie.”9 It was only when the railroad companies found a route bypassing Philadelphia that through trains to Washington were made possible.

  There were improvements, too, for passengers heading west to Chicago via Pittsburgh. From 1869 they no longer had to change there because the Pennsylvania took over the Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne & Chicago Railroad, which had previously insisted that passengers travel in its rolling stock through to the Windy City. However, it would take several years before the timetable was sorted out to guarantee a through service for all Pennsylvania passengers. The routes between major cities immediately became so lucrative that they attracted keen competition for patronage that did not always work to the benefit of passengers. The rival New York Central soon established its own through route, acquiring the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern to take its trains between Buffalo and Chicago. Within a few years, there were four main lines between the two cities, as the Erie took over the Atlantic & Great Western, which fortunately used the same six-foot gauge, whereas the Baltimore & Ohio, unable to find a suitable acquisition, built its own line across northern Ohio and Indiana to reach Chicago in 1874.

  These developments were part of a remarkable pattern of expansion of the railroads of the Midwest, where the rapid pace of growth before the war actually accelerated in its aftermath. The Granger railroads were progressing ever farther westward into the upper Midwest area but needed to offer inducements to attract settlers, without which they served little purpose. The railroads were rapidly connecting the Midwest with the West through building across the plains, where railroad construction was at its most feverish.

  The idea of encouraging settlers through the construction of a railroad was not new. The Illinois Central, which had difficulty attracting labor, let alone passengers, pioneered the idea in the 1850s with newspaper advertisements and what were called “fairyland pamphlets” depicting idealized versions of rural farmhouses. The ploy worked, with Illinois quickly becoming a destination for immigrants. After the Civil War, with several western railroads vying for settlers, far more sophisticated methods were used to induce people to “go west.” In 1870, the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy10 (known as “the Burlington”) employed a land agent, one Edward Edginton, in the port town of Liverpool in northwestern England, from which many emigrants set off on their journeys to the New World. Edginton’s job was to hand out leaflets and talk to the emigrants on their ships before departure and the boardinghouses where they lodged, extolling the virtues of settling in parts of Iowa and Nebraska served by the railroad.

  Soon, Europe was flooded with railroad company agents. By the early 1880s, the Northern Pacific alone employed nearly a thousand of them. Most railroad agents operated in the UK, but they were also scattered through Scandinavia, Germany, and Switzerland. The railroads flooded European newspapers with advertisements offering cheap land for sale and even created their own newspapers in order to promote these deals. Immigrants arriving at New York were targeted by railroad company agents who would approach newly arrived fortune seekers as soon as they disembarked. Then there was old-fashioned PR. Journalists were plied with fine wines and Havana cigars to produce articles extolling the virtues of settling in the West. The companies produced false rainfall statistics for the areas they were promoting and issued pseudoscientific advice suggesting, for example, that “rain followed the plow,” because the moisture released from the soil when it was churned over would later fall as rain. Possibly the most outlandish effort was made by one Burlington agent who organized a trip to America for a buffalo hunt led by “Buffalo Bill” Cody. The sixty lucky Englishmen chosen for the excursion were then expected to return to their homeland to convince their compatriots to settle. Even the fine arts were co-opted to lure settlers west. The Burlington commissioned an artist to produce eighty-five huge canvases of views of the areas to be settled, which were exhibited in a lecture tour around Britain under the bizarre title of Sylphorama of America by Sea, River, and Railroad.

  The world portrayed in much of this publicity material was far divorced from the harsh reality. The promoters tended to exaggerate the attributes of these remote parts of the United States, many of which were actually difficult to farm because of their dry climates and cold winters. No mention was made of the fierce blizzards that were a regular feature of the midwestern winter or the less regular but even more disastrous plagues of grasshoppers. The railroad companies, and indeed the settlers, were fortunate that, with a couple of exceptions, the 1870s and 1880s were a wet period when farms could be cultivated without the need for irrigation. However, many settlers were to suffer appalling privation in the last decade of the nineteenth century, when the Great Plains suffered one of its periodic bouts of drought, destroying their crops and forcing them to slaughter their cattle prematurely. By then, they had realized the railroad companies had conned them.

  On the other hand, not all the publicity produced by the railroads presented the West as a land of milk and honey. The railroad companies did not always hide the fact that conditions were likely to be harsh and that they wanted people prepared to work on farms, not clerks or even doctors and architects. In this respect, at least, the publicity material was, at times, brusquely honest: “Clerks ought not to think of coming unless they have thoroughly made up their minds to lay down pen and paper and take up spade or plough.”11 This honesty was partly motivated out of self-interest, as the railroads were keen to deter the destitute and the feckless, who would not be able to afford to purchase the land and were likely to fail as farmers. Ideally, from the railroads’ point of view, they needed people who could afford the $26.80 fare from New York to Omaha, Nebraska, even if it used up their life savings. Few were able to afford the return fare, which was deliberately set far higher by the railroad. In any case, not many would have been willing to repeat the experience of a transcontinental train ride. Conditions on these trains were appalling, with the immigrants, who were treated as freight, stuffed ninety to a coach fitted only with hard wooden seats. The settlers also needed sufficient funds to put down deposits on the land that the railroad companies had been granted for the construction of the lines. The Burlington, for example, offered land at $12 per acre in Iowa and at just $8 per acre in Nebraska. The company made loans available for the purchase of further acreage at a rate of 6 percent interest, which was cheaper than other railroads, which normally charged 10 percent.

  Of course, it wa
s not just the sophisticated recruitment methods of the railroads that attracted the immigrants. Conditions back home were often a spur to emigration. Many were eager to leave the Old World and had good reason for doing so, particularly the Irish, who started arriving in the mid-1840s, fleeing the Great Famine. Scandinavia also experienced a series of disastrous harvests in the mid-nineteenth century. In particular, Sweden, with terrible weather and then an impoverished backwater rather than the affluent country it is today, endured a particularly severe famine in the mid-1860s that drove many people to leave. Then there were the wars. The political upheavals caused by the 1870–1871 Franco-Prussian War and the subsequent rise of the militaristic Bismarck induced large numbers of Germans to head for the New World. The Burlington was quick to send agents to Alsace-Lorraine—annexed to Germany following the Franco-Prussian War—to lure its defeated and disgruntled inhabitants away from the newly imposed German yoke. The railroad company agents’ skill at targeting persecuted minorities reaped the richest dividend with the Mennonites, the most successful group of settlers to be recruited. They were a religious sect in czarist Russia who had enjoyed special exemption from military service, as it was against their nonviolent principles. When this immunity was abolished by the czar in 1870, they needed little persuasion to emigrate to the United States when Carl Schmidt, a German-speaking agent of the Santa Fe, discovered their plight. Schmidt entered Russia disguised as a farm-machinery salesman and visited thirty villages with the aim of convincing the Mennonites that the Kansas plains offered wheat-growing land just as good as that of the Russian steppes. He made no mention of locusts and blizzards and dismissed the threat from Native Americans. Despite discovering these difficulties, the Mennonites were delighted with what they found when they arrived in the Midwest.

  Inspired by Schmidt’s salesmanship, thirty-four families from the Crimea turned up in Kansas in the summer of 1874. To the locals, they were a strange bunch, tall and thin, clad in Russian blouses and billowing trousers, who seemed particularly ill-suited to the rigors of farming the dry land. How wrong the skeptics were. The Mennonites, who incidentally had a long tradition of emigration, did everything right, unlike many of the other groups of settlers. They had cashed in their belongings and smuggled out gold with which they immediately purchased some of the railroad’s land. They had also brought with them jars of wheat seed, a variety called “Turkey Red,” which was particularly well suited to the local climate. As a result, they proved to be the best-adapted settlers, so sought after that railroad land agents began competing with one another to attract them. Indeed, in one instance, an unprincipled Burlington railroad agent in Atchison, Kansas, persuaded a group to board his train rather than the Santa Fe service that had been specially provided to pick them up. “I stole the whole bunch except less than a dozen unmarried young men, and carried them all by special train, free, to Lincoln, Nebraska,” he later boasted. Eventually, as many as fifteen thousand Mennonites emigrated to Kansas. Those left behind suffered under the czar, with many being sent to Siberia, where wheat cannot be grown. Dee Brown notes the irony that a century later, “the descendants of those who came from Russia to the Great Plains in the 1870s were growing wheat in the 1970s for export to Russia, shipping millions of bushels to ports on the railroads that had brought them to America.”12

  Attracting men was the easy bit. But without women, the settlements would soon die out, and so the phenomenon of the mail-order bride, made possible by the railroads, emerged. There were very limited numbers of respectable women available for marriage in the West. The daughters who arrived with their parents or were born there were mostly far too young for the men who had come in search of work. Among them were a few schoolteachers, but nowhere near enough to satisfy demand. There was no shortage of prostitutes, but for marriage the men began to seek “mail-order brides.” So, in a precursor to online dating, men would advertise in eastern newspapers for a wife, and, similarly, eastern women who might be seeking a different way of life would send pictures and descriptions to the western newspapers. Often, a group of women would travel together to a western town, where “socials” would be arranged at which the men and women could mingle and become acquainted, rather like an early version of speed dating. Invariably, these women would travel west on the railroads. They would be met at the station either by the specific man they had come to marry (the true mail- order bride) or by a local organizer, who would house them and arrange for the socials.

  The railroads in the West made concentrated efforts to attract settlers because it was their only hope of salvation. Building railroads in the West was “a cutthroat business at the very best,” which came at a heavy price. Many projects never saw the light of day, and those that did were invariably constrained by a lack of cash. In truth, the railroads were not built to satisfy any existing need or demand. Far too many railroads in the West, especially the proliferation of transcontinentals, were built too quickly. One after the other, the resulting businesses, fed by generous subsidies, were for the most part not viable but dependent on a diet of state funding and the deployment of much sharp practice: “These Western railroads very often should not have been built when and how they were. Their costs over the long term, and the short term, exceeded their benefits.”13

  The railroads in the West faced other difficulties, ranging from disease and drought to attacks by Indians whose territory was gradually, with the permission of a pliant Congress, being further invaded. The workers building the lines often needed the protection of a militia, which could be either the US regular army or, more likely, a bunch of well-armed mercenaries. It was not only the Indians who attacked the railroads. There were internecine fights, too, most notably over the right to build through the Raton Pass, the only feasible route from Colorado down to New Mexico, and subsequently over another key route, the Royal Gorge of the Arkansas River. Both the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe (usually known as the Santa Fe) and the Denver & Rio Grande Railroads wanted to use the Raton Pass, and in theory there should have been plenty of room for the two lines, but, rather than negotiate, both railroad companies hired militias consisting of an unprepossessing bunch of hustlers and gunslingers. Legendary cowboy figures like Marshal William Barclay “Bat” Masterson of Dodge City and the notorious gambling gunfighter-dentist John Henry “Doc” Holliday were enlisted by the Santa Fe, which recruited a team of seventy gunmen, whereas the Rio Grande’s force at one point numbered two hundred men. The Santa Fe got there first in February 1878 and held the pass, and in the event managed to gain control without a shot being fired in the first stage of this “railroad war.” The dispute then shifted to the Royal Gorge, through which both railroads sought to lay tracks in order to access a key mining region. Even though the matter was going through the courts, a series of minor battles ensued, in one of which two Santa Fe men were killed, and at one point several Santa Fe train crews, working on Rio Grande tracks, were set upon and beaten: “For several months both sides maintained small armies in the field, spying on each other, committing acts of sabotage, kidnapping public officials, cutting telegraph wires, and diverting Colorado very much.”14 Eventually, a peace agreement was thrashed out two thousand miles away in Boston in February 1880, giving the Rio Grande, which had won the court case, rights over the Royal Gorge. Legend has it that the gun skills developed by the Santa Fe men during the two-year war later prevented a train wreck. Charles Watlington, the freight conductor of a train stalled by a wash out,15 was running up the tracks to prevent the following passenger service from smashing into it. The driver failed to see him, but Watlington, remembering his shooting skills, pulled out his gun and fired into the brake air hose between two passenger cars, which automatically brought the passenger train screeching to a halt.

  Apart from trying to shoot its rivals, the Rio Grande was a pioneering railroad in another, less violent, respect. It was the first major narrow-gauge railroad in the United States and would be the harbinger of a short-lived fashion for building these cheap
er railroads. Its tracks were constructed to the three-foot gauge rather than the standard four feet and eight and a half inches because its promoters realized that would reduce the costs dramatically in the hilly but sparsely populated terrain of Colorado. The narrower gauge not only saves on construction, as the right-of-way is smaller, but also allows cheaper and lighter rails, cars, and locomotives to be used. One calculation suggested that the first 25-mile section of the line was built at a cost of just twenty thousand dollars per mile, compared with estimates of ninety thousand for a standard-gauge railroad. According to the Encyclopedia of North American Railroads, “The Denver & Rio Grande ‘baby railroad’ captured everyone’s imagination and seemed to ignite the narrow-gauge explosion.”16 The Rio Grande eventually extended to 2,000 miles, and within fifteen years 11,700 miles of narrow-gauge railroad had been built across America, in all but a handful of states. The advantage was that narrow gauge, an idea that had been copied from the UK, where the Ffestiniog Railway in North Wales had been completed in the 1860s, allowed many towns and villages to have a railroad at a cost that made it economically feasible. These narrow-gauge lines served a variety of freight purposes, too: there were farm-to-market lines, which were mostly killed off by the trucks; forestry railroads, which were abandoned when the trees were all chopped down; and mining railroads, which disappeared once the mines were exhausted. The lack of connection with other railroads, and the limitation on the weight of freight that could be carried on them, resulted in the rapid waning of the narrow-gauge lines, and by 1920 all but 4,000 miles had either been abandoned or been converted to standard gauge. The Rio Grande, however, lived on until after the Second World War and 45 miles of the line survive as a scenic heritage railroad.