American novelist Marcia Davenport wanted to discover for herself the Wild West. The problem was that her quest for that West took place only in 1932, a few decades too late, many Americans must have thought. That year the wildest encounter for most people would be grappling with economic gloom and doom. Davenport, however, did find her Wild West and wrote about it in Good Housekeeping magazine in an article she titled "Covered Wagon—1932."

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"[I] wanted adventure, or whatever semblance of it could be had in the year 1932," she wrote. "So, of course, I flew." Davenport believed that to cross the United States from Los Angeles to New York "prosaically by rail was to be cheated." She explained that it "made no sense for me to sit for days in big plush armchairs, tended by troops of expert servitors, eating and drinking delicacies, looking for ways to consume one's ennui." Instead of the steady "hum of the safe steel rails," Davenport embarked on a journey that for her invoked the romance of "Oh, Susanna!" gone to Oregon by covered wagon "with a banjo on my knee."

It required four separate flights to make the transcontinental journey. On the segment from Salt Lake City, United forwarded the eight passengers aboard a lumbering trimotor biplane that followed the Overland route "made dear by song, verse, and story, the route of the ox trains, the Forty-niners, the stagecoaches, the pony express." On the way to Cheyenne, bad weather forced Davenport's plane to make an unscheduled landing at a U.S. government airmail emergency field called Parco, Wyo. the site of "a beacon tended by a man and his wife and his daughter who lived in a little woolly-western shack on the edge of the field."

At this isolated airfield the passengers waited out the tempest. After a restless night of little sleep, the group flew east again the next day only to be forced by dense fog to make a second emergency landing, this time in Laramie. For Davenport, all such trouble seemed to serve as a happy reminder of a time when the unpredictable nature of travel across the West made every journey a memorable adventure, but many years earlier, the railroads had taken the "Wild" out of the West and made long-distance travel safe, predictable, and hence to adventure-minded travelers like Davenport, boring.

The Transformers

Like a skilled magician, the railroads of the 19 th century had transformed America in ways that awed and dazzled onlookers. "The iron arms" of the railroad, observed Charles and Henry Adams in 1871, "have been stretched out in every direction; nothing has escaped their reach, and the most firmly established institutions of man have proved under their influence as plastic as clay." Perhaps in no other part of the United States was the power of railroads to transform as well as create afresh more visible than in its wildest West (beginning with the first transcontinental railroad in 1869). "Railroads have been built, and the means of water communication have been extended, the result of which already has been the redemption and occupation of rich areas from the primitive wilderness," boasted an 1883 publication devoted to settlement of the Pacific Northwest. "Within the brief time since these enterprises began, the advancement of the country has been everywhere apparent, and what has been already accomplished is simply wonderful."

Railroads of the West excelled at creating industrial order where no pattern of organization existed apart from nature, of being agents of change that essentially tamed the frontier. Consider, for example, how surveyors used precisely calibrated instruments to mathematically quantify the West as never before in terms of curvature, elevation and distance as they staked out prospective railroad lines. The process of transforming the West continued, and even accelerated, once actual railroad operations began. Approximation was no longer good enough in the West the railroads made. Something seemingly so simple as the space between the rails could not vary by more than a fraction of an inch, or the locomotives and cars would derail. Over time, and with occasional prodding from the federal and state regulators, everything from paper thickness to envelope sizes in company offices was standardized within the railroad industry.

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