How Railroads took the ‘Wild’ out of the West

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Lengthy sets of rules governed train operations—and even employees’ leisure hours off the job. No railroad company tolerated a drunken employee endangering the safety of passengers or fellow employees. For example, “the use of intoxicating liquors and frequenting of saloons is prohibited,” warned the Oregon Railway & Navigation Company railroad rulebook in 1881. Any employee “appearing in a state of intoxication” was to be dismissed immediately. Conversely, loyal employees who avoided intoxicating beverages received preferential treatment in promotion. No ambitious railroader dared to spend a leisurely evening at a boisterous saloon, one of the institutions synonymous with the Wild West. The railroads, which saw themselves as “civilizers” of the wild frontier by imposing industrial order and uniformity in place of unpredictability both in human behavior and in nature, took justifiable pride in engineering achievements that ensured efficient, habitual and safe operations of their trains year around.

A Matter of Time

In the fall of 1883 a group of well dressed ladies and gentlemen gathered with much fanfare in the wilds of Montana Territory. In their stylishness and cool elegance they looked conspicuously out of place. Some had traveled from as far as England, the Netherlands, and Germany to this isolated patch of sagebrush and sand on the banks of the Clark Fork River, and they had done so willingly. Nearby stood a large sign that read “ Lake Superior 1,198 miles / Puget Sound 847 miles.” It reminded visitors that they had assembled almost literally in the middle of nowhere.

Guests of the Northern Pacific Railroad had traveled to Gold Creek aboard five luxury trains to witness the driving of a last spike that mark ed the formal opening of the first transcontinental rails linking the Great Lakes and Mississippi Valley with Puget Sound and the Pacific Ocean. After the loud band music, the flowery oratory, and the last sledgehammer blows drove a golden spike into place, the Glittering Ones reboarded their special trains and left Gold Creek, most of them never to return to Montana. The day had been rich in symbolism. For one moment the old Wild West popularly associated with Indians, fur trappers and pioneer settlers stood face to face with the new West of high finance, nationwide mark ets and rapid advances in communication and transportation.

A little more than two months later in 1883, on another day rich in symbolism, North Americans collectively reset their clocks and watches to standard time, and like the symbolism of business moguls driving a golden spike in the wilds of Montana, the new system of timekeeping was an unadorned statement of railroad power. Our present time system was invented to resolve the confusion caused for the railroads of North America by dozens of local time standards—hundreds, in fact. Time back in the days of trail travel to Oregon and California needed only be measured casually by noting the position of the sun or by mark ing off each passing day. Every spring in the 1840s and 1850s individuals and families traveled west by wagon train, leaving the familiar Missouri Valley and rolling slowly across the lush grasses of the Great Plains. Their collective goal was to reach Golden California or fertile Oregon by September or October before snowfalls blocked mountain passes. The Donner Party resorted to cannibalism because it lost the seasonal race to the West Coast and became trapped by deep snow in the Sierras during the winter of 1846-47.

Before the fall of 1883 when the railroads created standard time, local variations prevailed throughout the West, and in most places approximate time was good enough to meet the demands of daily life. Minutes seldom seemed to matter. On June 17, 1866, to cite one example, a frontier newspaper, the Idaho World, chose to remind readers how communities of the West reckoned the passing hours during the era innocent of railroad regularity, an era in which idiosyncratic and imprecise timekeeping served as a metaphor for a simpler, preindustrial age: “The difference in time between Idaho City and New York is about two hours and forty minutes; between San Francisco and this place about thirty-five minutes. When it is 12 o’clock at Idaho City it is about twenty minutes to 3 o’clock in New York and twenty-five minutes past 11 o’clock in San Francisco.”

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