During the 1850s and 1860s, when steamboats and stagecoaches dominated long-distance travel across the West, their schedules varied according to the season. Not only did cold weather and ice halt river travel for months at a time, but ice and drifting snow in high mountain passes greatly slowed the pace of overland stagecoaches and their vital cargoes of mail, or stopped them literally in their tracks. In the new railroad era, steam locomotives and their passenger and freight trains would roll with impunity across frozen waterways and through the icy mountain passes of the West to reach their destinations regardless of the weather, and generally they would do so according to the printed schedule.

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Railroads used a combination of technology and muscle to triumph over nature. They dispatched snowplows of various types and armies of shovel-wielding workers to clear the tracks and keep trains moving. Only infrequently did their best efforts fail. On the rare occasion when railroads of the West lost a battle with Old Man Winter, their temporary plight gladdened the hearts of local journalists eager to write maudlin human-interest stories about snowbound trains and passengers marooned in the high Sierras, Rockies or Cascades. With proper equipment on the job and hard work, there was no reason why winter passenger train schedules should be significantly different from summer.

Further, with steady and consistent service no previous mode of transportation had been able to provide, railroads transformed or eliminated many seasonal variation once ingrained in Americans since birth. Only consider the nation’s dietary habits. Fresh oranges and grapefruit, for instance, were once unimaginable luxuries on the breakfast table, and especially for residents of the High Plains and mountain West during winter months. Yet, beginning with the widespread use of refrigerated cars beginning in the 1880s, all kinds of fruit—from apples and cherries to lemons and peaches—sped east from the newly planted orchards in southern California and the Pacific Northwest to help provide wholesome and nutritious meals for families in places as distant as Iowa and New Hampshire. Perishable cargoes traveled inside insulated cars that protected them from the ill effects of winter chill and summer heat. In time, seasonal variations meant no more to the railroads of the West than differences between night and day, which the carriers had early resolved by adding massive headlights to their locomotives.

Wherever railroads chose to run their tracks, they transformed the West by naming (or renaming) what they perceived to be boundless and undefined space. Some of the names recall the supremacy of a generation of western railroad builders, promoters, financiers and executives, all working tirelessly to transform the landscape of the Wild West. For example, Billings, Mont., was named for Frederick Billings, one of the many Northern Pacific founding fathers; and Avery, Idaho, was named for Avery Rockefeller, and investor in the Milwaukee Road. Railroads claiming the right to inscribe names of their own choosing across the West made sense only because many parts of the region appeared far younger historically to the Euro-Americans doing the naming (or renaming from an Indian perspective) than comparable lands in the Great Lakes or Mississippi River country. Vast portions of the modern American West were, in effect, the children of railroad parents who did so much to shape and transform them, and in many cases that included naming the land and its distinctive features.

When railroads first appeared in states such as Pennsylvania, Maryland, New York, and Massachusetts during the 1830s, the builders wedged their tracks and support structures into an existing landscape composed of farms and towns, some of them already generations old. Montana, by contrast, was the last of the lower 48 states and territories to hear the whistle of a steam locomotive, that ubiquitous sound of modernity. That auditory milestone did not occur until 1880, the year the first tracks entered the still sparsely settled territory. By then half a century had passed since the first steam locomotives thrilled residents of the East Coast.

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