How Railroads took the ‘Wild’ out of the West

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Railroads in recent years, grumbled the journal Forest and Stream, had “sought eagerly for the transportation of meat and hides from the regions where they were killed by hunters, forgetting that by thus encouraging the slaughter of this game, they were cutting off one of the greatest attractions to passenger traffic over their lines.” For that reason the Northern Pacific Railway ceased quoting rates for wild meat in the late 1880s. The northern transcontinental had come to realize almost too late that for many of its long-distance passengers the fish and game of the region served by the railroad was an important attraction. “This large and ever increasing class of travelers are well-to-do people, who have money to spend, and are thus desirable patrons of the road.” If the wild animals they enjoyed seeing from train windows disappeared, warned Forest and Stream, such passengers would likely travel across the West over another railroad having better scenery that included wild animals (presumably for viewing and not shooting).

All across the West, railroads made it possible for pioneer settlers to grow grain, fruit and vegetables and to raise sheep and cattle in areas once located beyond the limits of human perception and to ship even the most perishable commodities by train to once impossibly distant mark ets. W. Milnor Roberts, chief engineer for the Northern Pacific Railroad, observed in 1878 that farmers living near Colfax, Washington, could haul grain by wagon to steamboat landings on the Snake River, but “the transportation charges by the time it reaches Portland or Astoria will nearly equal its value, leaving a very small margin for the farmer.” Asking a farmer in that quandary “if he wants a railroad” was like asking any candidate for political office if he wanted to be elected. “Everybody—men, women, and children—want a railroad.” A “bright intelligent lady” assured Roberts that if the Northern Pacific would construct a line connecting eastern Washington farms with Puget Sound ports “it would pay more than two hundred percent profit every year.”

In return for all the profit agrarians expected to earn following the long-awaited arrival of railroad tracks, farm and ranch families across the West must have anticipated that they would soon be able to peruse the illustrated catalogs issued by merchandisers like Sears, Roebuck and Company in distant Chicago and order the latest fashions in dresses and suits, bigger and more efficient farm implements, or whatever else tickled their fancy, and have these prized purchases delivered in a timely manner to the nearest railroad station. And they were right. By the end of the 19 th century the railroads had created a nationwide mark et that made it possible for ranch families in Wyoming or New Mexico to dress in clothes every bit as modern as those found in the emporiums of East Coast cities

Ironically, railroads well into the first half of the 20 th century would uphold and promote their version of the “Wild West” to tourists contemplating vacations in the West, but the “Wild” of the railroad tourist’s West was contrived and controlled in a way to add a safe measure of excitement without posing any real risk or hardship. In fact, everything about the many ways railroads transformed the American West was intended to eliminate the wild and unpredictable in both nature and human behavior—and the sober-minded civil engineers and their mathematical calculations, the thick books of employee rules, the bureaucratic operating procedures, and the standardized methods of timekeeping all testify to the railroads’ desire to keep it that way. Ww

Carlos A. Schwantes, St. Louis Mercantile Library Endowed Professor of Transportation and the West, is the author of Going Places: Transportation Redefines the Twentieth-Century West, Long Day’s Journey: The Steamboat and Stagecoach Era in the Northern West and Railroad Signatures Across the Pacific Northwest. His book (co-authored with James Ronda) The West the Railroads Made is due out in 2008. Also suggested for further reading: Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863-1869, by Stephen E. Ambrose; and The Transportation Frontier: Trans-Mississippi West, 1865-1890, Oscar Osburn Winther.

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