The World the Railways Made

by Nicholas Faith

  The development of railroads competing with the Mississippi before the Civil War ensured that much of America’s heart-land, which had previously looked towards New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico, instead turned its back on the Mississippi and started to transport its grain to the Atlantic via Chicago and the Great Lakes. During the Civil War that arch-capitalist ‘Commodore’ Vanderbilt, who had made his fortune from steamboats, saw how Confederate control of stretches of the Mississippi had reinforced the trend. Immediately after the war he sold his steamship interests ‘for what they would bring, and began buying railroads despite the fact that his friends warned him that, in his old age, he was wrecking the fruits of a hard and thrifty life’.14

  The shrewd old Commodore also tried to exploit the idea of a rail bridge between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. He failed in Nicaragua, partly because of the transshipment required by his over-complicated plans, but largely because a parallel project, a railway built at immense financial and human cost across the Isthmus of Panama, made a fortune for its promoters in the fifteen years before the Transcontinental railroad was opened across the United States. But the idea has remained valid to this day. In the first years of the twentieth century the great contractor Weetman Pearson, later the first Lord Cowdray, built the Tehuantepec railway across southern Mexico, whose ‘creative originality’, in the words of R. S. Joby, ‘foreshadowed the use of railways as container bridges between oceans in our time’.15

  The railways could compete with water transport even in Germany, the only country to develop its waterway network at the same time as its railways. The River Rhine and its tributaries, flowing past the country’s major industrial centres, provided a means of transport a mere half as expensive as rail transport – water remained the principal means for transporting Ruhr coal more than a short distance. Yet, in Rayner Fremdling’s words, ‘The railway deserves to be labelled the hero of Germany’s industrial revolution … it is … extremely difficult to conceive of growth without railways because the increased use of natural waterways, and above all the construction of canals, was not a viable alternative to a railway system at the time when German economic growth gained its momentum.’16 The two could coexist. In Russia the economic boom engendered by the railways also ensured that the waterways doubled the traffic they carried in the last quarter of the 19th century – a period in which rail freight nearly trebled.

  In France political pressure favoured railway building and the canals were neglected. The turning-point came in 1857, in the midst of the railway boom, and, by no coincidence, the first year in which railways carried more freight than waterways. For in general the canals simply could not cope with the railways’ implacably increasing efficiency. As the original investment was written off so speeds rose and prices fell, by almost a half in Britain and France between the 1840s and the end of the century, by three quarters in the United States. No wonder nearly half of all the 4,468 miles of canals in the United States had been abandoned by 1880 and that few if any of the remainder were profitable.

  * Figures quoted by Patrick O’Brien in his introduction to Transport and Economic Development in Europe 1789–1914. He put the same idea in economic terms ‘static equilibrium analysis cannot deal effectively with the dynamic effects of railways over time.’

  1

  The Railway Regions

  Even railways could not magically transform a barren region. A diamond rush into Bahia province in Brazil promoted the construction of a narrow-gauge railway. The rush subsided before the railway was completed. Nevertheless, as late as the 1960s, ‘toy-like trains, belching clouds of black wood-smoke, today still creep across the seared land on the narrow rails laid without ballast directly onto dirt. The area languished in backwardness. Without a profitable crop like coffee to feed a growing international demand, no railroad could transform this region.’17

  By contrast they were an incomparable instrument in unlocking the wealth of previously inaccessible regions rich in natural resources, agricultural or mineral; and, a natural corollary, in attracting immigrants, usually from the Old World. The lyrical observer quoted below by William Fleming, describing the effect of the Central Argentine Railway on the pampas, could have been writing about the prairies in Canada or the United States or about much of Siberia:

  I have traversed districts which three years ago were wilderness; but a spur of railway has been driven into them, and instantly farming has been started. I saw hundreds of newly-built homesteads – crude and the life harsh, but it was the beginning of great things – and alfalfa has been laid down … cattle were feeding, and wide spaces which previously were sandy and apparently inhospitable were carpeted with the bright green of new wheat.18

  The Central Argentine Railroad attracted thousands of settlers from Italy, the country’s principal source of immigrants. Railways encouraged internal as well as external migration. In France they greatly increased seasonal migrations as well as making it far easier for peasants to escape from rural poverty; waves of Bretons, in particular, emigrated to serve Parisians, mostly as domestic servants or on the city’s public transport system.

  The biggest achievement by a single railway system was the creation of modern Siberia by the Trans-Siberian. Yet, as J. N. Westwood pointed out, Russian railways ‘never entered the national consciousness like they did in America … the railways were not a spontaneous grasping for territory and prosperity as they were in the United States, but a forced growth sponsored by the Tsar and built by foreigners.’19

  The railways’ influence was not confined to Siberia, for those built in Russian Central Asia were also essential instruments of regional development. But the Trans-Siberian transformed the life of half a continent. The migration it induced was on a gigantic scale, the most concentrated in history. Between 1896 and 1913 over 4¾ million emigrants were settled in new regions from all over Russia, mostly to Western Siberia. The results were dramatic. During the first decade of the century, grain exports trebled.

  This unprecedented shift of population was the result of deliberate government initiatives designed to act ‘as a safety-valve to the revolutionary unrest in Russia proper, while at the same time it is establishing a Greater Russia in Siberia, it is the government that leads them out, spoon-feeds them on the way, gives them grants of land and tools to till it with, until they are finally established in their new eastern homes.’20 The land still belonged to the Tsar – as the British journalist, Philips Price, put it, ‘Siberia exhibits perhaps the most extensive scheme of land nationalization in the world.’ But it also had profound social as well as economic effects. For the first time Russian peasants intermarried with those from other ethnic groups, with local Siberians, or with emigrants from other regions.

  The Turkish government copied the efforts of its Russian enemies. The Sultan’s agents even used religious arguments to try and persuade Muslims from all over Southern Russia as well as Anatolia in central Turkey to settle in Cilicia after the railways had enabled the region’s wheat and cotton to reach the Mediterranean coast by rail.

  But the most familiar tale concerns the prairies in the United States and Canada. In fact the colonisation process had started east of the Mississippi well before the Civil War when the Illinois Central, running south from Chicago, set the pattern for all subsequent regional railroad developments. The railroads relied on land grants, a major feature of federal, and sometimes state, policy between the first grant to the Illinois Central in 1850 to the last ‘Pacific’ charter twenty-one years later.

  These looked generous – a checkerboard of alternate strips between ten and twenty miles wide along the tracks. They were naturally perceived differently by radicals, appalled at what they interpreted as the profligacy of corrupt legislative bodies, and by the railroads’ supporters, who asserted that the railways needed the grants for their very existence. Radicals proclaimed that the land went mostly to already-wealthy speculators, boosters that they enabled the settlement of the West by hundreds of thousan
ds of sturdy homesteaders, each with their 160-acre plot. (Until recently the radicals wrote most of the history books, greatly exaggerating the size and, above all, the value of the grants).

  In Argentina a legal limit of 100,000 acres was easily evaded by unscrupulous speculators who cornered most of the new land on offer. But in the United States, where over 150 million acres were involved, there was plenty of room for everybody. Speculators did often exploit ordinary settlers, for everyone was acting from a variety of motives.

  Although the Illinois Central set the pattern, it followed earlier grants of land for canals and war veterans. At first it was considered ‘primarily a land company … and secondarily a railroad company. Its construction was made possible by a mortgage secured on its lands, and the interest charges were paid and the shares bought back by the proceeds from land sales.’21 The transcontinental lines, too, required massive land grants to act as a credit base before they could start to build. The grants proved particularly useful in enticing foreign investors, lured by the supposed value of the Golden West. But shrewder locals, dubious of the value of Western land, preferred to rely on the inherent value and the managerial capacity of the railroads themselves.*

  The railroads usually had to sell off the lands quickly and thus at bargain prices simply to finance construction. Moreover the grants provided only potential income; and, as the promoters of the Central Pacific up from Sacramento into the high Sierras found to their cost, the land could be so mountainous and unattractive that it was worthless. The biggest beneficiaries were the promoters of short lines designed to exploit attractive parcels of land, and the directors and managers of major lines. They bought alternate sections, combined them with the sections granted to their railroads and exploited the combined package with considerable success.

  Investors’ motives were often mixed. In Albert Fishlow’s words, ‘landowners invested in railroads not for the private return the projects earned, but for the indirect transport advantages that ultimately raised his land value. The manufacturer contributed, not for the dividends he received, but for the additional profits he would subsequently earn.’22

  The Canadians also had a long tradition of using ‘Dominion’ (public) lands to encourage settlement and development. But whereas the Americans favoured checkerboard grants, the Canadian grants consisted of unified chunks, designed to provide compact groups of homesteads. As a result the Canadian Pacific Railway was endowed with 25 million acres of Dominion lands, far and away the biggest grant to any single railway in the world. This vast area, as big as England, was integrated with the homesteads occupied by individual settlers far more harmoniously than in the United States. Nevertheless the promoters had a delicate task: they had to persuade potential investors that the land was immensely valuable while at the same time reassuring the politicians and public opinion that it was virtually worthless, if only to preserve the fiction that, as the Prime Minister Sir John Macdonald put it, ‘not a farthing of money will have to be paid by the people of Canada’. But inevitably, ‘as in the United States, so in Canada, railway land subsidies were at first hailed with delight, had their day, served their purpose, and ultimately called forth a widespread popular disapproval.’23

  The railroads required immigrants, as buyers of the land and as tied customers. Jim Hill, creator of the Great Northern, from Duluth to the Pacific, was a firm believer in the idea that a railway through virgin territory, provided only that it was fertile, automatically generated its own traffic. ‘If we build a road across the prairie,’ he said, ‘we will carry every pound of supplies that the settlers want, and we will carry every pound of produce that the settlers wish to sell, so that we will have freight both ways.’

  The Illinois Central began its sales campaign in New England, enticing many internal immigrants to the virgin glades of Illinois. But it ventured further, to Germany and Scandinavia, using distinguished salesmen like Francis Hoffman, a former Lieutenant-Governor of Illinois. He and his fellow-salesmen faced competition from individual states and from Canadian agents, as well as well-founded suspicions derived from unhappy experiences with earlier, unscrupulous salesmen. Moreover the Central lost many Scandinavians, who preferred colder states like Minnesota and Wisconsin. Yet the railroad did succeed in colonising over 1.5 million acres.

  Earlier migrations had been prompted more by states than by railroads, but some of the newer states were largely created by the railroads and naturally relied on them for new inhabitants. They were forced to look abroad because the supply of internal émigrés dried up during the Civil War, though the Northern Pacific had some success in attracting Easterners, especially former soldiers, in the 1870s. Competing railroads deployed their agents at strategic points, in Germany and Scandinavia, at the major ports of entry, notably Boston and New York, and at key railway junctions like Topeka. The Burlington was particularly active in Britain, where its major propaganda weapon was a map showing the Burlington’s lands in the very heart of the United States, lands it grandiloquently termed the ‘Gulf Stream of Migration’.*

  The Santa Fe accepted the challenge from wealthier railroads by the lavish distribution of percentages to a horde of agents backed by promotional literature in German, Dutch, Swedish, French, Danish and Russian. It faced a further problem: it disposed of three million acres in odd-numbered sections for ten miles either side of its tracks, but much of the Kansas section was already settled, so in the end the road received wider strips further west. Among the most professional operators was the Northern Pacific, a route inspired by Henry Villard, himself a German by birth. His agents had to lure immigrants to the Pacific North-West, reachable only by sea from San Francisco until the rail link was completed in 1883.

  The competition was so intense that the Santa Fe made no profit at all from the 100,000 acres it sold to those ideal settlers, the Mennonites. They were Germans settled in the Crimea since the days of Catherine II, but persecuted by Tsar Alexander III and famous equally for their efficient farming and their God-fearing ways. To attract them the Santa Fe had not only to satisfy material demands but also guarantee them exemption from military service.

  But it was the Canadian Pacific which went furthest in actually colonising its lands, deriving its ideas from the St Paul, Minneapolis and Manitoba, a railroad with which the founders had been connected.

  More important than the cash proceeds to the Company was the ability of the settler to buy land at moderate prices, to get it under cultivation without loss of time, and to produce that indispensable commodity for the prosperity of a pioneer economy – an export staple for world markets … the resources of the Company were directed from the outset, not to the manipulation of real estate on a variable market, but to the far sounder interests of settlement and transportation.24

  By 1924, thirty years after it opened, the CPR claimed it had been responsible for the settlement of 55,000 families on thirty million acres of the prairies. A tenth of the land had been improved thanks to the biggest single irrigation project ever undertaken by a railway, or anyone else in the world up to that point, in a scheme by which the railway invested $20 million in 4,000 miles of irrigation canals and ditches.

  But to film-goers the new regions are symbolised, not by irrigation projects, but by a series of images: of a handful of cowboys corralling great herds of cattle through the prairie dust, and guiding them to the railhead. The railways did not create the great cattle trails. They simply spread inexorably along existing routes. The process was set in motion just after the end of the Civil War when a pioneer livestock trader named Joseph McCoy based his entrepot at Abilene, an oasis of rich green grass and plentiful supplies of water, but one which on his arrival was a ‘very small, dead place consisting of about one dozen log huts, low, small, rude affairs, four-fifths of which were covered with dirt for roofing.’25

  Within a few months 35,000 cattle had been driven into this ‘very small, dead place’, and then the further hundred miles north to the railhead of the Kansas Pacifi
c, which in the succeeding years faced considerable problems keeping up with the subsequent surge of traffic. Within a few years observers were overwhelmed, not only by the size of the bovine pilgrimage, but also by its speed, noting that the trains averaged nearly twenty miles an hour, every hour, day and night.

  * See Thomas Cochrane in Journal of Economic History, Supplement X, 1950.

  * Burlingtonia was ‘said to be bounded on the north by the Aurora Borealis, and on the south by the Day of Judgment.’

  2

  The Industries the Railways Created

  Railways brought the whole universe of capitalism to previously self-contained regions. Such regions could never again be self-sufficient, could never retain the introversion characteristic of peasant cultures the world over. Nowhere was this more obvious than in rural France. Eugen Weber26 describes how in Savoy, once the railway arrived in previously isolated valleys like that around Die:

  Buyers appeared for cattle, lavender and in due course fruit from newly developed orchards, chemical fertiliser and superphosphates could reach the narrow valleys and help meet new demands; rye gave way to wheat; comfort replaced grinding poverty. The profound transformation can be dated to the railway’s coming in 1894 and the years immediately following, when the peasants became used to it and learnt how to handle the formalities involved in shipping and receiving merchandise. The outside world, which till then had little bearing on their own, now came in with a rush: skills like writing invoices and bills of lading, counting, and schooling in general acquired concrete meaning as occasions to use them multiplied. It was a story that repeated itself elsewhere.