Rival Rails: The Race to Build America's Greatest Transcontinental Railroad
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In response, Strong’s biggest weapon against Huntington was the same strategy he was pursuing in the East by building an independent line into Chicago. Shrewdly, Strong looked for an opportunity to do the same into Los Angeles. It wasn’t long before he found the perfect acquisition.
The Los Angeles and San Gabriel Valley Railroad was originally chartered in 1883 as a narrow gauge. It laid standard gauge rails instead, however, and eventually ran a line northeast to Pasadena, arriving there on September 11, 1885. Banking on developing agricultural markets, the Los Angeles and San Gabriel then continued eastward to Duarte for a total length of 31 miles.
None of this was particularly easy. Only begrudgingly did the Los Angeles city council grant the road a right-of-way into downtown, and the Southern Pacific extorted exorbitant freight rates to transport the new road’s rails, locomotives, and equipment to its railhead. But the Los Angeles and San Gabriel’s president was J. F. Crank, one of Southern California’s earliest promoters and most determined businessmen.
Early in January 1887, Crank went east to New York in search of expansion capital. Scarcely had he arrived in New York City when Crank received an urgent invitation to visit Washington, DC, from Leland Stanford, who was then representing both the state of California and the greater Southern Pacific interests as a United States senator. Almost simultaneously, Crank received a similar invitation from William Barstow Strong to come to Boston and meet with the Santa Fe’s board of directors. Crank was too prescient a businessman to doubt the topic both men wanted to discuss. The little Los Angeles and San Gabriel Valley Railroad was suddenly a pawn in a contest between two giants.
Having felt the heavy hand of the Southern Pacific in California firsthand, Crank eagerly accepted Strong’s invitation and took the next train for Boston. His railroad’s decision to build to standard gauge was about to pay huge dividends. Within an hour of meeting, Crank and Strong agreed to a “bargain” price for the short line. The exact dollars involved have not been documented, but whatever the amount, Strong was never afraid to spend money for strategic purposes. Crank’s little road was a thriving business in its own right—an 1886 net profit of $46,381 on gross income of $95,318—but most important to Strong, its railhead at Duarte was just 40 miles west of San Bernardino, where the Santa Fe tracks emerged from Cajon Pass.
Strong immediately put construction crews to work to close the gap between San Bernardino and Duarte. Clearly showing that it had been planning ahead, the Santa Fe already owned the right-of-way for a telegraph line between the two towns that helped to speed construction. Less than five months later, on May 31, 1887, Los Angeles welcomed the first Santa Fe train to arrive in town over its own independent tracks. The result was a rate war with the Southern Pacific, the intensity of which even Huntington could not have predicted.8
The Southern Pacific’s arrival in Los Angeles in 1876 had been welcome, but it did not unleash a huge Southern California boom. The population of Los Angeles took the decade from 1870 to 1880 merely to double to 11,183. During the same period, Denver mushroomed from 4,759 to 35,500, and San Francisco grew from 149,473 to 233,950.
Certainly there was no shortage of prospective settlers. Between 1860 and 1890, the population of the United States doubled from 31.5 million to 63 million people. One-third of the increase was fueled by immigration—mostly from European countries. The lack of immigrants to Southern California and its slow population growth stemmed in part from the cost of getting there. For starters, Huntington’s Southern Pacific was not offering any cut-rate deals. Chicago to Los Angeles fares averaged about $130 in the early years—equivalent to about $3,000 in 2008.
Immigrants were lured first to the farm belt of the Midwest and later to the Pacific Northwest and even northern California. In some cases, the Los Angeles Herald was probably correct when it bemoaned that would-be newcomers “say they can purchase homes [elsewhere] for what it would cost them to get here.”
There was also the issue of familiarity. European immigrants and East Coast transplants accustomed to winter weather, forested hills, and abundant water had to be sold on the potential of a different landscape. “It seems almost impossible, by the exercise of any human powers of description,” one Southern Pacific agent observed in 1884, “to bring them [potential immigrants] to a realization of the greater personal comfort, afforded by your equable and salubrious climate, and the additional productiveness and value that climate imparts to the soil on which it rests.”9
But promoters kept singing the praises of warm weather and sunny skies, and after the Santa Fe arrived on the scene to give some rate competition, a new wave of visitors began to ride the rails into Southern California. Most weren’t coming to stay, but they were the advance guard of a growing group of winter visitors. “Like birds of passage,” one resident observed, “the whole flock took wing as soon as the almanac announced that spring had come, leaving only a few to conclude to settle.”
Then in the spring of 1886, with the Santa Fe line complete over Cajon Pass, this seasonal exodus was balanced by a steady flow of incoming settlers throughout the summer. Once the Southern Pacific and the Santa Fe went to war over rates the following winter, the dam burst wide open.
At least one version of the “California for a dollar” story tells of a wild seesaw battle raging back and forth between the rate departments of the two railroads. First the Southern Pacific lowered its first-class ticket to $100. The Santa Fe announced fares for less than $100. As the price for fares between Chicago and California plummeted, each road shaved a few more dollars. Supposedly, on the morning of March 6, 1887, a furious exchange of telegrams found the Santa Fe down to $8 per ticket, to which the Southern Pacific responded with $6. By that afternoon, there were reports of rates as low as $1 per head.
Railroad accountants quickly brought their respective marketing departments to their economic senses. Fares promptly rebounded to $50 for first-class and $40 for second-class tickets, but the publicity accompanying the cry of $1 tickets to California had been heard. No more would the Midwest farmer, the newly arrived European immigrant, or the vacationer looking for a warmer climate think that they could not afford a passage westward.10
The result was that by the summer of 1887, the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe lines were both awash with huge numbers of passengers heading to California—many of whom put down roots and stayed. The flood of newcomers hurrying across the continent was reminiscent of the rush of the forty-niners. Only this time, instead of plodding along behind covered wagons pulled by oxen, these argonauts tossed their belongings into a freight car and rode across the country at twenty-five miles an hour in the comparative splendor of an immigrant-class coach.
Real estate prices in Southern California skyrocketed. Within a year, property transfers “increased from 6,000 to 14,000 and from $10 million to $28 million” in 1886 and then in 1887 reached 33,000 and $95 million. This boom would suffer a temporary bust two years later, but that would not stem the long-term trend. By 1890, the population of Los Angeles had quadrupled to more than 50,000 and a Santa Fe vice president predicted, “people will continue to come here until the whole country becomes one of the most densely populated sections of the United States.”11
Seizing upon this boom, the Santa Fe was not content merely to terminate in downtown Los Angeles. Strong undertook just the sort of local network expansion that Huntington had feared. Separate companies built these lines, but they had one thing in common: They all answered to the dictates of the Santa Fe.
Under the moniker of the San Bernardino and San Diego Railroad, the Santa Fe built a second independent line from San Bernardino into Los Angeles via the town of Riverside and Orange County. Running through the gap between the Chino Hills and the Santa Ana Mountains, this 70-mile leg opened in August 1888.
That same year, what came to be called “the Surf Line” was extended south along the coast to Oceanside and Del Mar and on into San Diego. This was part of the Santa Fe’s plan to mollify San D
iegans, but more important to the railroad’s operations, this leg bypassed the original California Southern route through flood-prone Temecula Canyon. The town of Temecula withered as a result, and when another flood swept down the Santa Margarita in 1891, the original California Southern tracks were not rebuilt.
The Santa Fe also reached out from downtown Los Angeles to the coast. Branch lines were built south to Redondo Beach to gain access to a harbor and west to Santa Monica to compete with the Southern Pacific’s ownership of Senator Jones’s original Los Angeles and Independence. Both of these lines quickly became popular tourist routes to serve the developing ocean-side resorts, and their success was a portent of what the overall tourist trade would soon become to the Santa Fe.
Having reached Los Angeles and broken down the Southern Pacific’s fence around California, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe was poised for the next chapter of its expansion. To be sure, there would be some rough spots in the tracks up ahead, but the proven leadership of Thomas Nickerson and William Barstow Strong had laid a solid financial and geographic foundation that would serve it well come what may.
In the last annual report he authored for the company, that of 1888, Strong wrote: “The history of Western railroad construction for the past quarter of a century has demonstrated that successful results can only be attained by occupying territory promptly, and often in advance of actual business necessity. This was the policy of the Atchison Company from the first,” Strong insisted. “It led the way. It built, not upon assured returns of profit, but upon a faith which time has abundantly vindicated—that the great Western and South-western regions of the country were rich in possibilities and that the company which first occupied the territory would reap the first and greatest rewards.”12
At the end of 1888, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe owned, operated, or controlled 7,706 miles of railroad—much of it in first-class condition. The little railroad that first steamed out of Topeka had become a corporate powerhouse in America’s transcontinental sweepstakes. About the only thing that hadn’t changed since it laid its first rails in 1869 was that Cyrus K. Holliday was still on its board of directors. “Santa Fe,” Holliday had once rhapsodized, dreaming of a destination. Soon that dream would become the reality of “Santa Fe all the way.”
Inaugurated in 1892, the California Limited became the first of the Santa Fe’s crack passenger trains between Chicago and Los Angeles; here engine no. 53, a 4-6-0 ten-wheeler, waits with its consist at La Grande Station in Los Angeles. (Colorado Historical Society, scan 20104180, W. H. Jackson Collection)
Part Three
Santa Fe
All the Way
(1889–1909)
An American cowboy is coming east on a special train faster than any cowpuncher ever rode before; how much shall I break the transcontinental record?
—WALTER “DEATH VALLEY SCOTTY” SCOTT TO PRESIDENT THEODORE ROOSEVELT, 1905
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Making the Markets
The southwestern railroads flung their tracks across generally wide-open spaces. Land grant sales in Kansas, mining revenues from Colorado, and transcontinental traffic across Arizona and New Mexico helped to pay some of the bills, but in many cases the railroads had to make their own markets. It was rarely easy.
When Frisco president Edward Winslow expressed interest in buying a 50,000-acre ranch out of the Atlantic and Pacific land grant in northern Arizona in an effort to spur land sales, Winslow’s wife and some friends made an inspection tour. A bumpy wagon ride across stark terrain and a sudden storm were enough to elicit a spousal veto. “Her impressions of the country,” the railroad’s land agent reported, “are not highly favorable.”1
But there were others who looked at the landscape with a different eye. William Jackson Palmer had pushed the merits of Colorado’s climate and scenery since his first love letters to Queen before the founding of Colorado Springs. After the Rio Grande reached Ogden, tourism through the mountains of Colorado became big business on the narrow gauge road. The awesome scenery of the Royal Gorge, Marshall Pass, and the Black Canyon of the Gunnison prompted the Rio Grande to adopt the marketing slogan “Scenic Line of America.”
But why stop there? In 1884 Shadrach K. Hooper, general passenger and ticket agent of the Rio Grande, went one step further and changed the slogan to read “Scenic Line of the World,” taking as its symbol the spire of Curecanti Needle in the depths of the Black Canyon. Advertisements made it clear that whether one was traveling “for business” or “for health and pleasure,” the mountain scenery “of this line is un-equaled in variety and grandeur by that of any other railway on either hemisphere.…”2
But the Denver and Rio Grande did not have a monopoly on scenery. Jay Gould’s attempt to build straight west from Denver had not been successful, but that did not keep hordes of sightseers from flocking to the Georgetown Loop. Scarcely had Robert Brewster Stanton ensured its proper completion when famed western photographer William Henry Jackson arrived on the scene in a private car provided by the railroad. Jackson staged four trains at various locations around the loop and produced a promotional series of photographs for the Union Pacific.
Excursions westward from Denver around the loop and to the end of track at Graymont became a staple for many Colorado visitors. The story is told that when one sophisticated Victorian lady apologized to her Denver hostess for arriving in a sooty condition after just such an excursion, the hostess brushed off her guest’s embarrassment by assuring her, “Never mind, my dear. We have all been around the Loop.”3
And although it was comparatively short lived, the Denver, South Park and Pacific, along with its Union Pacific–controlled successors, also had a star attraction in the Alpine Tunnel. Not only did the line traverse “some of the finest scenery on the continent,” but also the South Park could boast that it crossed the “highest point reached by rail in North America.” One Union Pacific brochure from 1886 told of its glories: “It is something to know that the world cannot duplicate this ride—this audacity of engineering; man has always before stopped short of this extreme.”4
The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe approached its marketing slightly differently. In time, the railroad would come to promote the grandeur of the Grand Canyon, the glories of sunsets setting the desert sky ablaze, and a close affinity to the historical cultures of the Southwest. But from the beginning—and overriding all these later themes—the Santa Fe focused on access and speed.
Within three years of the Santa Fe’s arrival at Deming in 1881, its advertisements were boasting of “Three Lines to the Pacific.” First and foremost, according to the Santa Fe, was its “Great Needles Route” via Albuquerque, over the Atlantic and Pacific to Needles, and the Southern Pacific on to San Francisco. The second route—again at the mercy of the Southern Pacific—was “the Los Angeles Route” west from Deming to the rider’s choice of Los Angeles, San Diego, or San Francisco. Finally, the third route touted connections from the Santa Fe spur at Pueblo, over the Denver and Rio Grande to Ogden, and westward on the Central Pacific to San Francisco.5
By the end of the 1880s, the Santa Fe’s aggressive expansion had rid itself of much of its reliance on the Southern Pacific, to say nothing of reaching Chicago’s Dearborn Station. With independent control of its own roadbed from Chicago all the way to Los Angeles came not only an ability to promote transcontinental access but also ever-greater speed.
In September 1889, William Barstow Strong, who had been the mainstay of the Santa Fe’s expansion for a decade, was forced to resign the railroad’s presidency. Strong was a casualty of an increasingly bitter power struggle between the road’s old-line Boston crowd and a new group of financiers centered in New York City. The conflict was a prelude to a period of financial unrest, but Strong’s successor, Allen Manvel, was to make one lasting contribution to the road.
A native New Yorker who came to the Santa Fe with more than thirty years in railroading, Manvel decreed that something significant had to be done to herald th
e completion of the Santa Fe’s Chicago–Los Angeles main line. The result was the California Limited, a passenger train that would operate between these two cornerstones of the American economy for more than a half century.
Manvel instructed his equipment managers to special order five first-class all-Pullman trains. Each consisted of six cars: (1) a combination baggage, club, and parlor car; (2) a dining car; (3) a through compartment car to Los Angeles; (4) a Chicago–San Francisco compartment and drawing-room sleeper car; (5) a Chicago–San Diego compartment and drawing-room sleeper; and (6) a combination sleeper and observation car with a small parlor and a covered observation platform at the rear of the train. (The San Francisco and San Diego cars were switched onto other trains at Mojave and Los Angeles, respectively, and sent on to their destinations without disturbing their occupants.)
The first westbound California Limited departed Dearborn Station at nine-thirty on the night of November 27, 1892. Designated train no. 3, by the next afternoon it was in Kansas City. Then westward the train roared across Kansas, eastern Colorado, and the grades of Raton Pass. By the evening of day two, the Limited was beyond Albuquerque and crossing the Colorado River at Needles. By nine in the morning on the third day, the train pulled into the station in downtown Los Angeles, after 2,265 miles and two and one-half days en route.
Sister trains were soon running in both directions on what was commonly advertised as the fastest service between the two cities. Over the years, the equipment and motive power of the California Limited changed with the times, and eventually it was relegated to second-class status by more glamorous successors, but at its inception and for years thereafter, the California Limited set the standard for transcontinental travel.6