The American West
Page 36
The Chicago lumber district. Harper’s Weekly, October 20, 1883.
Saint Louis’s loss was Chicago’s gain. Little more than a swampy outpost on the southwestern shore of Lake Michigan in the 1830s, Chicago was the creation of eastern capitalists in collaboration with the state of Illinois. While speculators invested in unimproved city lots, driving up property values, the state undertook an ambitious program of lakeshore harbor improvements and canal construction. During the 1840s, the city captured the grain trade of northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin. Chicago’s fortunes boomed just as eastern investors were pouring capital into railroad construction, and by the early 1850s a number of eastern railroad companies had selected Chicago as their western terminus, while several western companies were constructing lines radiating outward from the city into the adjacent countryside. One of them, the Chicago and Rock Island Railroad, struck at Saint Louis merchants. Ambitious Chicago businessmen hoped that the railroad would give them the wherewithal to capture the lead trade of Galena from Saint Louis control. The Rock Island line reached the Mississippi in 1854 and during its first season of operation succeeded in diverting half the output of the lead mines to Chicago. Two years later, the Rock Island became the first railroad to bridge the Mississippi.
“The faces of the men of business of the valley of the Upper Mississippi, who have heretofore looked Southward and downward, will now look upward and Eastward,” crowed Chicago’s Daily Democratic Press. “How can they resist it?” When in 1856 a Saint Louis steamboat crashed into the Rock Island bridge and exploded in flames, its owners sued the bridge company and the railroad. The case was a showdown between the two cities. “If we are beaten,” warned the Saint Louis Chamber of Commerce, “the commercial position of Saint Louis, which is now the pride and boast of her citizens, would be counted among the things that were.” And so it was. Abraham Lincoln, then an Illinois attorney in private practice, effectively argued in federal court that the railroad bridge represented the best hopes of a developing West. The jury deadlocked, the judge dismissed the suit, and Saint Louis was forced to concede the loss of the upper Mississippi. A reporter saw the evidence of Chicago’s victory on a visit to a mercantile establishment in Omaha. “The ancient store boxes in the cellar have ‘Saint Louis’ stenciled on them; those on the pavement, ‘Chicago,’” he wrote. “Omaha eats Chicago groceries, wears Chicago dry goods, builds with Chicago lumber, and reads Chicago newspapers.” Chicago’s triumph did not result simply from the “natural advantage” of its geography. Rather, it was the combined result of location, savvy investing, an innovative new mode of transportation, cutthroat competition, and the political crisis that marked the coming of the Civil War.10
. . .
Chicago emerged as the dominant western metropolis, the city with the strongest links to eastern markets, just as the explosive settlement of the trans-Mississippi West got under way. Chicago became what geographer Andrew Frank Burghardt calls a “gateway city,” the link between the settlements and resources of the West and the cities, factories, and commercial networks of the Northeast. Within a few years, the completion of the transcontinental railroad opened a hinterland of unprecedented size, one stretching from the Great Lakes to the Rocky Mountains and beyond. “The range of the trade of Chicago,” wrote an economist for the federal government in 1881, “embraces an area constituting more than one-half of the territorial limits of the United States.” Historian William Cronon has detailed the city’s role as headquarters for the late nineteenth-century colonization of the trans-Mississippi West. Chicago lumber merchants set thousands of men to work cutting the pine forests of the Great Lakes and shipped westward billions of board feet of lumber needed for the construction of the railroad system as well as for countless homes, towns, and cities on the Great Plains. Chicago entrepreneurs built dozens of grain elevators and devised the practice of commodity trading on the city’s board of trade, providing a world market for the thousands of farmers who converted the grasslands into produce. Chicago meatpackers financed the western cattle industry, and the South Side stockyards became the city’s largest employer, drawing tens of thousands of immigrant workers from Ireland, Germany, Bohemia, Poland, and Slovakia. Workers and raw materials rode the rails into town, and commodities exited in the cars. Chicago surpassed the river towns as the gateway to the West because the railroads tied the city to the region’s natural bounty.11
A deserted railroad town in Kansas. Harper’s Weekly, February 28, 1874.
By the 1880s Chicago stood atop a western urban hierarchy that included some two dozen cities in the trans-Mississippi West, each with its own commercial hinterland. The “railroad capitalism” of the late nineteenth century concentrated decision making in the great urban centers, arranging lesser cities into a pecking order. With Chicago at its center, this interconnected urban system, writes Gilbert Stelter, “reflected the basically colonial nature of western life.”12
William “Buffalo Bill” Cody told a story that illustrates this point. As a young buffalo hunter supplying meat for construction crews on the Kansas Pacific in the 1860s, Cody and a friend went into a partnership to develop a town they called Rome at a spot on the prairie where the railroad had announced that it would locate its repair shops. The partners staked out lots, and soon merchants, saloon-keepers, and ordinary settlers arrived and built on them. But returning from a hunt one afternoon, Cody discovered that “the town was being torn down and carted away. The balloon-frame buildings were coming apart section by section. I could see at least a hundred teams and wagons carting lumber, furniture, and everything that made up the town over the prairies to the eastward.” Officials in some far-flung corporate office had decided to relocate the repair facilities to Hays City, and Rome was unbuilt in a day.13
Denver nearly avoided duplicating Rome’s fall when the Union Pacific bypassed the town in 1867. The skittish among Denver’s business elite panicked, rushing north to Cheyenne on the rail line. A number of the city’s more determined and optimistic citizens, however, organized a railroad company of their own called the Denver Pacific and used their Washington connections to win a land grant and subsidy from Congress. The Denver Pacific ran tracks north and tapped into the transcontinental line. The Denver example proved the importance of aggressive boosters. Cities didn’t make themselves; blowhards with political connections were critical to the emerging urban system. Consider the case of the neighboring towns of Leavenworth and Kansas City, both aspiring to the status of regional metropolis. While Leavenworth’s citizens quarreled over the financing of a bond issue, the business and political community of Kansas City unified behind a plan to win a rail connection and offered choice lots to influential railroad men. Kansas City secured rail access across the Missouri River first, and Leavenworth fell in line as the tributary of its neighbor. The Texas towns of Houston and Galveston waged a similar struggle. Feeling secure with a fine bay and harbor, Galveston’s leaders wasted time squabbling over which railroad they should invite into the city, providing Houston’s inland elites with time to construct an ambitious canal to the Gulf, dredge a deep harbor at Buffalo Bayou, and finance a railroad of their own, linking them to the national transportation system. Houston captured a vast Texas hinterland while Galveston whined for years, teaching local schoolchildren that crass, commercial Houston had stolen their natural port.
In the Great Basin, the Mormons at first sought to remain apart from the developing urban network of the West. Brigham Young warned against commerce with outsiders, and the church leadership tried to link together its own hinterland through a series of ninety-six outposts extending southwest from Salt Lake City to the port of San Diego on the Pacific Ocean. The church assisted the settlement of more than seventy thousand emigrants on small farms and ranches along this corridor. But railroad construction and mining rushes subverted the Mormons’ careful isolation. Salt Lake City became a critical way station, attracting thousands of travelers and hundreds of gentile businessmen eager to pro
fit from their movement. The Mormon leadership came to the conclusion that their economic isolationism was only enhancing other people’s profits, so in 1869, when the Union Pacific line reached north of Salt Lake City, the church financed a line connecting the city with the depot at Ogden, and over the next decade the Mormons undertook a program of industrial development. By the mid-1870s, manufacturing had grown in the local economy to such an extent that a local magazine could write that Salt Lake City was “eminently a manufacturing community.”14
Temple Square, Salt Lake City. Photograph by Charles Roscoe Savage, 1889. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
By the end of the nineteenth century, a handful of western cities had escaped tributary status to become industrial and financial powers unto themselves. The twin cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, for example, took advantage of the cheap waterpower available at the Falls of Saint Anthony on the Mississippi River and built a lumber and flour milling industry. Using their own capital, local millers helped finance the construction of rail lines into the Dakotas and western Canada to capture the wheat and lumber trade. By 1880 the combined output of Minneapolis companies such as Pillsbury outpaced Milwaukee, Saint Louis, and Chicago in flour production. While the twin cities road processed carbohydrates to glory, Denver concentrated on smelting the ores from the Rocky Mountain’s numerous mines. In 1870, when the population numbered just 5,000, the city’s annual industrial output was only $250,000, but thirty years later Denver’s 134,000 residents were producing commodities valued at more than $50 million. Denver was able to circumvent Chicago and establish direct connections with New York financiers, becoming the regional command post for the great mining interests controlled by the Rockefeller and Guggenheim families.
An oil field near Houston. Photograph by Homer T. Harden, c. 1919. Library of Congress.
Houston’s rise as one of the great cities of twentieth-century America dates from the huge oil gusher unloosed in 1901 at Spindletop, in nearby Beaumont. Spouting two hundred feet high, it blew off a hundred thousand barrels a day for ten days, creating a huge oil lake that caught fire and burned for weeks. Within months, engineers tapped other vast oil fields along the Gulf coast. Local companies with names like Gulf, Texaco, Shell, and Humble (later Exxon) built refineries and established headquarters in Houston. With federal help, the city dredged Buffalo Bayou deep enough to permit oil tankers to reach the city. Petroleum became the foundation for an industrial economy that included chemicals, machine tools, and warehouses. By 1910 Houston’s economy had moved into the state of self-financed growth.15
The success of Houston, Denver, Salt Lake, and Minneapolis did not alter the basic flow of power from urban centers to rural hinterlands. Command and control lingered in the hands of a few men ensconced in high places in a few metropolitan areas. But the rise of regional cities did increase the number of high places. By 1900 Chicago had to share the roost with the upstarts as well as a West Coast competitor with gold claws.
. . .
San Francisco was the first regional city of the trans-Mississippi West to truly achieve takeoff, but even it began as a creature of the East. The Gold Rush drew people from many quarters, with a majority from the rural Mississippi valley. The residents of San Francisco, however, hailed mainly from the urban Northeast. During the city’s first decade nearly all the principal merchants and bankers were agents or associates of Boston and New York firms. A survey of the city’s lawyers found that 40 percent had been licensed to practice by the New York State bar. But the fabulous wealth of the mines led to the early creation of a powerful group of local capitalists. The event that signaled the arrival of San Francisco’s financial class was when its bankers and Silver Kings cornered the unprecedented wealth of the Comstock Lode in the late 1860s. From their headquarters on San Francisco’s Nob Hill, noted historian Rodman Paul, “Comstock millionaires underwrote many a new venture in the American West and abroad.”16
Bird’s-eye view of San Francisco. Lithograph by Charles R. Parsons for Currier and Ives, c. 1878. Library of Congress.
Henry George, San Francisco’s radical journalist, was one of the first to note the city’s bump in status. “Not a settler in all the Pacific States and Territories but must pay San Francisco tribute,” he wrote. “Not an ounce of gold dug, a pound of ore smelted, a field gleaned, or a tree felled in all their thousands of square miles, but must . . . add to her wealth.” By 1880 San Francisco’s commercial hinterland stretched from Panama to Alaska, from the sugar plantations of the Hawaiian Islands to the mining districts of northern Idaho. In 1880 approximately thirty thousand workers produced output valued higher than the combined total of all the other urban centers of the West. “San Francisco dwarfs the other cities,” the English scholar and diplomat James Bryce wrote in 1888, “and is a commercial and intellectual centre and source of influence for the surrounding regions, more powerful over them than is any Eastern city over its neighborhood. It is a New York which has got no Boston on one side of it, and no shrewd and orderly rural population on the other, to keep it in order.”17
In the 1870s San Francisco investors began spreading their capital to other sections of the state. Los Angeles, with a population of only ten thousand, was “still a mere village—mostly Mexican,” wrote visitor David Starr Jordan, “and the country round was practically a desert of cactus and sagebrush.” But investors from San Francisco took notice when the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe linked L.A. to the nation’s railroad network. Although the first transcontinental connection was built in 1876, it was the arrival of the Santa Fe Railroad in 1887 that commenced the city’s first boom. A fare war drove ticket prices down so far that a passage from Saint Louis cost as little as five dollars. That brought in an estimated two hundred thousand tourists, curiosity-seekers, and land speculators. Boosters pitched southern California to the crowds much as they had promoted Kentucky and Texas in earlier years. “There are calla lilies by the acre,” read one guidebook, “and tall enough to be picked by a man on horseback; hedges of geraniums, fifteen feet high; . . . roses of a thousand varieties, by the million, it being no rare thing to see a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand, or more, buds and blossoms and full blown roses on a single bush at the same moment.” One visitor wrote home: “I apparently have found a Paradise on Earth.”18
The cost of paradise rose with the resulting frenzy of buying and selling. In less than two years, developers laid out more than sixty new towns on nearly eighty thousand acres. The real estate bubble burst in 1889, yet the long money stayed in southern California. “People,” wrote the vice president of the Santa Fe, “will continue to come here until the whole country becomes one of the most densely populated sections of the United States.”19
Dense populations and desert environments do not make good partners unless water is added. With only enough precipitation in most years to avoid being classified as a semiarid climate, Los Angeles impressed many onlookers with its obvious deficiencies. The village lacked a proper harbor, and critics wondered why a city would develop there. “It is difficult to find any really good reason why the city of Los Angeles should have come into existence,” the ecologist Raymond Dasmann once wrote, reflecting the opinion of many of his fellow San Franciscans. But in the twenty years following the initial boom, the leaders of Los Angeles took aggressive steps to solve their problems. After intense lobbying, Congress voted in 1897 to “improve” the anchorage at the harbor of San Pedro, a part of greater Los Angeles.20
Meanwhile, the city prowled for new sources of water. In 1905 and 1907, the L.A. water commissioners proposed, and the voters approved, more than twenty-five million dollars in bonds to finance the construction of an aqueduct diverting the flow of the Owens River, some two hundred miles northeast in the Sierra Nevada. The water arrived in 1913, providing Los Angeles with more than enough capacity to satisfy its 350,000 residents, enough indeed to sustain a population numbering in the millions. What L.A.’s citizens had not been told, h
owever, was that a syndicate of wealthy citizens—including government insiders—had previously bought up more than one hundred thousand acres in the adjacent San Fernando valley, where Owens River water would be stored in reservoirs. “Anyone who knew this, and bought up more than one hundred thousand acres in the adjacent San Fernando valley while it was still dirt-cheap,” wrote historian Marc Reisner, “stood to become very, very rich.” The syndicate made an estimated profit of one hundred million dollars. In an era of aggressive promotion, the elite of Los Angeles set a new standard for urban buccaneering.21
A crowd celebrates the completion of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, bringing Owens River water to southern California. Photograph by Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Henry E. Huntington stood among L.A.’s elite real estate tycoons. Nephew and heir of Collis P. Huntington of the Southern Pacific Railroad (corporate successor to the Central Pacific), one of the legendary Big Four, Huntington invested his family wealth in Los Angeles trolley companies and real estate. By 1900 he had become southern California’s single largest landowner and majordomo of the interurban rail system known as the Pacific Electric. Huntington built dozens of new trolley lines, connecting his undeveloped tracts to the city center. “Railway lines have to keep ahead of the procession,” he instructed his lieutenants. Leaving nothing to chance, Huntington had his land subdivided into lots and planted with pepper trees from Peru, jacarandas from Brazil, and palms from Asia and Africa, had the streets surveyed and paved, and even had the utilities laid out in advance of building. He thus created the conditions for what became the southern California—and then suburban America’s—preference for detached single-family homes with private landscaped yards. Huntington helped invent a new kind of dispersed urban landscape, what a later generation would call sprawl. “As much as any single person,” writes historian Kenneth T. Jackson, Huntington “initiated the southern California sprawl that still baffles visitors.”22