What role did ATSF play in the taming of the west? It seems the birth, growth, and success of the Santa Fe coincided with the growth and success of southwetern ag industries. Starting with Kansas, then west into Colorado, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and eventually to the Pacific and Gulf of Mexico, ATSF seemed to be in it for the cattle and grain traffic. It appears, that as the railroad moved west, civilization followed it. A fella probably could have ridden the train to the gunfight at the OK corral. Was the grain and cattle traffic the reason for existing for the Atchison Topeka & Santa Fe?
I’ve read many books that purport Fred Harvey (and the Santa Fe) tamed the rugged west.
Thanks for this post, I work in HO scale SF and love to read anything about this line.
And coal from the New Mexico mines, and lumber from Northern Arizona, and all those immigrant cars bringing new settlers to the lands of a land grant railroad or further west to California, and fruit and vegetables from California.
The OK Corral was in Tucson, Santa Fe didn’t go there.
Circle-Cross: The circle of life and the Cross of Christianity, there is a herald for you.
I thought it happened in Tombstone, AZ. Where is Tombstone, AZ?
Dang you’re right, Tombstone is in Southeastern Arizona near the border. I thought all that track down that way was Espee.
I’m not sure where Tombstone is, but the Santa Fe must have made life a lot easier for the cowboys, and at the same time, eliminating a lot of their work.
Tombstone. Even farther from the ATSF.
The Santa Fe competed their line down to the Mexican port of Guaymas in 1882, which went through Fairbank AZ. Tombstone was served by a 9 mile branch from Fairbank, but I don’t know if the branch was part of the ATSF. Santa Fe traded their Mexican line to SP in 1897.
Was this coal and lumber to ship back east, or to supply the new settlers along the line? I know there was some land grants to get accross Kansas, so I presume there must have been departments in the railroad that worked on luring settlers there.
Some accounts I’ve read, say that the Harvey Girls contributed up to 5,000 wives to the mix of the former wild west.
There are several books which tell the stories of Santa Fe and Fred Harvey. Two are:
History of The Atchison Topeka and Santa Fe Railway by Keith L Bryant, Jr., a Professor
Santa Fe The Railroad that Built an Empire by James Marshall, a more romanticized version
The OK Corral is in Tombstone, which is 100 road miles southeast of Tucson. The Southern Pacific ran into Tombstone on a branch off of the Sunset Route. The Santa Fe ran through northern Arizona (Flagstaff, Williams, etc.)
There are surviving Harvey Houses at the Grand Canyon, Winslow, and Seligman. The ones at Grand Canyon and Winslow, the El Tovar and La Posada, have been restored and are open to the public, but the one at Seligman is derelict and would require millions of dollars to restore because of lead paint and asbestos used throughout.
The Seligman Harvey House Havasu was demolished this Spring. Demolition started May 5th, Havasu House is gone.
Some outlaws we’d make. We’d end up on the 3:10 to Yakima, and wonder where the bad guys were.[C):-)][(-D]
Thanks diningcar. Most everything I’ve read about it was quite romanticized. It’s as if the ATSF was happily expanding their grain and cattle business, and one day the guys said "Hey! Let’s head to the Pacific…and…and Mexico…and Kansas City…and Chicago…"etc. Never any good background as to where the railroad was headed and why.
This map shows the line running south of Benson, but does not show the branch to Tombstone.
Speaking of the Santa Fe and the taming of the west… Is there a good book or other source covering the “war” betwixt the Santa Fe and the Rio Grande in the Royal Gorge?
ATSF did play a role in taming the West, but to elevate it to supreme status, as is all too often done in railfan (and rail magazine) circles, is to miss the geographic big picture. First, the geographic center of North America is in North Dakota, so there’s a lot of “Western” real estate that other railroads tamed, which Santa Fe didn’t come within several hundred miles of. Secondly, those other railroads, in most cases, tamed parts of the West that were enormously more difficult to tame than anything Santa Fe had to deal with. Laying track across the Southwest toward southern California meant throwing a number of big bridges across rivers, carving roadbed through open desert hillsides, and putting up with excruciating heat. Up north, meanwhile, railroads building through the Rockies, Cascades, Sierra Nevada, and other ranges had countless miles of tunneling and cut/fill/bridgework to do, plus everything from summer heat to winter cold and snow. (OK, so up north they had more plentiful water, and more abundant timber for making ties, but…) Jim Hill was every bit the tamer of the West that Harvey was. Harvey’s goal was the California shore. Hill’s goal reached beyond Puget Sound to the Orient. It wasn’t until long after Harvey was gone that L.A./Long Beach began developing into a major seaport. Hill’s counterparts north of the border knew where they were heading too; it just took longer for their dreams to reach potential. Portland, Tacoma, Seattle, Vancouver, and Prince Rupert are several days’ sailing time closer to China than L.A., and with fuel costs getting where they are, it’s becoming smarter for most of North America to import its merchandise and export its coal, grain, and potash through Northwest ports than Southwest ports. The West that was tamed by railroads is not limited to what’s south of Sacramento.
Robert Athearn’s “Rio Grande – Rebel of the Rockies” is the accepted source. Athearn described this in a number of other publications but they’re all virtually the same.
As you read it, you might keep in mind that Athearn was quite consistent through his career; everything I’ve read of his academic work was a building block of his central thesis of Western U.S. History. Athearn’s thesis about the D&RGW was part of a larger thesis in vogue during Western History during his era, which was that the West was treated at best as a stepchild of the East, and at worst as a location for wealth to be sucked out of and no investment put back. Translated to the D&RGW, that meant that any time the D&RGW had local control, it was a good thing for the railroad and for the West, and any time it had non-local control, it was a bad thing for the railroad and for the West. Whether you agree with that thesis is not the point, the point is that if you read Athearn knowing about his thesis, his writing becomes a lot easier to understand, and a lot easier to learn from. You might not learn a darn thing about the Rio Grande reading Athearn, but you can definitely learn about the chip the West carried on its shoulder in the 1920-1965 era, when it felt ignored, slighted, and dismissed as ignorant Cow Country by the “hi-falutin East.” And from that you can learn quite a bit about policy and politics in the West during Athearn’s era and subsequently, which has emphasized imitation of the East and simultaneously rejection of Eastern influence or control over its policy. Americans are nothing if not comfortable with their inconsistencies!
RWM