The Last American Frontier

by Frederic L. Paxson

To these deliberate acts in aid of the Pacific railways, Congress added others in the form of local or state grants in the same years, so that by 1871 all that the companies could ask for the future was lenient interpretation of their contracts. For the first time the federal government had taken an active initiative in providing for the destruction of a frontier. Its resolution, in 1871, to treat no longer with the Indian tribes as independent nations is evidence of a realization of the approaching frontier change.

The new Pacific railways began to build just as the Union Pacific was completed and opened to traffic. In the cases of all, the development was slow, since the investing public had little confidence in the existence of a business large enough to maintain four systems, or in the fertility of the semi-arid desert. The first period of construction of all these roads terminated in 1873, when panic brought transportation projects to an end, and forbade revival for a period of five years.

Jay Cooke, whose Philadelphia house had done much to establish public credit during the war and had created a market of small buyers for investment securities on the strength of United States bonds, popularized the Northern Pacific in 1869 and 1870. Within two years he is said to have raised thirty millions for the construction of the road, making its building a financial possibility. And although he may have distorted the isotherm several degrees in order to picture his farm lands as semi-tropical in their luxuriance, as General Hazen charged, he established Duluth and Tacoma, gave St. Paul her opportunity, and had run the main line of track through Fargo, on the Red, to Bismarck, on the Missouri, more than three hundred and fifty miles from Lake Superior, before his failure in 1873 brought expansion to an end.

For the Northwest, the construction of the Northern Pacific was of fundamental importance. The railway frontier of 1869 left Minnesota, Dakota, and much of Wisconsin beyond its reach. The potential grain fields of the Red River region were virgin forest, and on the main line of the new road, for two thousand miles, hardly a trace of settled habitation existed. The panic of 1873 caught the Union Pacific at Bismarck, with nearly three hundred miles of unprofitable track extending in advance of the railroad frontier. The Atlantic and Pacific and Texas Pacific were less seriously overbuilt, but not less effectively checked. The former, starting from Springfield, had constructed across southwestern Missouri to Vinita, in Indian Territory, where it arrived in the fall of 1871. It had meanwhile acquired some of the old Missouri state-aided roads, so as to get track into St. Louis. The panic forced it to default, Vinita remained its terminus for several years, and when it emerged from the receiver's hands, it bore the new name of St. Louis and San Francisco.

The Texas Pacific represented a consolidation of local lines which expected, through federal incorporation, to reach the dignity of a continental railroad. It began its construction towards El Paso from Shreveport, Louisiana, and Texarkana, on the state line, and reached the vicinity of Dallas and Fort Worth before the panic. It planned to get into St. Louis over the St. Louis, Iron Mountain, and Southern, and into New Orleans over the New Orleans Pacific. The borderland of Texas, Arkansas, and Missouri became through these lines a centre of railway development, while in the near-by grazing country the meat-packing industries shortly found their sources of supply.

The panic which the failure of Jay Cooke precipitated in 1873 could scarcely have been deferred for many years. The waste of the Civil War period, and the enthusiasm for economic development which followed it, invited the retribution that usually follows continued and widespread inflation. Already the completion of a national railway system was foreshadowed. Heretofore the western demand had been for railways at any cost, but the Granger activities following the panic gave warning of an approaching period when this should be changed into a demand for regulation of railroads. But as yet the frontier remained substantially intact, and until its railway system should be completed the Granger demand could not be translated into an effective movement for federal control. It was not until 1879 that the United States recovered from the depression following the crisis. In that year resumption marked the readjustment of national currency, reconstruction was over, and the railways entered upon the last five years of the culminating period in the history of the frontier. When the five years were over, five new continental routes were available for transportation.

The Texas and Pacific had hardly started its progress across Texas when checked by the panic in the vicinity of Fort Worth. When it revived, it pushed its track towards Sierra Blanca and El Paso, aided by a land grant from the state. Beyond Texas it never built. Corporations of California, Arizona, and New Mexico, all bearing the name of Southern Pacific, constructed the line across the Colorado River and along the Gila, through lands acquired by the Gadsden Purchase of 1853. Trains were running over its tracks to St. Louis by January, 1882, and to New Orleans by the following October. In the course of this Southern Pacific construction, connection had been made with the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé at Deming, New Mexico, in March, 1881, but through lack of harmony between the roads their junction was of little consequence.

The Pacific Railroads, 1884

This map shows only the main lines of the continental railroads in 1884, and omits the branch lines and local roads which existed everywhere and were specially thick in the Mississippi and lower Missouri valleys.