CHAPTER VI
ATCHISON, TOPEKA & SANTA FE
Charter—Strategic extensions—Competitive extensions—Effect on finances—Raise in rate of dividend—Reorganization of 1889—Acquisition of the St. Louis & San Francisco and of the Colorado Midland—Income bond conversion—Receivership—English reorganization plan—Mr. Little’s report—Final reorganization plan—Sale—Subsequent history.
The Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad has been reorganized twice, in 1889 and in 1893–5; the first time without, but the second time after a foreclosure sale. The keynote of its history has been extension. It was the enterprise of the men in control before 1889 which gave it the position and power it holds to-day, but it was also that enterprise which necessitated its first reorganization by imposing upon it heavier burdens than it could bear.
Chartered in Kansas in 1863, the Atchison spread west, southwest, south, and northeast. It received some aid from the state of Kansas in the shape of a grant of lands, but depended primarily on the investment of private capital. Kansas itself was not, in 1870, a very encouraging field for railroad building. It had been admitted as a state only in 1861, and could boast for the most part of less than two inhabitants to the square mile;—although settlement was pushing westward with considerable rapidity, and stores of mineral wealth had been discovered in Colorado. The railroad in those days had to create its own traffic, and population followed the means of transportation. The peculiarity of Kansas was a central position, which lent itself to schemes of the most far-reaching nature. A railroad reaching from one end of the state to the other might almost equally well have been extended to California, to Chicago, or to the Gulf; and could be sure in time, if it survived, of the carriage of a vast volume of traffic out in every direction from the Central West. The Atchison managers saw this opportunity, and courageously and persistently endeavored to realize it;—part of the project they announced, and part they kept back till the fitting time should come.
The systematic extension of the Atchison Railroad may be divided into four parts:
(1) The construction through Kansas to Colorado, to save the charter, then down the valley of the Rio Grande to Albuquerque.
(2) The securing of a connection with the Pacific Coast by construction, lease, or traffic agreement.
(3) The connection with the Gulf.