Sunset Limited: The Southern Pacific Railroad and the Development of the American West, 1850-1930

This is a wonderful railroad history, that actually has little to do with the railroad. As (eventually) a large landowner from land grants, and greatly dependent on the success of its farmer customers, the railroad was forced to take an active interest in the stewardship of the West's resources, at a time when government was either unwilling or unable to do much. Massively researched, evidently over a long period of years (there are 177 pages of notes), Orsi shows how the railroad did a lot to develop the West without destroying its resources. Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks, and Lake Tahoe, owe much of their current beauty and protected status to the efforts of the railroad and its managers. A lawsuit pushed by the SP ended hydraulic mining (which was burying farmland below under barren gravel). It sold its land to farmers on very easy terms (better than the government's terms), with the its land divided up to form viable farms. The railroad did much to establish and organize water supplies in its (mostly) arid territory, it organized stock trails so stockmen could get their herds to market, and it helped establish the first forest fire fighting services. Orsi also takes a long look at the Mussel Slough Affair, showing that it was an organized attempt by squatters to steal land. The judge who ordered the evictions of these thieves was incidentally the same one who ended hydraulic mining in California, and the SP's local land agent later lobbied in Washington to get the first Yosemite and Seqouia Parks bill passed. So many charter members of John Muir's Sierra Club were railroad officials that some feared the organization was contaminated. Well written, the book is a tremendously interesting look at how the railroad established the West, for its own benefit of course but also in awareness of the responsibility to maintain the West's resources. Highly recommended.

The Sunset Limited is a fitting name for this book. Of course it's the name of the flagship train of the Southern Pacific that ran between New Orleans and Los Angeles. It's also fitting because sunset came to the Southern Pacific and ended its identity - although most of its trackage is still being operated by the successor Union Pacific. The story of railroading in the United States is the story of little railroads getting started to serve some particular market and then dozens to hundreds of theae smaller roads eventually being bought or merged together. The Southern Pacific started and ended exactly this way. This book is an excellent telling of the story of the Southern Pacific from it's beginning as a bunch of small independents through its glory years as one of the major railroads in the country down to its inglorious years. The only real surprise in the book is the benevolent attitude towards the company compared with the writing of many who condemed for a variety of evils.

As an historian said about this book; "It should be required reading for those interested in the West, the environment and business". Indeed it should. Because more than just blowing away all the dis-information that the Southern Pacific suffered from for decades (and contributed to its collapse), this book provides excellent case studies of how industry, government, NGO's, and the Press cooperated on solving complex and politically charged problems. In fact it was amazing to me to see how well and patiently these disparate groups worked with each other. Much more so than today. There is a lesson here.

This actually could have been a three star review, but I have to give credit to the thuroughness of the scholarship, the excellent photographs and the superb 200+ end notes, which are a mini-book in themselves. Orsi's book is "revisionist" if it is proper to call a thesis that glorifies a massive American corporation "revisionist". I suppose that it qualifies if one is taking the scholarship of major American and French universities from the sixties onward as the standard. Simply put, Orsi's goal is to set the record straight about the Southern Pacific. No "Octopus" in his eyes, the Southern Pacific was an important innovator in the area of agriculture, conservation and scientific forestry. Indeed, without the Southern Pacific, California and the west as we know it would not have been possible. Aside from rewriting bits of history from the railroad's perspective, Orsi's main scholarly contribution is his access to the Southern Pacific's own corporate records. Certainly this is an approach that gives a more complicated picture of the corporations motives and morals then the simplistic "Octopus" portrait of Frank Norris. Orsi also has access to better statistics then scholars operating in the past had (i.e. the railroad's internal statistics), so that allows him to fairly castigate those who have painted an unrealistic portrait of, say, the size of the Southern Pacific's land grants. Although I am sympathetic to his attempt to rehabilitate the image of the Southern Pacific, I found some of the assertions regarding the tremendous difficulties the S & P had in carrying out its good intentions hard to take. If one was to rely on Orsi's book as one's only source, you might believe that the Southern Pacific was a money losing venture, operated out of sheer philanthropy of the "Big Four". I'm serious about that comment: There is no mention about the tremendous personal fortunes of Stanford, Huntington and Co., let alone any discussion of the profit of the railroad as a whole. On the other hand, Orsi goes out of his way to demonstrate expenditures the railroad made in support of the common good. Of course, I can hear the authorial response: Everyone already knows about the money that was made, I'm trying to fill in the stuff that everyone doesn't know. Still, one example: The S & P operated the Pacific Land Company, which operated at the behest of the Big Four by subdividing land for sale. Orsi says that there wasn't any record of how much money that Land Company made and says it's impossible to even determine how the land and profit was accounted for within the S & P. Is that so? I find it curious, as I found the curious the almost complete lack of (positive) financial data. On the whole, I thought Orsi does a great job. However, I would have liked more balance, even if he is writing this book to even the score.