| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Sunset Limited: The Southern Pacific Railroad and the Development of the American West, 1850–1930. By Richard J. Orsi. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. xxii, 615 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-520-20019-5.)
Richard J. Orsi's book on the Southern Pacific Railroad does many things right. Orsi's research, stretched over twenty years, is exhaustive. He has mined the company archives effectively, as well as other primary repositories. Using his deep knowledge of the company, its employees, and its policies, he constructs a detailed picture, tracking particularly the impact of midlevel bureaucrats on the railroad company.	1
Orsi also conceptualizes the Southern Pacific well. The most important, and often overlooked, fact about all railroads is that they cross land—usually a considerable amount of land. This necessarily involved them in matters of land sales, land development, land (and water) policy, and conservation. Although other historians have addressed this relationship between western railroads and land development, it is a point that bears repeating.	. . .

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