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Book Review
| Sunset Limited: The Southern Pacific Railroad and the Development of the American West, 1850–1930. By Richard Orsi. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. xxii + 615 pp. Maps, illustrations, notes, index. $29.95.
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| Railroad histories are typically written from a negative perspective. The Southern Pacific Railroad (SP) has been described as a corporate hydra since novelist Frank Norris used the metaphor of an "Octopus" (p.46) to depict it over a century ago. Richard Orsi, in Sunset Limited, writes a balanced account of the SP and its leaders, and in so doing provides historians with a long overdue model by which other corporate entities and their historical roles can be assessed. |
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Orsi's book is firmly imbedded in two historiographical schools. First, it represents a continuation of the "classic" school of railroad histories, though it far exceeds them in terms of depth and accuracy of research and its even-handed approach. Second, the book also extends the "corporate" school best represented by Alfred Chandler who, in Visible Hand, The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Harvard, 1977) wrote that the railroads created and implemented modern corporate and managerial structures that other late nineteenth-century industries emulated. Orsi pushes this argument beyond the big business framework and contends that because the SP was often the first large organized entity to locate in remote parts of the far West, it was uniquely positioned to create environmental policy, construct irrigation projects, and encourage efficient agricultural practices long before state and federal governments were capable of doing so. |
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The book is revisionist, written as a narrative, organized thematically, and the style and grammar are beyond reproach. Chapter titles such as "Public Irrigation," and "Scientific Agriculture," effectively describe the topics to be discussed. Orsi debunks many popular myths about the SP. First he argues that the railroad land grants have been greatly exaggerated by nineteenth-century critics and twentieth-century historians and demonstrates that only in rare instances did the classic "checkerboard land grant-pattern" exist (p. 70). Orsi also contends, contrary to many accounts, that the SP sold land to small farmers at reasonable prices, and worked with them to develop a long-term stable agricultural economy. He further demonstrates how the company moved toward conservationist and preservationist ideologies after major construction was completed and that its monetary contributions and political influence were decisive in bringing federal protection to more than three hundred miles of the high Sierra including Yosemite and Sequoia national parks, and Lake Tahoe. |
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The SP also played a leading role in developing western water resources. The SP promoted irrigation on agricultural lands and facilitated the passage of the Newlands Reclamation Act of 1902. Likewise, the SP developed drinking water systems for company towns and the general public. Orsi even elicits sympathy for the SP by explaining its attempts to survive hostile corporate takeovers, attacks by anti-SP politicians, and armies of squatters who staked claims on railroad land. In the end, the SP and its leadership are portrayed as multifaceted and nuanced, much like the settlement of the West itself. |
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Orsi supports his arguments with 179 pages of endnotes and bibliographic references to sources that range from the classics of railroad historiography to private documents and manuscripts held by the SP Corporation. Sunset Limited is lavishly illustrated with dozens of photographs, and maps. It is a wonderful example of what can happen when first-rate scholarship meets a publisher willing to do it justice. |
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Byron E. Pearson is an associate professor of history at West Texas A&M University and the author of Still the Wild River Runs, Congress, the Sierra Club and the Fight to Save Grand Canyon (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002). |
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