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REVIEWS
THE WEST THE RAILROADS MADE
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by Carlos Schwantes and James P. Ronda
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| University of Washington Press in association with Washington State Historical Society and John W. Barriger III National Railroad Library, Seattle and London, 2008. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. 256 pages. $39.95 cloth. |
| Distinguished historians Carlos Schwantes and James Ronda have written an especially insightful and beautifully illustrated interpretation of western railroads and their countless influences, particularly in the northern Great Plains and the Pacific Northwest during the last half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. Conceived as a companion piece to an exhibition of railroad-inspired popular and fine art, the book is highlighted by several hundred color and half-tone illustrations selected mostly from the extensive collections of the Washington State Historical Society and the John W. Barriger National Railroad Library at the St. Louis Mercantile Library, University of Missouri, St. Louis. Through the design, decoration, and interpretation of their equipment, buildings, rights-of-way, and publications, American railroads in their era of dominance generated some of the nation's most beautiful and meaningful popular and fine arts. Featured in this book, as in the exhibition, are maps, photographs, drawings, paintings, pamphlet covers, ads, and journalistic pieces, as well as sidebar selections from contemporary writings, depicting railroads and how Americans perceived them. Judging from this lush volume's sample, the exhibition is a powerful exploration of one of the most important of all American historical themes. |
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The authors' gracefully written narrative traces the extension of railroads from St. Louis and Chicago westward through the northern Great Plains and the Pacific Northwest. Emphasized are urban rivalries, common faith in the salutary effects of railroads, international trade and imperial ambitions, and the elusive quest for national unity and security as principal nineteenth-century forces shaping the pace and direction of line building and regional development. Railroad technology, and no longer strict geographical advantage — particularly access to navigable waterways — determined city and countryside fates, and the initially dominant St. Louis and Portland were quickly outdistanced by late-coming rivals Chicago and Seattle as regional metropolises. More significantly, the book examines the many other, more fundamental ways railways transformed the natural and social landscape, the work, business, culture, indeed the very lives of westerners and Americans generally. The iron horse revolutionized space-time relationships, forged a national marketplace and new trade patterns, increased profits from resource extraction, stimulated intentional and unintentional population growth and change, created most of the transformative industries of the era (such as cattle, grain, minerals, lumber, and both land and water development), enriched cities, empowered large organizations, and standardized and rendered more "efficient" everything from labor to machine parts to diets to time-keeping. In short, what has become called the "modern era" dawned with the driving of golden spikes. |
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This is no narrow, triumphal story, however. Schwantes and Ronda also probe the dream-busting, relation-shattering alter ego of burgeoning railway power. If the iron horse created jobs and wealth, birthed great cities, and unleashed technological and cultural creativity, it did so, at least in part, by tearing down old structures that had served many people well. The fortunes of older communities and those disadvantageously located on the rail networks, and the people living in and dependent on them, dwindled, sometimes snuffed out altogether. Small towns and country areas generally relinquished independence and control of their lives to distant cities, corporations, and organizations whose interests often diverged from their own. Increasingly, workers were forced to bargain unequally with ever-stronger employers. Every rising industry, moreover, exacted horrendous tolls from nature — land eroded and wasted, waters polluted, forests and prairies denuded, wildlife annihilated, life-sustaining ecological patterns forever overturned. People, like other beings, increasingly became subject to discipline by the sometimes-cruel "iron hand of the market." Even the railroads themselves — over-capitalized and over-built, grown fat and conservative from their own successes — like the steamboats before them fell prey to market forces and the competition from motor vehicles and faded into the background after World War I. The authors conclude by evoking the ironic contradiction inherent in the railroad revolution, as in all powerful technologies, including today's: "every train carried cargoes of progress and poverty, triumph and failure" (p. 201). |
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Some of this book's contents will likely be familiar to serious students of railroad and western history, but the compelling narrative and stunning illustrations will appeal to all readers. Schwantes and Ronda are to be congratulated for having given general readers and scholars alike this thoughtful and beautiful reminder that not all truly revolutionary technologies are current ones, that in their century railroads worked a magic every bit as transformative of life and economy as today's computers. Perhaps there is something in that for all of us to learn. |
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| RICHARD J. ORSI
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| California State University, East Bay |
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