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  • All Aboard for Santa Fe: Railway Promotion of the Southwest, 1890s to 1930s
  • Lynne Pierson Doti
Victoria E. Dye . All Aboard for Santa Fe: Railway Promotion of the Southwest, 1890s to 1930s. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005. xi + 163 pp. ISBN 0-8263-3657-4, $24.95 (cloth).

All Aboard covers the Atchison Topeka and Santa Fe (AT&SF) railroad's attempts to promote tourism in the Southwest. The emphasis is on New Mexico, particularly Santa Fe and, as a separate narrative, Albuquerque. Interestingly, the AT&SF did not pass through Santa Fe. In the 1870s, when the company planned a route from Dodge City, Kansas, to Colorado, where abundant fuel could be loaded, to New Mexico then to California, the foothill town of Santa Fe was by passed in favor of the lower and more accessible town of Lamy. Fortunately, for both the city and the railroad, the city subsidized an 18-mile spur to Santa Fe from Lamy, and the AT&SF was subsequently often called the Santa Fe. One always had to transfer, however, to get to the namesake city.

Tourism promotion by the AT&SF started in the 1880s, as did all promotion of the southwestern United States, with appeal to the consumptives. Special cars were designated for the sick traveling by rail. The city itself echoed this theme and, by 1897, offered a true sanitarium [End Page 643] and at least three other hotels, which catered to the convalescent crowd. In a related health-themed promotion, AF&SF published a pamphlet "Reasons why Santa Fe is the Most Comfortable Summer Route to California," touting the high altitudes passed on the southern route, presumably to counter the obvious fact that it was the southern route and might be presumed to be the warmer route. Visions of the un-air-conditioned journey through the dusty desert even now make airport security seem less of a challenge.

Despite all the promotion of Santa Fe, the early growth was modest. Population grew from 4,765 in 1870 to 7,236 in 1920, a lower growth rate than Southern California, Arizona, or even Utah. It was in the 1920s that the picturesque cachet of Indian crafts, the romance of history, and the comforts provided by Fred Harvey seemed to come together to make the city famous. AT&SF commissioned jewelry and advised artisans to scale down and restyle native jewelry as necessary to make it saleable to the tourists. An annual celebration, the "Fiesta" was started in 1919 with an apocryphal history and a multicultural story line. The infamous Zozobra ("gloom"), a large wooden man, was first symbolically burned at the 1926 Fiesta (although other sources say 1924). Fred Harvey first partnered with AT&SF in 1876 in Topeka to create the Harvey House. The trains stopped there for meals, and a horde of well-trained young women greeted the passengers in restaurants, which were much nicer than travelers experienced elsewhere. By 1926, the venerable La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe was newly rebuilt, redecorated, and run by Harvey. It was enough of an attraction to make the side trip from Lamy worthwhile. Harvey offered more than meals and lodging. "Indian Detours," a joint venture of AT&SF, Major Hunter Clarkson (son-in-law to AT&SF president) and Fred Harvey featured motorcar (van) tours. Theirs was not an original idea, however, and one of the most interesting stories in this book is about entrepreneur Emily Hahn, who started the tour company and sold out to the partnership. The private automobile, the depression, and finally World War II made the tour company only briefly successful, and these same factors also led to the decline of the AT&SF railroad's influence on the history of New Mexico by the 1930s.

One short chapter gives a parallel history of Albuquerque, where the population of the city grew rapidly as it became the main terminal between Topeka and Los Angeles.

The unique source for this book seems to be pamphlets published by the rail company. They occasionally differ in their version of history from more established sources, and one hopes that the author has determined the correct information...

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