The Cloud-Climbing Railroad by Dorothy Jensen Neal, and: The Northern Pacific—Main Street of the Northwest by Charles R. Wood (review)

154 Western American Literature loaded with detail, is needed, supplemented with several full-page area maps, even though our age may not be conspicuously map-minded. These are but mere suggestions for a second edition and no reflection on or criticism of a splended coverage of a dramatic storyl W il l ia m H. A r c h e r , Tennessee Wesleyan College The Cloud-Climbing Railroad. By Dorothy Jensen Neal. (Alamogordo, New Mexico: Alamogordo Printing Co., 1966. 81 pages, map, illus. $6.00.) The Northern Pacific—Main Street of the Northwest. By Charles R. Wood. (Seattle: Superior Publishing Co., 1968. 208 pages, map, illus. $13.95.) The topography and climate of the American West made railroad build­ ing and operation with the crude tools and steam locomotives of fifty or seventy-five years ago a dangerous and difficult task. As with most situations in which men battled nature at great odds, this early period of western rail­ roading is now surrounded by an aura of romance. It seems, in fact, that the further into the past this era of iron men and iron horses recedes, the greater grows present-day interest in it. Nowhere is this growth more apparent than in the body of railway literature, to which Northern Pacific and The Cloud-Climbing Railroad are recent additions. Dorothy Jensen Neal resides in the section of New Mexico about which she wrote. Her “Cloud-Climbing Railroad” was a lumber carrier, typical of many western short lines that depended on a single industry for their traffic. Most of these lines vanished as mines played out or as paved roads penetrated logging districts. In the early 1890’s, a promoter named Charles Bishop Eddy pushed a railroad northward into the New Mexico desert from El Paso, Texas. The line was hard pressed to find crossties. Timber was abundant in the Sacra­ mento Mountains above the company town of Alamogordo, however. To reach this supply, Eddy built the Alamogordo and Sacramento Mountain Railway, a subsidiary to his main line. This was the Cloud-Climbing Railroad. It came honestly by the name since it achieved a 4700 foot climb above the desert floor in a mere thirty-two route miles, making use of a switchback and a series of reverse curves on the way. After its parent line was completed, the Alamogordo and Sacramento Mountain did a lucrative business carrying tourists and lumber. Both Eddy lines were eventually sold and combined into one operation, which was ab­ Reviews 155 sorbed by the Southern Pacific in 1924. After a final peak of wartime traffic, abandonment of the mountain railroad occurred in 1948. It is unfortunate that much of the romance and excitement that opera­ tions on the Alamogordo and Sacramento Mountain must have possessed are lost in the retelling. The book is characterized by a lack of transition and a frequent lack of continuity. At one point (pages 41-42) four unrelated topics are introduced, discussed, and dismissed within a page and a half. The style of the book is that of a newspaper reminiscence-column. People are introduced not in terms of their personal or occupational importance to history, but instead identified as the ancestor of some present-day Alamogordo resident. While the book contains a wealth of human-interest incidents, it fails to establish their relevance to the larger events in the history of the region that the railroad served. It is plain that Mrs. Neal thoroughly investigated the events on which this book was based. Her contribution would have been more valuable, however, if she had placed these events in the context of the national affairs they resulted from, rather than leaving them in isolation. In Northern Pacific, Charles R. Wood has written about another peculiarly western phenomenon: the Pacific Railroad. Dozens of these lines were planned during the half-century after the Civil War. They were giant undertakings for the times and only a handful actually reached coastal cities. One of these was the Northern Pacific. This is Wood’s second book, following Lines West, which dealt with the Great Northern Railway. Both books are pictoral histories, a familiar format in rail literature. Northern Pacific is organized into three...