Sunset Limited: The Southern Pacific Railroad and the Development of the American West, 1850-1930 (review)

This richly detailed labor of love by Richard J. Orsi attempts "a new approach to an important theme in the history of the American Far West: the complex impact of a large, powerful business corporation on the process of settlement, economic development, and environmental change in a frontier region" (p. xiii). It pays scant attention to traditional corporate history, with its emphasis on leaders, interline relations, politics, regulation, labor, freight, and passenger matters. Orsi dispatches the corporate story of the Southern Pacific (SP) in a single brisk chapter before launching into his true concerns: the role of the West's largest railroad in settling land, developing water resources, promoting agricultural growth, and furthering resource conservation in the region. The result is a fresh and revealing slant on the history of a company that did more to influence the development of the Far West than any other.

As the largest transportation system in the world, the SP developed a reputation for ruthlessness and heavy-handed use of power that culminated in Frank Norris's devastating portrayal of it as the "Octopus" in California life and politics. Whatever its actual transgressions, many of the charges levied against the company were exaggerated or simply false. With surgical precision Orsi lays out and punctures the myths that have encrusted the SP's history in his areas of interest by placing them in a context forged from exhaustive research in company and other archives. Where earlier writers have seen corporate self-interest leading to policies of negative obstructionism, Orsi finds the same impulse generating repeated acts of positive action across a broad spectrum of developmental issues. Much of the initiative and work for these efforts came from middle managers, specifically the three men who served as land agents from 1865 to 1933: Benjamin B. Redding, William H. Mills, and B. A. McAllaster.

Orsi is an advocate whose goal is not to whitewash the SP but rather to make a strong case for his client from evidence hitherto ignored or not available. In this quest he succeeds admirably. Far from retarding settlement and economic development, the SP vigorously pursued the dispersal of its land grant, especially to small farmers, despite obstacles that would have dissuaded less determined companies. In the water-starved desert territories, as well as in less parched regions, the company took the lead in developing water supplies and irrigation systems. It promoted scientific farming techniques, encouraged newcomers to grow crops suited to their location, and sponsored popular farm demonstration trains to bring information to farmers across its territory. It devised new marketing and shipping techniques, such as the fruit trains that brought western produce to distant markets.

Those who see the railroad as a machine that laid waste to the natural environment—and Orsi recites the list of its negative impacts—will be stunned to learn that SP spearheaded major programs of environmental conservation and reform. Especially was it instrumental in the struggle to create national parks at Yosemite, Sequoia, and Lake Tahoe, all of which were threatened by developmental destruction. In a variety of areas it preached and practiced policies of resource conservation that were designed to put its "properties on the most conservative and scientific basis" (p. 376). As Orsi emphasizes, the SP pursued these policies from a blend of self-interest and identification with the communities and regions it served.

Orsi crafts a compelling and convincing case for this unusual role by a unique company. So persuasive is his argument that readers unfamiliar with railroad history or with that of the SP in particular may well wonder how that road developed such a bad reputation if it did so much good. Orsi alludes often to the company's tarnished image, both at the time and among later historians, but he does little to explain or detail its origins. Even a brief account of how...