13

Transcontinental at Last

The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe was one of the few western railroads with transcontinental ambitions that did not have the word Pacific in its name. That certainly did not mean, however, that the railroad’s transcontinental plans were any less determined or that they stopped in the middle of New Mexico. By 1881, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe was advancing on the Pacific Ocean by three different fronts.

Admittedly, William Barstow Strong and the Santa Fe received little more than a handshake from Collis P. Huntington and the Southern Pacific at Deming, but Strong and his board of directors seem to have sensed well in advance that might be the case. They undertook the construction south from Albuquerque in part to protect the Santa Fe’s southern flanks and to keep Jay Gould and/or Huntington from building north from El Paso.

The Santa Fe’s second Pacific front was via the Sonora Railway to Guaymas, Mexico. But even though the Santa Fe built its own New Mexico and Arizona Railroad from Benson, Arizona, south to join the Sonora Railway at the Mexican border at Nogales, this route, too, was dependent on the dictates of the Southern Pacific because of the 174-mile joint trackage agreement between Deming and Benson.

What the Santa Fe needed—and what Strong had been patiently acquiring by bits and pieces—was a transcontinental route between the Mississippi and the Pacific completely under its own control. A key component was to come from assorted railroad ventures that traced their roots back to the fervent expansionism of Thomas Hart Benton.

Even before the Pacific Railroad surveys of 1853, Senator Benton had long championed a railway between St. Louis and San Francisco. What might lie in between was, Benton once told Congress, “a matter of detail.” The most important thing to him was to set the termini of the route irrevocably in the two cities that hugged the 38th parallel. To that end, the Pacific Railroad Company of Missouri was incorporated in 1849, to build west from St. Louis.

It didn’t get very far, and the trials and tragedies of John C. Frémont and John Gunnison while filling in the “detail” along the 38th parallel soon had Missourians pondering the more southerly 35th parallel route instead. St. Louis would still be the eastern terminal, but a south-west branch of the Pacific Railroad Company was projected to cut diagonally across the state to Springfield, which had long touted itself the logical railroad gateway to the 35th parallel route.

Amidst the land grant giveaway in the aftermath of the Civil War, Springfield got its opportunity. Benton was dead by then, but Frémont acquired control of the south-west branch—renamed the Southwest Pacific Railroad—and used the line’s goal of Springfield to promote the new Atlantic and Pacific Railroad as the logical extension westward from there.¹

With a lengthy list of incorporators that included J. Edgar Thomson and Thomas A. Scott, the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad Company was formed by an act of Congress on July 27, 1866. It was to run generally west from Springfield to a point on the Canadian River, then to Albuquerque, the headwaters of the Little Colorado River, and on to the Colorado River, “at such point as may be selected by said company for crossing; thence by the most practicable and eligible route to the Pacific.”

There was no promise of the lucrative bond subsidies that had benefited the Union Pacific, but the Atlantic and Pacific land grant was generous—every alternate section to the extent of twenty alternate sections per mile on each side of the railroad line through the territories and ten alternate sections per mile on each side through any state. The Atlantic and Pacific was required to begin construction within two years, complete at least fifty miles per year, and finish its main line by July 4, 1878.

But there was one section in the enabling legislation that bespoke the hand of Collis P. Huntington. Despite authorizing the Atlantic and Pacific to proceed “by the most practicable and eligible route to the Pacific,” section 18 provided that Huntington’s Southern Pacific Railroad was “authorized to connect with the said Atlantic and Pacific Railroad… at such point, near the boundary line of the State of California, as they shall deem most suitable for a railroad line to San Francisco.”²

Whether this provision merely afforded the Southern Pacific the opportunity to connect with the Atlantic and Pacific at the Colorado River or prohibited the Atlantic and Pacific from building beyond it into California would soon be a matter of heated debate.

The mercurial Frémont was soon off to other ventures, but by June 1871, the Atlantic and Pacific had consolidated with the Southwest Pacific as planned. It completed its line across Missouri through Springfield to the state line and continued into Indian Territory and a junction with the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad (the Katy) at Vinita, Indian Territory.

Much as Tom Scott did to court San Diegans on behalf of the Texas and Pacific, a Missouri delegation traveled to San Francisco in 1872 to win friends and connections at the contemplated western end of the line. But Californians were of divided loyalties. Some favored Scott’s Texas and Pacific enterprise; others wanted a line totally under Californian control; and, of course, the Big Four muddied the waters by opposing any railroad that might someday compete with the recently finished Central Pacific or the expanding Southern Pacific.

Meanwhile, the Atlantic and Pacific leased the original Pacific Railroad of Missouri that had finally made it from St. Louis to Kansas City, albeit by floating a staggering debt. This orphan of Benton’s Pacific dreams would someday emerge as Jay Gould’s vaunted Missouri Pacific, but in the mid-1870s, it floundered, and it took the Atlantic and Pacific down with it.

The Atlantic and Pacific went into receivership on November 3, 1875, but its directors and major shareholders quickly devised what became the ultimate coup. They formed a new corporation that would bid at foreclosure for the Atlantic and Pacific’s franchise and land grant, while being free from the Atlantic and Pacific’s debts.

On September 8, 1876, the Atlantic and Pacific went on the auction block on the east steps of the courthouse in St. Louis. Two days earlier, the soon-to-be Missouri Pacific had sold for $3 million. But this time the insiders were in control. When the auctioneer dropped his gavel, the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad—with its land grants potentially worth millions and millions of dollars—was sold for the paltry sum of $450,000 to the new corporation. “The new company is to be called the St. Louis & San Francisco Railway Company,” the Railroad Gazette reported wryly, “because, perhaps, it has no terminus in either city.”³

But the reality was that the St. Louis and San Francisco Railway now owned the Atlantic and Pacific franchise outright, and the parent company made plans to strike westward from its railhead at Vinita. When continuing uncertainty over its right-of-way and land grants across Indian reservations delayed that construction, the St. Louis and San Francisco bypassed Indian Territory and built westward into Kansas instead. Given its ultimate goal, the railroad replaced the old Atlantic and Pacific trademark of “the Vinita Route” with a new moniker. Henceforth, the St. Louis and San Francisco Railway would be known as “the Frisco Line.”

The Frisco’s immediate destination was Wichita, Kansas. While bypassed by the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe main line, Wichita had taken upon itself to build a 20-mile spur and ensure its future as a cattle town and commercial hub. Looking to become a rail center as well, Wichita encouraged the Frisco’s advance by floating a county bond issue. But by the time the Frisco laid tracks into town, the Santa Fe main line stretched westward to Albuquerque. One look at the map told the story.

If the Frisco continued westward and paralleled the Santa Fe across southern Kansas, there would be fierce competition between the two roads. Regardless of how the Frisco’s claims in Indian Territory were resolved, they were likely to be of dubious value. (Oil discoveries would change that, but not until much later.)

For its part, the Santa Fe was concerned about another competitor shadowing it across Kansas. It had long contended with just such competition from the Kansas Pacific north of its line. Rather than competing with each other across the plains, perhaps there was a way that the Frisco and the Santa Fe might work together and put their resources into finishing the 35th parallel route west from Albuquerque instead of knocking heads in Kansas.