My Amazon Review of John Sedgwick's "From the River to the Sea:......"

 

Railroad War in the West

 

From boardrooms to courtrooms to private armies fighting it out on the rails, John Sedgwick tells the story of the great railroad war that shaped the American Southwest. On one side there was General William Jackson Palmer of the Denver & Rio Grande and on the other side was William Barstow Strong of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe. They fought it out in the mountains of Colorado and the highly critical Raton Pass that separates Colorado from New Mexico. Both wanted to reach the Pacific Ocean.  Along the way they fought over who would serve the great silver mines of Colorado. We also have an appearance on behalf of the Santa Fe, Bat Masterson of Dodge City and OK Corral fame.

 

At the outset the Denver & Rio Grande had all of the advantages. It was already present in Colorado while the Santa Fe was a pissant railroad serving Atchison and Topeka, Kansas. However Strong was by far the better railroad man first as general manager and later as president of the Santa Fe. Strong wins the Raton Pass and extends his railroad deep into New Mexico and then heads west to Los Angeles. The business side of the deal was sealed at the Santa Fe’s headquarters in Boston where Strong and Palmer were coerced into a deal by robber baron Jay Gould who controlled the mighty Union Pacific at the time. Neither party could afford to cross Gould.

 

When the Santa Fe makes it into Los Angeles, then a sleepy backwater town of 30,000 or so in 1887 he at once breaks the California monopoly of the Southern Pacific and then ends up in a price war that lowered the Chicago-Los Angeles fare to a mere $1.00. With that a surge of people flood into sunny Southern California that quintupled the population of Las Angeles to 150,000 by 1890.

 

Sedgwick tell a great story of how these two men helped shaped the West as we now know it. Sometimes he gets bogged down in too many details, but the book will make a great read for those interested in the history of the American West.

For the full Amazon URL see: Railroad War in the West (amazon.com)