Ridden Upon:The Consequences of Railroads on the TexasFrontier Promotional Promises: Railroad companies such as the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe, and the Texas and Pacific excelled at railway promotion. These steel behemoths plowed through the Texas terrain, unlike any other state. Railway lines and industrialization challenged the frontier mentality of West Texas, forever altering its former subsistence based identity.
Atchison Methods for Promotion: Cyrus K. Holliday chartered the esteemed Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad in 1859; Holliday worked to create a transcontinental rail line. The railroad rapidly delivered new opportunities for trade and industrialization in the West. Early on, America had expansionist policies demonstrated through Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase in 1803. The train merely facilitated the trends of Manifest Destiny that began nearly a half century earlier. The ATSF and other railways contributed to the extermination of the buffalo, the demise of the Plains Indians, and the steep rise of the range cattle industry. The ATSF used the city of Santa Fe as a promotional opportunity for their company. In the 1880s, the ATSF attached itself to the medical belief that Western dry air helped tuberculosis patients recover. New Mexico tuberculosis patients died at a three percent rate; however, New Englanders in the East faced a twenty-five percent death rate.
Cyrus K. Holliday
The history of the region and the people of Santa Fe offered an important marketing tool for the company’s promotion of Westward tourism. It thrived on the image of the West that it so nearly destroyed. The ATSF used images of the Native American way of life on itineraries and other promotional materials to bolster the region’s economy. The ATSF used pictures of submissive Native American tribes, such as the Pueblos, while the company left images of more combative Apache, Comanche, and Mexicans absent from their marketing strategies.
“We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. Did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each one is a man…. The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them. They are sound sleepers, I assure you. And every few years a new lot is laid down and run over; so that, if some have the pleasure of riding on a rail, others have the misfortune to be ridden upon.” – Henry David Thoreau
Photos Courtesy of: Victoria E. Dye, All Aboard for Santa Fe Railway Promotion of the Southwest, 1890s to 1930s, (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006), 46, 54.