How Railroads took the ‘Wild' out of the West

Rounding Windy Pt. Manitou & P.P. Ry., Colo. (William Henry Jackson)

(Wild West Magazine) ... Like a skilled magician, the railroads of the 19th century had transformed America in ways that awed and dazzled onlookers. "The iron arms" of the railroad, observed Charles and Henry Adams in 1871, "have been stretched out in every direction; nothing has escaped their reach, and the most firmly established institutions of man have proved under their influence as plastic as clay." Perhaps in no other part of the United States was the power of railroads to transform as well as create afresh more visible than in its wildest West (beginning with the first transcontinental railroad in 1869). "Railroads have been built, and the means of water communication have been extended, the result of which already has been the redemption and occupation of rich areas from the primitive wilderness," boasted an 1883 publication devoted to settlement of the Pacific Northwest. "Within the brief time since these enterprises began, the advancement of the country has been everywhere apparent, and what has been already accomplished is simply wonderful." Continued