From the river to the sea The untold story of the railroad war that made the West

Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Novelist and historian Sedgwick (Blood Moon) delivers a dense yet colorful history of the "frenzied competition" between two railroad tycoons to lay tracks between Colorado and the Pacific Ocean. Sedgwick casts Rio Grande railway owner Gen. William Palmer, a "certified Civil War hero" who built a castle in Colorado Springs to lure his 19-year-old bride west, and William Barstow Strong, the business-minded president of the much-larger Santa Fe railroad, as polar opposites. Yet Strong's 1877 offer to lease 30% of Palmer's railroad set off an epic clash that united the two men in a single-minded drive to outdo the other. Sedgwick chronicles their race to lay claim to routes between Colorado and southern California in scrupulous detail, documenting press campaigns, courtroom showdowns, and standoffs between the private armies of both railroads. According to Sedgwick, the struggle between Palmer and Strong was crucial to the development of southwestern cities including Santa Fe and Albuquerque, and transformed L.A. from a "sun-splashed Spanish pueblo... to a bustling city." Though generalists may have a tough time keeping track of all the technical details, railroad buffs will be riveted. (June)

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Review by Library Journal Review

In 1869, America's first transcontinental railroad joined East and West but left plenty of land to be conquered by the clickety-clack of trains. Aided by federal grants, two daring railway men launched the Rio Grande and Santa Fe railways, which led to virtual warfare involving mercenaries and local militia. From the author of Blood Moon; with a 100,000-copy first printing.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

The history of a railroad gold rush. Many know about the great American Transcontinental Railroad, but Sedgwick introduces us to the "longest, most expensive, and most destructive railroad war in American history." It's the tale of a fight between two men and their creations: Civil War Gen. William Jackson Palmer and his Denver & Rio Grande Railway and the ambitious William Barstow Strong and his Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway. Palmer and Strong battled for "the chance to develop and define the modern West as no one else could," and it was personal. Both had their sights set on the Pacific, but first came the treacherous Raton Pass on the Colorado--New Mexico border. Originally, the train lines ran perpendicular to each other, but with each new track and developed property alongside much of the land they got for free, they became "entwined." Sedgwick recounts the many strategies employed to find the best routes through the Southwest, introducing us to many colorful characters: financiers, entrepreneurs, surveyors, law enforcement (Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson), and even a silver drill--touting Oscar Wilde. After Strong made it to the pass first, Palmer turned his attention to the towering rock faces of Royal Gorge in the Arkansas Valley and its rich silver mines in nearby Leadville. Sedgwick's narrative meanders in his discussion of Palmer's extensive legal and financial maneuvers to protect his Rio Grande route to Leadville. Railway baron Jay Gould, with his own ambitions, worked a deal that would permit the two railways to head westward on separate routes. Strong lost Leadville to Palmer, but he was now able to grow in the Southwest. A financial deal with Southern Pacific let Strong take a southern route; on May 31, 1887, his line reached Los Angeles. Sedgwick emphasizes the financial over the dramatic; readers may wish for more about the building of the railways: the day-to-day laying of track, the workers' experiences, how they overcame geographical challenges, etc. Sturdy popular history, but numerous sidetracks covering business and money slow the race west. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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ProloguePROLOGUE A Tale of Two Cities L.A. THE ONLY CITY IN the world that goes just by its initials, like the self-assured global celebrity it is. Unlike Miami with its beaches, New York with its skyline, or Houston with its oil, Los Angeles is a fantasy of a city whose identity somehow floats free of mundane physical characteristics. All, that is, except for the sunshine radiating down from impossibly blue skies and the palm trees that rise up in greeting. Unlike virtually everywhere else in America, to say nothing of America itself, L.A. has no founding myth to define it. No pilgrims, no explorers, no pioneers. While most people have the vague idea that the city dates back to Spanish times, the details are lost in the glitter, replaced by the gauzy notion that it somehow created itself as a product of its movie business. It's hard to account for it otherwise. Although L.A. lies by the sea, it did not begin life as a port. Nor was it birthed by the river that runs through it from the San Gabriel Mountains or a natural resource like the gold that brought prospectors surging into San Francisco. (Oil wasn't found until L.A. was well established, which is why a pumpjack might be cranking away in a McDonald's parking lot.) No, the city in fact owes its origin to something so foreign to its self-conception that it represents a violation of its existential code. It was started by a railroad. Los Angeles is a railroad town. Startling as that might sound, on reflection it should not be quite so surprising, since railroads gave rise to countless cities in the West (and plenty in the East, too). While San Francisco, up the coast, was not built by a railroad, it was certainly built up by one when the first transcontinental arrived there in 1869. Numerous other western cities were created almost entirely by railroads--Denver, Reno, Dallas, Houston, Seattle, Tacoma, to name just a few. Curiously, Los Angeles was not the result of the first railroad that came to town nearly so much as the second. Its arrival set off a furious competition between the two in the spring of 1887 that dropped the price of a $125 ticket from Chicago to just one single solitary dollar. The news set off a stampede into Los Angeles. Just in the first three years of the frenzy, it went from a sun-splashed Spanish pueblo of thirty thousand to a bustling city of a hundred and fifty thousand, a fivefold expansion that marks the most explosive growth of any city in the history of the United States. That growth curve has rarely flattened since. Over a thousand miles to the east, Colorado Springs lies just south of Denver on the edge of the Rockies, a mile up in the crystalline mountain air. A rather sedate, if not sleepy, college town in the shadow of Pikes Peak, a jagged-topped "fourteener" that looms over everything, Colorado Springs was also created by a railroad. Founded in 1871, it was intended to be a mountain retreat in the Alpine manner, a place of healthy air and cultural refinement for high-end refugees brought in by train from the smoggy East. Small, out-of-the-way, closed-in, Colorado Springs seems to exist in a separate universe or on a separate plane of meaning from L.A. But there is a connection between them all the same. The train that made the modern Los Angeles started in Colorado Springs. Not literally--the town never had an L.A. Express--but figuratively, riding the tracks of history, which often run by puzzling, circuitous routes from the past into the present. While the course of progress is often thought to be the result of economic, social, technological, and environmental forces beyond anyone's control, that was not at all true of the development of the railroads. In the robust industrial age, they were all run by powerful, strong-minded men who bent their industry, and a good deal of the country, to their will. They set the course, chose the route, and built up the cities and towns their tracks reached. In this, Colorado Springs and Los Angeles were no exception. The fates of these two distant cities, one as big as the other is small, were linked because the railroad men behind them were linked. More than linked, in fact. Bound like a pair of conjoined twins, two bodies somehow sharing a single mind, burning as one with the identical, all-consuming determination to go west. It was freakish, but undeniable: these two wildly different men became almost indistinguishable once they focused on the same objective and did so in the full realization that only one of them could attain it. It made quite a ball of fire, this frenzied competition, a blind, stupid, and utterly destructive jealous rage. A sun all of their own making that drew all eyes to it--even as the real one rose up overhead, day after day, and silently crossed the sky to the far horizon, as if to remind these two railroad men what they were fighting for: the chance to develop and define the modern West as no one else could. Excerpted from From the River to the Sea: The Untold Story of the Railroad War That Made the West by John Sedgwick All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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