RAIL HERITAGE SPEAKER DETAILS OPENING OF WEST

JACKSON -- The western railroads, more than anything else, played a key role in opening, settling and developing the frontier wilderness known as the American west.

That's the message Craig Miner, a professor of history at Wichita (Kan.) State University, brought Saturday to Southeast Missouri railroad and history enthusiasts.

Miner was the featured speaker Saturday at a program on "The Significance of the Railroad in the Opening of the West."

The program was part of the Jackson Railroad Heritage Weekend, sponsored by the Friends of Steam Railroading, the Missouri Humanities Council and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Miner told the audience of about 200 gathered Saturday at the former Jackson Grade School Auditorium that the railroads forever changed the character of the land, and the native Americans who lived there.

"Clearly, 19th century railroads gave Americans what they wanted for the American west," he said. "It ushered out an old culture and brought in a new culture.

"It modified the landscape through engineering and science. To quote the Bible, the railroad engineer could make the crooked way straight.

"In doing so, the railroad insured that the pastoral West was suddenly and irrevocably lost as opportunity and comfort overtook the Plains dwellers with a rush."

Miner said Missouri, in many ways, is the cradle of all western railway development. He said the Pacific Railroad of Missouri was the "mother" of nearly all the railroads eventually created in the state - among them, the Missouri Pacific, and the St. Louis, Iron Mountain & Southern.

As early as the late 1840s, men such as Missouri's Thomas Hart Benton dreamed of a transcontinental railroad that would link St. Louis with the Pacific, "even though his son-in-law, John C. Freemont, nearly froze to death in the Rocky Mountains trying to find a route for it through the Central Rockies," Miner said.

But the Civil War temporarily stalled those dreams, he added. After the war, though, soldiers looked toward the "Western Desert," in lieu of the destructive exploits of the war.

"In the beginning, it wasn't very attractive," Miner said. "The explorer, Coronado, strangled the person that took him there. But poised to penetrate this desert, and to shunt into history forever its native (American) population, were steam-driven machines dispatched by American railway corporations."

After Congress passed the Homestead Act and provided aid to the first westward rail lines, Miner said thousands of people - soldiers with land warrants, laborers weary of the mines and factories, and immigrants looking for freedom and space - all looked with hope to the West.

Miner said the steel rails were the "Rivers of Iron and the "Highways of Nations" that opened the wilderness.

He quoted Thomas Allen, speaking in 1851 at a St. Louis railroad celebration: "A railroad...is a new lever of power more potent than any Archimedes ever dreamed up."

Miner explained that the Greek scientist had once said he could move the world with a lever if he just had a place to put the lever.

"The railroad was Archimedes' lever...the fulcrum on which the world could be moved," he said. "The western railroads solved the Great Plains puzzle in four basic western challenges.

"First, what to do with the Indian, which was fundamental to opening the west; second, how to make the desert bloom; third, how to populate the plains; and last, how to keep the settlers there... through all the hardships."

Miner said the railroad brought an end to the Indian's nomadic life by attracting farmers and ranchers who claimed the ground. The railroads also drew hunters who decimated the bison population that the natives were so dependent on for sustenance.

The same railroads also brought soldiers who were able to drive the Indian tribes onto reservations.

Making the "desert" bloom wasn't quite as easy, Miner said. The railroad's agents had told the potential settlers that "rain follows the plows and the rails," an assertion that turned out to be false.

But a long wet period in the 1870s helped to save the railroad's reputation and continue the western growth.

Miner said railroad agents scoured the nation and Europe, looking for people to go west on trains to buy cheap land for the railroad, build farms and towns, and raise crops, which, of course, were shipped back east on the same trains that supplied the west.

"The Santa Fe went into Russia and persuaded wealthy Mennonite farmers to leave their homes and settle in the western United States much to the displeasure of the Czar," he said. "In this country, entire towns back east were persuaded to move west and homestead railroad land."

Miner said the railroad's link between civilization and wilderness spawned the development.

When difficulties arose in the form of pestilence or severe drought he said the railroads transported thousands of carloads of supplies from the east to the settlers at no cost.

Miner said that following a particularly bad drought, the railroads provided seed grain and employed idle farmers and ranchers to help them survive until the next year.

"Some would say it was self-interest on the part of the railroads, but the result was there, and it helped keep the people there, who would never otherwise have survived," he said .

"One-hundred years after the great boom that opened the western half of our country, the railroad locomotive should have its honored place as an icon of America."