Author: Evan Nicole Brown / Source: Atlas Obscura
In February 1883, the Southern Pacific Railroad created a new path for Americans who wanted to head out West. Its transcontinental “Sunset Route” was officially completed, connecting New Orleans directly to California.
This innovative transit line, the second transcontinental connection, between the Southeast and the Pacific not only brought new commerce to the wild, wild West, but shifted migratory patterns in a way that changed the relatively new state of California. In particular, Los Angeles’s present-day black population has creole influences that are a direct result of the Sunset Route.The four railroad barons responsible for this ambitious reach across the nation were Collis P. Huntington, Charles Crocker, Leland Stanford, and Mark Hopkins. The ever-competitive Huntington sought to capitalize on his company’s 85 percent dominance over California’s tracks by laying down a railway through the South. Through his own capital and funds from the other three (targeted bribery, too), Huntington gained control of several smaller railroads, giving birth to the Sunset Route. (It should be noted that it was completed and connected thanks to the low-paid and dangerous labor of Chinese immigrants.)
The route covered a whopping 9,000 miles of track, by modest approximation. And just like that, the “Big Four” had achieved a stranglehold over the shipping industry on the Pacific seaboard, which ensured that their interests in the ports there would be taken seriously. As an added bonus, this railroad pushed commercial freight through Los Angeles, which fueled the subsequent “speculative land bubble” that took off later in the decade.
Faustina DuCros, a sociologist at San Jose State University,…
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