RAILROAD CROSSINGS: THE TRANSNATIONAL WORLD OF NORTH AMERICA, 1850-1910 By Christine Ann Berkowitz A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of History University of Toronto © Copyright by Christine Ann Berkowitz 2009. RAILROAD CROSSINGS: THE TRANSNATIONAL WORLD OF NORTH AMERICA, 1850-1910 By Christine Ann Berkowitz Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Department of History, University of Toronto, 2009 ABSTRACT The last quarter of the nineteenth century is often referred to as the “Golden Age” of railroad building. More track was laid in this period in North America than in any other period. The building of railroads was considered synonymous with nation building and economic progress. Railway workers were the single largest occupational group in the period and among the first workers to be employed by large-scale, corporately owned and bureaucratically managed organizations. While there is a rich historiography regarding the institutional and everyday lives of railway workers and the corporations that employed them, the unit of analysis has been primarily bounded by the nation. These national narratives leave out the north-south connections created by railroads that cut across geo-political boundaries and thus dramatically increasing the flows of people, goods and services between nations on the North American continent. Does the story change if viewed from a continental rather than national perspective? Railroad Crossings tells the story of the people and places along the route of the Grand Trunk Railroad of Canada between Montreal, Quebec and Portland, Maine and the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad (and later of the Southern Pacific) between Benson, Arizona and Guaymas, Sonora. The study first takes a comparative view of the cross-border railroad development followed by a consideration of emerging patterns and practices that suggest a broader continental continuity. The evidence demonstrates that this broader continental continuity flows from the application of a certain “railroad logic” or the impact of the essence of ii railroad operations that for reasons of safety and efficiency required the broad standardization of operating procedures that in many ways rendered place irrelevant. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT....................................................................................................................................II TABLE OF FIGURES................................................................................................................... V RAILROAD CROSSINGS: AN INTRODUCTION..................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 1: CORRIDORS OF CONTINUITY AND CHANGE ............................................. 11 CHAPTER 2: FROM ISOLATION TO INTEGRATION ........................................................... 52 CHAPTER 3: LABOUR MOBILITY AND OCCUPATIONAL MIGRATION........................ 94 CHAPTER 4: A CERTAIN RAILROAD LOGIC .................................................................... 137 CHAPTER 5: RAILWAY WORKERS, UNIONS AND THE STATE.................................... 179 CONCLUSION........................................................................................................................... 220 BIBLIOGRAPHY....................................................................................................................... 227 iv TABLE OF FIGURES Figure 1 Political Map of North America ca. 1840 ..................................................................... 17 Figure 2 Political Map of North America ca. 1900 ..................................................................... 17 Figure 3 Map of the Grand Trunk Montreal to Portland Line ca 1853........................................ 26 Figure 4 Schematic of the Sonora System c1880. ....................................................................... 43 Figure 5 Railways British North America, ca1850.................................................................... 143 Figure 6 Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe R.R. Co. 1872........................................................... 144 Figure 7 The Santa Fe System ca. 1880..................................................................................... 146 Figure 8 Connections across the southern border ca. 1882. ...................................................... 146 Figure 9 The SP controls access to the port city of San Francisco, ca. 1898. ........................... 148 Figure 10 Map showing the Sonora System in the northwest and the lack of connections to other Mexican Railroads, ca. 1888....................................................................................................... 171 v Railroad Crossings: An Introduction Under the headline, “Strikers Fill Nogales Town,” the Los Angeles Times reported that on 18 January 1911 the locomotive engineers working for the Southern Pacific of Mexico (SPdeM), a subsidiary of the Southern Pacific (SP), in the States of Sonora and Sinaloa had gone out on strike seeking wage parity with their counterparts on the SP in the United States. 1 Although small in number, only 62 locomotive engineers in total described as native and American, their impact was initially far reaching. The strike affected the lines running south from Nogales to Guaymas, Mazatlan and Cananea, Mexico, a total of roughly 1000 miles.2 Strikers used the border to their advantage, avoiding Mexican law by conducting all strike action north of the border in Nogales, Arizona.3 They refused to operate the switch engine in the yards at Nogales, Arizona as it belonged to the line south of the border. The congestion in the yard backed up freight and passenger runs forcing officials to man the trains in order to maintain minimal operations. In short order all other connecting lines in Mexico placed an embargo on passenger and freight shipments over the affected lines because they were unable to guarantee delivery on time. According to one newspaper account there were 250 carloads of oranges billed through to Canada and 350 carloads of tomatoes, eggplant, green peppers and other similar produce.4 The result was serious congestion throughout Mexico, ultimately with continental reverberations. Earlier in June of 1910, a decision affecting brakemen and conductors on the eastern lines had been successfully negotiated for over 27,000 employees of the eastern lines, but not the 5,000 trainmen employed by the Grand Trunk of Canada and its subsidiary the Central 1 "Strikers Fill Nogales Town," Los Angeles Times, 22 January 1911. 2 Ibid. 3 "Mexican Lines of Southern Pacific Tied," Tucson Arizona Daily Star, 18 January 1911, col. 6, p. 3. 4 Ibid. 1 Vermont.5 Like the workers on the Southern Pacific of Mexico, the employees of the Grand Trunk walked off the job seeking wage parity with their counterparts in the eastern lines in the United States.6 The strike lasted fifteen days, affected service and connecting lines from Portland Maine through Quebec, Ontario and Michigan to Chicago. In this case there were reports of violence and corporate and government attempts at suppression on both sides of the border. Nevertheless the strike ended with an arbitrated settlement in favour of the employees of the Grand Trunk and its subsidiary the Central Vermont, a settlement very close to that awarded competitive eastern US lines. Both the Southern Pacific of Mexico and the Grand Trunk Railway operated lines that crossed international North American borders. By the early part of the twentieth century an extensive web of railways crisscrossed the continent not only east and west but also north and south. The growth of a continental space, one in which people, goods and ideas flow relatively freely across borders, and in so doing create conditions that contribute to the development of parallel social, economic, and political conditions, can be witnessed in the events of these two strike actions. What began as a national movement of organized railroad workers within the United States had a continental impact. The preceding narrative is one in a series of vignettes in this study, chosen to illustrate the increasing connectedness of the North American continent in the late nineteenth century facilitated by the expansion of a continental railway network. The story of railroad development holds a significant place in the North American historiography of industrialization, imperialism and nation building. Railroad development on the continent began in the United States and 5 "B. & O. Wage Scale On Vanderbilt Lines," New York Times, 18 May 1910, p. 5. 6 "The Trainmen's Demands," The Toronto Globe, 17 June 1910, col. 2 p. 9. 2 Canada in the 1830s and in Mexico in the 1840s.7 Expansion slowed dramatically in the United States during the American Civil War but then resumed with a vengeance reaching its peak across the continent in the 1890s.8 In Canada, development progressed more slowly and evenly with the first transcontinental railroad reaching completion in 1885.9 After the building of the first road with British support in the 1840s, railroad development in Mexico would be delayed for some thirty years and then grow dramatically from the 1870s through the 1890s.10 The impetus behind the construction of these early railroads was driven by local business interests and was intended to connect existing market towns within a regional economy or to link extraction industries with processing facilities. By mid-century much had changed politically on the North American