The arrival of transcontinental railroads in the Pacific Northwest during the 1880s marked one of the key turning points in the region's history. The Northwest had been integrated into global trading networks since the 1780s, when British vessels began carrying away sea otter pelts to China; and the Northwest had been integrated into far western trading networks since the time of the Gold Rush, when California's demand for produce and lumber had sent ships to regional shores. Yet as late as 1880 the Pacific Northwest remained largely isolated from both the main currents of the global economy and the bulk of the population in the United States. From the writings of people like James Swan, Americans knew that the Northwest possessed resources to be exploited. Yet other parts of the country generally provided plenty of the kinds of resources that the Northwest had to offer, and the place remained too inaccessible for most people. Consider, for example, the extent to which people homesteaded in the region. Between 1862 and 1880, only 9,800 people in Oregon and 9,500 in Washington filed homestead claims; by contrast, 62,000 and 59,000 filed claims, respectively, in Minnesota and Nebraska—states located closer to, and served better by railroads from, eastern centers of population.
Logging RailroadThe population of Idaho, Oregon, and Washington in 1880 amounted to no more than 283,000. After the arrival of transcontinental lines during the 1880s, the number of people grew quickly. By 1910 the three states contained more than 2 million residents. The substantial increase resulted in large part from the arrival of railroads, which brought more people to settle in the region, more investments in the extractive economy, more awareness of opportunities, and more of a means to increase exports to the rest of the world. No longer so remote, the Northwest became even more integrated into the networks of the global economy and the commerce of the United States. Boosters exuded confidence that the railroads would elevate the regional economy, and perhaps even put the Northwest on a par with other parts of the country. They were gratified to get the attention of big capitalists from the East and Europe, to be the focus of advertising campaigns, to become the destination for thousands of new migrants. They embraced the new cities and new commerce that railroads helped to create. However, many booster's hopes were misplaced. Railroads may have liberated the Northwest from its isolation and accelerated its pace of settlement, but they brought with them their own constraints and limitations. In some ways they heightened the sense that the Northwest was the colony, the hinterland, of other places.
If the railroads exported the Northwest (or at least its products) to the East, they also imported the East to the Northwest. By that I mean two things. First, railroads transported to the remote region the social and cultural and economic and political traits that characterized Gilded Age America. By conquering distances between different corners of the country, railroads helped to disseminate the modernizing ways of the late 19th century. The Northwest received as a result an intense dose of urbanization, industrialization, and immigration—and it came at a formative time when social institutions were beginning to jell. Outside of the Willamette Valley, industrialism found few entrenched institutions within Anglo-American society that were capable of resisting or buffering its ways. Second, railroads came with strings attached, and these strings took the form of conditions determined by people back East. No western town, territory, or state had the resources to build a transcontinental line itself. As a result, they relied upon cooperation between the federal government and finance capitalists to obtain rail connections, and they had to live with the terms that those eastern "benefactors" laid down. They had to accept, for example, the bargain struck between Congress and the Northern Pacific Railroad which granted the company immense tracts of western lands as an incentive for building the line. Most of all, they had to learn to live with the enormous influence that railroad companies exerted on their societies.
