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THE “FRISCO” RAILROAD
St. Louis- San Francisco Railway Company
In the annals of American history, the optimism of great age of the
railway barons and the building of the transportation networks across
the spreading
pioneer west is perhaps most exemplified in the name of this railroad
company. With the discovery of gold in California in and the following
rush of excitement to get to the west, a railroad convention was held
in 1849. A pamphlet had been published in Boston, proposing a railroad
be built from St Louis to San Francisco, called curiously, the Boston
Plan.
The pamphlet put forth the proposition “The iron will of the sovereign people, pointing to the imperative necessity of the immediate completion of the St. Louis and San Francisco Railroad, a work whose very existence will give us the mastery of the Pacific and the India seas, thereby averting foreign wars, by warning foreign powers of the necessity of being on good terms with so powerful a country as ours”… Unfortunately, the railroad to the golden west was not yet begun, and ultimately never make it as far as the dream. A railroad was built and expanded and remains today but never got further west than Texas.
The original and present-day
line of the St. Louis-San Francisco Railway, better known as the Frisco,
began construction in St. Louis as the Southwestern
Branch of the Pacific Railroad, chartered on March 12, 1849, by the Missouri
Legislature. The charter of the Pacific Railroad was to lay tracks from
St. Louis to the western boundary of Missouri, and there to meet up with
any rail line to be built eastward from the Pacific Coast. Its projected
route was from St. Louis to Jefferson City to Sedalia to Independence
and Kansas City, a line south of the Missouri River and substantially
parallel to it. This old ‘Pacific’ railroad, for which first
ground was broken in St. Louis on July 4, 1851, was the first of the
steam railroads constructed west of the Mississippi River.
The plan was partly the result of the reports of the expeditions of John C. Fremont (known for some rather grandiose self-promotion) to connect the Mississippi Valley and Missouri River to California, Oregon, and the Pacific Coast with one or more trunk railway routes, joined with auxiliary wagon roads. Fremont bought part of the railroad with the idea of carrying out his dream. But Fremont investments failed and he lost the railroad. Fremont also wanted to be president of the United States, but the office and the credit for the Transcontinental Railroad went to Abraham Lincoln.
The railroad spread south and west from St Louis, through Missouri, then through acquisition of the lines and routes extended southward through Oklahoma, Arkansas and into Texas, but the Frisco’s progress west was halted by the complexities of Oklahoma and Texas politics and land ownership shifts with the discovery of oil. The present day main line of the Frisco Railroad traces the route from St Louis through Springfield to Tulsa and Oklahoma City. The railroad lines run parallel to parts of the old Route 66, the highway which roughly follows the path westward, which carried cars to California during n the dustbowl, but never quite connected the Frisco line. Late the Santa Fe Railroad did make that connection to the golden state.
The Frisco railroad logo represents the idea of a stretched raccoon hide. The idea came from railroad Vice President G.H. Nettleton, who on a tour of the tracks, during a stop in Neosho, Missouri noticed a drying hide tacked to the side of the depot, where the local agent was supplementing his wages of $1.25 an hour by tanning and selling hides. Rather than reprimand the worker, Nettleton bought the hide for 2 dollars. Later the now familiar brand logo of the railroad appear with the name inside the sideways outline of a stretched coon hide.
Personal History Connection
My great grandfather
worked in service of the railroads being constructed in the late 19th
Century and my grandfather, William, was born in Afton, Oklahoma,
while a spur of the Frisco was being built in the heart of Indian
Territory. In 1886-87 the line was being extended from Ft Smith, Arkansas
to Paris,
Texas, a route of about 169 miles, cutting right through then
Indian Territory of eastern present day Oklahoma. My grandfather followed
his father with the railroads, eventually to Oregon, before joining
the Army
to serve in WWI.
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