The Southern Pacific and the Railroad Town

The Southern Pacific Railroad reached the Bakersfield area in eighteen seventy-four, with its first depot about three miles east of town, and the arrival reorganized the city in the way that railroad arrivals reorganized virtually every western American city in the second half of the nineteenth century: it determined where wealth concentrated, which neighborhoods grew, which businesses survived, and where the working class lived relative to the tracks.

The Southern Pacific was building its line south from Sacramento through the San Joaquin Valley, heading eventually toward Los Angeles and the transcontinental connection that would tie California's agricultural output to national markets. Kern County sat at the southern end of the valley, and Bakersfield was the gateway. The railroad shops, the freight yards, and the passenger facilities that the Southern Pacific built here created a working-class employment base that was qualitatively different from the seasonal agricultural labor that surrounded the city. Railroad work was year-round, skilled, organized, and it attracted a population of mechanics, engineers, and maintenance workers who had options in ways that field workers did not.

The Southern Pacific's relationship with the Central Valley was not straightforwardly benevolent. The railroad controlled freight rates and land availability across the region in ways that Kern County farmers and businessmen found extortionate for decades. Frank Norris's novel The Octopus, published in nineteen oh one, used the Mussel Slough Tragedy of eighteen eighty, in which a confrontation between settlers and a railroad land-recovery party killed seven people in the San Joaquin Valley, as the basis for a broad indictment of railroad monopoly power. Norris's Octopus was the Southern Pacific. Every farmer in Kern County in nineteen oh one knew what the title meant.

The railroad's dominance eroded through the twentieth century as highway freight and air travel shifted traffic patterns. The Southern Pacific merged into Union Pacific in nineteen ninety-six. The freight lines through Bakersfield are still active. The story of the first arrival, and what it cost the valley to have a railroad and what it cost to not have one, is still unresolved in the accounting.