Imagine the vast expanse of the United States in 1861 just before the outbreak of the Civil War when the country wasn’t yet 100 years old. Half a century earlier, Lewis and Clark traversed the limits of the country and then traveled to parts unknown. Traders, adventurers and cowboys followed. With the end of the Mexican American War, the United States acquired the great swaths of land from the Great Plains to the Pacific. Such distances were unimaginable and daunting for average travelers and settlers.
In its wisdom, the government, led by President Lincoln, wanted to connect the two coasts of the country. The idea wasn’t new, but wrangling over how to pay for such a costly endeavor paralyzed the effort. The gold rush galvanized the need to get
out west in a hurry. An extremely generous incentive program of giving away every other square mile of land to the railroads that conquered each mile, and additional cash payments for every mile of track laid, did the trick. Great industrialists Collis Huntington, Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins and Charles Crocker, ever after known as “The Big Four,” saw the riches to be had and swung into action, buying small concerns and consolidating lines.
The Southern Pacific Railroad would trek through the Coachella Valley. Surveyors reached Indio, known as Indian Wells at the time, on March 25, 1872. They reported that this point was halfway between Los Angeles and Yuma, Arizona and made for a perfect spot for a train station. By 1876 trains were operating from Los Angeles.
Built in the popular Craftsman style, Indio’s Southern Pacific depot and was the center of town life. Business was entirely connected to the world through the railroad. Social life depended upon the adjacent hotel. Dances were hosted in the dining room on Friday nights for visitors and workers alike. Indio quickly developed into an agricultural wonderland with the ability to ship produce on the railroad. Ingenious farmers grew citrus, dates, cotton, grapes and onions, first with artesian wells, and later with the help of Colorado River water brought in through miles of trenches and canals.
(The torrential rains in 1905 overwhelmed the various canals and poured the entire contents of the Colorado River into the Salton Sink for two years, creating the sea. Frantic efforts to fix the breech failed until the government finally turned to the Southern Pacific Railroad for help.)
With the connection to New Orleans complete, the Southern Pacific didn’t limit itself to agricultural shipping but began advertising the wonders of California to entice visitors and settlers. Brochures touted the Sunset Route with colorful descriptions of the exotic sights and interesting stops along the way.
Advertisements for the railroad touted, “Yuma, the Colorado River and California is (sic) reached 1,754 miles west from New Orleans … the route is through a region that is peculiar and interesting. At Imperial Junction, a branch line of the Southern Pacific runs south to the celebrated Imperial Valley, which has sprung into a wonderful existence in a night, almost, because of its splendid fertility, its varied, almost tropical products, freedom from frosts, great volume of water for irrigation, taken from the Colorado, and its rapid development and adaptability for all forms of agriculture, yet in the heart of the desert.”
The watered desert sprung forth. The railroad delivered its bounty. In 1914, the valley shipped more than four thousand train cars of cantaloupes to all sections of the United States. The desert had an exploding population with small towns, streetcars, clubs, newspapers, hotels and a “high class civilization.”
The brochures continued describing the route, “the journey is then through the Salton Valley and along the northern shores of the Salton Sea made by an overflow of the Colorado Rivers some years ago. Here the train runs for miles below the sea level, at Salton reaching the bottom of a great depression at a depth of 253 feet. This condition is peculiar and unequaled and is not even approximated by any other railroad in the world. The route through the California desert passes through Thermal, Coachella and Indio, all below sea level, and climbs the divide, reaching the apex at Beaumont, California.”
Before Beaumont, the train stopped in Palm Springs. The little town also had agriculture in the late 19th century, and a narrow-gauge railway connecting the orchards at Palmdale, (now Smoke Tree Ranch,) with the Garnet station of the Southern Pacific in order to ship fruit to the coastal markets. The little narrow-gauge engine was named Cabazon, and it pulled several flatbed and two passenger cars fashioned from San Francisco trolley cars.
Tourism rapidly replaced agriculture in Palm Springs. By the next decade, daily trains carried visitors to their desert vacation destination, “America’s Winter Playground” from points both east and west. A new train station was completed in 1934, north of town near Tipton Road in the Spanish Mediterranean style, with stucco walls, heavy hand-hewn beams and a tiled roof to match the finest hotel in town, Nellie Coffman’s Desert Inn.
By the time Palm Springs was incorporated in 1938, the city was world-renown with great thanks to the ubiquitous advertising of the Southern Pacific Railroad. Until the mid-1950s, visitors traveling long distances came by almost exclusively by train, in deluxe Pullman cars. Even after the availability of air travel, many preferred the train, including First Lady Mamie Eisenhower who came to Palm Springs each winter by private railway car into the late 1960s, a century after the Civil War and the early dreams of connecting the country by rail.
Tracy Conrad is president of the Palm Springs Historical Society. The Thanks for the Memories column appears Sundays in The Desert Sun. Write to her at pshstracy@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: Southern Pacific Railroad connected Indio, desert to the world
