Frank Norris – Railroad in Northern New Mexico

Description

Frank Norris is a retired historian with the National Park Service. His career with the agency began in 1981, at Custer Battlefield National Monument. He recently retired from the National Trails Intermountain Region office.

He is the author of several articles about the overland trails, including “Trails and Rails: the Impact of Railroad Construction on the Overland Trails, 1863-1869,” co-written with Lee Kreutzer and published in the Overland Journal, and “A Geographical History of the Santa Fe Trail,” which was published in the Journal of the West.

The Santa Fe Trail bridged the gap between the Missouri River Valley and New Mexico for almost 60 years. Between 1821 and the end of the Civil War, the trail’s eastern terminus was either Independence, Westport, or Leavenworth. In 1866, however, rails began advancing west across Kansas, and the Santa Fe Trail’s effective length became progressively shorter.

As will be noted in the presentation, the construction of the first railroad into the Southwest was not just a technological achievement; it was the stage upon which three railroads battled for supremacy throughout the 1860s and 1870s