Chapter One: The Railroad, Mobility, and Space
E ATING A LONG THE R AILS
While the next two chapters of this dissertation cover dining options offered to travelers and citizens by Chinese restaurateurs in El Paso and Mexican chili-stand vendors in San Antonio, another version of the restaurant developed specifically for the
88 Ibid., 304. 89 Ibid., 302–11.
western railroad lines should be noted. The now famous Harvey Houses, created by Fred Harvey, began operations along the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe in 1876, and before long became the standard for dining along the railroad in the Midwest and Southwest into the twentieth century.90
Before he became a restaurant magnate, Harvey contracted for a smaller railroad company during the Civil War selling tickets for the main line that ran several miles north of Leavenworth, Kansas, Harvey’s home. When a branch line reached the city a few years later, Harvey took full advantage by expanding his business and hiring others to run his locations while he set off across the country as a freight agent for a railroad company.91 During his travels, Harvey learned that the dining options throughout the
United States that were convenient to railroad depots and stops were far from consistent. He sought to remedy that situation, especially in the West, by creating a chain of
standardized restaurants in and near railroad depots and stops along the route. He opened the first Harvey House restaurant in Topeka, Kansas, in 1876.92
Harvey Houses competed directly with saloons, hotel restaurants, and chophouses for business along the lines. Harvey hoped to set his restaurants apart by establishing a
90 Stephen Fried, Appetite for America: Fred Harvey and the Business of Civilizing the Wild West - One Meal at a Time (New York: Bantam Books, 2010); Jeri Quinzio, Food on the Rails: The Golden Era of Railroad Dining (Lanham Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014); Levenstein, Revolution at the Table.
91 Fried, Appetite for America; Quinzio, Food on the Rails, 13–18. 92 Fried, Appetite for America, 49; Quinzio, Food on the Rails, 14.
system of standardization and efficiency and offering “good food, clean accommodations and civil behavior to railroad service.”93 Harvey’s convincing sales pitch that a traveler
would not be able to find this type of clean, civilized atmosphere with high-quality food at other restaurants across the West highlights the ideas and national narratives about accepted restaurants, proper food space, and ethnicity that existed at the end of the nineteenth century.94
One major defining characteristic of the nineteenth-century Harvey Houses is today the defining characteristic of any chain – that is consistency across time and space. A train passenger could leave Topeka just after breakfast, stop in Wichita around lunch, and pull in to the Amarillo station in time for dinner and see the same menu, same shiny seemingly clean interior, and be served their meals by a mythic Harvey Girl, the
restaurants army of young, white, single easterners that they brought to the west as a civilizing presence.95
In many cases, that same passenger would have the opportunity to dine at a Chinese-owned restaurant near the depot, but as the quote above assumes, passengers could not receive the same type of high-quality service and cleanliness at other
93 Gordon, Passage to Union: How the Railroads Transformed American Life, 1829-1929, 206. 94 Again, see Gabaccia, We Are What We Eat; Levenstein, Revolution at the Table, for their analyses of the industrialization of American food and restaurants at the turn of the twentieth century.
95 I will comment on the Harvey Girls in comparison to the equally mythic “chili queen” of San Antonio later in chapter three.
establishments. In reality, Chinese restaurants in the western United States had been complimented and praised for their service, cleanliness, and food quality that bordered on consistent across restaurants as most served an Americanized menu with chops of varying sorts, potatoes, stewed vegetables, and wild game. However, as I will illustrate in chapter four, the racist assault (both physical and verbal) by labor groups and western
communities upon the Chinese in America and the spaces they inhabited marked them as unclean and uncivilized in the eyes of many people for many years.
CONCLUSION
The railroad brought large-scale economic, social, cultural, and geographical change to lands west of the Mississippi River after the conclusion of the Civil War. Boosters sold investors and immigrants on the potential and abundance of lands in the West, and the completion of the first transcontinental railroad proved that those lands were available. The first transcontinental carved an east-west artery through the Great Plains, over the Rocky Mountains and into California by 1869, and soon thereafter, railroad companies began branching out from that major artery into other areas of the west to exploit natural resources for East Coast markets. The railroad prompted the development of regional, national, and international networks for trade in all manner of goods, but especially for resources such as ores, timber, cattle, and commodity crops like cotton. Land adjoining the track became a valuable commodity in most cases, creating communities out of nothing seemingly overnight. Immigrants, tourists, and business travelers visited and moved into areas along the railroad lines creating major growth and
demographic change in existing communities, drastically changing some communities within a few years.
The arrival of millions of new immigrants into western lands required a host of new services in places that had not seen restaurants, cleaners, hotels, and dry-goods stores prior to the railroad connecting their community to East Coast markets and populations. It spurred the creation of streamlined, consistent experiences from tourist attractions to restaurants. Fred Harvey created the Harvey House and placed them inside or adjacent to railroad depots across the Great Plains and into the Southwest in part to provide travelers with a recognizable eating experience across space and in the face of independent
restaurants, saloons, and hotels. The Harvey House and its Harvey Girls embodied the idea of the restaurant in America. Harvey’s reach in Texas was limited, but rail travelers headed to Texas witnessed and/or experienced the Harvey House on the way to their destination and found a very different experience in the plazas of San Antonio and the chop houses of El Paso.
The development of the railroad system in East Texas began modestly just before the Civil War but had matured by the end of the 1870s when the first line reached San Antonio, over two decades after it had arrived in other parts of Texas. By that time, railroad companies and their partners had created a vast network of exchange from Galveston to Dallas to Austin that also connected the region nationally and
internationally. Chapter two will highlight the spatial, economic, and demographic changes the railroad brought to the landscape in Texas in order to point to the differing
ways its arrival affected both San Antonio and El Paso. It also sheds light on the important regional food networks that were established before it rolled into these areas.