Map Showing the Line of the True Southern Pacific Railway and the Short Link Necessary for Its Completion

Cartographer: Rand, McNally & Co., engravers and printers, Chicago (issued for the Southern Pacific Railway promotional bureau, ca. 1878)

Year: 1881

This brochure-style strip map plots an all-rail Gulf-to-Pacific trunk line along the 32nd-parallel corridor championed as the “True” Southern Pacific. A heavy blue line marks completed track from Los Angeles east to Mesilla (N.M.) and from Houston through New Orleans to Atlanta and the Atlantic seaboard; a contrasting red dash shows the missing 150-mile “short link” across west-Texas desert whose construction would create an unbroken low-latitude route between every Atlantic and Gulf port and the entire Pacific Coast. Existing eastern rail networks are densely over-printed to emphasize traffic connections, while pastel state tints and fine hachures outline the deserts, basins, and mountain flanks the road would traverse. A cartouche pledges that once the gap is built “every Gulf City and every Atlantic City [will have] direct rail communication with the whole Pacific Coast,” framing the map squarely as a lobbying piece aimed at Congress and investors considering federal land-grant aid for the project.