The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 75, July 1971 - April, 1972 Page: 23
566 p. : ill. (some col.), maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Arthur E. Stilwell and the Founding of Port Arthur
and eastern Kansas City, and Stilwell embarked on a new career.
Using a number of construction companies, all affiliated with the
Missouri, Kansas and Texas Trust Company by stock ownership and
interlocking boards, and issuing collateral trust mortgages to finance
construction, Stilwell extended his operations to include additional
mileage west to Kansas City, Kansas, and east to Independence,
Missouri.1" Martin then proposed that a line be built south from
Kansas City to Hume, Missouri, where coal mines had recently
been opened. Stilwell not only agreed and began to float bonds for
the line, but also began to contemplate a railroad extending from
Kansas City to the Gulf of Mexico using the railways around Kansas
City as a base.'" In his memoirs Stilwell described this scheme with
his usual vivid prose: "My life's greatest resolution came to me in
this hour. I, a struggling young insurance man, unknown and un-
heralded[,] would go West, build a railroad to a Southern port as
an outlet for export shipments. . . . Let me say simply that I had
a hunch.""
Undoubtedly, the conception was not just a "hunch," for the
idea of a direct rail line to the Gulf from Kansas City was not new.
Grain farmers, Kansas City promoters, Senator Thomas Hart Benton,
and others had discussed such a line since the 185o's." The Kansas
City Board of Trade had tried to promote grain shipments to Gal-
veston; railroads had been organized to build from Kansas City to
Sabine Pass on the Gulf in the 188o's; and as late as 1893 the Populist
party sought such a railway." These schemes, like Stilwell's, were
predicated on the belief that farmers and grain dealers could vastly
reduce their shipping costs by a direct rail line to the Gulf at
Galveston or Sabine Pass.
Using a myriad of construction companies, railroad corporations,
and real estate subsidiaries, Stilwell and Martin began to extend
'6This method of financing construction of railroads was not unusual in the period. See
Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. (comp. and ed.), The Railroads (New York, 1965), 45-46;
Thomas Warner Mitchell, "The Collateral 'rust Mortgage in Railway Finance," Quarterly
Journal of Economics, XX (May, 1906), 454-455, 466.
"l"Minute Book of the Kansas City, Rich Hill and Southern Railroad Company"
(Office, Kansas City Southern Railway); Jefferson City Daily Tribune, August 4, 1887.
17Stilwell, "I Had a Hunch" (December 3, 1927), 168.
"sEngineering News, XXXIX (February 17, 1898), 117; Charles N. Glaab, Kansas City
and the Railroads: Community Policy in the Growth of a Regional Metropolis (Madison,
1962), 32, 129-13o.
"The Railroad Gazette (New York), June 18, 1874, September 2o, 1889, January 17,
1890o; New York Times, August 18, 1887, September 2, December 4, 5, 1898.
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 75, July 1971 - April, 1972, periodical, 1972; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101201/m1/35/: accessed April 26, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.