When the first passenger train to Wichita arrived the night of Thursday, May 16, 1872, it seemed the entire town had waited up to meet it. Rolling up to the wooden depot on Douglas, the steam train and its 44 occupants were met by a cowboy brass band. Jubilation is not a strong enough word to describe the mood in the city. “Regular through trains reached our depot yesterday,” wrote Marshall Murdock, the usually sober frontier editor, in the next day’s paper. “The bosom of our valley heaved and sot with ecstatic emotion. All is joy and many, very many, are too full for utterance. We are exhausted, bewildered and can say no more. It is enough.” Such was the relief, as Murdock put it, of being “within the bounds of civilization.” You could board the train one day in Wichita and be in St. Louis the next, and Chicago the day after. By May 1872, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway had already crossed most of Kansas and was nearing the Colorado border. It had already reached Emporia in 1870 and Newton in 1871. It did not veer south to Wichita, but continued its westward journey, generally following the old Santa Fe Trail, which had been scouted half a century before. It took a spur line, the Wichita and Southwestern Railway Co., to bring passenger service to the city, but that line was soon absorbed by the Santa Fe.
Source: Kansas Reflector
