It's only been a couple of years since the country observed the 150th anniversary of THE golden spike ceremony: the completion of the transcontinental railroad, celebrated in Utah.
That line pointed toward San Francisco, already a big, important city. Contrast that with Los Angeles, 1870 population under 6,000. What changed to make L.A. so huge over the coming decades? Another railroad took a different route to the Pacific from the east.
And it was quite a fight with another line, as described in John Sedgwick's book From the River to the Sea: The Untold Story of the Railroad War That Made the West. The author visits with an overview of the Rio Grande-vs-Santa Fe fight and how it unfolded.