Throughout most of the nineteenth century, the West functioned as a barter economy. Items like eggs and butter were traded for goods and services. Clothing was handmade or handed down. Farm equipment, too expensive and heavy to haul on wagons cross country, was shared among neighboring farms. Farm families mostly grew it, traded for it, or did without.

Imagine the excitement when the Northern Pacific first delivered a supply of catalogues from Sears, Roebuck and Company in Chicago. For the first time, families were able to peruse illustrated catalogs, and order fashionable clothing, kitchenware, better farm implements, or whatever tickled their fancy. Better yet, prized purchases were delivered to the nearest railroad station within days!

Big crowd of people in front of Chicago, Milwaukee & Puget Sound electric bipolar locomotive no. 10250. The sign on the train reads, 'World's largest shipment of bench type washers from Newton, Iowa, for Seattle, W.E. Dooley & Co.'

Though Sears entered the mail-order business in 1886, Chicago’s Montgomery Ward and Company was even older. Both firms benefited from farmers’ discontent with local prices in the Midwest.1

What the catalog companies offered rural America was not merely a department store between covers but a compelling social message. Selling ready-to-wear clothing with common colors, standard sizes, and the latest styles meant something. It told western farmers and small-town business folk that they could be like their eastern relatives. The catalogs spelled out rules for respectability in everything from dress to home furnishings.

A sample order form printed in the 1902 Sears, Roebuck and Company catalog says it all. William Johnson, living in Cherry county, Nebraska, ordered the following: a book on blacksmithing, a gold-filled bracelet, a twelve-gauge shotgun, ten pounds of coffee, and 100 bars of laundry soap. Johnson could be confident that when the railroad delivered his box, his bars of soap were just like those sold in any city. His shells would fit any twelve-gauge in western Kansas or northern Idaho. And if the gold-filled bracelet was for his wife, she could be sure that it might also grace the wrist of any woman from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon.

The catalog created a vast rural "common market" that shaped a common culture. What took the catalog to thousands of western customers and then delivered their orders was the Iron Road. The first transcontinental visionaries thought the railroad itself would be a nationalizing force. But even more powerful than the rails themselves was what came in box cars.