Robert E. Strahorn

Robert Edmund Strahorn (1852–1944) was an American journalist, author, railroad promoter and entrepreneur who played a significant role in the development and promotion of the American West. Born in Pennsylvania, he entered newspaper work while still young and moved to Denver in 1870. During the Great Sioux War of 1876–77 he travelled with U.S. Army forces as a war correspondent, reporting from the field before turning his attention increasingly to western expansion. In 1877 railroad magnate Jay Gould hired him as a publicist for the Union Pacific Railroad. Strahorn and his wife, Carrie Adell “Dell” Green Strahorn, subsequently travelled thousands of miles through Idaho, Wyoming, Montana and the wider Northwest, often by stagecoach and horseback. His books, newspaper articles and promotional material presented western land, towns and economic opportunities to prospective settlers and investors, while he also advised railroad interests about routes, stations and potential town sites.

Strahorn moved beyond publicity into land speculation, town development, railroads, irrigation and electrical power. He was associated with the development of communities including Caldwell, Payette, Weiser, Shoshone and Hailey in Idaho, later becoming particularly influential in Spokane and eastern Washington. He promoted and built railway projects including the North Coast Railroad and became involved with the Portland, Eugene & Eastern Railroad and other schemes intended to open central and eastern Oregon to rail traffic. His career brought considerable wealth but also major reverses: an unsuccessful attempt to develop Fairhaven as a great railway terminus cost him heavily, and investments made shortly before the 1929 crash eventually destroyed much of his remaining fortune. He died in San Francisco in 1944 at the age of ninety-one. His life illustrates the close relationship between journalism, railroad expansion, land speculation and settlement in the nineteenth-century West—the same expansion that transformed western communities while also placing increasing pressure on Indigenous lands and societies.

In Jane Kirkpatrick’s Everything She Didn’t Say, Carrie Strahorn’s published memoir celebrated twenty-five years of travel with her husband Robert, a railroad promoter who helped advertise and develop the American West.