Thirty-second parallel Pacific railroad in Texas 1872

This study seeks to explore the antecedents of The Texas and Pacific Railway Company. It is based upon voluminous materials, many of them of an official nature, yet none of the corporate records of any of the corporations analysed was available as sources. There is, indeed, no certainty that they are extant, but if so, presumably, they are in the possession of the Texas and Pacific. As late as 1858, there were three sets of stock books of the Southern Pacific Railroad Company, of Texas, and its antecedent companies, one for each the Atlantic and Pacific, the Texas Western, and the Southern Pacific. In the middle 1870's, four volumes of the minutes of the stockholders and directors of these companies were available. At that time only the minute book of the Southern Pacific company which had been sold out in 1859 had not been found. The writer, further, has been unable to ascertain the whereabouts of any of the books of the Memphis, El Paso and Pacific Railroad Company and of the Southern Trans-continental company. In addition to facing a shortage of corporate records of the corporations, the investigator into the history of the thirty-second parallel roads discovers an amazing paucity of materials on the men connected with the road, although many of them are of more than interest. The manuscript papers of none of the central figures are available. In addition, there are no adequate published biographies of important men like Robert John Walker, Thomas Butler King, and Marshall Owen Roberts, and there is not so much as a readily available biographical sketch of Jeptha Fowlkes, Vernon King Stevenson, and other substantially important men. The longest memoir of Thomas Jefferson Rusk, Carrier Belle Stewart's The Life of Thomas Jefferson Rusk (M.A. thesis, University of Texas, August, 1922), does not contain a single reference to Rusk's interest in the Pacific railroadHistor