Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad - Hardcover

Bain, David Haward

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 067080889X ISBN 13: 9780670808892

Publisher: Viking Adult, 1999

Synopsis

A dramatic history of the construction of America's first transcontinental railroad chronicles three seminal decades in American history, describing the vast enterprise to build a railroad from Missouri to the Pacific in terms of the remarkable expansion of the United States of America. 30,000 first printing.

About this title

Review

On the morning of May 10, 1869, a gang of Irish immigrants met a party of Chinese laborers on a windy bluff northwest of Salt Lake City, Utah. Tired to the bone, the two groups laid down the last of countless wooden ties, bought at the exorbitant cost of six dollars apiece, and thus joined two great rail lines, the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific, to form a single transcontinental route. That rail line made possible the mass settlement of the West, and, as those who conceived it well knew, it changed the course of American history.

David Haward Bain's superb narrative of westward rail history, weighing in at 800 pages, ends not with this great achievement but with the political and financial scandal that would almost overshadow it. Along the way Bain looks closely at the entrepreneurial men who foresaw the possibilities of a vast nation joined by a steel ribbon--most memorably the hit-and-miss businessman Asa Whitney, who proposed to Congress an ingenious scheme to fund the building of the railroad through commercializing the right of way. Some of the men who came after Whitney, such as Mark Hopkins, Collis Huntington, and Leland Stanford, amassed great fortunes in realizing this dream. Others died penniless and nearly forgotten in the wake of political maneuverings and bad deals. Bain's vigorous, well-written narrative does much to restore those overlooked actors to history. --Gregory McNamee

From the Back Cover

Beginning in 1842 with a visionary's dream to span the continent with twin bands of iron, Empire Express captures three dramatic decades in which the United States effectively doubled in size, fought three wars, and began to discover a new national identity. From self-made entrepreneurs such as the Union Pacific's Thomas Durant and the Central Pacific's Collis Huntington, to era-defining figures such as President Lincoln, Generals Grant and Sherman, Mark Twain, and Walt Whitman, to the thousands of nameless laborers -- especially the Irish and Chines -- whose backbreaking work made the railroad possible, this extraordinary narrative summons an astonishing array of voices to give new dimension, not only to this monumental endeavor, but also to the culture, political struggles, and social conflicts of an unforgettable period in American history.

Edition details

• Publisher: Viking Adult
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 067080889X
• ISBN 13: 9780670808892
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 797