The Old Iron Road

An Epic of Rails, Roads, and the Urge to Go West

There is a corridor in these United States, along which tens of millions of people pass every year. But within sight of this highway -- Interstate 80 -- are old and older routes chosen by explorers, expeditions, and engineers -- by wagon train pioneers, Pony Express riders, Pacific railroaders, and excursionists taking the "horseless carriage" out for its earliest long-distance spins to rediscover America. By getting off the big, roaring highway, tracing those bygone paths and threading through bypassed towns and hamlets -- out where in history, something happened -- one may find a million stories.

In the summer of 2000, award-winning author David Bain (Empire Express) and his family left their home in Vermont and headed west in search of America's past. Spiritually their journey began on a Kansas trail where the author's grandmother was born in a covered wagon in the year 1889. Between the Missouri River and the Golden Gate, they retraced the entire route of the first transcontinental railroad and large stretches of the Oregon and California trails, and the equally colorful old Lincoln Highway. Following vanished iron rails and wagon wheel ruts, bumping down back roads and main streets, they discovered the deep, restless, uniquely American spirit of adventure that connects our past to our present.

A superb writer and an exacting researcher, Bain conjures up a marvelous sense of coming unstuck in time as he lingers in the ghost towns and battlegrounds, prairies and river ports, train yards, museums, deserts, and diners that line the old emigrant routes, the railroad, and the Lincoln Highway. As he cruises west to California, Bain encounters a fascinating cast of characters, both historic and contemporary --from Mark Twain and Willa Cather to Henry Fonda and Marlon Brando, from pathfinder John C. Fremont and colorful Calamity Jane to Old West re-enactors and naturalist Terry Tempest Williams. Here, too, are memories of Bain's grandparents and the journeys that shaped his own heritage.

Writing in the tradition of William Least Heat-Moon and Ian Frazier, yet with an engaging warmth and a deep grasp of history all his own, David Haward Bain has fashioned a quintessentially American journey.


David Haward Bain is the author four previous works on nonfiction, including Empire Express and Sitting in Darkness, which received a Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Book Award. His articles and essays have appeared in Smithsonian, American Heritage, Kenyon Review, and Prairie Schooner, and he has reviewed regularly for The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, and Newsday. He co-produced the documentary "Transcontinental Railroad" for the PBS "American Experience" series, and has appeared widely in venues as varied as Bill Moyers' "Becoming American: The Chinese Experience" and C-SPAN's "Booknotes" with Brian Lamb. A teacher at Middlebury College and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Bain lives in Orwell, Vermont.

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Cover Photographer
Jim Richardson