"What a terrific read! THE OLD IRON ROAD is an elegant combination of riveting storytelling, modern travelogue and impeccable history. By taking his family across America retracing the route of the first transcontinental railroad, award winning prose stylist David Haward Bain rediscovered the glory days of the railroad. Ghosts abound, including John Fremont, Butch Cassidy, and Ulysses S. Grant. When literary awards are handed out at years' end, THE OLD IRON ROAD deserves a few."
--Douglas Brinkley, Professor of History at the University of New Orleans, and author of TOUR OF DUTY, WHEELS FOR THE WORLD, and THE MAJIC BUS
The New York Times Book Review
July 4, 2004/Page 6
Honk if You Love Railroads
A historian took his family on a cross-country trip that retraced the steps of early Americans
By Verlyn Klinkenborg
Imagine a picaresque race across the country, east to west. Some of the racers—like the historian David Haward Bain and his family, for instance—live in the present. Some live in the past, like Samuel Clemens, the Donner-Reed party, assorted forty-niners and Mormons and emigrants. A few, like the Bains and Alice Huyler Ramsey, who in 1909 became the first woman to drive across the country, pay little attention to the clock. Others, like Grenville Dodge, chief engineer for the Union Pacific, are really racing against bankruptcy, and to them time is everything. Many begin the journey in St. Joseph, Mo., the traditional jumping-off point for the westward journey, but most come from farther east, like the Bains, who started in Vermont. Some take the train, some lay the rails, some walk, some drive oxen, and some drive the Lincoln Highway or the country roads that thread away from the interstate. Set them all on the road together, as simultaneously as the linear nature of words will allow, and you have Bain’s book “The Old Iron Road.”
Bain is the author of ”Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad” (1999), a history of the enterprise that culminated in the joining of the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific railroads in the Golden Spike Ceremony at Promontory, Utah, in May 1869. Researching and writing that book took 14 years, and Bain planned the cross-country journey he describes in “The Old Iron Road” as a way to reward his wife and children for their patience and support—and, really, to show them some of the wonders he had come across in his work. In one sense, then, “the Old Iron Road” is a retelling of “Empire Express” from a personal angle. Instead of the chronologies of politics and economics and track laying, this book is anchored by the geographies of the many Americas Bain and his family found as they made their way west by car.
But another impulse also drives this book. Writing a big book—and, just short of 800 pages, “Empire Express” is very big—requires a tunnel vision that gets narrower and narrower as time passes. You forget how much you know and remember only how much there is to know. You stop looking around and start staring at your next few steps. In “the Old Iron Road,” Bain affords himself the luxury of wandering—literally—over the tracks his previous book set down across the American West. But this time he gets to make all the detours, take all the dead-end roads, meet all the characters he did not have time for or did know about the first time around. In “The Old Iron Road,” the dead seem to rise up to greet him as he goes, and the living save all their best stories for him.
We meet a lot of familiar folks on the road with Bain—John C. Fremont, Calamity Jane, Henry Fonda, Fred Astaire, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. But we also meet a lot of people who are less well known, like Edwin E. Perkins, late of Hastings, Neb. Perkins was an inventor whose imagination was wedded to the hyphen. He created Motor-Vigor, Glos-Comb and Jel-Aid before finally perfecting in 1927 the product that made him wealthy, Kool-Aid. We get to know railroad ghost towns before the people moved out and the ghosts moved in. We get a distant glimpse of the thousands of Chinese who worked on the rails nearly a century and a half ago, their “acres of canvas tents staked out along the railroad grade” and their “cook fires redolent with peanut oil, garlic, cuttlefish and pork.”
It is impossible to cross this country by land without being changed by the experience. “The Old Iron Road” captures this fact vividly, as in as many different forms as Bain can find room for in its pages. And if, at times, we feel as though we’ve been dragged through far too many county museums and eaten in far too many historic hotels with unhistoric food, it is still engaging to cross the country in the company of someone who knows the road so well. Best of all, Bain leads the reader to people who know every inch of the crossing—by rail or ox cart—better than he can imagine. We are lucky to be in their company, even for a while.
For many readers, “The Old Iron Road” may seem like a book to travel with, to lead them off the main roads and into a hidden country. When it becomes a paperback, I hope it will be reprinted in the form of an old-fashioned AAA TripTik, one of those customized plastic-bound route guides that the auto club prepared, and still prepares, to guide travelers on their way. In a TripTik, each new page is a new stretch of road, with side routes and attractions properly marked. “The Old Iron Road” is a book that cries out for that kind of graphical representation, a way of visually chronicling all the American journeys it contains.
Verlyn Klinkenborg writes editorials for The Times. He is the author of “The Rural Life” and “Making Hay.”
Chicago Tribune
June 20, 2004 Sunday
By June Sawyers.
"The Old Iron Road: An Epic of Rails, Roads and the Urge to Go West" (Viking; $27.95)
What is it about the West that has so captured the popular imagination? Is it the promise of a better future? The hope that life's troubles will vanish if one just keeps on moving forever westward? In the summer of 2000, David Haward Bain and his family left their home back East and headed west. For him, the trip wasn't about the destination but about the journey--some 7,000 miles one way, he notes. Retracing the route of the first transcontinental railroad, they follow along routes and trails where covered wagons and handcarts once treaded, down back roads, through ghost towns and battlegrounds, across prairies and wide rivers. Bain pays spiritual homage to the memory of his grandparents who traversed this land in an earlier time. He takes us to "Catherland," the area of Nebraska where Willa Cather grew up. We meet the ghosts of the heroes (Wild Bill Hickok), villains (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) and iconoclasts (trapper Jim Bridger) who once populated the West. This is a very personal and warm account--no dry history here--of a journey of the heart that concludes on a poignant note. Anyone who loves history and appreciates the writing of William Least Heat-Moon, Jonathan Raban, Bruce Chatwin and John McPhee will want to add it to their collection.
Library Journal
The titular Old Iron Road is none other than the nation's first transcontinental railroad. Bain's previous Empire Express chronicled the building of the railroad, but this new work takes the form of a personal travelog. In the summer of 2000, the author and his family followed the route of this historic track by automobile, traveling from Kansas City, MO, to San Francisco via Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada. Historic accounts of particular people and places along the way make for lively and interesting reading, along with Bain's entertaining descriptions of and reflections on modern events and sights. Scout's Rest Ranch at North Platte, NE, offers him the opportunity to discuss "Buffalo Bill" Cody, while Elko, NV, brings out Bing Crosby's connection with the town. The overall effect is a modern exploration of the American West and its development of a sense of place in the tradition of Charles Kuralt and Bill Moyers, with whom Bain has previously worked. Highly recommended for public and high school libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 1/03.]-Nathan E. Bender, Buffalo Bill Historical Ctr., Cody, WY Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
The Portland Oregonian
Sunday, May 16, 2004
MATT LOVE
Like most good road trips, David Haward Bain's "The Old Iron Road: An Epic of Rails, Roads, and the Urge to Go West" starts a little slowly but picks up once encounters with unfamiliar landscapes and history begin.
For this reader, Bain's narrative of his Western road trip with his wife and two children found the right gear near Page 80 with his visit to a Nebraska museum, where Bain discovers and then relates in fascinating detail how Hastings, Neb., is the birthplace of Kool-Aid.
In 1999, Bain's monumental "Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad" was published after more than a decade of research and writing. This effort demanded much sacrifice from his wife and children and prompted Bain to ask the question: "How can I repay my spouse for 14 years of belief and support in this project? How can I reward my good children for not getting complexes because their dad always had a faraway look in his eyes, and was always tired, their entire lives?"
His answer was a road trip in the summer of 2000. Bain took his family on a two-month, 7,000-mile trip in a Dodge Durango from the family's home in Vermont to San Francisco. Upon reaching Omaha, the journey would loosely follow the route of the first transcontinental railroad. It was a route, a story, that Bain had devoted much of his life to but apparently never intimately shared with his family.
The result of that "odyssey," as Bain describes it, is "The Old Iron Road," a richly interesting book of travel and history that also has the virtue of being a beautiful and original portrait of a family together definitely not going to Disneyland.
Instead this remarkable family went to the West and engaged a particular passage through it, one that roughly corresponds to Interstate 80. Taken along for the ride, a reader joins Bain's family's pursuit of history by way of visiting dozens of museums, big and small, looking around, asking questions and talking together. That something tragic happens to the Bain family two years later as related in the epilogue makes this road trip all the more poignant.
"The Old Iron Road" weaves the story of building the railroad, Bain's nuanced observations on how the interstate highway system murdered some laid-back American customs, and an unfolding cast of people who hail from or made history in cities along the route.
It's a cast that includes, to name a few, Willa Cather, Marlon Brando, Malcolm X, Mark Twain, Bing Crosby, Buffalo Bill, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and the various rogues who built the railroad.
Bain never allows these biographical digressions to go too far afield. They have purpose, and in combination with the other aspects of this book seem to be investigating who Americans were when railroad was king. By extension, readers then ask, who and what have we become since? -- two questions today much on the mind of any sentient American.
Bain has produced an excellent and inspiring book. It so inspired this reader that he made Kool-Aid (Black Cherry -- 10 cents a packet!) for the first time since the Nixon administration, rented "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," made plans to visit his local historical museum and for the first time ever considered wanting a family so he could take them on an American road trip like the one Bain took with his.
Bain discusses his book at 7:30 p.m. Friday at Powell's City of Books, 1005 W. Burnside St. The event is co-sponsored by Amtrak.
The Economist (London)
The wild west
'Cross the wide Missouri
May 13th 2004
The Old Iron Road: An Epic of Rails, Roads, and the Urge to Go West
By David Haward Bain
Viking; 434 pages; $27.95
THE here-today-gone-tomorrow impermanence of life in the old American west pervades David Bain's history of the penetration of the country's last frontier. Everything there has changed in the 200 years since Captain Meriwether Lewis and Lieutenant William Clark left St Louis on 14th May 1804 to explore an overland route to the Pacific. The 15m buffalo that roamed the range are gone. So are the squaws and the braves. Too many Indian peoples, once proud and free, now eke out lives of wretched humiliation on reservations. But melancholy over these sad departures is balanced by admiration for the deeds of the pioneers. They endured unimaginable hardships in turning a wilderness into one of the most prosperous places on earth.
In writing this book, Mr Bain aimed to link the present to the past. His two children and his wife Mary, who has since died prematurely of heart disease, accompanied him on a 7,000-mile adventure from Omaha, Nebraska, to San Francisco's Golden Gate. In it they sought to follow, as far as possible, the tracks of the covered wagons and the rails of the first transcontinental railway.
A few odd facts are unearthed along the way: the revelation, for instance, that Malcolm X, Marlon Brando and Fred Astaire were all born in Omaha. But the Bain family is most fascinated by the boomtowns that busted when a railway by-passed them or an interstate highway left them stranded: ghostly places like Piedmont, Wyoming (above), which once bragged four saloons, a livery stable, hotels, a schoolhouse and water towers, but is now just a smear in a big landscape.
Towns serving mines grew bigger and fell even harder. Goldfield, Nevada, which had 20,000 inhabitants early in the 20th century, has a mere 450 today. Railways decayed too. In its glory days a station in Omaha serviced more than 200 passenger trains a week. Today people travel by air or by road. The old railway station is now a museum, and gift shops stand in place of the old ticket offices.
This type of destruction continues apace when, for instance, a new Wal-Mart sucks shoppers away from the Main Streets of nearby towns. But Mr Bain does not labour that point. His imagination is caught more by wild mid-19th century places: towns whose dedication to debauchery made them whirlpools of sin. It is the deeds of their whores, gangsters and drunks that excite him, not those of their lawmen and preachers. He lingers nostalgically in Boot Hill cemeteries, the last abodes of bodies that were shot, lynched or otherwise violently assaulted.
The reputations of a few American legends are damaged by asides. Philip Sheridan, a Unionist hero in the civil war, is exposed as a bloody ethnic cleanser. So is John Frémont, the so-called Pathfinder. He permitted a massacre of the Indians in the northern Sacramento Valley that was similar to the atrocities at Wounded Knee, Sand Creek and Bear River. “The number I killed I cannot say,” his scout, Kit Carson, recalled. “It was a perfect butchery.”
Indians friendly to the settlers were treated almost as savagely as unfriendly ones. The lament of a “co-operative” chief of the Shoshone, an Indian tribe eventually forced by the American government to share a reservation with its ancient enemies, is haunting. “The white man, who possesses this whole vast country from sea to sea, who roams over it at pleasure and lives where he likes, cannot know the cramp we feel in this little spot, with the underlying remembrance of the fact, which you know as well as we, that every foot of what you proudly call America not very long ago belonged to the red man.”
Indian killers apart, most of Mr Bain's trailblazers are likeable, even when roguish. He quotes extensively from the early writings of Mark Twain (then called Samuel Clemens), an intrepid and often sensationalist newspaper reporter on the American frontier. “To find a petrified man,” Twain later confessed, “or break a stranger's leg, or cave an imaginary mine, or discover some dead Indians in a Gold Hill tunnel, or massacre a family at Dutch Nick's, were feats and calamities we never hesitated about devising when the public needed matters of thrilling interest for breakfast.”
None of this history's characters are more genuinely heroic than the persecuted Latter-Day Saints led by Brigham Young into the desolate lands of Utah, where they made deserts prosper. Young was a man ahead of his time when it came to nature. He instructed his flock that no game was to be killed until it was wanted for food, “for it is a sin to waste life and flesh.” Few non-Mormons heeded his words. The old wild west, so utterly changed, is the poorer for it.
Publishers Weekly
THE OLD IRON ROAD: An Epic of Rails, Roads, and the Urge to Go West
David Haward Bain. Viking, $27.95 (446p) ISBN 0-670-03308-1
* Bain plumbed the history of America's West in Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad, and he elegantly broadens his scope here by logging 7,000 miles from his home in Vermont to California with a wife and daughter who'd never been to the West Coast and an eight-year-old son who'd never left the East Coast. Bain first takes them to the capacious Kansas City home where his grandparents lived, finding a "forgotten waste" (the house had been razed), a discovery illustrating one of Bain's themes: the curious interplay of past and present. He uses physical entities-museums, abandoned highways, the pioneers' still-discernible wagon wheel ruts-to swerve into historical forays that deftly and palpably engage. Bain lassoes the usual suspects-Calamity Jane, Butch Cassidy, Buffalo Bill Cody-but his prodigious research also reveals the stories of forgotten figures like Esther Hobart Morris, a Wyoming suffragist who was the first American woman to receive a civil appointment (as justice of the peace of South Pass City), and western writer Owen Wister, who helped establish the cowboy as an American archetype. Bain's main concern, however, isn't merely to foster a dialogue between the 19th-century Old West and its contemporary incarnation, but to fashion a literary travelogue. In that capacity, he's an intriguing guide (he eloquently describes the easy familiarity of the road by explaining why he doesn't let on to Bruce Hornsby that he knows who he is when their two families happen to meet). Bain bypasses a facile sentimentality for a more complex portrait of the American West. B&w photos not seen by PW. Agent, Ellen Levine. (On sale May 10)
USA TODAY
June 21, 2004
Summer travel doesn't have to be a major production. Non-fiction books set in distant, exotic or offbeat locales can take you away without the complications or expense of leaving home. [One] of the season's best: The Old Iron Road: An Epic of Rails, Road, and the Urge to Go West by David Haward Bain (Viking, $27.95).
In this memoir, Bain tells of the journey he and his family took in the summer of 2000 as they followed the route of the first transcontinental railroad from Omaha to San Francisco. Traveling by car, Bain and his wife, Mary, and children, Mimi, 11, and David, 8, paused on a stretch of road in eastern Kansas, the place where Bain's grandmother Rose Donahue Haward was born in a covered wagon in 1889.
The journey capped years of research and financial struggle. For Bain, it was a trip that circled back on the 14 years he spent writing Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad, published in 1999. Bain saw the trip as a way to repay his wife and children for the time spent on his magnum opus. It was an opportunity to share the history he compiled and the personal stake the family's ancestors had in the pioneering spirit that led to the rail's creation.
How many of us get to share our life's work with our loved ones? Superhighways have paved over the old transcontinental rail line, but the family found that the route is still lined with Old West ghost towns and wide-open prairie.
For Bain, the journey's meaning is immeasurable: Two years after they returned, Mary, 46, died of heart complications.
--Kathy Balog, special for USA TODAY
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
Recommended. . . . The esteemed historian who wrote "Empire Express," a classic historical account of the transcontinental railroad, retraces his dogged research steps in a two-month, 7,000-mile family odyssey from Vermont to California, much of it retracing the railroad route and wagon ruts west across the country.--John Marshall, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, June 27, 2004 (reprinted Louisville Courier-Journal, same date)
AMAZON.COM--David J. Gannon, San Antonio, TX
As a reward for their unwavering patience in putting up with him while he wrote his excellent book on the building of the transcontinental railroad, David Haward Bain treated his wife, Mary, and their two children to a 7000 + mile trip out west, roughly retracing the routes of the original pioneers who settled the area. The Old Iron Road: An Epic of Rails, Roads, and the Urge to Go West is the literary result of this undertaking. Part family history, part US History, part true travelogue, the book is a wonderful and highly informative look at the often sad and tragic history of those who settled the west.
Although itís the history that is especially compelling in this mix, that history is delivered in the way it must have been during the trip itself. Bain is the master of the odd fact, such as the revelation that Malcom X, Marlon Brando and Fred Astaire were all born in Omaha, Nebraska. The traditional figures, such a Buffalo Bill are included, but it is Bainís anecdotes about more marginally known characters--such as Phillip Sheridan and Brigham Young--that really hit home. Bain also goes to great lengths to cover the ways and results of the pioneerís relations and actions towards the various Native Americans disrupted by the Anglo western migration.
However, it is the pace itself that so obviously moves Bain. His treatment of the many isolated and wasted ghost towns they encounter and how the development of the west proved boon to some, disaster to others is both insightful and, often, quite moving.
In the end, the family interactions and this ëhistoryí of their travels prove to be moving as well, especially when one is cognizant, as I was when reading it, that not long after the trip Bainís wife died of heart disease. In the end, the book proves to not just be informative, but heartwarming as well.
A truly unique book that is, all in all, one of the best anecdotal historical books I have read in a long, long time.