Boston Globe, January 10, 2000
Pride and pitfalls along a coast-to-coast track
By Michael Kenney, Globe Staff
Recent news reports about a proposed merger of the Burlington
Northern Santa Fe Corp. and Canadian National Railway Co. said it
would fulfill the century-old vision of a single transcontinental
railroad. Not that you can't travel from the Atlantic to the Pacific
by rail today and have been able to do so - even with a change or two
along the way - ever since the linking of the eastbound Central
Pacific and westbound Union Pacific rail lines in 1869. But what the
proposed merger - a $5 billion Halifax-to-Los Angeles deal - would do
is put it all in the hands of one corporate tycoon.
And that is a dream that must have engaged, even fleetingly, the
continental-sized egos of some of the visionaries, schemers, and
promoters that populate the epic story of David Haward Bain's
''Empire Express.''
The story itself is very neatly framed between accounts of the
visionary Asa Whitney and the revolting Credit Mobilier scandal.
Whitney, a failed New York merchant, was inspired by the notion of a
transcontinental rail line and he tirelessly promoted it until the
dream was taken over by harder-headed schemers.
The scandal, when it broke three years after the two rail lines
were linked, exposed the officials of both railroad companies as well
as a vice president of the United States (Henry Wilson of
Massachusetts) and a parlor-car ful of leading politicians (including
five Bay State congressmen) as swindlers and crooks.
This is a big book (at 797 pages), but it is a big story,
authoritatively told, and there is scarcely a detail that a reader
would happily forgo. Take just one that lingers in a reader's mind.
It is July 1867 and a surveying party headed by Grenville M. Dodge, a
Civil War general born in Danvers who had become Union Pacific's
chief engineer, is investigating what Bain calls ''the thorniest
engineering problem on the whole line to date'' - the crossing of
Dale Creek some 100 miles north of Laramie, Wyo., which would require
construction of a trestle bridge 1,400 feet long and 125 feet
high.
But Dodge pauses to pick some flowers and writes to his wife: ''No
matter how sterile or ragged this country, it is dotted all over with
roses, leaves and grasses, with singular stones and valuable mines.''
By itself, that is an insignificant detail. But it suggests just how
skillfully Bain has humanized a story that sweeps from New York
boardrooms to the US Capitol - competing there with the Civil War for
politicians' attention - to mountain passes and Indian encampments,
all in the context of a breathtaking engineering accomplishment.
A lesser writer than Bain - also the author of ''Sitting in
Darkness,'' an account of the American involvement in the Philippines
- would have juggled these competing stories, following first one and
then another. But the very way they overlapped is what makes the
story so extraordinary, and Bain's response is to weave them
together. This is done to great effect in Bain's account of the
lobbying for congressional approval of land grants for the railroad
right-of-way. These occurred even as Washington was in a state of
near-siege during the early months of the Civil War.
Bain recounts a meeting in January 1863 when a group of railroad
lobbyists met at the White House with President Abraham Lincoln -
''the onetime Illinois railroad lawyer,'' Bain reminds us. With the
capital still reeling from Union defeats at Antietam and
Fredericksburg, a ''careworn'' Lincoln listens as ''his visitors
urged him to approve a five-foot distance between rails for the
Pacific railroad.'' And later, just two days before giving his
Gettysburg Address, Lincoln meets with Thomas C. Durant, a
doctor-turned financial manipulator, and selects Council Bluffs,
Iowa, as the starting point for the Union Pacific line, acknowledging
that he, like Durant, owned land in the town.
And Bain does it again when he weaves together accounts of Indian
raids on work crews and boardroom raids on the federal treasury and
incautious investors. Of all the workers on the railroad - including
Irish and Chinese and, at one crucial stage, Mormon construction
workers - those most at risk from Native American raids were the
small surveying parties out miles ahead of the larger construction
teams. One such attack by a Sioux war party claimed the life of a man
whom chief engineer Dodge called ''one of the brightest of our young
engineers.''
''Empire Express'' was 14 years in the researching and writing. In
return for this, Bain allows himself the occasional indulgence of a
line like ''the setting was perfect for an ambush'' to make a
transition from an account of Indian raids to an account of boardroom
skulduggery. The reader is not just willing to pardon such
indulgences but to delight in them as part payment for an account
that is thoroughly masterful.
Syndicated in the Bergen (NJ) Record, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Sacramento Bee, San Jose Mercury News, Norfolk (VA) Virginian-Pilot,