Book-of-the-Month Club
December 1999 Main Selection
Description:
New York businessman Asa Whitney had a vision: to build a railroad
from Lake Michigan to the Pacific that would transform the western
wilderness into "not only the thoroughfare of the vast world, but its
garden." "Who can oppose such a work?" Whitney asked all who would
listen.
Who indeed? In fact, the building of the transcontinental railroad
is one of the great adventures in American history--a tale of grand
visions and greedy scheming, peopled with heroes, dreamers, and
scalliwags. It was played out against the background of the gold
rush, the Civil War, and the great western migration. And it involved
some of the country's most eminent leaders in a fight for spoils that
was unprecedented in our country's history. In Empire Express
David Haward Bain fully captures its drama and its import.
Bain begins the story long before the first spike is driven, as
congressmen jockey for sectional and personal advantage and
businessmen connive to line up backing for the enterprise. Bain is
gifted at bringing to life the people who made the railroad
happen-men such as the engineer Theodore Judah, known as "Crazy
Judah" because of his railroad obsession, who realized that the route
taken by the Donner Party was the answer to how to get a railroad
over the Sierra Nevada; Collis Huntington, a brawny hardware merchant
"with a cash register for a heart," who helped bankroll Judah's
Central Pacific Railroad Company and ended up controlling an empire;
the Union Pacific's Thomas C. Durant, "a lean and reckless
engulf-and-devour shark of a speculator"; and William Tecumseh
Sherman, who itched for an excuse for an Indian war and vowed to
crush the Sioux and the Cheyenne.
The narrative never flags, and there's a telling episode on almost
every page. President Lincoln tries to fix the starting point of the
railroad at Council Bluffs, where he happens to own some land.
Congress debates a railroad bill while the Civil War battle of
Spotsylvania rages. Army troops massacre unresisting Southern
Cheyenne and Arapaho women and children at Sand Creek. On a grand
railroad tour of the West, two hundred distinguished politicians,
socialites, and tycoons are frightened out of their wits by a sham
Indian raid arranged by the sponsors of the tour.
Like David McCullough's The Path Between the Seas and
Stephen Ambrose's Undaunted Courage, Empire Express is a book
as grand as its subject. Railroad buffs will love it, of course, but
so will all of our members who enjoy a good history that entertains
while it illuminates. 800 pages, 32 pages of black-and-white
photographs, maps.