Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad

Viking Press, November 1999

Penguin Paperback, August 2000

0-670-80889-X -- $34.95 -- 6x9"

800 pp. -- 32 pp. photographs, 8 maps

It was the dawn of the Gilded Age; it welded the new western United States to the east with twin bands of iron; it opened a path for settlement and exploitation which utterly transformed the West as it sealed the doom of the free-roaming, indigenous Plains Indian culture; it was the culmination of the backbreaking labors of more than twenty-five thousand laborers, most of them Chinese immigrants and Irish roustabouts; it was a national enterprise not unlike the construction of the Pyramids in Egypt; it set patterns of corporate and political practice which have endured until this day; it was the collective dream of American society, from its roughest muddy-boots base to its silk-hatted pinnacle; it was, without a doubt, the century's second most transformative chain of events after the Civil War. Empire Express is the story of that gigantic enterprise to build a railroad from the Missouri to the Pacific, across the great unknown of the West, which culminated in the driving of the Golden Spike in the Utah desert in 1869 but ended in pervasive national scandals just four years later. It's also about the building of the enterprise known as the United States of America.

Spanning three dramatic decades, during which America effectively doubled in size, dreamed of glories upon the world's stage, fought three wars, and began to discover itself,Empire Express reads like a novel -- colorful, lively, extremely dramatic -- a page-turner, told from the points of view of participants, the dreamers and the doers, the explorers, surveyors, tracklayers, soldiers, politicians, the pushcart salesmen-turned-railroad moguls, the Chinese and Irish immigrants, and the Native Americans who were thus displaced. It uses their voices and words to great dramatic effect. It draws on original sources as no previous chronicler has done -- thousands of pages of handwritten letters, diaries, telegrams, and an array of biographical and historical works. Empire Express is also the first work on this subject to treat all the events in the building of the railroad in context, intrinsically connected to larger or distant events, part of a much larger, national picture viewed through a clear, discerning wide-angle lens. Exploration, territorial expansion, settlement, national politics, the Civil War, the rise of the national business community, all have a part in this story of the Pacific Railroad -- but this is most dramatically evident in its treatment of the story of the Plains Indians -- the Cheyenne, Sioux, and Arapaho who resisted the cavalry and settlers' incursions, and so dramatically fought the railroad. Time and time again in this story, skirmishes and raids along the Nebraska-Wyoming railway are shown to be linked to distant events -- far out of earshot and gunshot range in other territories as well as far away in political Washington, D. C.

Empire Express begins in 1842, off the Cape of Good Hope on the deck of a poky, Asia-bound ship, with the story of the bereft and bankrupt merchant Asa Whitney, who regained his fortune in China and discovered his true calling upon returning home, devoting his fortune and his life to getting a Pacific Railroad on the national agenda by haunting the halls of Congress. The narrative ends thirty years later, under the Capitol rotunda, with the crushing fall of a popular politician and the exposure of a powerful, hidden railroad lobby during a six-month period of Washington scandal and inquiry which obsessed the press and the national imagination. In between there are the dramatic, often cliff-hanging stories of an unforgettable procession of characters: exploring engineers like Theodore Judah (who discovered the magic track route across the 7,000-foot-high California Sierra in the footsteps of the tragic, doomed Donner Party) and Grenville Dodge (who found the way across the Rockies while being pursued by an Indian war party); self-made entrepreneurs like Thomas Durant (who commanded the Union Pacific Railroad like a hidden puppeteer, and who made millions) and Collis Huntington (who built a railroad empire across the west, buying and selling politicians along the way); brave, doomed frontier surveyors like Percy Browne and L. L. Hills (killed by Indians reacting to foolish, ignoble Army actions hundreds of miles away); anxious, forebearing women like Frances Casement and Jennie Reed, left back home in the settled towns to raise the children while their husbands faced danger out on the great plains; beleaguered tribal leaders like Spotted Tail and Red Cloud, who alternated between conciliation and defiance as the bluecoats and the puffing Iron Horse heralded the onrush of farmers, ranchers, prospectors, and townsfolk which ended the old ways of life in the West. There are also the nameless legions of laborers, especially the Chinese with their exotic food and opium pipes, and the Irish (most fresh off the Civil War battlefields) with their fondness for the dusty diversions in the shoot-'em-up, Hell-on-Wheels railroad towns. Throughout this story there are, too, the familiar Civil War-era faces of Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan, and beloved literary figures like Mark Twain and Walt Whitman, all of whom appear and reappear, their lives inextricably linked -- as are we all -- to the story of the Empire Express

DAVID HAWARD BAIN lives in Orwell, Vermont, with his wife, Mary Smyth Duffy (a painter) and their two young children, Mimi and David. He has conducted prose and poetry workshops at Middlebury College since 1987, and has been associated with the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in varying capacities since 1980. Born in Camden, New Jersey and raised in Port Washington, New York, he was educated at Boston University and then lived in New York City for 14 years, working first in book publishing and then as a full-time writer. His first book, Aftershocks (Methuen, 1980, Penguin, 1986), was an account of a post-Vietnam murder case; Sitting in Darkness: Americans in the Philippines (Houghton Mifflin, 1984; Penguin, 1986), a book about our forgotten war in Asia at the turn of the last century and its modern-day consequences, received a Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Book Award; Whose Woods These Are: A History of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference (Ecco Press, 1993), examined creative writers in community. A collection, Best Be Getting Home: Essays on Place, Writers, and Writing, is forthcoming. His short work has appeared in Smithsonian, American Heritage, Prairie Schooner (Readers' Choice Award, 1997), Kenyon Review, Columbia Journalism Review, TV Guide, and Glamour, and regularly in The New York Times Book Review, Newsday, Philadelphia Inquirer, the Washington Post Book World, and the Los Angeles Times. "The House on Hemenway Hill," an essay about moving to a Vermont farm and having an unrequited love affair with a 200-year-old, abandoned house, originally appeared in Prairie Schooner, and was among the "Notable Essays of 1996," selected by Robert Atwan. He has received grants from the Rinehart, Lebensburger, and Wyndam Foundations, and a fellowship from the N.Y. State Council on the Arts/P.E.N. Foundation. He is on the Board of Directors of the Mount Independence Coalition, a private group supporting the educational mission of the Mount Independence State Historic Site, a Revolutionary War fortification on the Lake Champlain shore, five miles from his home in Orwell Village. A lifelong musician, he plays keyboards in a local band, the Sleeping Dogs.

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