Project MUSE - Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863-1869, and: Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad (review) (original) (raw)

Technology and Culture 43.1 (2002) 169-170

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Book Review

Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863-1869

Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad

Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863-1869. By Stephen Ambrose. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000. Pp. 432. $28.

Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad. By David Haward Bain. New York: Viking, 1999. Pp. xiii+797. $34.95.

The first transcontinental railroad was a captivating enterprise full of intrigue, suspense, drama, and human as well as material accomplishment. The centennial of its completion in 1969 brought a spate of books. More recently two more studies have appeared--one by Stephen E. Ambrose and the other by David Haward Bain. Both are good reads, although the styles are immensely different; of the two, Bain's is the better book.

The story is well known. Suffice it to say here that the railroad from Council Bluffs, Iowa, to Sacramento, California, 1,776 miles, was a great national undertaking--one that would glue together a nation tyrannized by immense distances, one that would "conquer" the West and spawn countless opportunities for the burgeoning nation. Prosecuted by two independent companies--Central Pacific from the west and Union Pacific from the east--the line would find its way through vast reaches of mostly unoccupied land and ahead of adequate demand. Private money was understandably scarce. This would be a joint venture of private and public assets, a cooperative enterprise completed at Promontory Summit, Utah, on 10 May 1869.

Ambrose's approach is essentially celebratory, the transcontinental railroad as "the greatest achievement of the American people in the nineteenth century," excepting only "winning the Civil War and abolishing slavery" (p. 17). On occasion he is depressingly casual ("these guys," p. 77; "entering the Sierra for real," p. 147), wildly speculative ("George Francis Train . . . wearing the only white suit west of the Mississippi," p. 90), confuses facts (Charles Crocker and Company was not synonymous with Contract and Finance Company, p. 105), and gets the facts wrong (CP's longest tunnel was 16 feet wide and 11 feet high, not 26 by 20, p. 155, and tunnelers had to pierce ironstone and not granite at Donner Summit, p. 146). The research might best be characterized as "once over lightly." Ambrose even seems ignorant of the best study of Grenville M. Dodge, one of the primary players in this drama, and is willing to rely on scholarship that is dated or lacks credibility. To his credit, however, Ambrose keeps the focus on the players, large and small, and tells a compelling story.

Bain's thesis is harder to detect, but by comparison to Ambrose his work is more skeptical, more critical, more willing to impose modern sensibilities on historical interpretation. Solidly rooted in existing scholarship (and careful assessment of it), Bain's book also derives in great part from primary [End Page 169] sources thoughtfully and thoroughly examined. Errors of fact are few (government payments per mile were 16,000permileoverflatlands,16,000 per mile over flatlands, 16,000permileoverflatlands,32,000 across plateaus, and 48,000throughmountainousterrain,not48,000 through mountainous terrain, not 48,000throughmountainousterrain,not24,000, 48,000,and48,000, and 48,000,and96,000, p. 178; CP trestles were not temporary and were not sunk in masonry but rather were fastened to wood sills that rested on rock beds, p. 223; the map on page 257 is of CP and not UP). Bain pays close attention to detail, but is prone to chase a wild hare; indeed, the entire work might have profited from judicious pruning.

Ambrose and Bain have taken strikingly different approaches in their back-to-back studies of this epic accomplishment; their efforts warrant back-to-back reading.

Don L. Hofsommer

Dr. Hofsommer is professor of history at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota, author of The Southern Pacific, 1901-1985 and numerous other studies of railroad history, and longtime editor of The Lexington Quarterly.

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