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Linking a Nation: Stephen Ambrose's Story of the Building of the Transcontinental Railroad

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SOURCE: “Linking a Nation: Stephen Ambrose's Story of the Building of the Transcontinental Railroad,” in Chicago Tribune Books, September 3, 2000, p. 5.

[In the following review, Weinberg offers favorable assessment of Nothing Like It in the World.]

When I was young, the building of the interstate highway system transformed the U.S. The obstacles were huge, but road crews working heavy machinery got the job done. The time spent driving between major cities was cut in half.

Amazing as the building of the interstate highway system was, something far more amazing had occurred a century earlier—the building of a transcontinental railroad, with no heavy machinery to do the heavy lifting. How tens of thousands of laborers managed to build a serviceable railroad across rivers, through mountains and into deserts with little more than shovels, axes and dynamite boggles the mind.

Stephen Ambrose's new book makes the how of it understandable, but no less mind-boggling. With publication of this book, a lot of minds will be boggled, because when Ambrose writes, a lot of people read. Perhaps no Ph.D. historian has ever reached so many readers. Nothing Like It in the World, about the building of a railroad that made the U.S. accessible from east to west, deserves to be a best seller, much like Ambrose's books about the Lewis and Clark expedition (Undaunted Courage) and the Army during the final year of World War II (Citizen Soldiers), to name just two of his 22 previous works.

Early in the book, Ambrose admits that despite his training as a historian specializing in 19th Century American culture, he balked when his editor suggested the topic. He had stereotyped the men behind the building of the transcontinental railroad as corrupt. “I wanted nothing to do with those railroad thieves,” Ambrose writes. But he and his editor agreed on a compromise: He would spend six months reading “the major items in the literature, so I could see if there was a reason for a new … book on the subject.”

Ambrose found many previously published books to admire, including Maury Klein's 1987 work Union Pacific: Birth of a Railroad, 1862–1893 and George Kraus’ High Road to Promontory: Building the Central Pacific Across the High Sierra (1969). Ambrose decided to go ahead by focusing on a question that previous authors had for the most part ignored: How did they build the railroad? rather than, How did they profit from it?

As it turns out, David Haward Bain, a teacher at Middlebury College, was researching a similar book. Bain's Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad, reached stores in late 1999. It is equally well-written and, at almost 800 pages, nearly twice as long as Ambrose's book.

Bain covers a longer time period. For instance, he opens with a scene from 1844, as Asa Whitney, who has been scheming about how to finance a transcontinental railroad for many years, is on a ship that has to travel halfway around the world to get from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean. The journey steels Whitney's resolve when he returns to the East Coast to lobby Congress for a railroad. Another key railroad promoter, Grenville Dodge, does not appear in Bain's book until Page 157.

Ambrose, on the other hand, opens his book with a chance 1859 meeting in Council Bluffs, Iowa, between Dodge and soon-to-be president Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln, on the campaign trail in his quest for the White House, hears from his host that Dodge, in the audience, knows more about railroads than anybody in the nation.

At this juncture, Ambrose's skill at setting scenes, using dialogue and building suspense takes over. In Ambrose's telling, Lincoln “studied Dodge intently for a moment and then said, ‘Let's go meet.’” Lincoln and his host strolled to a bench where Dodge was sitting. “Lincoln sat down beside Dodge, crossed his long legs, swung his foot for a moment, put his big hand on Dodge's forearm, and went straight to the point: ‘Dodge, what's the best route for a Pacific railroad to the West?’

“Dodge instantly replied, ‘From this town out the Platte Valley.’

“Lincoln thought that over for a moment or two, then asked, ‘Why do you think so?’”

After hearing the answer, Lincoln “went on with his questions, until he had gathered from Dodge all the information Dodge had reaped privately doing surveys for the Rock Island Railroad Company on the best route to the West. Or, as Dodge later put it, ‘He shelled my woods completely and got all the information I'd collected.’”

Despite Ambrose's storytelling skills, I would recommend Bain's book over Ambrose's for its comprehensiveness. But Ambrose fans, as well as readers who want a shorter version than Bain's, will not be wasting their money or time with Nothing Like It in the World.

The cast of characters is unforgettable. The stars of Ambrose's drama include Dodge, a Civil War Union general who became the chief engineer of the Union Pacific as thousands of workers laid track after the war's end; Theodore Judah, the professional surveyor who conceived the Central Pacific, the second line that met up with the Union Pacific in the Utah wilderness; Mormon religious leader Brigham Young, whose power in Utah made him a key player automatically; financiers who contributed unimaginable amounts of money to the project, especially Thomas Durant, Oakes Ames, Oliver Ames, Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington, Charles Crocker and Mark Hopkins; Lincoln; Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, who would later become president; and Gen. William T. Sherman, who probably could have been elected president if he had chosen to run.

Of all those men he admires, Ambrose seems to have a special relationship with Judah, who started his labors as an 18-year-old railroad construction manager. Judah possessed great vision, setting out to explore the Sierra Nevada range because there might be a mountain pass that would make railroading from coast to coast possible. How he returned from that arduous, dangerous adventure to team up with his wife, Anna, as Washington lobbyists in favor of railroad construction is a tale of optimism and persistence. There was no choice in Judah's mind: Government funding had to be involved, because only the government possessed the resources to pay for it.

To Ambrose's credit, he does not spend all of his precious space on the tycoons and professional engineers. He also devotes considerable attention to the laborers who sweated day in, day out for years under conditions so harsh that words almost fail. Those laborers, mostly of Chinese and Irish descent, are the mostly unnamed heroes of the saga.

The obstacles that had to be overcome—and the questions that arose because of them—provide the book with endless drama. What route should the tracks follow? There were so many choices, each one tied up in questions of geography, politics and finance. Once started, would the project really be completed given the obstacles? How many lives would be lost during construction? How many individuals and institutions would go bankrupt trying to profit?

Ambrose has the answers, some of them surprising, for his legion of readers.

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