Nothing Like it in the World
Nothing Like it in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869 – Steven Ambrose
In this book, Ambrose, who together with David McCullough is one of the best popular historians writing in the US today, takes on the building of the US transcontinental railroad (and, almost as important, the parallel telegraph line), which culminated with the driving of the golden spike, uniting the country at Promontory, Utah in 1869.
At this distance and in our day of transcontinental jet travel and 75 mph interstate freeways, we forget that as recently as 150 years ago the fastest a person could travel from the Missouri-Mississippi River system to the Pacific Coast was 3 miles an hour: the average speed of a man walking at a good clip or riding on horseback. That’s 30 miles a day, so to get from Council Bluffs, Iowa, western terminus of the rail network in the US in 1863, to Oakland, California took 56 days, just under two months…assuming everything went very, very well: no Indian attacks, no illness, no natural disasters, etc. Then, thanks to the vision and enterprise of a few men, Abraham Lincoln being at the top of the list, shortly after May 10, 1869 travel time from coast-to-coast, not just Council Bluffs to Oakland, dropped to under a week for those willing (and able) to purchase a first class ticket! And to give further context, the Civil War was still being fought during the first two years of its construction, and the definitive battles of the Indian Wars weren’t fought until well after it was completed (in fact Geronimo didn’t surrender until 1886).
The government’s scheme for building the railroad involved encouraging the formation of two companies, the Union Pacific, building from east to west, and the Central Pacific, west to east; that competed with each other, funded by gov’t payments and given checkerboard land grants along their respective routes, to get the job done. The story is replete with good guys (visionary explorers, engineers and construction bosses like Theodore Judah, Grenville Dodge, Jack Casement), robber baron capitalists (Thomas Durant, Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington, Charles Crocker), vice (the “Hell on Wheels” mobile entertainment centers that followed the UP construction crews, who were mostly Civil War veterans) and virtue (the remarkably hard working and sober Chinese workers employed by the CP). What makes their feat even more remarkable was that there were no high explosives in those days, only black powder, and no steam shovels, only picks, shovels and wheelbarrows. In the case of the Central Pacific, in particular, all construction materials other than timber (rail, powder, spikes, etc) had to be sent by sea to California from the east coast of the US!
Ambrose amply chronicles the corruption and egregious self-dealing of the CP and (especially) the UP but, in the end, they got the job done and both the American people and their gov’t received enormous benefits from it. All American people benefited from it except the original Americans, the Indians, for whom the railroad (and the telegraph that followed it) was more like a death knell.
I detoured over from I-15 on my way south from Montana in July and visited Golden Spike National Monument at Promontory Point, Utah at the northern end of the Great Salt Lake, just after finishing the book. I was the only visitor at the Monument, probably because I got there before it opened, but I doubt it ever gets many. I hiked the cuts and the “Big Fill” along the abandoned grade built by the Chinese laborers of the CP just east of the site of the joining of the rails. I came away even more impressed by the audacity, engineering skill and brute human force needed to complete it, and wondered how many Americans even remember that there was once “nothing like it in the world”.
