David Haward Bain - Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad

Praise for Empire Express

Empire Express is more than a study of the building of a railroad. It encompasses the range of nineteenth-century American life as it swept up Native Americans, women, settlers, con men and speculators in one of mans greatest accomplishments.

The Denver Post

A big story, authoritatively toldthoroughly masterful.

The Boston Globe

Empire Express is one of those books that anyone with any interest in railroad history or the American West must acquire and keep close at hand. It is gargantuan, truly towering, and thanks to David Haward Bains lengthy and painstaking research it is as complete as this subject can ever be. Bain uses the voices of the transcontinental railroads builders to tell much of this epic tale. Furthermore, to enliven his narrative, he brings in contemporary events relative to this great American endeavor.

Dee Brown, author of Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee and Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow

A breathtaking tale enthusiastically toldof vision, greed, adventure, courage, betrayal, accomplishment. Empire Express is a spirited telling of a complicated tale.

Chicago Sun Times

Stunningly researched, prismatically written mix of Robert Caro, David McCullough, Shelby Foote and Connie Bruck.

Salon

One of the greatest of all American stories has finally found a chronicler up to the task of telling it. David Haward Bain has managed to encompass it allgenuine heroism and brutal dispossession, utopian vision and rampant corruption, technological wonders and war with the elementsin a vivid narrative that no one interested in the American character will want to miss.

Geoffrey C. Ward, author of The West, An Illustrated History and coauthor of The Civil War

Monumental historyis exhaustively researched, even-handed in judgement and lucidly written. Bains work will be the definitive account of the transcontinental railroad for many years.

The Hartford Courant

This is truly a monumental work, equal to the monumental era it portrays.

The Florida Times-Union

A vast panorama, meticulously researched. Bain never forgets that two strenuously competitive companies were doing the building, one headed east, the other west. Every internal trouble the builders facedgrimly inhospitable terrain, avalanches, Indian battles, keeping track of supplies, and money, always moneywas played out against this imperative need to hurry, hurry, hurry. You couldnt even take out time to hate your neighbor, and what a contentious bunch they were, in Bains definitive telling of the tale.

David Lavender, author of The Way to the Western Sea and The Great Persuader

Displaying energetic research and enthusiasm for the subject matter, Bain brings the linking of the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, and the era that produced it, back to life.

Publishers Weekly

Empire Express is a brilliant work, a stunning fusion of splendid scholarship and graceful writing.

Kirkus (starred review)

PENGUIN BOOKS

EMPIRE EXPRESS

David Haward Bain is the author of three previous works of non-fiction, including Sitting in Darkness, which received a Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Book Award. His articles and essays have been published in Smithsonian, American Heritage, Kenyon Review, and Prairie Schooner, and he has reviewed for The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Newsday, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and regularly for The New York Times Book Review. Bain teaches at Middlebury College, works with the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and lives in Orwell, Vermont, with his wife and two children.

Empire Express

Building the First
Transcontinental Railroad

David Haward Bain

PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street,
New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue,
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182190 Wairau Road,
Auckland 10, New Zealand

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:
Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,
a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. 1999
Published in Penguin Books 2000

Copyright David Haward Bain, 1999
All rights reserved

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint an excerpt from
The Year of Decision: 1846 by Bernard DeVoto. Copyright 1942, 1943
by Bernard DeVoto. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.
All rights reserved.

Maps by Northern Cartographic, South Burlington, Vermont

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS:
Bain, David Haward.
Empire Express: building the first transcontinental railroad/David Haward Bain.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN: 978-1-101-65804-8
1. RailroadsUnited StatesHistory. 2. West (U.S.)History.
I. Title.
HE2751.B24 1999
385.0973dc21 9933375

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the
condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out,
or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding
or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition
including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

For Mimi Aitken Duffy Bain
David Montrose Duffy Bain

The book ends here, for we are not dealing with Western history. That history exists, one may remember, and its spectacle might be touched upon almost anywhere. Already in 1847 Asa Whitney, the dreamer of railroads, was by no means the figure of cloud-cuckoo land which he had been a year beforeprecisely as the abolitionists had, in that year, somehow ceased to be madmen. The spectacle of Western history might begin with the railroads, or with the stagecoaches that preceded them, or the pony-express ridersor with tall masts coming into the Bay of San Francisco, taller masts than any seen there before. Or it might begin with spectacles curiosa: the airship that was to cross to California in three days but somehow didnt, or a nester waking at midnight to see against the copper circle of the Arizona moon the silhouettes of Lieutenant Beales camels. Or with the wagons that kept on coming year after year till Asa Whitneys dream took flesh, and very little difference between any of them and those we have followed here. Or agony giving a name to Death Valley. Or the mines in the canyons where the Forlorn Hope starved, or the mines anywhere else in the ranges of the West. Or the Long Trail and its herds, its ballads, and its too much advertised gunfire. Or the vigilantes, the Sioux and the Cheyenne rising, the army on the march. Or anything else from an abundance of spectacle.

B ERNARD D E V OTO ,
The Year of Decision: 1846

I have always lived within the sound of a train whistle, whether it was the Pennsylvania (upon whose tracks countless pennies were flattened), the Baltimore and Ohio, the Long Island, the New Haven, Conrail, the BostonCharles River freight yard, the IND, or the IRT. And for twelve years its been Amtrak on the Delaware and Hudson tracks, six miles away across rolling farmlands and Lake Champlain. Train stories, train lore, train movies, and train songs chugged through my childhoodof course I had a Lionel setand as an adult Id rather take Amtrak than my car or a plane. No contest.