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Great and Shining Road Epic story of the transcontinental railroad Williams w/DJ
A Great and Shining Road The epic story of the transcontinental railroad by John Williams
Hard Cover with dust jacket
Copyright 1988 FIRST EDITION
341 pages indexed
CONTENTS
Introduction3
1. America, the Machine, and the Idea Whose Time Had Come6
2. Understanding the Void20
3. "Crazy" Judah, the Big Four, and the Pacific Railroad Act29
4. The First, Faint Stirrings49
5. Scheming in the Wild East69
6. The Chinese Factor and the Indian Threat93
7. The UP Gets an Army; the CP Gets a Race119
8. War Whoops on the Plains and the Octopus Is Born146
9. Into Darkest Wyoming and the Sierras Surrender170
10. Backstabbing Across the Plains and Blessedly Flat Nevada189
11. The Union Pacific Does Not Bear Scrutiny Well215
12. Carving Through Nevada236
13. Crocker's Wager and the Golden Spike244
14. Judgment Day269
Acknowledgments288
Notes289
Bibliography325
Index332
On May 10, 1869, the Golden Spike linked the Central Pacific Railroad with the union Pacific Railroad at Promontory Point, Utah. The dream of a railroad across America had at last come true. A Gnat and Shining Road tells the story of swaggering men with big plans, of the Republic emerging from the Civil War and reaching for its manifest destiny.
The men who imagined the transcontinental railroad were impassioned profiteers, an unlikely, often ruthless band, guilty of both financial double-dealing and ferocious ingenuity. When ice delayed operations in the Sierra Nevadas, the boys of the Central Pacific formed the Summit Ice Company and sold their problem to California saloons. When herds of buffalo ripped up the tracks, the men of the Union Pacific just killed tens of thousands. (Thus was the legend of Buffalo Bill born.) While his partners finagled in Washington and on Wall Street, Jack Casement, an ex-Union general, dressed in a fur coat, a cossack hat, and shining cavalry hoots and carrying a pistol and bullwhip, drove the workers of the Union Pacific to new track-laying records. Meanwhile, from the West, thousands of Chinese immigrants blasted, climbed, and inched their way through the perilous California mountains.
The railroad transformed the country forever. It decimated the Plains Indian culture by destroying the herds of buffalo that sustained it. It virtually created the timber and steel industries; it opened the West for commerce. Farms grew up along the length of the rails.
Thousands of immigrants from Europe and Asia came here to help build the iron road: it united a nation.
The story of the railroad is a capitalist opera, starring powerful politicians and generals, con artists and ne'er-do-wells. Set in opulent parlor cars and well-heeled boardrooms and rowdy frontier towns, on desolate plains and in deadly gorges, it is a story of vision and corrupdon, of empire building at its most vulgar and glorious.
John Hoyt Williams combines scholarship with personalities, historical analysis with plain old tall talcs, to tell a story that will appeal to readers of American history and adventure, to railroad buffs, and to lovers of the American West. A Great and Shining Road is an epic in a grand tradition.
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