"Nothing Like it in the World" by Stephen E. Ambrose

Above: "Nothing Like it in the World." Stephen E. Ambrose - 382 pages.

In any case, whichever book is read, the completion of the Transcontinental Railway is an important event in American history, without more than cursory knowledge of which, a full understanding of the American experience is not possible.

I completed reading this book today, 21 November 2019.
Following is the book summary from bookbrowse.com. Scroll further for SDT comments.

Bookbrowse.com Book Summary:
Ambrose writes with power and eloquence about the brave men -- the famous and the unheralded, ordinary men doing the extraordinary -- who accomplished the spectacular feat that made the continent into a nation.

In this account of an unprecedented feat of engineering, vision, and courage, Stephen E. Ambrose offers a historical successor to his universally acclaimed Undaunted Courage, which recounted the explorations of the West by Lewis and Clark.

Nothing Like It in the World is the story of the men who built the transcontinental railroad -- the investors who risked their businesses and money; the enlightened politicians who understood its importance; the engineers and surveyors who risked, and lost, their lives; and the Irish and Chinese immigrants, the defeated Confederate soldiers, and the other laborers who did the backbreaking and dangerous work on the tracks.

The Union had won the Civil War and slavery had been abolished, but Abraham Lincoln, who was an early and constant champion of railroads, would not live to see the great achievement. In Ambrose's hands, this enterprise, with its huge expenditure of brainpower, muscle, and sweat, comes to life.

The U.S. government pitted two companies -- the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific Railroads -- against each other in a race for funding, encouraging speed over caution. Locomotives, rails, and spikes were shipped from the East through Panama or around South America to the West or lugged across the country to the Plains. This was the last great building project to be done mostly by hand: excavating dirt, cutting through ridges, filling gorges, blasting tunnels through mountains.

At its peak, the workforce -- primarily Chinese on the Central Pacific, Irish on the Union Pacific -- approached the size of Civil War armies, with as many as fifteen thousand workers on each line. The Union Pacific was led by Thomas "Doc" Durant, Oakes Ames, and Oliver Ames, with Grenville Dodge -- America's greatest railroad builder -- as chief engineer. The Central Pacific was led by California's "Big Four": Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington, Charles Crocker, and Mark Hopkins. The surveyors, the men who picked the route, were latter-day Lewis and Clark types who led the way through the wilderness, living off buffalo, deer, elk, and antelope.

In building a railroad, there is only one decisive spot -- the end of the track. Nothing like this great work had been seen in the world when the last spike, a golden one, was driven in at Promontory Summit, Utah, in 1869, as the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific tracks were joined.

Ambrose writes with power and eloquence about the brave men -- the famous and the unheralded, ordinary men doing the extraordinary -- who accomplished the spectacular feat that made the continent into a nation.

Bishop's Comments:

This book has been on my bookshelf, unread, since it was first published in 2000.

Still, "Nothing Like it in the World" has been top of mind since I purchased it. I live very near key locales associated with Transcontinental Railroad history: Evanston, WY where a large number of Chinese railroad workers bivouacked; Promontory Point, UT where the Central Pacific Railroad, coming from the west, and the Union Pacific Railroad, coming from the east were joined; Echo Canyon, just up the road from my home in Park City, where hundreds of Mormon railroad workers were provided to the Union Pacific Railway by Mormon prophet, Brigham Young.

Over the last twenty years, I have motorcycled to, or past, these destinations, read the on-site story boards, and celebrated the idea that all of a sudden, one day, transport from the east coast to the west coast could be accomplished in a week versus the two or three months it took most people to make the journey before that date.

The Transcontinental Railway was the "moon landing" of its day. It opened the way to increased colonization of the west, facilitated trade between the coasts, and drew people to build towns and cities along the route. After the railway link-up, the US could be truly thought of as one nation, and not two separate, distant geographies, only loosely aligned.

2019 was the 150th year anniversary of the pounding of the golden spike.

I joined in some of the anniversary celebrations. I traveled to Ogden with Montage and The Commodore to view the Big Boy, the restored Union Pacific locomotive. Big Boy was one of twenty or so huge, high torque locomotives built in the 1940's to haul long freight trains.

I also travelled to Echo twice, once with my oldest grandson and his friends, and the other time with Montage and the Dentist, to, again, see Big Boy. With my friend, The Pope, I visited Promontory Point for the third or fourth time. There we saw replicas of the first locomotives, one from each railroad company, to reach that spot.

With the other set of three grand kids, I went to the Utah State Capitol building to see the Golden Spike Exhibit. I was struck, at that exhibit, by the fact that of the hundreds of exhibited, contemporary photos of the railroad's construction, few, if any, included images of the 10K Chinese immigrant workers who worked on the Central Pacific Railway from Sacramento to Promontory Point.

Lack of recognition of the Chinese work force on the Transcontinental Railway has been a justifiable sore point from some time.

Ambrose chronicles how the Central Pacific "Big Four," Collis Huntington, Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins and Charles Crocker had a hard time finding labor to build the western end of the track. Many new immigrants were arriving in California, but, none of them, it seems, wanted a job working on the railroad. They, many of them Irish immigrants or former Civil War soldiers, wanted to seek their fortune in the gold fields.

Finally, someone came up with the idea of hiring Chinese labor. There was a Chinese community in San Francisco, and more Chinese could be easily "imported" from then economically destitute China, brought low by the opium wars.

Central Pacific principal Leland Stanford, initially, was apoplectic about the idea of hiring Chinese labor. Using words today deemed racist and derogatory, Stanford remarked that "Chinamen" were lazy and incompetent.

As word was received about the successful engineering, surveying, and track laying process of the Union Pacific (UP) coming from the east, Stanford, representing the Central Pacific, keen on ramping up the competition to build more track than the UP, was left with no other choice than to hire Chinese workers.

Stanford and his colleagues were pleasantly surprised. The Chinese workers, diminutive in size compared to the white workers, worked hard and more than carried their weight. There is a wonderful narrative in the book about how the assiduous Chinese worked around the clock to relentlessly bore out long tunnels in the Sierra Nevada range to meet Central Pacific deadlines.

I visit Stanford University once or twice a year and each time I go I reflect on the irony of Leland Stanford callously dissing the Chinese race - then, and now, having one third of the students enrolled in his namesake University of Chinese extraction. I don't want to be critical of Stanford. That was then, this is now. These are different times. Lets view Stanford's and the Chinese workers' experience as a great opportunity for both races to grow in mutual understanding (...though, there is still a lot of progress to be made. It is not clear to me that the Chinese, as a race, do not remain resentful of erstwhile Western oppression, segregation, victimization (the opium wars), and disdain, even as, today, they make remarkable progress in advancing the standard of living for their people to approach the levels of the West).

Happily, the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary celebration of the Transcontinental Railway, at Promontory Point this year, roundly embraced the Chinese worker contribution to the extraordinary Transcontinental Railway construction. Elaine Chou, US Secretary of Transportation, and of Chinese ancestry herself, speaking at this year's 150th year anniversary celebration at Promontory Point, paid official US tribute to the contribution of the Chinese workers. It took too much time... but, better late than never.

There are some good narratives in the book about the Mormon contribution to the Transcontinental Railroad.

Salt Lake City, in 1869, was the only settlement of any significant size between the railway's two terminuses, Omaha, Nebraska and Sacramento, California. The Central Pacific people were thrilled to receive an offer of Mormon worker assistance from Brigham Young. Young wanted the railway to come through Salt Lake City, but his offer of Mormon labor was not a significant enough bargaining chip to divert the railway from going through Ogden, forty five miles north of Salt Lake City. Still Young supplied the workers. He and his workers had a hard time getting paid. Ambrose points to correspondence between Young and Crocker on the point of delayed wages payment.

The "bad" came with the good. The temporary "Hell On Wheels" settlements along the railroad route for workers, shysters, con-men, snake-oil salesmen, boozers and prostitutes are notorious as being some of the most debauched - and dangerous - settlements in American history. Shootings were di rigueur and law enforcement non-existent.

There is of course much more. Financing, route engineering... Theodore Judah was the engineer designer of the railway route over the Sierra, the same grade that is used for the railway today. Ambrose rightly marvels that Judah could carve such a route with only on-ground surveying techniques, no aircraft, satellite images etc. commonly required for such engineering today. Judah did not survive to see the completion of his work. But, in railroad engineering circles, even today, Ted Judah is a rock star.

Twenty years back when I was at the visitor's center at Promontory Point, a docent cautioned me about reading Ambrose's book saying there were better books out there. He told me scholars in the know aver that Ambrose's book contains a lot of historical errors. The docent told me to buy "Empire Express," by David Haward Bain. Bain's book was, he said, better documented and more accurate.

I bought both books, and still have Bain's book, unread, on my bookshelf. I did a tiny bit of research after reading Ambrose's book, and sure enough, there were some critical reviews dissing Ambrose for reasons conveyed by the visitor's center docent twenty years ago. Yet, Ambrose's book has been the "go to" popular account of this topic. Bain's book hasn't had near the success.

I may take a crack at reading Bain in the coming months. I guess Ambrose won out for the same reasons VHS overwhelmed the superior Betamax: superior marketing and bad timing of market entry. Ambrose's stellar reputation as a popular historian likely helped his book sales.

In any case, whichever book is read, the completion of the Transcontinental Railway is an important event in American history, without more than cursory knowledge of which, a full understanding of the American experience is not possible.