Willrow's Hood
Tuesday, April 27, 2004
Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad by David Haward Bain
David Haward Bain is currently a professor at Middlebury College. He was asked to write this book by an editor at Viking, an he took to it with gusto. There have not been so many recent books written that are modern works of new scholarship on the transcontinental railroad. The most impressive thing about this book was the extent of Bain's research. In an effort to write a comprehensive book, he was slowed by the research of Murray Klein, but as he write, it was "worth the wait." In addition to Klein's research (which he used to help make sense of the more difficult fiancial history of the Union Pacific Company), Bain used literally hundreds of sources from collections of letters, books and periodicals to government and railroad documents.
All of this research was to yield some new points and shed new light on subjects not adressed in most b0ooks on this subject. Bain notes in his introduction that he wished to highlight people who were more "under the radar." Not people like Dodge, Oakes or the Big Four, but women and indians, groups about which less has been documented.
He also realized in his research how many books on the transcontinental railroad were attempted, and just how many of those books had relied on other books for their information rather than primary sources. He saw a eries of myths that were propogated through these books but were not corroborated with actual handwritten documents. The fact that these documents were original archival handwritten scraps meant that many of the scholars who had attempted to decipher them had failed or given up.
The best of the new sources Bains used was a collection of letters that came from Collis P. Huntington's office in New York, where a huge amount of eight to ten page letters between Huntington and the principle players of the railroad were. The researchers who originally transfered these handwritten letters to microfilm had left them out of order, and presumably that difficulty lead to the letters being overlooked as sources of information for new work about the transcontinental railroad.
Bain's angle and attempt to make his book stand out start at the very beginning. While many books, especially the older ones, start with Theodore Judah, Bain starts with Asa Whitney's, who wrote a book proposing a railroad that reached the pacific, and even approached the government with his estimates of its cost and how much land they should sell him (a 66-mile wide strip!). As a result of his desire to write a book like this, the book is highly anecdotal. There are a large number of minor players who are mentioned here that I did not read about elsewhere, General Patrick Edward Connor. The fighting he did against indians at the Bear Creek Massacre is well documented, but again, most of the books on the transcontinental railroad graze over the issue that the government was giving these railroad companies massive land grants that the idians considered theirselves to be the woners of. The study of these intricacie s makes this book superior in mamy ways to the works of Klein and others, and again its honesty instead of a general upbeat and "Hooray for american pirit" attitude of Ambrose.
Empire Express is a hulking book that reads more like Murray Klein's accout of the Union Pacific than any other book I saw, but that is not to say he rides Klein's coattails at all. He takes the more personal approach to writing, looking at the workers and those people "under the radar" rather than the great men, the company itself and the more dry, techincal side of things. It is an anomaly in the sense that it is a new work on an old subject, but it has a lot of new information in it. Normally the new information would be highly suspect, but since the new information just comes from the fact that Bain was able to find primary sources that were underresearched lends it a high level of credibility.
Disregard this if for some reason you find it, it's part of a school assignemtn I'm doing right now on a computer that's not connected to the network and doesn't have MS Word
The sources for Oscar Lewis' The Big Four: The Story of Huntington, Stanford, Hopkins and Crocker and the building of the Central Pacific are reliable, but biased sources. Most of the personal information he was able to dig up on these men came from primary documents, specifically journals, letters and a huge number of newspaper articles written during the men's lifetimes. The biggest credibility problem with these sources is that all of the information one would find in such documents is oppinional. Because this book is a biography, however, there is no amount of research that could find better, more objective sources. These documents are the next best thing to firsthand interviews with people who knew the Big Four personally. this is a biography, however
Oscar Lewis admits all of the potential shortcomings and biases of his book from the very beginning. He explains, though, that because the men who made up the Big Four were so prominent in business and in California in general, that there was hardly anyone in California writing at the time who didn't have some sort of a bias on these men. Indeed, a quick viewing of Lewis' bibliography shows that several of his books that contained information about these men were just histories of ninteenth century california, from which these four men were inextricable.
The best part about this book is that none of the other books was able to personify the men so much. There is not a lot of personal information on Judah (there was more of that in High Road to Promontory) or the other men who were profiled in the book (David Colton, etc.). But the Big Four are characterized well. Leland Stanford came off as an arrogant bastard in a lot of the books I looked at. These books noted that he went by the title of Governor long after he left office, but in Lewis' book there is talk of a quiet man at home who did not care for social outings, and, later in life did not care for travel of all things--though he thought it to be an "elevating experience' for anyone with the means to give it a try.
Crocker was described like a hulking, proud man. He also seems to be a huge jerk. Lewis calls him boastful, stubborn, tactless, and vain all in one sentence. Still, Lewis admits, he had some cunning to him. Like the others he rose from a small position of no real importance in Sacramento to being one of the most important men in the country in a very short matter of time. And no man in the United States at the time had been superintendent over more yards of track than Charles Crocker. Huntington was characterized as a crumudgeonly miser, but a cheerful one that everyone grudgeingly liked and respected anyway.
Uncle Mark Hopkins is the oldest man in the group, and Lewis wrote of him almost affectionately, describing his hunched style of walking that carried him with deceptive speed. In business, Lewis writes, he was "closed-mouthed and cautious." The author even goes so far as to talk about habits in eating (he ate mostly green vegetables, which caused him a great deal of trouble when he required them during his early days in California) and conversation (he regularly stroked his beard, which always caused him to seem even older than his constituents.) This sort of information, while pointless in a dry, purely historical context, can make the rest of the books on a similar subject easier to read, because the reader gets a sense that these were real men, not just cardboard cutouts who wrote checks and oversaw construction.
Rather than pictures, which can be found elsewhere, Lewis printed a lot of reproductions of political cartoons from newspapers of the day. Since a great deal of newsprint was spent on these four men in the mid-to-late nnteenth century, it makes sense that these cartoons would be frequent, and they're great to see, both for ther artistry and in light of the fact that this is the sort of historical document people don't consider as often. IT would be a shame if they were lost in time.
Again, since this book is not strictly about the transcontinental railroad, its scope goes far beyond that subject. But it is well-written, in a good conversational tone that dates it slightly (it was written in 1938) but gives it a friendly feeling. These four hundred pages were the easiest that I read, even funny at times, and almost always interesting. Possibly due to the lack of technical detail involved.
Monday, April 26, 2004
