The Old Iron Road: An Epic of Rails, Roads, and the Urge to Go West - Softcover

Bain, David Haward

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143035266 ISBN 13: 9780143035268

Publisher: Penguin Books, 2005

Synopsis

The award-winning author of Empire Express describes his and his family's odyssey west as they retraced the entire route of the first transcontinental railroad, offering a fascinating glimpse of the American spirit of adventure, determination, and character that led to its construction, as well as the journeys that shaped both his own heritage and American history. Reprint.

About this title

About the Author:

David Haward BainĀ's four previous books of nonfiction include Empire Express and Sitting in Darkness, which won a Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Book Award. His articles and essays have appeared in Smithsonian, American Heritage, Kenyon Review, and Prairie Schooner. He teaches at Middlebury College.

From Publishers Weekly:

Bain plumbed the history of America's West in Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad, and he elegantly broadens his scope here by logging 7,000 miles from his home in Vermont to California with a wife and daughter who'd never been to the West Coast and an eight-year-old son who'd never left the East Coast. Bain first takes them to the capacious Kansas City home where his grandparents lived, finding a "forgotten waste" (the house had been razed), a discovery illustrating one of Bain's themes: the curious interplay of past and present. He uses physical entities-museums, abandoned highways, the pioneers' still-discernible wagon wheel ruts-to swerve into historical forays that deftly and palpably engage. Bain lassoes the usual suspects-Calamity Jane, Butch Cassidy, Buffalo Bill Cody-but his prodigious research also reveals the stories of forgotten figures like Esther Hobart Morris, a Wyoming suffragist who was the first American woman to receive a civil appointment (as justice of the peace of South Pass City), and western writer Owen Wister, who helped establish the cowboy as an American archetype. Bain's main concern, however, isn't merely to foster a dialogue between the 19th-century Old West and its contemporary incarnation, but to fashion a literary travelogue. In that capacity, he's an intriguing guide (he eloquently describes the easy familiarity of the road by explaining why he doesn't let on to Bruce Hornsby that he knows who he is when their two families happen to meet). Bain bypasses a facile sentimentality for a more complex portrait of the American West. B&w photos not seen by PW.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0143035266
• ISBN 13: 9780143035268
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 448