Nothing Like It In The World by Stephen Ambrose

Next to winning the Civil War and abolishing slavery, building the first transcontinental railroad from Omaha, Nebraska, to Sacramento, California, was the greatest achievement of the American people in the nineteenth century. - Stephen Ambrose, Nothing Like It In The World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869

Promontory, Utah

Historian Stephen Ambrose's upcoming book, Nothing Like It In The World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869 tells the story of the building of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific like none other. Masterfully written and narrated, Ambrose produced a definite gem. This latest book was even more fascinating than his recent Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West, which remained on the New York Times' Bestseller List for fifty weeks.

The story of the transcontinental railroad is one of people. People who surveyed the route, financed and managed the railroad, protected the workers, ran the government, developed the towns along the way, but most importantly, the thousands of workers - especially the Irish and Chinese, who helped build the railroad across the United States. Ambrose vividly discusses their experience. Most poignant is the story of the Chinese workers who lived and worked under dozens of feet of snow in snow caves in the Sierra Nevada during one of the worst winters in history. The tragic loss of life of these workers during the myriad of avalanches and cave-ins is truly staggering. Even when the snow was not on the ground, the work in the Sierra was dangerous, deadly, and slow. Workers progressed no more than six inches per day through some of the toughest sections of granite, drilling holes and dynamiting inch by inch, risking their lives with each chaotic explosion.

Ambrose thoroughly chronicles each step of the building of the railroad, from the surveys of Theodore Judah in the west and Greenville Dodge in the east, to the backing of big business and the Big Four, to the driving of the golden spike at Promontory, connecting Omaha and the east with Sacramento and the west. The achievement of the railroad is truly amazing, considering especially that the entire railroad was built using nothing but shovels and dynamite and each rock was removed and each tie and rail was laid by hand.

I highly recommend this books for its amazing story of man against nature, struggling to build a transportation corridor across a dangerous and difficult continent. There's not much else as important to the history and geography of the United States as the building of the first transcontinental railroad and Stephen Ambrose tells this story magnificently.

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