EMPIRE EXPRESS - Building the First Transcontinental Railroad by Bain, David Haward

New York, 1999, Viking, US First edition, hard bound in dust jacket, FINE/FINE CONDITION, 6 1/2 x 9 1/2, ( dj price clipped) xviii, 797 pages, illus, maps, notes, bibliog., index.I---------------------------------------------It was the dawn of the Gilded Age; it welded the new western United States to the East with twin bands of iron; it opened a path for settlement and exploitation, utterly changing the West as it doomed the Plains Indian culture. After the Civil War, it was the century's most transformative chain of events. Beginning in 1842 with a visionary's dream to span the continent with a single railroad line, Empire Express captures three dramatic decades in which the United States effectively doubled in size, fought three wars, and began to discover a new national identity. Culminating in the driving of the Golden Spike in the Utah desert in 1869, which touched off a frenzy of celebration, the narrative ends in 1873 in Washington under the Capitol rotunda, with the crushing fall of a popular politician and the exposure of a powerful, hidden railroad lobby–a scandal, which, for half a year, dominated the press and the country's imagination.