"What a terrific read! THE OLD IRON ROAD is an elegant combination of riveting storytelling, modern travelogue and impeccable history. By taking his family across America retracing the route of the first transcontinental railroad, award winning prose stylist David Haward Bain rediscovered the glory days of the railroad. Ghosts abound, including John Fremont, Butch Cassidy, and Ulysses S. Grant. When literary awards are handed out at years' end, THE OLD IRON ROAD deserves a few."
--Douglas Brinkley, Professor of History at the University of New Orleans, and author of TOUR OF DUTY, WHEELS FOR THE WORLD, and THE MAJIC BUS
The New York Times Book Review
July 4, 2004/Page 6
Honk if You Love Railroads
A historian took his family on a cross-country trip that retraced the steps of early Americans
By Verlyn Klinkenborg
Imagine a picaresque race across the country, east to west. Some of the racers—like the historian David Haward Bain and his family, for instance—live in the present. Some live in the past, like Samuel Clemens, the Donner-Reed party, assorted forty-niners and Mormons and emigrants. A few, like the Bains and Alice Huyler Ramsey, who in 1909 became the first woman to drive across the country, pay little attention to the clock. Others, like Grenville Dodge, chief engineer for the Union Pacific, are really racing against bankruptcy, and to them time is everything. Many begin the journey in St. Joseph, Mo., the traditional jumping-off point for the westward journey, but most come from farther east, like the Bains, who started in Vermont. Some take the train, some lay the rails, some walk, some drive oxen, and some drive the Lincoln Highway or the country roads that thread away from the interstate. Set them all on the road together, as simultaneously as the linear nature of words will allow, and you have Bain’s book “The Old Iron Road.”
Bain is the author of ”Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad” (1999), a history of the enterprise that culminated in the joining of the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific railroads in the Golden Spike Ceremony at Promontory, Utah, in May 1869. Researching and writing that book took 14 years, and Bain planned the cross-country journey he describes in “The Old Iron Road” as a way to reward his wife and children for their patience and support—and, really, to show them some of the wonders he had come across in his work. In one sense, then, “the Old Iron Road” is a retelling of “Empire Express” from a personal angle. Instead of the chronologies of politics and economics and track laying, this book is anchored by the geographies of the many Americas Bain and his family found as they made their way west by car.
But another impulse also drives this book. Writing a big book—and, just short of 800 pages, “Empire Express” is very big—requires a tunnel vision that gets narrower and narrower as time passes. You forget how much you know and remember only how much there is to know. You stop looking around and start staring at your next few steps. In “the Old Iron Road,” Bain affords himself the luxury of wandering—literally—over the tracks his previous book set down across the American West. But this time he gets to make all the detours, take all the dead-end roads, meet all the characters he did not have time for or did know about the first time around. In “The Old Iron Road,” the dead seem to rise up to greet him as he goes, and the living save all their best stories for him.
We meet a lot of familiar folks on the road with Bain—John C. Fremont, Calamity Jane, Henry Fonda, Fred Astaire, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. But we also meet a lot of people who are less well known, like Edwin E. Perkins, late of Hastings, Neb. Perkins was an inventor whose imagination was wedded to the hyphen. He created Motor-Vigor, Glos-Comb and Jel-Aid before finally perfecting in 1927 the product that made him wealthy, Kool-Aid. We get to know railroad ghost towns before the people moved out and the ghosts moved in. We get a distant glimpse of the thousands of Chinese who worked on the rails nearly a century and a half ago, their “acres of canvas tents staked out along the railroad grade” and their “cook fires redolent with peanut oil, garlic, cuttlefish and pork.”
It is impossible to cross this country by land without being changed by the experience. “The Old Iron Road” captures this fact vividly, as in as many different forms as Bain can find room for in its pages. And if, at times, we feel as though we’ve been dragged through far too many county museums and eaten in far too many historic hotels with unhistoric food, it is still engaging to cross the country in the company of someone who knows the road so well. Best of all, Bain leads the reader to people who know every inch of the crossing—by rail or ox cart—better than he can imagine. We are lucky to be in their company, even for a while.
For many readers, “The Old Iron Road” may seem like a book to travel with, to lead them off the main roads and into a hidden country. When it becomes a paperback, I hope it will be reprinted in the form of an old-fashioned AAA TripTik, one of those customized plastic-bound route guides that the auto club prepared, and still prepares, to guide travelers on their way. In a TripTik, each new page is a new stretch of road, with side routes and attractions properly marked. “The Old Iron Road” is a book that cries out for that kind of graphical representation, a way of visually chronicling all the American journeys it contains.
Verlyn Klinkenborg writes editorials for The Times. He is the author of “The Rural Life” and “Making Hay.”
The New York Times Book Review
Paperback Row: "In Empire Express, David Haward Bain recounted the enterprise that joined the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific railroads in 1869. In "The Old Iron Road" he takes his family on a picaresque road trip, retracing the route of the transcontinental railroad and stretches of the Oregon and California trails."--Ihsan Taylor, May 29, 2005
Los Angeles Times
WESTWORDS
Rumbling toward sunset
Jonathan Kirsch
May 23, 2004 Sunday
The story of the American West was -- and is -- essentially the story of movement. In "The Old Iron Road," David Haward Bain sets out to retrace the "extraordinarily resonant and historical corridor" that once carried explorers, emigrants, prospectors, Pony Express riders and rail passengers from the Missouri River to the Golden Gate. For Bain, however, the expedition turns out to be a journey of self-discovery too.
At one point, for example, the author pauses along a stretch of Kansas Highway 7/73 to reflect on an obscure moment in American history that figures crucially in his existence: "Somewhere on this road between Atchison and Leavenworth in eastern Kansas," he muses, "my grandmother Rose Donahue Haward had been born in a covered wagon in the year 1889." Thus does Bain humanize the epic tale that he tells in "The Old Iron Road," and his wholly winning book can be approached (and enjoyed) as history, memoir and travelogue of the highest order.
At every opportunity, he points out the linkages that connect contemporary Americans, famous and obscure, to the places, events and people who figure importantly in our history. "There was a chambermaid in one motel near the Omaha airport, on whose paternal line a great-great-great- had fought to push the Cheyenne away from the tracks out on the Plains as an army bluecoat," he writes, "and on whose maternal side was a member, far back, of that tribe."
Bain discloses a telling fact in passing -- he and his family logged some 7,000 miles of travel from east to west in the course of researching his book. That's because Bain allows himself to wander the back roads and byways just as freely as he wanders in memory and history, and he shuns the interstates in favor of "rolling along the original route of the Union Pacific Railroad, and following the ruts of the wagon pioneers."
As a result, he is able to share some rare and endangered experiences of the American road -- stopping for lunch at places with names like Mom's Kitchen rather than McDonald's, for instance, and skipping the theme parks in favor of a miniature Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, a display of some 20,000 hand-carved and painted figures that took a pair of inspired husband-and-wife artisans about 12 years to create. "Not even after bending and peering for an hour," writes Bain, "did one get a fill of it."
Wherever he goes, Bain's eye falls on the odd but illuminating fact of history. As he passes through Atchison, for example, he recalls that Abraham Lincoln once delivered a speech on the same theater stage "that, in four years, would suffer the boot heels of John Wilkes Booth, doing 'Richard III.' " And then he flashes forward a half-century or so to point out that Atchison is also the birthplace of Amelia Earhart, "spirited tomboy and future aviatrix," who scandalized the local gentry by climbing trees, riding bareback and exploring local Indian caves, an unladylike young lady whose risk-taking predicted her future exploits.
Bain delights in seeking out the humble places of origins of famous people -- Marlon Brando and Malcolm X, Willa Cather and Dick Cavett. He notes that Wyoming has named a state park after sportscaster Curt Gowdy. But he also introduces us to a Nebraska farm boy turned amateur chemist named Edwin E. Perkins, whose inventions included a laxative-based cure for tobacco addiction called "Nix-O-Tine," a gasoline additive called "Motor-Vigor," a hair pomade called "Glos-Comb" and a rather more successful concoction of sugar and flavorings, first offered to the public in 1927, which became known as Kool-Aid. Perkins may be a forgotten man, but we learn that in Hastings, Neb., he is still remembered with an annual festival known as Kool-Aid Days.
Bain presents himself as a time traveler, flashing back and forth between the here and now and the dream world of what used to be. "The time is coming, and fast, too," wrote a young railroad surveyor all the way back in 1868, "when in the sense it is now understood, THERE WILL BE NO WEST." And, in fact, much of what Bain encounters in his travels is ghostly in one sense or another -- frontier stockades and ICBM sites, fossil beds of extinct dinosaurs and death masks of dead outlaws, abandoned Overland Stage stations and desolate ranches, even "a bare, ruined Roman Catholic cathedral." On the old Lincoln Highway, he sees a spray-painted sign on a derelict motel that is very much in the spirit of the Old West: "NO TRESPASSING -- SURVIVORS PROSECUTED."
Bain, a teacher at Middlebury College in Vermont and the author of "Empire Express," a history of the transcontinental railroad, is accustomed to working on a grand scale, and "The Old Iron Road" is certainly an ambitious and sometimes magisterial undertaking. But it is also intimate and engaging, and I was often reminded of such charming and idiosyncratic books as William Least Heat-Moon's "Blue Highways" and Reyner Banham's "Scenes in America Deserta." Both of these books sent me on quests to see what the authors had seen and described so beguilingly, and I felt the same urge on page after page of "The Old Iron Road." *
[Illustration]Caption: PHOTO: WESTWARD: Workers build the Central Pacific Railroad on the Nevada plains in 1868.; PHOTOGRAPHER: File photo; PHOTO: SWEET: Nebraska amateur chemist Edwin E. Perkins introduced Kool- Aid to the public in 1927.; PHOTOGRAPHER: Viking
Jonathan Kirsch, a contributing writer to Book Review, is the author of, most recently, "God Against the Gods: The History of the War Between Monotheism and Polytheism."
Chicago Tribune
June 20, 2004 Sunday
By June Sawyers.
"The Old Iron Road: An Epic of Rails, Roads and the Urge to Go West" (Viking; $27.95)
What is it about the West that has so captured the popular imagination? Is it the promise of a better future? The hope that life's troubles will vanish if one just keeps on moving forever westward? In the summer of 2000, David Haward Bain and his family left their home back East and headed west. For him, the trip wasn't about the destination but about the journey--some 7,000 miles one way, he notes. Retracing the route of the first transcontinental railroad, they follow along routes and trails where covered wagons and handcarts once treaded, down back roads, through ghost towns and battlegrounds, across prairies and wide rivers. Bain pays spiritual homage to the memory of his grandparents who traversed this land in an earlier time. He takes us to "Catherland," the area of Nebraska where Willa Cather grew up. We meet the ghosts of the heroes (Wild Bill Hickok), villains (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) and iconoclasts (trapper Jim Bridger) who once populated the West. This is a very personal and warm account--no dry history here--of a journey of the heart that concludes on a poignant note. Anyone who loves history and appreciates the writing of William Least Heat-Moon, Jonathan Raban, Bruce Chatwin and John McPhee will want to add it to their collection.
Library Journal
The titular Old Iron Road is none other than the nation's first transcontinental railroad. Bain's previous Empire Express chronicled the building of the railroad, but this new work takes the form of a personal travelog. In the summer of 2000, the author and his family followed the route of this historic track by automobile, traveling from Kansas City, MO, to San Francisco via Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada. Historic accounts of particular people and places along the way make for lively and interesting reading, along with Bain's entertaining descriptions of and reflections on modern events and sights. Scout's Rest Ranch at North Platte, NE, offers him the opportunity to discuss "Buffalo Bill" Cody, while Elko, NV, brings out Bing Crosby's connection with the town. The overall effect is a modern exploration of the American West and its development of a sense of place in the tradition of Charles Kuralt and Bill Moyers, with whom Bain has previously worked. Highly recommended for public and high school libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 1/03.]-Nathan E. Bender, Buffalo Bill Historical Ctr., Cody, WY Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
The Portland Oregonian
Sunday, May 16, 2004
MATT LOVE
Like most good road trips, David Haward Bain's "The Old Iron Road: An Epic of Rails, Roads, and the Urge to Go West" starts a little slowly but picks up once encounters with unfamiliar landscapes and history begin.
For this reader, Bain's narrative of his Western road trip with his wife and two children found the right gear near Page 80 with his visit to a Nebraska museum, where Bain discovers and then relates in fascinating detail how Hastings, Neb., is the birthplace of Kool-Aid.
In 1999, Bain's monumental "Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad" was published after more than a decade of research and writing. This effort demanded much sacrifice from his wife and children and prompted Bain to ask the question: "How can I repay my spouse for 14 years of belief and support in this project? How can I reward my good children for not getting complexes because their dad always had a faraway look in his eyes, and was always tired, their entire lives?"
His answer was a road trip in the summer of 2000. Bain took his family on a two-month, 7,000-mile trip in a Dodge Durango from the family's home in Vermont to San Francisco. Upon reaching Omaha, the journey would loosely follow the route of the first transcontinental railroad. It was a route, a story, that Bain had devoted much of his life to but apparently never intimately shared with his family.
The result of that "odyssey," as Bain describes it, is "The Old Iron Road," a richly interesting book of travel and history that also has the virtue of being a beautiful and original portrait of a family together definitely not going to Disneyland.
Instead this remarkable family went to the West and engaged a particular passage through it, one that roughly corresponds to Interstate 80. Taken along for the ride, a reader joins Bain's family's pursuit of history by way of visiting dozens of museums, big and small, looking around, asking questions and talking together. That something tragic happens to the Bain family two years later as related in the epilogue makes this road trip all the more poignant.
"The Old Iron Road" weaves the story of building the railroad, Bain's nuanced observations on how the interstate highway system murdered some laid-back American customs, and an unfolding cast of people who hail from or made history in cities along the route.
It's a cast that includes, to name a few, Willa Cather, Marlon Brando, Malcolm X, Mark Twain, Bing Crosby, Buffalo Bill, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and the various rogues who built the railroad.
Bain never allows these biographical digressions to go too far afield. They have purpose, and in combination with the other aspects of this book seem to be investigating who Americans were when railroad was king. By extension, readers then ask, who and what have we become since? -- two questions today much on the mind of any sentient American.
Bain has produced an excellent and inspiring book. It so inspired this reader that he made Kool-Aid (Black Cherry -- 10 cents a packet!) for the first time since the Nixon administration, rented "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," made plans to visit his local historical museum and for the first time ever considered wanting a family so he could take them on an American road trip like the one Bain took with his.
Bain discusses his book at 7:30 p.m. Friday at Powell's City of Books, 1005 W. Burnside St. The event is co-sponsored by Amtrak.
The Economist (London)
The wild west
'Cross the wide Missouri
May 13th 2004
THE here-today-gone-tomorrow impermanence of life in the old American west pervades David Bain's history of the penetration of the country's last frontier. Everything there has changed in the 200 years since Captain Meriwether Lewis and Lieutenant William Clark left St Louis on 14th May 1804 to explore an overland route to the Pacific. The 15m buffalo that roamed the range are gone. So are the squaws and the braves. Too many Indian peoples, once proud and free, now eke out lives of wretched humiliation on reservations. But melancholy over these sad departures is balanced by admiration for the deeds of the pioneers. They endured unimaginable hardships in turning a wilderness into one of the most prosperous places on earth.
In writing this book, Mr Bain aimed to link the present to the past. His two children and his wife Mary, who has since died prematurely of heart disease, accompanied him on a 7,000-mile adventure from Omaha, Nebraska, to San Francisco's Golden Gate. In it they sought to follow, as far as possible, the tracks of the covered wagons and the rails of the first transcontinental railway.
A few odd facts are unearthed along the way: the revelation, for instance, that Malcolm X, Marlon Brando and Fred Astaire were all born in Omaha. But the Bain family is most fascinated by the boomtowns that busted when a railway by-passed them or an interstate highway left them stranded: ghostly places like Piedmont, Wyoming (above), which once bragged four saloons, a livery stable, hotels, a schoolhouse and water towers, but is now just a smear in a big landscape.
Towns serving mines grew bigger and fell even harder. Goldfield, Nevada, which had 20,000 inhabitants early in the 20th century, has a mere 450 today. Railways decayed too. In its glory days a station in Omaha serviced more than 200 passenger trains a week. Today people travel by air or by road. The old railway station is now a museum, and gift shops stand in place of the old ticket offices.
This type of destruction continues apace when, for instance, a new Wal-Mart sucks shoppers away from the Main Streets of nearby towns. But Mr Bain does not labour that point. His imagination is caught more by wild mid-19th century places: towns whose dedication to debauchery made them whirlpools of sin. It is the deeds of their whores, gangsters and drunks that excite him, not those of their lawmen and preachers. He lingers nostalgically in Boot Hill cemeteries, the last abodes of bodies that were shot, lynched or otherwise violently assaulted.
The reputations of a few American legends are damaged by asides. Philip Sheridan, a Unionist hero in the civil war, is exposed as a bloody ethnic cleanser. So is John Frémont, the so-called Pathfinder. He permitted a massacre of the Indians in the northern Sacramento Valley that was similar to the atrocities at Wounded Knee, Sand Creek and Bear River. “The number I killed I cannot say,” his scout, Kit Carson, recalled. “It was a perfect butchery.”
Indians friendly to the settlers were treated almost as savagely as unfriendly ones. The lament of a “co-operative” chief of the Shoshone, an Indian tribe eventually forced by the American government to share a reservation with its ancient enemies, is haunting. “The white man, who possesses this whole vast country from sea to sea, who roams over it at pleasure and lives where he likes, cannot know the cramp we feel in this little spot, with the underlying remembrance of the fact, which you know as well as we, that every foot of what you proudly call America not very long ago belonged to the red man.”
Indian killers apart, most of Mr Bain's trailblazers are likeable, even when roguish. He quotes extensively from the early writings of Mark Twain (then called Samuel Clemens), an intrepid and often sensationalist newspaper reporter on the American frontier. “To find a petrified man,” Twain later confessed, “or break a stranger's leg, or cave an imaginary mine, or discover some dead Indians in a Gold Hill tunnel, or massacre a family at Dutch Nick's, were feats and calamities we never hesitated about devising when the public needed matters of thrilling interest for breakfast.”
None of this history's characters are more genuinely heroic than the persecuted Latter-Day Saints led by Brigham Young into the desolate lands of Utah, where they made deserts prosper. Young was a man ahead of his time when it came to nature. He instructed his flock that no game was to be killed until it was wanted for food, “for it is a sin to waste life and flesh.” Few non-Mormons heeded his words. The old wild west, so utterly changed, is the poorer for it.
Newsday, Long Island, NY
Retracing the trails, page by moving page
Spencer Rumsey
October 30, 2005
The Old Iron Road: An Epic of Rails, Roads, and the Urge to Go West, by David Haward Bain (Penguin Books, 375 Hudson St., New York, NY 10014; 212-366-2272; www.davidhbain.com; $15):
Eminent historian, gifted writer and patient father, David Haward Bain piled his wife and two children (ages 11 and 8) into his Durango for a two-month, 7,000-mile journey from Vermont to San Francisco. He'd just finished writing his highly praised history of the transcontinental railroad, "Empire Express," and he was "seized with a vision" to take his family out West. In the confines of his vehicle he hoped that his children (and his ever-sympathetic wife, Mary Smyth Duffy, a painter) would appreciate his "blabber about Lewis and Clark, mountain men and fur traders, Indians and the railroad." They obviously did because he knows how to tell a great story.
This book reminds you that an American parent's duty does not begin and end with a trip to Disney World. No, you owe your kids a chance to get a handle on what America means - that frontier wildness that still sparkles from a billboard, say, above Times Square. With Bain as your guide, go back in time to North Platte, Neb., where in the winter of 1866 the townsfolk, a wild bunch indeed, "were having a good time, gambling, drinking and shooting each other." That's the stuff our myths are made of.
On one level, "The Old Iron Road" is an entertaining story about a family's summer odyssey; but on another, it's about an American historian's attempt to answer the question, "What, after all, had the trails and train wrought?" By the end you realize it's operating on yet another level, more poignant than you imagined: a tribute to his late wife. This book is a gem.
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. Agent, Ellen Levine. (On sale May 10)
USA TODAY
June 21, 2004
Summer travel doesn't have to be a major production. Non-fiction books set in distant, exotic or offbeat locales can take you away without the complications or expense of leaving home. [One] of the season's best: The Old Iron Road: An Epic of Rails, Road, and the Urge to Go West by David Haward Bain (Viking, $27.95).
In this memoir, Bain tells of the journey he and his family took in the summer of 2000 as they followed the route of the first transcontinental railroad from Omaha to San Francisco. Traveling by car, Bain and his wife, Mary, and children, Mimi, 11, and David, 8, paused on a stretch of road in eastern Kansas, the place where Bain's grandmother Rose Donahue Haward was born in a covered wagon in 1889.
The journey capped years of research and financial struggle. For Bain, it was a trip that circled back on the 14 years he spent writing Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad, published in 1999. Bain saw the trip as a way to repay his wife and children for the time spent on his magnum opus. It was an opportunity to share the history he compiled and the personal stake the family's ancestors had in the pioneering spirit that led to the rail's creation.
How many of us get to share our life's work with our loved ones? Superhighways have paved over the old transcontinental rail line, but the family found that the route is still lined with Old West ghost towns and wide-open prairie.
For Bain, the journey's meaning is immeasurable: Two years after they returned, Mary, 46, died of heart complications.
--Kathy Balog, special for USA TODAY
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
Recommended. . . . The esteemed historian who wrote "Empire Express," a classic historical account of the transcontinental railroad, retraces his dogged research steps in a two-month, 7,000-mile family odyssey from Vermont to California, much of it retracing the railroad route and wagon ruts west across the country.--John Marshall, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, June 27, 2004 (reprinted Louisville Courier-Journal, same date)
AMAZON.COM--David J. Gannon, San Antonio, TX
As a reward for their unwavering patience in putting up with him while he wrote his excellent book on the building of the transcontinental railroad, David Haward Bain treated his wife, Mary, and their two children to a 7000 + mile trip out west, roughly retracing the routes of the original pioneers who settled the area. The Old Iron Road: An Epic of Rails, Roads, and the Urge to Go West is the literary result of this undertaking. Part family history, part US History, part true travelogue, the book is a wonderful and highly informative look at the often sad and tragic history of those who settled the west.
Although itís the history that is especially compelling in this mix, that history is delivered in the way it must have been during the trip itself. Bain is the master of the odd fact, such as the revelation that Malcom X, Marlon Brando and Fred Astaire were all born in Omaha, Nebraska. The traditional figures, such a Buffalo Bill are included, but it is Bainís anecdotes about more marginally known characters--such as Phillip Sheridan and Brigham Young--that really hit home. Bain also goes to great lengths to cover the ways and results of the pioneerís relations and actions towards the various Native Americans disrupted by the Anglo western migration.
However, it is the pace itself that so obviously moves Bain. His treatment of the many isolated and wasted ghost towns they encounter and how the development of the west proved boon to some, disaster to others is both insightful and, often, quite moving.
In the end, the family interactions and this ëhistoryí of their travels prove to be moving as well, especially when one is cognizant, as I was when reading it, that not long after the trip Bainís wife died of heart disease. In the end, the book proves to not just be informative, but heartwarming as well.
A truly unique book that is, all in all, one of the best anecdotal historical books I have read in a long, long time."
Albany Democrat-Herald
"Reliving the journey taken by many of our own ancestors, award-winning author David Bain and his family leave Vermont in 2000 heading west across the U.S. Following rails and rivers, trails and ruts, they encounter history and fascinating characters along the way. Visiting battlegrounds, ghost towns, museums, basins, and bluffs, Bain chronicles his family's journey both past and present in this engaging narrative." September 18, 2004
Philadelphia Inquirer
"Title to tote along [when] summertime brings reading time for armchair traveling: David Haward Bain looks for traces of the first transcontinental railroad in The Old Iron Road." -- Michael Harrington, Philadelphia Inquirer, May 20, 2005
Chicago Sun-Times
"A fine latter-day travel account of fulfilling the old American urge to go west, following the route of the original transcontinental railroad." -- Chicago Sun-Times, May 1, 2005
BestWestern.com -- "Traveling Lite" column
The quest for the Perfect Souvenir has occupied the energies of Traveling Lite for years.
Our office is testimony to our efforts. On a bookshelf is a small doll clad in a grass skirt. She wiggles agreeably when tapped. There’s a small, colorful ceramic cow (that doesn’t wiggle even a little bit), an equally small statue of a jackalope (plus a full-sized one mounted on the wall, on which we hang our hat), and a stuffed armadillo. Don’t ask.
It gets worse at home.
These were early efforts in our quest for the Perfect Souvenir. Today, we are much more sophisticated and we believe we have achieved our goal.
For Traveling Lite, the Perfect Souvenir of any trip is a book. That’s right. A book. We look for books that tell something about the place we have been, its history, its significance in the great flow of civilization, or just something fun about the place. We have amassed a rather large travel library and it gives us a good deal of pleasure and recalls warm memories of the places we’ve been.
In addition to bringing a book home from our travels, we never leave home without one. Selecting the right book for our travels isn’t always easy. It must be interesting, well-written and the right size. Size and weight make a difference if you have to lug the thing through the endless maze of the Chicago or Atlanta airport, for example. Some books are for reading in your easy chair at home. Others are for reading as you endure the self-inflicted pain of air transportation.
On rare occasions, we find a book we absolutely fall in love with and we plan our travels around it. The recently published The Old Iron Road, by David Haward Bain, is such a book. Bain is the author of the critically acclaimed Empire Express, a new look at the building of the transcontinental railroad in the 1860s and its impact on the growth of the American West. Being a big fan of railroads and especially the Union Pacific, we loved the book.
His new book is a travel odyssey published by Viking Press. With his family in the family van, he retraces the route of the transcontinental railroad, which is also very nearly the route of the old Lincoln Highway and several of the important pioneer trails in the western migration of the 1800s. Their two-month expedition begins in Kansas City, moves north to Omaha and then west through North Platte, Cheyenne, Salt Lake City and on to San Francisco.
Along the way, he stops to visit museums, tourist attractions (and traps!), small restaurants, roadside historic markers, wagon ruts and anything else that looks interesting. The Bain family drives old brick-surfaced highways, meets a variety of interesting people and, in general, appears to have a wonderful time as they discover the real heart of America.
It is a warm tale, lovingly written.
Traveling Lite enjoyed it because we grew up in that part of the world and have driven most of the highways the Bain family drives and experienced the same sense of time-disconnect as Chimney Rock pierces the distant horizon or as Union Pacific fast freight roars by in a thunderclap of sound and motion. We also enjoyed it because we appreciate good writing and the gentle perspective of an author who truly loves history.
And now we want, more than anything, to get in a car in Omaha and head west on Highway 30 with no real schedule and no plan other than to experience the joy of the trip.
The Old Iron Road has a bittersweet ending. Two years after the trip, the author’s wife of 22 years died from complications related to cancer and her heart. In this, the Bain family mirrors the tragedy that often struck the families that went west by covered wagon on those early trails. It is a sad ending to a wonderful family adventure.
So, if you’re looking for something to tuck in your carry-on bag or toss on the front seat next to you for your summer travels, we recommend The Old Iron Road. It’s the book we wish we had written, but we thank David Bain for having done so. If it’s the only souvenir you bring home, you did good.
And if you decide to pack up and head west, along the way you’ll find plenty of fine Best Western hotels. We’ll see you down The Old Iron Road, traveling lite. -- Skip Boyer, "Traveling Lite," BestWestern.com <http://www.bestwestern.com/tripplanner/travelarticles/issue_thirteen.asp>
Skip Boyer is Best Western International's executive producer, travel historian and resident wit. The latter position he fills about half the time. For more than 20 years, he's been writing about travel for Best Western, including a full-length corporate history, Simply the Best. A native of Nebraska, he is fascinated by maps, place names, odd events, obscure museums, secondary highways, small towns and the pure joy of travel. He still believes that getting there is half the fun. The other half, of course, is getting back.
Folio: The Newsletter of The Patrice Press
August 2004/Vol. 17, no. 3
Gregory M. Franzwa, Editor
"Surprised I am, at how well our “road trips” are being received in folio. But if you like those stories, you will absolutely love David Bain’s latest, The Old Iron Road. He’s going to take us from the Missouri River’s “jumping-off” places to San Francisco, and he does it with élan—enough élan to make this Old Man want to take a refresher course in travel journalism.
The new book implies that this is a follow-up to his award-winning Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad. (Yes, we have that 800-page masterpiece in stock in paperback, at $18, and if you haven’t read it you ought to be ashamed of yourself.)
Well, he does loosely pattern his text after Empire Express, but he does a lot more than follow the rails. For example, he and his family (wife, two kids) pull into the National Frontier Trails Center. You’ll learn about the magnificent Merrill J. Mattes Library, the center’s introductory motion picture, the three corridors devoted to the Oregon, California, and Santa Fe Trails (Independence is on all three, you know). Three pages of text on the place, and not one dull word. Two more pages on St. Joseph, and another on Council Bluffs.
Jumping across the Missouri, Bain tours us through the Union Pacific museum in Omaha, and many other fascinating vignettes on that eastern terminus of the great railroad.
And then comes Chapter 4, “The Lincoln Highway.” And Bain really nails that one. He travels on the historic brick stretch east of Elkhorn, telling us along the way about Nelson Jack’s 1903 transcontinental drive there, before the road was paved. And of Bellamy Partridge, and the other folks I weave into my own Lincoln Highway books.
How well I remember my own research trips west of there. The little towns, the old Lincoln Highway paralleling US 30 for miles. In Omaha Bain talks about its native son, Marlon Brando. In Grand Island, about Henry Fonda. Facts which could be deadly dull on a chamber of commerce brochure jump for joy when described by David Bain.
He leaves that old Lincoln Highway and his Old Iron Road to drive south for a few miles to Red Cloud. He writes a paragraph on the Oglala chieftain, but we get close to seven pages on Willa Cather, because she lived there.
To illustrate that working journalists can also be literary artists, here is a quote from Bain’s material on Red Cloud and Cather:
“All of us answer some sort of call, and it was the same call that Cather wrestled with, as did her characters in her novels and stories. ‘There are only two or three human stories,’ she had written in O Pioneers!, ‘and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before, like the larks in this country that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years.’ I gave Mimi [Bain’s daughter] a squeeze, and Mary and Davey joined in.
“A herd of cows congregated a mile away below a windmill. Shadows of clouds raced across the prairie. Wagon ruts ran out along a ridge.”
Back to the north, Bain switches back to the mid-nineteenth century to tell the story of the Indian atrocities of the 1860s. (While in the Hastings museum he stares, fascinated, at the arrow that pinned two young white boys together.) He is as captivated with the museum arching over I-80 east of Kearney, as were those of us who attended the Lincoln Highway Association conference in Grand Island three years ago. A visit to Buffalo Bill Cody’s Scout’s Rest ranch north of North Platte is only a part of his narrative about that delightfully historic city.
A young Mark Twain gets some attention for his visit to Julesburg, but for some reason we found nothing about nasty old Jules Bene. One would think that Bain would have seen accounts of even nastier old Jack Slade settling a score with Jules – tying him to a fence post, slicing off his ears, and shooting him repeatedly in non-fatal areas before tiring of the sport and finishing him off. (Bain had two kids along—reason enough to leave the gore to other historians.)
He wanted to follow the Lincoln Highway to the Wyoming line, but at the same time he didn’t want to miss the great stuff on the Oregon Trail, fifty miles to the north. So he drove through the Wildcat Hills to visit Chimney Rock, and he lays three pages on us there. Then on to Scotts Bluff and the story of Rebecca Winters, a Mormon mother who died east of town in 1852 and who was reburied nearby in 1995.
And so it goes as the Bain family drives west. He relates some of the stories of the Union Pacific which he had omitted in Empire Express. Out in Ogden he met our mutual friend Chris Graves, he of the awesome knowledge of the building of the Central Pacific in the 1860s. Graves, who retired from his bank vice-presidency in 1995, dove into a study of the CP full-time. When he isn’t studying it, and collecting its historical artifacts, he is sharing both the knowledge and the artifacts with others. Including the reviewer. And including, especially, David Bain.
It was Graves who climbed all over my frame when I wrote a glowing review of Stephen Ambrose’s Nothing Like It In the World, which as it turns out contains no less than fifty major errors. And when David wrote his railroad book, he caught it, too, for repeating the old canard about Chinese workmen being lowered in baskets to dynamite a ledge for the CP at Cape Horn, near Colfax, California.
Graves hauled me up there, just as he did David, to show that the only way anybody could be lowered down that gentle slope would be at the end of a jib boom. The basket thing is pure, unadulterated baloney. Ambrose greeted this disclosure with an arrogant, stony silence. Here is how Bain addressed his earlier error:
“There has been a durable story about Cape Horn; that the Chinese wove reed baskets that were then attached to the ropes and lowered with a drilling man in each. Most railroad historians, including, alas, myself, have been lulled by a few secondary sources and some 1860s journalism and travel guidebooks to repeat the baskets story…sticklers, amateur and professional historians alike, will rib me about Cape Horn baskets until we are gone.”
No we won’t. When a writer with skills like this is willing to admit to an error, we know we are dealing with a first-class writer, as well as a first-class human being.
As we read through the last chapters of this book, it seemed as if I was part of this man’s family, and developed a closeness to them through the seven thousand miles of their epic journey across America. I had been at all the places they had visited years ago. It was all familiar to me. And as the remaining pages dwindled to an eighth of an inch, there came a feeling of regret, as we neared the end of a warm and delightful adventure.
The main text ended on page 396, to be followed by a one-page Epilogue. And it is on that single page that I got a shock—a stunner, one that left this reviewer reeling. Go to your bookstore. Buy this book. And read it just as I read it. You’ll see what I mean."
--Reviewed by Gregory M. Franzwa. Mr. Franzwa is the award-winning author of many books on Western history, including Oregon Trail Revisited and Impressions of the Santa Fe Trail: A Contemporary Diary; as editor of Patrice Press, he has edited definitive guidebooks on the Lincoln Highway, the Oregon, Santa Fe, Mormon Pioneer, and California Trails, as well as historic trail diaries, memoirs, and analytical historic maps. As a newsletter, Folio is avidly followed by thousands of Western trail buffs, collectors, and sojourners.
Kliatt Magazine
November 2005
David Bain took his family on a trek through the American West a few years ago, wandering about several states until they ended up at the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. What with good cars and the Interstate freeway system, travelers by the thousand easily traverse their route in a short time. Unknowingly, though, their wheels are literally passing over the ruts of Conestoga wagons, the streets of defunct and forgotten towns, hunters' trails, and the unmarked graves of countless Native Americans and pioneers. Bain tells us their stories, and numerous others, bringing history brilliantly to life as he makes his way west.
The writing style is leisurely and heavily anecdotal, much in the style of John McPhee and his followers. It brings numerous people and almost-forgotten episodes back to life, from the trivial to the highly significant. There is a real immediacy to "living history" such as this: to learn about some long-ago adventure and then to actually see the same location as it is today. The author has a keen eye for the present, too, and blends his stories with the quirky characters he meets along his way. One difficulty is that Bain's narrative is apt to jump back and forth among various historical eras, and historical figures sometimes flicker in and out of the present.
Having said that, the book makes one itch to get out in the boondocks and rediscover the old boom-and-bust towns, diamond frauds, and Native American battle sites. YA readers with even a tiny spark of curiosity ought to find it fascinating. Raymond Puffer, Ph.D., Historian, Edwards AFB, Lancaster, CA
Nancy Pearl's More Book Lust (2005)
After he finished his superb Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad, historian David Haward Bain decided to take his wife and two children on a journey from their home in Vermont out to California by way of old logging roads, superhighways, and railway routes. The result is the equally readable The Old Iron Road: An Epic of Rails, Roads, and the Urge to Go West.” – Nancy Pearl, More Book Lust : Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason (Sasquatch Books, 2005)