Nothing Like it in the World

Nothing Like it in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863-1869 is a narrative history by Stephen E. Ambrose, first published in 2000. The book tells the story of the construction of America's first transcontinental railroad in the latter half of the nineteenth century – a feat of engineering almost unimaginable, and wholly unprecedented, at the time. Aside from the text, the book also contains thirty-two pages of black and white photographs of the men and machines that Ambrose discusses, as well as several maps. As Ambrose himself puts it in the opening line of his book: "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 19th century." This quote exemplifies both the adulatory tone in which the book is written, and the seriousness with which Ambrose takes his subject. That said, and although Nothing Like it in the World was an immediate best seller – a testament to Ambrose's accessible prose, and unusual celebrity for an academic – it has been plagued ever since with charges of sloppy research and plagiarism.

Ambrose's account of the construction of the transcontinental railroad begins with the early surveyors who determined the paths of the rails, and moves from there to the capitalists and cronies that oversaw the venture (and tried, illegally, to get rich off of it), and then the hordes of workers who were called in to do the actual grunt work. And there was a lot of grunt work to do. On one end, stemming from Sacramento, the Central Pacific slowly worked its way towards Omaha. There, rival Union Pacific was inching its way west, trying to outpace Central Pacific in building towards a common midpoint – and the union of the lines. The Golden Spike uniting the two branches was driven in at Promontory Summit in May 1869.

But there were many obstacles that had to be cleared before this could happen. Many of these were obvious enough, at least in hindsight. There was, for example, the inclement terrain (like the towering Rockies) and even less clement weather to deal with. These factors only stressed supply lines that were undependable to begin with. There were also never quite enough workers to meet demand; those that there were – mostly Chinese, Irish, and Mormons – were severely overworked. But their work was in many ways superlative: at one point, ten miles of railroad were laid in a day, something never before done. Even so, there was significant pressure to speed the construction schedule, and this led in practice to sacrificing safety for expediency. (Incidentally, one benefit of this emphasis was the development of an efficient style of construction: each worker performed only one task, such as setting down ties, positioning spikes, or hammering spikes – an approach that would apparently later inspire the likes of Henry Ford.) And finally, and unsurprisingly, the Indian tribes through whose territory the line passed were not altogether thrilled by the trespassers.



Ambrose also spends a lot of time detailing the human element in charge of organizing the line. A colorful – and often quite underhanded – cast of characters parades through Ambrose's telling. There was what he calls the “big Four” of the Central Pacific: Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington, Charles Crocker, and Mark Hopkins. There was also Union Pacific's Thomas "Doc" Durant, and his toady General Grenville Dodge. But Ambrose gives special attention, and not without reason, to President Abraham Lincoln. Although understandably best known for abolishing slavery in the US, Lincoln also was responsible for ordering the building of the transcontinental railroad; it was, in fact, one of his pet projects, and widely regarded as important to re-establishing the unity of a country suffering from the divisions of the civil war. Nor was Lincoln unaware of the economic value of the railroad, which stood to make possible in a little over a week the kinds of transports that had previously taken weeks at sea.

Stephen Ambrose's Nothing Like it in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863-1869 is only one of many best-selling books written by the historian. That said, it was not intended, and is not, a scholarly work strictly speaking, as the various criticisms of its shortcomings amply demonstrate. Although a well-told, spirited story, and correct in its generalities, readers expecting to find a factually correct account of the details of the first transcontinental railroad's creation are advised not to rely on Ambrose's work alone.