Train Roll On, and On, and On...

Review of:  Nothing Like It In the World, written by Stephen E. Ambrose and read by some poor actor who must've really needed the money.  New York (high percentage shot):  Simon and Schuster, 2000 (seriously).

Instructions on what noises to make if you want to look inside the audio edition.

Summary:  This is a recent (2000 C.E. f'realz) history book about trains by someone who claims in the introduction that he loves history, has written previous books about history, gets requests from publishers to write books about history and only became a fan of trains through researching this book.  This last anecdote is clearly apocryphal; Mr. Ambrose does not, under any circumstances that do not involve civil war re-enactment with live ammunition, like trains.

I recommend this audio book to:  anyone who compulsively reads everything published about trains, but doesn't seek to understand anything about United States history, and/or doesn't listen very closely.

What I learned:  The Civil War was both a catalyst and a great hindrance to the construction of the first rail-road line to California.  The train unified the "Union" (get it!?) and replaced a route that involved months of sailing on big wooden ships where many passengers contracted fevers and died.  The ships mostly sailed to and from Panama where, in the absence of any sort of "canal" there, most would-be gold-miners walked through the jungle, contracted fevers, and died.

Also, Abe Lincoln got rich as a railroad lawyer, and had his campaign considerably advanced by special-interest backing from his former colleagues.  Beyond that, he basically gave railroaders a blank check to take as much land out of the Territories as they could build tracks over, and to sell unlimited bonds with their interest backed by government credit, in order to enrich his personal land holdings near the starting point of the rail line.

The scoundrels Lincoln gave this blank check to, known as "the Big Four" (presumably because of their weight, which is tracked and cited as evidence of their greatness (no pun intended) when it increases), had made their fortunes re-selling Ames shovels in their California general stores to immigrants who survived the boat rides from Europe to New York, from New York to Panama, and from Panama to San Francisco so that they could wander out into the unmapped California hills, contract fevers, and die.  Before building the railroad, the Big Four jointly managed a wagon road across the California hills.  If you have any doubt how that worked out for their beloved customers, I recommend the mother of all interactive historical resources, Oregon Trail:

Spoiler alert...

When I Stopped Listening:  Disk 6 of 12

Why I Stopped:  By disk four, Ambrose has basically run out of meaningful connections to his true passions:  Abe Lincoln and the Civil War.  Instead he's been rambling on for hours about different people wandering around the Northwest in search of level ground, and about the process involved in making the ground even more level, so that the trains won't tip over on their own, thereby creating jobs for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.  Since the leveling process is mostly documented by the company and not the workers, and since his heart really isn't in this, Ambrose just tiredly retypes the bosses' ridiculously high opinions of themselves as friendly managers who treat their brutish, animalistic, drunken workers the best that anybody possibly could, taking great pains to cuss them out twice for working too slowly "before calling the time-master to give them their time," and patiently busting strikes when pay is delayed.

In Disk 6, though, he starts talking about "bands of Indians" impeding "the progress of the Americans."

An Indian (then British).

An American (not Johnny Depp).

Now, we can all understand Columbus calling the Haitians, "Indians."  That was an honest mistake.  Columbus was lost, ignorant, and probably helping many of his panicked, seasick crew flee the inquisition (to get fevers and die at sea).  Columbus can be forgiven for not knowing where India was (and still is today!) because he was a fifteenth century sailor without adequate maps of the world, guided by a vague notion that there was something to all this "round earth" nonsense.  If, however, you are an alleged historian, with alleged expertise in American history, getting paid in advance to write a book about American history in the year 2000, when Mapquest has been freely available for three years and is discussed daily on All Things Considered as "probably the next Microsoft," and you think the people who lived in America before the Europeans came over to take their land are Indians, you need to go back to kindergarten and start over.

A human being greeting another human being.

When Ambrose repeats propagandist accounts verbatim, without adding any critical thought, we end up reading, in the twenty-first century, that a railroad executive at the head of a heavily armed team of experienced manual laborers "encountered Indians" and, without any further provocation, "kept the Indians at bay by occasionally firing at them."  This is not a history book anymore.  It is a spaghetti western.  If you encounter a human being who is native to a place you don't come from, it is traditional among human beings to say hello in their native language, not to try to kill the person by hurling a chunk of metal at him.  That may be how one greets orcs or dragons, but even Tolkien's monsters always shoot first, often with completely uncalled-for bursts of flame.  If they don't, the good guys just sneak around them and get on with their vacation.

Tolkien's dragon, Smaug, greeting a hobbit.

The role of a historian is to analyze primary and secondary sources in the objective light of modern understanding and explain the meaning and the causality of past events, not just to retype old lies and occasionally update them for modern spelling conventions.  Ambrose makes a token argument as to why the railroaders are afraid of the Indians, in which he presents, without any analysis, an Easterner's statement that, "what the chiefs wanted was impossible:  to keep the West as a grazing and hunting ground for buffalo."  This thesis was basically refuted by a little thing called "the dust bowl," which served as America's object lesson in the superiority of millions of years of evolution as an ecological planning method over monocultural cultivation of non-native crops and consequent annihilation of all migratory land fauna, no matter how majestic or fuzzy.  Perhaps, in retrospect, given a sober reading of this secondary source, enlightened by some intervening history, what the Americans wanted was to be treated as human beings by the invading army, and to preserve a biodiverse country that provided more than enough food for themselves and a few hopefully-polite-enough-not-to-shoot-guns-at-them visitors.

Ambrose is not entirely ignorant of history.  He seems to be a big fan of Abraham Lincoln at times, and at one point even mentions that (then President) Lincoln simultaneously preserved the United States of America from the secession of half its states and ended its tradition of legal human trafficking.  However, he is also the first source I have ever read that paints Lincoln as a special-interest lawyer, elected by well-heeled colleagues and always ready to grease the hands that feed him.  An American historian writing entire chapters portraying Lincoln as a typical Republican corporate lackey is a little like if some christian monk sat down and spontaneously typed out a fifth Gospel but just couldn't bring himself to leave out Jesus' previously unremarked summer internship as a loan-shark.

"'and good riddance,' I'm sure he must have thought." -Ambrose's
unusually thoughtful and insightful characterization of
Theodore Judah's reaction to the secession of all the Southern
senators who had blocked the most feasible rail lines could also 
describe Ambrose's own reaction to the great railroad engineer's
tombstone, if he ever took a second to google it, and didn't just
re-type someone else's description:  "His wife erected him a tombstone.
It bears his name and dates."  In fact, Mr. Ambrose, if you're reading
this, I bet you didn't even know that this was Judah's tombstone.
What's that?  You say you did?  Well guess what?  It isn't.

I'm sure there are plenty of other ancient, decrepeit, addlepated American historians who still don't know the difference between Indians and Native Americans (well, maybe just five, and at least three of them teach at Liberty University), but I can't believe I listened to half of a book by the one American Historian who doesn't love Abraham Lincoln.  Traffic was bad, but that doesn't sound like enough of a defense.  Okay, there's some nobility in trying to stay objective about sacred cows (or, in the case of Ambrose's "Indians," bison) and then there are some cultural figures that you simply do not mess with.  And Amrose is not even a Confederate sympathizer, that I can tell.  He's just trying to be punctiliously impartial about the part of history that he understands and cares about, which, to reiterate, is the Civil War.  This overwise impartiality is completely lacking from his commissioned retelling of the story of some fraudulent businessmen building a railroad to California, though, because he doesn't actually know or care anything about any stinking fraudulent businessmen building any stinking railroad out through any stinking wilderness if they weren't dressed in blue and gray and on their way to shoot muskets at each other.  They can all, as far as he's concerned, just make like Theodore Judah, the engineer who first planned their historic route (now I-80, partly):  contract fevers and die.

Conclusion:  If you've read every book you can about trains, and you just need to know a little bit more, or at least hear a bunch of the same facts and lies again, presented by a civil war historian who doesn't like trains, but got a big advance from his publisher after a focus group found that many other people who like reading about the civil war do in fact like trains, listen to this book immediately for only $99!  If you want to understand American history and are attracted by the sight of a name you've seen on the cover of lots of hardbacks at the bookstore, maybe you should check out one of the books he actually enjoyed writing, instead.  I'm confident in stating that they're better, because they couldn't possibly be worse.

Stars:  The one in William Stafford's "A Star In The Hills."  The one at the beginning, that is.  Certainly not the hypothetical one at the end.