Nothing Like It in the World is the story of the men who built the transcontinental railroad — the investors who risked their businesses and money; the enlightened politicians who understood its importance; the engineers and surveyors who risked, and lost, their lives; and the Irish and Chinese immigrants, the defeated Confederate soldiers, and the other laborers who did the backbreaking and dangerous work on the tracks.

The Union had won the Civil War and slavery had been abolished, but Abraham Lincoln, who was an early and constant champion of railroads, would not live to see the great achievement. In Ambrose's hands, this enterprise, with its huge expenditure of brainpower, muscle, and sweat, comes to life.

The U.S. government pitted two companies — the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific Railroads — against each other in a race for funding, encouraging speed over caution. Locomo-tives, rails, and spikes were shipped from the East through Panama or around South America to the West or lugged across the country to the Plains. This was the last great building project to be done mostly by hand: excavating dirt, cutting through ridges, filling gorges, blasting tunnels through mountains.

At its peak, the workforce — primarily Chinese on the Central Pacific, Irish on the Union Pacific — approached the size of Civil War armies, with as many as fifteen thousand workers on each line. The Union Pacific was led by Thomas "Doc" Durant, Oakes Ames, and Oliver Ames, with Grenville Dodge — America's greatest railroad builder — as chief engineer. The Central Pacific was led by California's "Big Four": Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington, Charles Crocker, and Mark Hopkins. The surveyors, the men who picked the route, were latter-day Lewis and Clark types who led the way through the wilderness, living off buffalo, deer, elk, and antelope.

In building a railroad, there is only one decisive spot — the end of the track. Nothing like this great work had been seen in the world when the last spike, a golden one, was driven in at Promontory Summit, Utah, in 1869, as the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific tracks were joined.

Ambrose writes with power and eloquence about the brave men — the famous and the unheralded, ordinary men doing the extraordinary — who accomplished the spectacular feat that made the continent into a nation.

Introduction

ONE Picking the Route 18301860

TWO Getting to California 18481859

THREE The Birth of the Central Pacific 18601862

FOUR The Birth of the Union Pacific 18621864

FIVE Judah and the Elephant 18621864

SIX Laying Out the Union Pacific Line 18641865

SEVEN The Central Pacific Attacks the Sierra Nevada 1865

EIGHT The Union Pacific Across Nebraska 1866

NINE The Central Pacific Assaults the Sierra 1866

TEN The Union Pacific to the Rocky Mountains 1867

ELEVEN The Central Pacific Penetrates the Summit 1867

TWELVE The Union Pacific Across Wyoming 1868

THIRTEEN Brigham Young and the MormonsMake the Grade 1868

FOURTEEN The Central Pacific Goes Through Nevada 1868

FIFTEEN The Railroads Race into Utah January 1April 10, 1869

SIXTEEN To the Summit April 11May 7, 1869

SEVENTEEN Done May 810, 1869

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Maps

From Chicago to Omaha

Nebraska

Wyoming

Nevada

Utah

California