Newspaper Article

SOMETIMES, THE REAL STORY IS HOW YOU GET THERE FROM HERE

Powers, Katherine A

2000

Overview

[Bernard DeVoto]'s project is to show how the geography of the North American continent supported the concept of empire that eventually brought the United States and her specific borders into being. But what interests me far more than this notion is the book's narrative detail, the wonderful prose, and vivid imagery in which all is conveyed. Here are portraits of Indians, conquerors, explorers, and surveyors; wry descriptions of wrong-footed schemes and of a desire for riches so great that it created geography a priori. Of the 16th- century Spanish, DeVoto writes with characteristic brio: \"Romantic, histrionic, cruel, and trance-bound, they marched in rusty medieval armor toward the nonexistent.\" Later he traces the years of frenzied trapping and trade and trailblazing, and of continuing deluded presumption, of fantasies acted upon that would be funny were their results not so tragic. In conclusion, DeVoto lauds the expedition of Lewis and Clark, an achievement whose importance \"went rippling out through the history of the West and of the United States.\" Both [John Noble Wilford]'s and DeVoto's books have made me much more alert to topography than ever I was. Thus, I got the most intense pleasure out of Stephen Ambrose's \"Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863-1869.\" \"Next to winning the Civil War and abolishing slavery,\" he writes, \"building the first transcontinental railroad, from Omaha, Nebraska, to Sacramento, California, was the greatest achievement of the American people in the nineteenth century.\" Throughout the book Ambrose strikes this triumphal note, which I began to find rather wearing. Still, it was a small irritation to put up with in order to revel in the astonishing dimension of the transcontinental project, an adventure that turned into a race with the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific rushing toward each other from east and west. Without power tools and the internal combustion engine, the railroads were built spanning rivers and crossing three mountain ranges. The terrain, the political battle over the course of the roads, the character of those who surveyed the country and charted the course of the roadbeds, the ingenuity and dedication of the engineers, the itinerant culture of the men who hewed out the wilderness and laid the rails, are all compellingly portrayed.

• Publisher: Boston Globe Media Partners, LLC
• Subject: Books-titles / Cartography / Course of Empire, The / DeVoto, Bernard / History / Nonfiction