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Riding the Transcontinental
Rails:
Overland Travel on the Pacific Railroad 1865-1881
Compiled and Edited by Bruce C. Cooper
The unmistakable new “aura of adventure” created by the opening of the first
Transcontinental Railroad in May, 1869, soon fostered an almost insatiable
public appetite for information about Pacific railroad travel in much the same
way that man’s first footsteps on the moon would do for the interest in space
travel a century later in 1969. And what America’s Nineteenth century “armchair
adventurers” most often sought out and devoured with the greatest of passion
were the colorful “first person” accounts of transcontinental railroad travel,
authored by so many of the era’s most popular writers, which soon began to
appear in the pages of newspapers, monthly literary magazines, and travel books
of the day.
Included within the pages of “Riding the Transcontinental Rails: Overland
Travel on the Pacific Railroad 1865-1881” are of some of the best of these
contemporary accounts of overland rail travel in the West. These gems of travel
literature have been culled from the works of such acclaimed writers as the
noted adventurer and New York Tribune correspondent Albert D. Richardson, the
widely traveled Springfield (MA) Republican owner and Editor Samuel Bowles,
Scottish novelist, poet, and essayist Robert Louis Stevenson, former New York
Evening Post Managing Editor and world traveler Charles Nordhoff, onetime
Chicago Evening Journal military correspondent Benjamin F. Taylor, American
novelist Helen Hunt Jackson, and her close friend and frequent traveling
companion Sarah Chauncey Woolsey, herself a popular author of children’s novels.
These accounts first appeared between 1865 and 1881 in these authors’ own books
as well as in the pages of such widely read periodicals as Harper’s New Monthly
Magazine, Scribner’s Magazine, The Overland Monthly, the New York
Times, and the
New York Tribune.
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