Many of Dickinson's poems build on images from carriages, the railroads, and even balloons. Reed playfully treats the Underground Railroad as it might have been conducted by interstate bus and airplane. Alger pictures horse cars and ferry boats in New York as used by poor boys. The post-War construction of the transcontinental railroad is presented from the Chinese laborers' perspective by Wong and Kingston, and in great detail from the construction engineer's point of view by Grey. Twain and Warner also trace the construction of the post-War railroads with particular emphasis on the local and national corruption which accompanied land speculation. Brock, in a retrospective, fantasy novel, depicts interstate and urban rail systems, while Twain's stories give other anecdotes of train travel. A character in a novel by James sees the streetcar as a sign of American progress, while Alcott uses English trains, and, especially, Continental carriage traffic as standards to which America might aspire. Ridge also applauds the long-distance railroad. Ballads from the nineteenth century variously extol and deplore the use and construction of canals, railroads, and carriages.
Author: Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
Title: The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
Date: A few before 1886 Written: 1860s-1880s
Systems: Carriage, train, boat, balloon
Context: Contemporary, Massachusetts
Dickinson's facility at producing vibrant images is occasionally used to describe carriages and roads. "My wheel is in the dark! / I cannot see a spoke/ Yet know its dripping feet/ Go round and round" (10) "No Man can compass a Despair - / As round a Goalless Road / No faster than a Mile at once / The Traveller proceed - " (477). Carriage traffic is affected by the weather: "After the Sun comes out / How it alters the World - / Waggons like messengers hurry about / Yesterday is old - / All men meet as if / Each foreclosed a news - / Fresh as a Cargo from Batize / Nature's qualities - " (1148).
A famous riddle-poem on the hummingbird uses the excitement of the carriage as its point of comparison:
A Route of Evanescence
With a revolving Wheel - A Resonance of Emerald - A Rush of Cochineal - And every Blossom on the Bush Adjusts its tumbled Head - The mail from Tunis, probably, An easy Morning's Ride - (1463).
And a nice sleigh poem with (typically for Dickinson) rather cryptic images in the first stanza which are resolved in the second:
Glass was the Street - in tinsel Peril Tree and Traveller stood - Filled was the Air with merry venture Hearty with Boys the Road - Shot the lithe Sleds like shod vibrations Emphasized and gone It is the Past's supreme italic Makes this Present mean - (1498).
Dickinson builds a poem about separation around an ocean-going ship metaphor: "One port - suffices - for a Brig - like mine - / Ours be the tossing - wild through the sea - / Rather than a Mooring - unshared by thee. / Ours be the Cargo - unladen - here - / Rather than the 'spicy isles - ' / And thou - not there - " (368). A description of sailing ship rigging: "And Frigates - in the Upper Floor / Extend Hempen Hands - " (520). And an off-shore wreck, described in terms similar to many newspaper accounts: "Glee - The great storm is over - / Four - have recovered the Land - Forty - gone down together - Into the boiling Sand - / Ring - for the Scant Salvation - Toll - for the bonnie Souls - / Neighbor - and friend - and Bridegroom - Spinning upon the Shoals - " (619).
Dickinson reflects the age's fascination with balloons, emphasized, perhaps, by their experimental use during the Civil War. This poem depicts a public exhibition, ending in a crash which meets with the audience's indifference and discourages the investors.
You've seen Balloons set - Haven't You? So stately they ascend - It is as Swans - discarded You, For Duties Diamond - Their Liquid Feet go softly out Upon a Sea of Blonde - They spurn the Air, as 'twere too mean For Creatures so renowned - Their Ribbons just beyond the eye - They struggle - some for Breath - And yet the Crowd applaud, below - They would not encore - Death - The Gilded Creature strains - and spins - Trips frantic in a Tree - Tears open her imperial Veins - And tumbles in the Sea - The Crowd - retire with an Oath - The Dust in Streets - go down - And Clerks in Counting Rooms
Observe - "'Twas only a Balloon" - (700).
A person (or God) who quietly "asked if I was his" is compared with the balloon: "And then He bore me on / Before this mortal noise / With swiftness, as of Chariots / And distance, as of Wheels. / This World did drop away / As Acres from the feet / Of one that leaneth from Balloon / Upon an Ether street." (1053).
In a later poem, from the 1880s:
As from the earth the light Balloon Asks nothing but release - Ascension that for which it was, Its soaring Residence. The spirit looks upon the Dust That fastened it so long With indignation, As a Bird Defrauded of its song. (1630).
Several stanzas and a couple of complete poems point to the railroad. "But Miles of Sparks - at Evening - / Reveal the Width that burned - / The Territory Argent - that / Never yet - consumed - " (469). The sound of freight trains near the "Brick Shoulders" of a house is captured in "Coals - from a Rolling Load - rattle - how - near - / To this very Square - His foot is passing - " (570). A poem on scheduling, where "cars" is shorthand for the railroad: "I think the longest Hour of all / Is when then Cars have come - / And we are waiting for the Coach - / It seems as though the Time / Indignant - that the Joy was come - / Did block the Gilded Hands - / And would not let the Seconds by - / But slowest instant - ends - " (635). Dickinson's comparisons go both ways, from human-made to nature "A Bee his burnished Carriage / Drove boldly to a Rose" (1338) or the other way, "Like Trains of Cars on Tracks of Plush / I hear the level Bee - " (1224). Waiting for the train and for spring: "I thought the Train would never come - / How slow the whistle sang - / I don't believe a peevish Bird / So whimpered for the Spring - " (1449).
The road bed:
The Brain, within its Groove Runs evenly - and true - But let a Splinter swerve - 'Twere easier to You - To put a Current back - When Floods have slit the Hills - And scooped a Turnpike for Themselves - And trodden out the Mills - (556).
And this famous riddle-poem which centers around the "iron horse" metaphor and makes passing comments on typical issues such as speed, noise, and scheduling:
I like to see it lap the Miles - And lick the Valleys up - And stop to feed itself at Tanks - And then - prodigious step Around a Pile of Mountains - And supercilious peer In Shanties - by the sides of Roads - And then a Quarry pare To fit its Ribs And crawl between Complaining all the while In horrid - hooting stanza - Then chase itself down Hill - And neigh like Boanerges - Then - punctual as a Star - Stop - docile and omnipotent At its own stable door - (585).
In an apparent reference to modern railroad construction, the suspension bridge: "Faith - is the Pierless Bridge … / It bears the Soul as bold / As it were rocked in Steel / With Arms of Steel at either side - " (915).
Edition used: Thomas H. Johnson, ed. Boston: Little, Brown, 1960.
Author: Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
Title: Flight to Canada
Date: 1976
Systems: Airplane, steamboat, train, carriage
Context: 1861-1866, Virginia, Ohio, Canada
Reed's wonderfully anachronistic poem, "Flight to Canada," opens the novel of the same name. The poem's speaker, the fugitive slave Quickskill, uses the term "flight" in two senses. Like many fugitives in the antebellum years, he makes a run for Canada, but travels there by airplane to avoid his pursuers at the bus terminal:
Dear Massa Swille: What it was? I have done my Liza Leap & am safe in the arms of Canada, so Ain't no use your Slave Catchers waitin on me At Trailways I won't be there I flew in non-stop Jumbo jet this A.M. Had Champagne Compliments of the Cap'n Who announced that a Runaway Negro was on the Plane. Passengers came up And shook my hand & within 10 min. I had Signed up for 3 anti-slavery Lectures. Remind me to get an Agent Traveling in style Beats craning your neck after The North Star and hiding in Bushes anytime, Massa Besides, your Negro dogs Of Hays & Allen stock can't Fly....
The poem sets the tone and style for the novel which is a humorous, somewhat blasphemous treatment of anti-slavery activity during the Civil War. The poem combines references to Harriet Beecher Stowe's wildly popular Uncle Tom's Cabin, 1852, ("my Liza Leap") with a version of twentieth-century celebrity (lecture invitations, champagne) in order to expose both abolitionism and contemporary "multi-culturalism" as rackets in their own right.
In a hilarious send-up of Abraham Lincoln (and others), the novel critiques collaboration between the north and the south during the Civil War. Lincoln has come to Virginia to borrow money from Arthur Swille, the wealthiest slave owner in the country, who drinks two-gallons of "slave mothers' milk" each morning. At the novel's end we learn that instead of slave mothers' milk, the obsequious house slave Uncle Robin has been serving Swille a double gallon of Coffee Mate each day: "They serve it on the airplanes. I'm an old hand at poisons, and so I'd venture a guess that if...whoever pushed him hadn't he'd of 'gone on' from the cumulative effects of the Coffee Mate." The book glosses this revelation with a list of ingredients: "Corn-syrup solids, vegetable fat, sodium caseinate, mono- and diglycerides, dipotassium phosphate, sodium silicoaluminate, artificial flavor, tricalcium phosphate, and artificial colors" (Ch. 29). So much for airplane food.
In his interview with Swille, Lincoln quickly drops his corn-pone manner when he sees that it is ineffective. He captures Swille's attention and earns his affection with an impassioned tribute to the railroads. Swille quickly agrees to fill the war chest of the Union as well as the Confederate army. Here's the speech; the author's tone here is one of high parody:
A train whistle is heard.
'Mr. Swille, listen to your train. That great locomotive that will soon be stretching across America, bumping cows, pursued by Indians, linking our Eastern cities with the West Coast. Who built your trains, Mr. Swille? The people did, Mr. Swille. Who made you what you are today, Mr. Swille? A swell titanic titan of ten continents, Mr. Swille. Who worked and sweated and tilled and toiled and travailed so that you could have your oil, your industry, Mr. Swille? Why, we did, Mr. Swille. Who toted and tarried and travestied themselves so that you could have your many homes, your ships and your buildings reaching the azure skies?...Yes, I know I'm a corn-bread and a catfish-eatin curmudgeon known to sup some scuppernong wine once in a while, but I will speak my mind, Mr. Swille. (Ch. 4).
This oration invokes the railroad in part to prove Lincoln's virility. The parody works here precisely because the association of railroads, masculinity, and patriotism is such a strong one in American letters. Here Ishmael Reed points to the exaggerated fervor and sly rhetoric of this tradition: Lincoln includes himself in a "we the people" of which he clearly is not part. The majority of those who will tarry and toil over the transcontinental railroad he envisions will be convicts, poor, Chinese or African American.
In another piece of anachronism, three slaves escape the Swille plantation. One of them, Stray Leechfield, had already shown an early aptitude in cunning. He slowly and methodically stole enough chickens to set up his own chicken farm in a nearby county. The proof of his wealth is, of course, his new 'carriage' which featured "factory climate-control air conditioning, vinyl top, AM/FM stereo radio, full leather interior, power-lock doors, six-way power seat, power windows, white-wall wheels, door-edge guards, bumper impact strips, rear defrost and soft-ray glass" (Ch. 4).
Edition used: New York: Atheneum, 1989.
Author: Horatio Alger (1834-1899)
Title: Ragged Dick
Date: 1867
Systems: Horse car
Context: 1860s, perhaps before the Civil War, New York city
You can piece together key features of the New York horse-car system from Alger's books - costs, routes, and some of the social customs. The Third Avenue and Harlem line runs to the terminus at 103rd street; it costs 6¢ for "way-passengers" who go less than full distance, 7¢ for the whole route; it's rather crowded until 40th Street (Ch. 9). [Alger also tells you about the mechanics of savings banks and other institutions which a young lad might need to know about to survive in New York.] At the start we learn of a Johnny Nolan who hid on top of a freight car from Albany to get to the city, over a thousand miles, he claims.
Omnibuses, drays, and carriages make it difficult to cross Broadway at Astor House. Dick points out that you can sue for damages if you get run over, and points to a widow whose husband had been killed after waiting 6 hours to cross (Ch. 4). A newsboy, Johnny Mullen, was run over by an omnibus and his friends visited him in the hospital. (Dick exaggerates for humorous and ironic effect, especially in the early chapters.) On the way uptown Dick and a friend are unable to sit next to a woman since she spreads her dress to keep the scruffy lads away; she later falsely accuses them of stealing her purse, and the conductor (apparently a general-purpose problem-solver) has her find it in her pocket (Ch. 9).
The Brooklyn ferry takes five minutes and costs 2¢. In a late chapter Dick rescues a young kid who fell off and got a permanent desk job as the reward from the kid's father (Ch. 26).
Edition used: London: Collier-Macmillan, 1962.
Author: Horatio Alger (1834-1899)
Title: Mark, the Match Boy
Date: 1897
Systems: Horse car, ferry
Context: 1860s, perhaps before the Civil War, New York city
This book follows some of the same characters as Ragged Dick and adds more details about New York horse cars and ferries. The car from Astor Place to City Hall Park takes half an hour. Mark, down to his last dime, can sleep on the Fulton ferry for 2¢ since they don't force people to leave. The boat has gentlemen's and ladies' cabins, but men take all the seats in the latter, so the women must stand, while the men also pollute their own space with pipe and cigar smoke (Ch. 8).
Dick and his friends keep getting more and more money (hundreds, not thousands of dollars), so he can afford to hire a hack to take the sickly Mark to his boarding house (Ch. 13). In an excursion to Fort Hamilton, the boys take the Fulton Ferry to Brooklyn, and, since the train could be crowded, they hire a carriage (Ch. 24).
Dick telegraphs Mark's grandfather in Milwaukie [sic], as Mark turns out to be his lost grandson. The grandfather arrives on the next afternoon (Ch. 24).
Edition used: London: Collier-Macmillan, 1962.
Author: Shawn Hsu Wong (b. 1949)
Title: "Each Year Grain"
Date: 1974
Systems: Railroad work
Context: 1850s & 60s, and 1970s, California, Chinese-American perspective
This fiction addresses the Gold Mountain legend that brought Chinese laborers to California mines and railroads in the mid-nineteenth century. Drawn to the Gold Mountain by its promise of wealth and hence social mobility, the narrator's great-grandfather, together with many other hopeful Chinese, finds illegal passage to San Francisco. The large ships carrying illegal immigrants would drop a lifeboat outside the Golden Gate before steaming into the harbor. The lifeboat, filled with Chinese, would come in quietly and unload. If it seemed they were about to be caught bringing in a boat load of illegals, those manning the boat would throw the Chinese overboard. This meant certain death because the Chinese were chained together and therefore unable to swim ashore.
The story shows the Gold Mountain legend to be more than a false promise; degradation in the land they gave their lives to becomes a proud and bitter irony for this great-grandfather and for some of the other Chinese. Many railroad workers and miners insisted that their bones be sent back to China upon their deaths - "at least that much of them would return home away from the land that humiliated them and the life they loathed." But the great-grandfather is different: "It was the work that broke him and the work that he desperately held on to - to make a little place in this country." The narrator tells us, "Since this land was important enough for him to give his life to, he should not leave and that his sons should follow him to this country, and his soul would protect them."
But even the ironic pride in self-sacrifice is eventually drained as great-grandfather loses total faith in the land: "The railroad was finished and the Chinese were chased out of the mines. They were allowed to live but not marry. The law was designed so that the Chinese would gradually die out, leaving no sons or daughters."
Edition used: Hans Ostrom, ed. Lives and Moments: An Introduction to Short Fiction. Chicago: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1991.
Author: Maxine Hong Kingston (b. 1940)
Title: "The Grandfather of the Sierra Nevada Mountains." In China Men.
Date: 1980
Systems: Railroad construction
Context: 1863-69, 1870s-1906; Northern California: Stockton and the Sierra Nevada mountains; Chinese-American perspective
"Grandfather left a railroad for his message: We had to go somewhere difficult. Ride a train. Go somewhere important. In case of danger, the train was to be ready for us."
With these words Kingston claims the railroad as a source of ethnic pride; for the China Men who picked and blasted through granite, who dangled in baskets along sheer cliffs in order to lay bridges across the mountains, the Transcontinental railroad was their claim to legitimacy and their greatest legacy: "'The Greatest Feat in the History of Mankind,' [the white demon officials said.] 'Only Americans could have done it,' they said, which is true...He was an American for having built the railroad." Kingston recreates the perils and exhilaration of labor on the railroad through her grandfather's eyes. She shows that Chinese labor built the infrastructure of the nation:
They built railroads in every part of the country - the Alabama and Chattanooga Railroad, the Houston and Texas Railroad, the Southern Pacific, the railroads in Louisiana and Boston, the Pacific Northwest, and Alaska. After the Civil War, China Men banded the nation North and South, East and West, with crisscrossing steel. They were the binding and building ancestors of this place.
The chapter begins with the granddaughter's estimation of the power of her grandfather's gift. Stockton, California is "a special spot of the earth," the only Pacific coast city to be crossed by three railroads - the Santa Fe, Southern Pacific and Western Pacific. The tracks run just behind her house and prove a rich source for daydreams, games, and encounters with hoboes. To the young girl the trains are all thunder and sparks as they vault "godlike" "across the sky." Later, when the railroad is dismantled and the family carries off the abandoned materials, Kingston notes, "I am glad to know exactly the weight of the ties and the size of the nails."
Her grandfather, Ah Goong, was hired on sight - "chinamen had a natural talent for explosions." China Men first used gunpowder to blast tunnels and to bore pits into the sides of mountains. They were the first to test dynamite, which "added more accidents and ways of dying," but accomplished in three years what would otherwise have taken fifty. Kingston details the size and feel of the fragile baskets that dangled men above ravines, the spectacle of a man falling a long, long while to the bottom, the bitter living conditions in all seasons, the China Men's semi-successful nine day strike to maintain their $30 dollar per month wage, the sight of a single prostitute, leashed and led down the line for the use of countless men. "There is no record of how many died building the railroad," Kingston remarks.
Through it all Kingston is fascinated by her grandfather's strange optimism, his pride in his body and in the efficiency of the Chinese teams, his pride in America. She concludes with an account of the Driving Out at the close of the century; the labor completed and the laborers useless, the Chinese are forced out of towns, massacred, deported.
Edition used: New York: Alfred Knopf, 1980.
Author: Zane Grey (1872-1939)
Title: The U. P. Trail
Date: 1918
Systems: Railroad, especially construction
Context: 1866-1869, chiefly Wyoming
This "Western" is partly a celebration of the building of the eastern end of the Union Pacific after the Civil War, with an undercurrent of complaint about the corruption and greed of the railroad's managers, and a framing motif concerning the destruction of the West. The central character, Neale Warren, is a skilled and honest engineer, so the role of designing the roadbed and laying track is seen as being central to the enterprise.
The opening chapters lyrically describe the old St. Vrain and Laramie wagon trail which was the path taken by the "U. P. R."; lurking by the trail are the Sioux who will vex the railroad as it is being surveyed and built. Former Union General Lodge, leader of the construction effort, proclaims, "No Indians - nothing can stop us" (Ch. 4). Typically, later, "the Indians could not be everywhere. Neale and King [his sidekick from Texas] took chances, as had all these travelers" who follow the old trail (Ch. 10).
The novel gives extensive detail on how the railroad was built, from Neale's initial surveying, to the grading gangs, laying of gravel, then ties and tracks, and finally driving spikes. "The drivers - the spikers - the men who nailed the rails - who riveted the last links - these brawny, half-naked wielders of the sledges, bronzed as Indians, seemed to embody both the romance and the achievement." "[T]he thousands of plodding, swearing, fighting, blaspheming, joking laborers on the field of action… here with the ties and the rails and the road-bed was the heart of that epical turmoil" (Ch. 33). Much of this is dramatized as Neale works directly on the line after his girl friend is taken East by her father (Ch. 33 and 35). The process ends at Promontory Point, where, just as the Golden Spike is driven, Allie Lee turns up after paying off her father's debts with the gold her mother companions buried just before they were killed by the Indians, etc., etc. (This is a Western, after all.)
Grey points out the role of the Irish, "In labor or fighting this Irishman [Casey] always gravitated to the fore" (Ch. 29). At Promontory Point, "Here mingled the Irish and negro laborers from the east with the Chinese and Mexican from the west" (Ch. 35), or, less charitably and more frequently, the "paddies" and the "coolies." Neale had earlier predicted the scene:
"Take thousands of soldiers - the riffraff of the war - and thousands of laborers of all classes, niggers, greasers, pigtailed chinks, and Irish. Take thousands of men who want to earn an honest dollar in trade, following the line. And thousands who want dollars, but not honestly. All the gamblers, outlaws, robbers, murderers, criminals, adventurers in the States, and perhaps many from abroad, will be on the trail. Think, man, of the money - the gold! Millions spilled out in these wild! ... And last and worst - the bad women!" (Ch. 9; Grey's suspension dots)
The process is plagued with ongoing corruption, chiefly through operations where a stretch of track is built then torn up and rebuilt since the owners are being paid by the government by the mile. It starts with the Credit Mobilier scandal which is analyzed in some detail (Ch. 10). Contractors pay kickbacks for ties, get paid double for workers' wages; commissioners gain from stock sales and also own the construction companies (Ch. 10). Even on the eve of Promontory Point, the word spread "that the grading gangs from east and west had passed each other in plain sight, working on, grading on for a hundred miles farther than necessary" (Ch. 33). One of the on-site managers sets out the case: "'I know financiers, commissioners, Congressmen, and Senators - and I told you before the directors are all in on this U.P.R. pickings'" (Ch. 23). Neale visits Washington where he meets Senators, Congressmen, and other government officials who are well informed about the U.P.R. This discussion covered "every phase of the work, from the Credit Mobilier to the Chinese coolies that were advancing from the west to meet the Paddies of his own division. How strange to realize that the great railroad had its nucleus, its impetus, and its completion in such a center as this!… These Easterners talked of money, of gold, as a grade foreman might have talked of gravel." He gets a glimpse into "labyrinthine plot built around the stock, the finance, the gold that was constructing the road" (Ch. 24).
The tale is told with some regret. Slingerland, the old trapper, whose mountain lodge is Neale's and Allie's refuge, sees "the result of civilization marching westward": "Before that survey the Indians had been peaceful and no dangerous men rode the trails. What right had the Government to steal land from the Indians, to break treaties, to run a steam track across the plains and mountains?" (Ch. 11). At the end of the book, "Every ringing sledge-hammer blow had sung out the death-knell of the trapper's calling. This railroad spelled the end of the wilderness." Buffalo and other wild animals are exterminated; "Progress was great, but nature undespoiled was greater." All Slingerland can see is "a gutted West" (Ch. 36). The final chapter shows a Sioux chief overlooking a train, "This beast that puffed smoke and spat fire and shrieked like a devil of an alien tribe… Those white men were many as the needles of the pines. They fought and died, but always others came." The train is "a symbol of the destiny of the Indian - vanishing - vanishing - vanishing - " (Ch. 37).
Edition used: New York: McKinlay, Stone & Mackenzie.
Authors: Samuel Langhorn Clemens [Mark Twain] (1835-1910) and Charles Dudley Warner (1829-1900)
Title: The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today
Date: 1873-1874
Systems: Railroad, steamboat, riverfront construction
Context: Pre Civil War, late 1860s to early 1870s; Middlewest and east coast
This novel deals with the corruptions of post Civil War land speculation in the west and middlewest, with special emphasis in the first half on railroad and riverway-improvement schemes. Efforts to attract the railroads to a small, run-down town in Missouri are a central action. As Twain and Warner trace the sequence of events, the opening move involves land surveyors, who in the case of Philip Sterling and Henry Brierly are totally untrained - "'I don't know an engine from a coal cart.'" "'Field engineer, civil engineer. You can begin by carrying a rod, and putting down the figures'" (Ch. 12). Soon, however, "Nobody dressed more like an engineer than Mr. Henry Brierly," and he quickly figures out that "the chief object of a preliminary survey was to get up an excitement about the road, to interest every town in that part of the state in it, under the belief that the road would run though it." Jeff Thompson is "the most popular engineer" for this work - he does lousy surveying, but generates lots of interest (Ch. 17). An earlier project, the "Salt Like Pacific Extension," further out west used the promise of $40,000 per mile construction costs to fool hundreds of farmers into selling their land. "Slap down the rails and bring the land into the market" is the working guideline (Ch. 13). Philip becomes disenchanted with Salt Lick: "The railroad contractors held out large but rather indefinite promises" (Ch. 23).
When the surveyors get to Stone's Landing, they announce that "this is the railroad, all but the rails and the iron-horse." The leading citizen, Colonel Sellers, makes a speech of welcome where he outlines his plan - tear the town's few buildings, rename it "Napoleon," put up a Court House and a University, widen and straighten the river, dredge the harbor, raise a levee, and, of course, put in the train station. The Colonel happens to own the square mile where all of this will take place, but, as part of a series of kickbacks, he sells a partial share Jeff and offers shares to the other surveyors. They decide to petition Congress with their plan to improve Columbus River navigation (Ch. 17). Senator Abner Dilworthy visits the site, and advises the entrepreneurs to seek $200,000 to $300,000 rather than $1 million from Congress; he also asks for his kickback (Ch. 20). A bill for $200,000 eventually passes, and Harry goes to Stone's landing to supervise preliminary work on straightening the Columbus River, but the money to pay for the labor never arrives; the workers revolt and the project is, in effect, abandoned (Ch. 25). Despite the problem, Colonel Sellers lays out the railway route with silverware, shears, and china on the dining room table and speaks piously about how farm produce will be delivered to St. Louis: "…and there's your turnip country all around Doodleville - bless my life, what fortunes are going to be made…." (Ch. 27). When Harry gets to the Columbus River Slackwater Navigation Company headquarters in New York city, he finds out that nearly all of the money was used up in bribes to Congress and advertisements about the scheme (Ch. 28).
Aside from the various frauds which dominate the story, the main plot centers on Laura Van Brunt whose parents are lost in a steamboat accident. At a time before the War, we see the Hawkins family which has fairly large landholding in the "Knobs" district of eastern Tennessee. "Squire" Hawkins looks forward to the day when steamboats will come up the little Turkey river, and the "bigger wonder - the railroad," and coaches "that fly over the ground twenty miles an hour." As with the later events in the book, places isolated from transportation have little value (Ch. 1). After a scene where ignorant slaves treat the steamboat. "quivering athwart the dusky water," as the arrival of the Lord: "'Well how dey's some folks says dey ain't no 'ficiency in prah,'" they take the Boreas to St. Louis to find another way to get rich (Ch. 3). The Boreas' captain spots the Amaranth and a race begins. With details about soundings to seek water too shallow for the other boat, and constant concern about the boiler pressure, the two are eventually "locked together tight and fast in the middle of the big river." "And then there was a booming roar, a thundering crash, and the riddled Amaranth dropped loose from her hold and drifted helplessly away!" After the explosion and ensuing fire, the Boreas picks up the survivors, including Laura; the badly burned are treated in the main saloon. Eventually 22 bodies are found, 39 are wounded, and 96 are missing. The inquest does not cite the irresponsibility of the boat race or overtaxing the equipment - it is "the inevitable American verdict … NOBODY TO BLAME" (Ch. 4).
In a curious episode, Philip is in a "drawing room car" on a train to "Ilium" Pennsylvania. The conductor asks a lady to leave her seat and forces her from the car. She stumbles and falls in the passageway between the cars and "would inevitably have gone down under the wheels" if Philip hadn't rescued her. He confronts the conductor who calls brakemen and they throw Philip and his carpet-bag off the train when it slows down. The other passengers do not protest, and the newspaper story from the next day takes the railway's side. Philip concludes that he can't sue because "a personal fight against a railway corporation was about the most hopeless in the world." A stranger at the station agrees; the railroad "'owns all these people along here, and the judges on the bench too'" (Ch. 29). Other train scenes are more ordinary, as in the account of Philip's ride from Washington to New York with a delay at Havre de Grace, a hot box near Baltimore, "Jersey, everlasting Jersey, stupid irritating Jersey," and on to "Newark, three or four Newarks apparently; then marshes, then long rock cuttings devoted to the advertisements of patent medicines and ready-made clothing," and finally the ferry-boat to New York (Ch. 46). Much later, as the plots converge, Philip is on the night train to Philadelphia: "At any other time the swing of the cars would have lulled him to sleep, and the rattle and clank of wheels and rails, the roar of the whirling iron, would have only been cheerful reminders of swift and safe travel" (Ch. 63).
Edition used: Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1972.
Author: Darryl Brock
Title: If I Never Get Back: A Novel
Date: 1990
Systems: Train, carriage
Context: 1869; Cincinnati and East coast and San Francisco; 1980s, San Francisco
Self-consciously based on "historical rummagings" into the Cincinnati Red Stockings baseball team in 1869, Brock promises that "many events - even minor ones - occurred as I have shown them" ("Acknowledgments"). The story begins when the narrator is on the Amtrak from Cleveland, having just buried his father - an evening of emotional trauma and drink; he wakes up or time-travels to a nineteenth-century train and hooks up with the Red Stockings to join their eastern swing and return to Cincinnati. His (real) Grandpa's interest in both baseball and in Mark Twain who also plays a role, especially after Sam's mother had been killed in a car crash and his father deserted the family with the insurance settlement.
The historical reconstruction is rather detailed, so we read about the kinds of carriages, carts, and omnibuses the team uses during its tours, trains with their sleeping and dining cars, ferries across various rivers, and so on. Along the way we get episodes which were surely typical in the nineteenth century, but which are almost never mentioned outside of the daily newspapers - a crash between a brewer's wagon and butcher's cart (in Syracuse) (Ch. 4), one carriage with Sam in hot pursuit of another with the bad guys (Ch. 19), and brothels and gambling houses at the interchange between the Union and Central Pacific at Promontory Utah (Ch. 25). On a hot day in Cincinnati, "Dung in the streets flaked into particles and was swept up by sultry air currents off the rive to mix with soot and form a toxic, eye-stinging dust… Horses collapsed on the cobblestones, unable to pull streetcars or buses up the steep hills even in double or triple teams" (Ch. 15).
For example: The narrator, Sam Fowler, happens to meet Mark Twain on a train near New York. Of course, Sam knows (and tells us he knows) how things turned out; nevertheless, he and Twain speculate about the possibility of flying machines - Twain is seen thinking about transcontinental service. They get off at Jersey City and ferry across the Hudson on a small side-wheeler where baggage wagons take the luggage to the hotel. The new Ninth Avenue Elevated is pulled by cable, since steam trains are not allowed south of 48th Street because they cause too much noise and they pose a possible fire hazard (Twain explains). The paved sidewalks are covered by awnings; lots of wooden bicycles are on the streets, along with public minicoaches and swifter carriages and horsecarts; the traffic is imperfectly controlled by cops. A new railway depot is being constructed in midtown (Ch. 7). Sam is temporarily separated from the team, but when it returns we learn that the anti-steam ordinance requires that trains be pulled by horses to the New Haven depot near Madison Square (Ch. 8).
Edition used: New York: Crown Publishers.
Author: Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorn Clemens] (1835-1910)
Title: The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain
Date: 1865-1916
Systems: Railroad
Context: Contemporary, Middle west
"Cannibalism in the Cars" (1868) is set in December, 1853 on a train from St. Louis to Chicago. The train with twenty-five passengers, "no ladies and no children," gets stuck in a massive blizzard fifty miles from any house. Futile efforts of the passengers to dig the train out fail and the driving-wheel shaft breaks. After a week in the snowdrifts the passengers get hungry. Twain tracks this line out to its bizarre conclusion - the story is told by a man who knows the ins and outs of Washington, and the passengers engage in a formal, Robert's-Rules debate on who gets elected for breakfast. "I shall always remember Walker… [Morgan] was one of the finest man I ever sat down to… he was a perfect gentleman, and singularly juicy." A high-tech take on the Donner disaster.
"The Invalid's Story" (1882) takes place in a baggage car where the narrator was, he thought, accompanying a friend's coffin from Cleveland to his home in Wisconsin. Owing to a mistake in the baggage tags, the corpse got shipped to a rifle company in Peoria, and he and the expressman work through a grotesque evening sparked by a rotting Limburger cheese which they are persuaded is the corpse. It turns out that the expressman is used to transporting corpses: "I never did see one of 'em warm up to his work so, and take such a dumnation interest in it… as long as I've ben on the road; and I've carried a many a one of 'em, as I was telling you." The railroad system, coupled with family mobility must have created a new attitude toward family burial.
"Playing Courier" (1891) traces a comic series of errors by an American who is guiding a tour group from Aix-les-Bains to Geneva. The complications include trying to buy tickets (he gets two-year-old lottery tickets by mistake), sending trunks from the French hotel to Zurich or Jericho, having three (horse-drawn) cabs with their meters running when he forgets his errands, and so on. Twain comments on the different customs in Europe: you can only buy through tickets in London and Paris; in Switzerland nothing goes free except hand luggage; the "lightning expresses are pretty fastidious about getting away some time during the advertised day." Twain clearly assumes that the logistics of upper-class rail travel are known well enough to entertain his audience.
A story from Following the Equator (1897) tells of a Presbyterian Sunday school teacher who goes courting in his buggy, decides to take off his clothes to go swimming, and, after having to chase the walk-away horse, winds up clad only in his lap-robe. His intended, her mother, and two women friends confront him, and the final scene is his intended reaching for the robe. "That was the end of the tale. The passenger who told it said that when he read the story twenty-five years ago in a train, he was interrupted at that point - the train jumped off a bridge." If you've got access to wheels in the 1870s, you hire a buggy from the livery stable.
"Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" (1907) mentions a balloon ride.
Edition used: New York: Bantam Classic, 1964.
Author: Henry James (1843-1916)
Title: The American
Date: 1876 Written: 1875-6
Systems: Street car, Railroad
Context: 1868, Travel in Europe
Christopher Newman had come most recently from San Francisco, the western edge of the New World, to bring progressive ideas about life and civilization to the Old World. Early on he sees the presence of modern transportation, the street-car, in Brussels as "the reappearance of this familiar symbol of American civilisation." He carries his personal attitude toward modern travel with him as well: "He had always hated to hurry to catch railroad trains, and yet he always caught them" (Ch. 5). Throughout the novel, Newman's efforts at a kind of reverse colonization run into the effective resistance of European institutions. Europe just takes what it wants, as it symbolically had done with the streetcar.
Edition used: New York: Norton Critical Edition, 1978.
Author: Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888)
Title: Little Women
Date: 1868-69
Systems: Carriages, train
Context: Contemporary, Boston area, London, Nice
Amy Marsh's travels to England and Europe become the occasion for her to describe various sorts of foreign behavior and customs for an American audience in a novel which became a famous and influential. In one of her letters she remarks with enthusiasm on riding a train in England where "we were whisking along at the rate of sixty miles an hour." She also describes ordering a Hansom cab to tour London, and notes that "Every one rides - old men, stout ladies, little children, and the young folks do a deal of flirting here." Presumably both the speed and the extent of carriage use, with the vague hint about sexual opportunity are all different from what one found in Boston (Ch. 31). A later portrait of the streets of Nice emphasizes the cosmopolitan nature of that city as well, again, as the carriages: "Many nations are represented … [including] free-and-easy Americans, - all drive, sit, or saunter here.… The equipages are as varied as the company, and attract as much attention, especially the low basket barouches in which ladies drive themselves, with a pair of dashing ponies, gay nets to keep their voluminous flounces from overflowing the diminutive vehicles, and little grooms on the perch behind." When she meets her old American friend, Theodore Laurence, "Amy who preferred to drive; for her parasol-whip and blue reigns, over the white ponies' backs, afforded her infinite satisfaction" (Ch. 37). Even at the end of the century, it is rare to see women driving.
The main scenes are at the Marches' home near Boston. They are able to hail an omnibus to go to Boston (e.g., Ch. 14), and, for special events such as taking six to eight people to an artistic fête in the countryside, they hire a carriage (Ch. 26). In contrast, their richer neighbors the Laurences have a "cherry-bounce.' (Hannah's [a servant's] pronunciation of char-a-banc.)" - a carriage with benches. In a gently humorous scene, the German teacher Mr. Bhaer turns down the chance to flag down the passing "omniboos" on a muddy road, when he proposes to Jo Marsh, the central character, a scene which symbolizes how the world passes them by.
Taking the overnight train to Washington is not a major event. When a telegram comes about Mr. Marsh's illness, Mrs. Marsh travels the next morning. Similarly, when Beth is ill, the family telegraphs to Washington, and the only concern is that the snow might delay her arrival (Ch. 15 and 18). Incidentally, when Amy travels to Europe as Aunt Carrol's companion, it is on a steamer, but the travel is presented as being routine.
Edition used: New York: Viking Penguin, 1989.
Author: John Rollin Ridge (1827-1867)
Title: "The Atlantic Cable"
Date: 1868
Systems: Train, horse car
Context: Contemporary
This short poem about mid-century progress covers the major events such as the transcontinental railroad - "And man is nearer to his brother brought." Ridge goes past a series of systems, the horse car ("beasts were tamed to drag the rolling car"), "winged ships" which "did skim the bosom of the bounding sea," steamships ("came next to wake the world from sleep"), and finally the train seen in its post-war perspective. "The thund'rous chariot pause in mid career. / Its crimsoned wheels no more through blood to steer… A throbbing heartstring of Humanity!" Celebratory poems like this must have been cranked out by the hundreds in American newspapers.
Edition used: Paul Lauter, et al., eds. The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Vol. 1. Lexington, MA, D. C. Heath, 1990.
Author: Various
Title: American Ballads: Naughty, Ribald, and Classic
Date: Middle to late nineteenth century
Systems: Canal, steamboat, train, carriage, streetcar
Context: Chiefly last half of the nineteenth century
Ballads from the second half of the nineteenth century give snapshots of the systems' construction, operations, as well as their periodic disasters. Along the way we find heroes, many criminals (petty and felonious), and sexual encounters of various sorts.
Canals:
"The Erie Canal," rhymes with the mule's name, "Sal." The towing run is fifteen miles; the cargo is lumber, coal, and hay; the chorus talks of "Low bridge, eve'rybody down." The second stanza is about getting to a lock at 6 o'clock and a return to Buffalo.
"Black Rock Pork," apparently a tough, unpalatable variant, is brought on board a Buffalo to New York canal boat. After three days the boat strikes a "rock of Lackawanna coal" (another black rock), gets a hole which has to be repaired with the driver's "crumbly undershirt." The cook, "six feet in her socks; / She had a bosom like a box-car, / And her breath would open the locks." In the final stanza, for no apparent reason, "the cooks is in the poor-house, / And the crew is all in jail."
"A Song of Panama" uses the "'Chuff! chuff! chuff!'" of the heavy equipment to glorify the great canal of the twentieth century: "We're a liftin' half creation, an' we're changin' it around." (Alfred Damon Runyon, 1880-1946.)
Steamboats:
"Jim Bludso" is the engineer on a Mississippi steamboat with wives in Natchez and Pike (County) and no real home. His "religion" is "To treat his engines well; Never be passed on the river" and not lose a race to The Prairie Bell. In a race a fire "burst out" and Jim holds the boat's "nozzle agin the bank / Till the last galoot's ashore." Jim dies, doing his duty. (John Hay, 1838-1905, Pike County Ballads, 1871.)
In "Natchez Nan and her Gambling Man," the honest gambler is Derringer Dan; Nan is the captain's daughter. At Belle Bayou the boat takes on cotton and a dishonest gambler, Handsome Hank. Hank shoots Dan dead; Nan "Hopped into the Mississipp" in despair. Aside from the riverboat gambler stereotypes, this portrays a devoted woman. (C. H. Wheeler.)
"John Maynard" (1862) is an account of the Lake Erie steamer, Ocean Queen, which catches fire with 300 aboard. Maynard, the captain, calmly heads the boat for shore; the flames get to the wheelhouse, but the captain holds course and all but the brave captain are saved. "God rest him! Never hero had / A nobler funeral pyre!" One might expect that nearly every major boat disaster led to a ballad like this one, published regionally or nationally. Train, plane, and automobile rarely inspire such reactions, perhaps, in part, because they do not have names. (Horatio Alger, Jr., 1834-1899)
Trains:
Railroad construction, in general, is the topic of "I've Been Workin' on the Railroad" - "All the livelong day"; the whistle blows early. "Just to pass the time away" ironically makes railroad work sound relaxing. This song was revised from an earlier one, "I've been working on the levee."
"What the Engines Said" celebrates the opening of the Union Pacific in 1869. The engines have "half a world behind each back," and they talk about their origins. The Western engine had struggled over the Sierras; the Eastern one about the Atlantic ocean and about "nursing in my iron breast / All his vivifying heat." In reply, the Western engine points to its East, "All the Orient, all Cathay." Finally, it is remarkable that the two engines "have met without collision." This is a popular version of the theme expressed in Whitman's "Passage to India." (Bret Harte, 1836-1902.)
"Casey Jones" (1900) was "a brave engineer" who rode to fame on "a heavy eight-wheeler." They leave the South Memphis yards "on the fly" but run into track washed out by heavy rain and have a hard time catching up to their schedule. They are on the same track as a passenger train; the fireman jumps, but Casey stays and takes "his farewell journey to the Promised Land." As he nears death, he really wishes he were on the Southern Pacific or the Santa Fe, rather than "the old I.C.," the Illinois Central. (The accident occurred on April 30, 1900.)
"The Hell-Bound Train" depicts a dream of a Texas cowboy who "Had drunk so much he could hold no more." "The engine with human blood was damp, / And the headlight was a brimstone lamp; / An imp for fuel was shoveling bones, / And the furnace roared with a thousand groans." The devil, the conductor, says "So you've paid full fare and I'll carry you through." The cowboy wakes, prays, and is saved.
"The Boston Burglar" is convicted and put "on the passenger one cold, cold winter's day. / And every depot that I passed I heard the people say, / 'That man's the Boston Burglar, for prison he is bound, / All for his evil doings he's off to Charlestown.'"
"Sam Bass and How His Career Was Short" (1879) explains how Sam, from Indiana, with some friends from Texas "robbed the U. P. train" and three others ("all the passengers, mail, and express cars too"). All four robbers are shot or arrested. More notorious is "The Death of Jesse James" which begins with robbing the Glendale train on a Wednesday; he's shot in the back on a Saturday (April 3, 1882).
"In the Baggage Coach Ahead" features a young man with a babe in his arms; the child's cries annoy the others: "'We have paid for our berths and want rest.'" The babe's mother is dead in the baggage coach ahead. The men console him and the women help with the child, "And soon was the little one sleeping in peace, / With no thought of sorrow or pain." The train, as a somewhat public space, can bring people together. (Gussie Davis.)
"The Charming Young Widow I Met on the Train": The narrator, on his way to his uncle's funeral and large legacy, can't find a first class seat so rides second class and meets the lovely widow and her young child. She asks what time it is, since he has a watch; she sobs when he asks the child's age. At a station near Boston she sees her husband's brother, asks the narrator to hold the child, gets off, and does not re-board the train. He finds his watch, purse, ticket, gold pencil case missing, and discovers that the child was a dummy. "And now I wish to counsel young men from the country… Beware of young widows you meet on the railway." You just can't tell.
Another traveller, "The Dying Hobo" expresses the man's final hope to go to a place "Where cops don't hound a hobo, or pinch a man on sight… where brakies ain't so mean." He hears the whistle (of death) and dies, and "His pardner swiped his shirt and coat and hopped the eastbound train," thus showing the indifference of the hobo world. (Bob Hughes.)
Carriage
"The Dark Girl Dressed in Blue" is a story like that of the widow on the train, set on a "Broadway stage" going to Central Park. The girl seeks change from the narrator since she has only a $10 bill. He makes change for her; they walk around for a couple of hours and stop at a bar. He uses the ten to pay for drinks; she leaves. The money is counterfeit. The lesson: "Be careful what you do, / When you make the acquaintance of ladies strange, / Especially a dark girl dressed in blue."
"The Deacon's Masterpiece, or the Wonderful 'One-Hoss Shay'" (1858) describes a carriage, built in 1755 and still working in 1855. The deal is that chaises break down but don't wear out, so the deacon picks his materials carefully; when the carriage fails it just turns into the pile of raw materials. The song points to the anniversary of Jonathan Edwards's Freedom of the Will, and is Holmes' allegorical commentary on the continuing influence of Puritan thought on New England. (Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1809-1894)
Street car
"Punch, Brother, Punch" (1874) is a parody of a sign in the horse cars. Aside from rhyming "fare" with "passinjare," we get lines like "A buff trip-slip for a 6-cent fare / A pink trip-slip for a 3-cent fare," so he must "punch with care." (Isaac H. Bromley.)
"Gossip in a Street Car" by Con Carbon, the poet laureate of the Pennsylvania coal country. The car breaks down and, "while the men were fixing it," women talk about family and town news until the conductor says they are on their way. It's hard to know whether the stalled car is the occasion for the talk or for the narrator's listening to it.
Edition used: Charles O'Brien Kennedy, ed. New York: Fawcett (Gold Seal), 1952.
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