Building Of The First Transcontinental Railroad By Nathan HC 1950

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Building Of The First Transcontinental Railroad By Nathan HC 1950
The Building Of The First Transcontinental Railroad By Adele Nathan
Hard Cover
Copyright 1950
Fourth printing
Young Adult Book
180 Pages
"History," the dictionary says, "is a narration of facts and events, arranged chronologically."
This means that history is the story of things that happened in the order of their happening. The best kind of history is either told or written down by people who were there at the time-eye witnesses. Later on it is re-told and re-written and passed on from father to son and from generation to generation.
Many times two or three people sec the same thing, but they tell about it in different ways. That's what makes history so interesting. And that's what makes history something to argue about.
The history that is in this book is mostly from the stories of different people, many of whom were on the spot when the Pacific railroad was built. Some of them were written by "Old Timers"-eye witnesses-and were published in the magazines and records of the Union Pacific and the Southern Pacific Railroad Companies. Some of them were printed in magazines and newspapers of the day. All of those I was allowed to read. Others were told me by people who had heard them from their fathers or their grandfathers. Dan Casement, General Jack's son, gave me a number of good ones. General Dodge was always making speeches and giving interviews to the papers, and Construction Engineer Reed and many other people kept diaries or wrote home about their adventures. I've been lucky enough to see many of these letters and diaries.
But there were so many people involved in the building of the Pacific railroad that there are many, many accounts of it published in books. A lot of these books are in the public library. I think you ought to go and read them. When you do read some of these books you will see that some of the same stories seem different from the way I tell them.
History is not just dates and places. It is a collection of the things that men and women and children think and do and say, and the reports they make and the stories they tell. Everybody who writes about history has his own point of view and that's what makes the study of history so exciting.
Friends of mine interested in railroading have helped me a great deal. Among them are: Mr. Ralph Budd of the Chicago Railroad Authority, Mr. Arthur E. Stoddard, President of the Union Pacific, Mr. Wm. G. Murphy of the Union Pacific, Mr. D. L. Joslyn and Mr. K. C. Ingram of the Southern Pacific, Mr. Alan Bell of Steve Hannagan Associates, Mr. S. L. Vigilante of the New York Public Library, Mr. Daniel Hassel whose father was a railroad surveyor, Mr. Charles Fisher, President of the Railway and Locomotive Historical Society, and Mr. Milton Bernstein, Major George Fielding Eliot and Margaret S. Ernst, who love railroads.
Col. Robert Self Henry, Executive Vice President of the Association of American Railroads, read it all over for me and made many helpful suggestions. He knows all about railroads and writes books about them himself.
My friends, Lillian Gainsburgh, and Ray Rour, Drusilla Darr and Dorothy Lindner, set it all down for me.
And two very young friends, Susan Omansky and Judy Pilpel, read the whole thing before it was really a book and told me exactly what they thought of it and what I ought to change.
Of course these are only a few of the people with whom I talked or who wrote me letters or sent me pictures and magazine articles. Anything like "The Building of the Transcontinental Railroad" is such a big subject that it takes a lot of cooperation before its history can be written.
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