Lovewell History

I picked up a copy of Stephen E. Ambrose’s Nothing Like It In the World several years ago when I was curious about the role the Union Pacific Railroad played in the settlement of Kansas and Nebraska.  The book is not only a worthwhile read but hard to put down, because the author makes the possibility of success seem so remote.

The building of the first transcontinental railroad would have been staggeringly ambitious at any time.  Getting the project underway while the American Civl War was still being waged with no end in sight, sounds bonkers even today when we know that they somehow managed to pull it off.

However, according to Ambrose, far from being an impediment, the Civil War provided a fertile training ground that made the railroad somewhat more feasible.  A familiarity with command structure had been drilled into a generation of young leaders.  Disciplined by four years of continual warfare, they were forced to sharpen their problem-solving skills, taught to think on their feet and respond to crisis by instinct.  

The proposed road was to be built between California and the Missouri River, with the Central Pacific making tracks eastward from Sacramento and the Union Pacific heading west out of Omaha.  Funding was provided by government bonds, parceled out as work progressed, with bonuses paid as goals were met.  Speedy work was rewarded, no matter how slipshod it may have been.  The emphasis was on getting it done.  Crews could always double back and correct hazardously shoddy workmanship later on.  

A detailed breakdown of the financial skullduggery that went into the endeavor could surely fill a volume unto itself.  To take the best-known example: While the Union Pacific performed the administrative and clerical chores for their half of the road, they relied on a separate corporation named Crédit Mobilier to handle the actual construction, at a premium price.  Of course everyone was entitled to make a profit, and both corporations helped themselves to a tidy one.

The problem lay in the fact that the boards of directors for the Union Pacific and Crédit Mobilier were, by and large, the very same men, who were now being compensated twice over for those inflated costs on every section of track being hammered into place.  And while certain guardrails had been imposed on government-backed Union Pacific Stock, Crédit Mobilier certificates could be spread around liberally.  They made the perfect bribe, since their value increased so as long as the company continued to thrive.

Even the name Crédit Mobilier seemed to carry a whiff of duplicity.  It happened to be the name of an unaffiliated French financial institution which funded railroads and other public works projects on a vast scale.  The cachet of a well-known name seemed irresistible.  A Pennsylvania company which was attempting to build a railroad west of Kansas City, reorganized in 1863 as the Union Pacific Railroad, Eastern Division, as if to imply a familial bond with a well-heeled cousin.  An Act of Congress forced the name to be changed to Kansas Pacific Railroad.

While Stephen Ambrose gives ample coverage to various fraudulent schemes, as well as the general outcry that arose when investigators began putting two and two together, he takes a surprisingly lenient view towards the men who engineered the shady business.  After all, he argues, there was no guarantee that the grand project to unite east and west wouldn’t sputter to a halt long before completion.  Besides, none of the participants would make that large a fortune on the deal.

Moreover, the major incentive dangled in front of railroad executives was the vast acreage put at their disposal along either side of the tracks, much of which, even more than a century afterward, remained essentially worthless.

In Ambrose’s view, I think, some degree of corruption was not only to be expected, but was somehow necessary.  It was the special sauce needed to guarantee the accomplishment of a supremely Herculean labor.  Anyway, that was my takeaway from the book even before I began to hear muffled rumblings about the writer’s own occasionally cagey habits.

At the time I knew little about Stephen E. Ambrose except that he had written Undaunted Courage, the story of Louis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery, an audiobook that kept me company on a long drive to visit relatives one summer in the late 1990’s.  I was not even aware that the author had died of lung cancer a few years before I began investigating all things Lovewell around 2006, when I ordered a previously-owned copy of Nothing Like It in the World on eBay. 

During the final two years of his life, Ambrose drew fire from critics for some factual errors and what appeared to be made-up quotes in a few of his books.  Next came attacks for his apparent tendency to borrow sentences from the works of earlier writers on the same subjects, without quotation marks or proper citation.

This inquiry blossomed to ensnare at least one other prestigious author, Doris Kearns Goodwin, whose books on the Kennedy family contains passages lifted entirely from her sources.  Ms. Goodwin apologized, promised to do better, and withdrew from the Pulitzer committee.

Although Stephen Ambrose sometimes promised to include corrections and more complete citations in future editions, he was on the whole less contrite.  As he made clear in a quote contained in his bio on Wikipedia, he was writing books to be read, not studied.

The allegations of literary misdeeds entailed only a few pages each from about six or seven titles out of a lifetime output which included thirty books, among them at least half a dozen best-sellers, and sixty-nine works in all.  

Considering the mountain of research and daily drudgery that goes into writing a major work of historical nonfiction, Ambros occasionally may have looked at the formidable task ahead of him as something akin to building a railroad through the Sierra Nevadas.

A few shortcuts and a little pilferage now and then would surely be forgiven in the long run.