Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow: Railroads in the West

New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977. Book Club Edition. First Printing. Hardcover. Good/Fair. [8], 311, [1] pages. Endpaper map. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. DJ worn, torn, and soiled. Recounts the remarkable growth and westward expansion of the railroads during the second half of the nineteenth century, portraying heroes, villains, and victims and narrating their roles in the railroads' conquest of the West. Dorris Alexander "Dee" Brown (February 29, 1908 - December 12, 2002) was an American novelist, historian, and librarian. His most famous work, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, details the history of the United States' westward colonization of the continent between 1830 and 1890 from the point of view of Native Americans. During the Great Depression he went to George Washington University in Washington, D.C. for graduate study. Brown worked part-time for J. Willard Marriott, attended classes, and married Sally Stroud (another graduate of Arkansas State Teachers College drawn to Washington by the New Deal). Eventually he found a full-time job and became a librarian for the U.S. Department of Agriculture from 1934 to 1942. During the war, Brown worked for the United States Department of War as a librarian and never went overseas. From 1948 to 1972, he was an agriculture librarian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he had gained a master's degree in library science and became a professor. As a part-time writer, he published nine books, three fiction and six nonfiction, by the end of the 1950s. During the 1960s, he completed eight more including The Galvanized Yankees and The Year of the Century: 1876, which he described as his personal favorite. Hear that Lonesome Whistle Blow unspools the history of the beginnings of the American railroad system. By the mid-nineteenth century, settlers in Missouri and California were separated by a vast landscape that dwarfed and isolated them, conquerable only by "the demonic power of the Iron Horse and its bands of iron track." Although the building of the great railroad is commonly known as a story of romance, adventure, and progress, it also has a dark side, as profiteers decimated American Indian tribes, exploited workers, and destroyed ecosystems. Despite this, by the turn of the twentieth century, five major railroads would span the continent. This account vividly illustrates the railroad builders' breathtaking skill, ambition, and ingenuity. . Brown compellingly tells a high-stakes tale, an exhilarating history that still holds lessons for today.