A01=David Haward Bain
American History
American West
Author_David Haward Bain
Battlefield
Calamity Jane
California
California Trail
Category=WGF
Category=WTL
Cross Country Journey
Cross Country Trip
Desert
Emigrant Route
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eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_travel
Family Journey
Family Trip
Ghost Town
Golden Gate
Great Plains
Henry Fonda
History
John C Fremont
Kansas
Lincoln Highway
Mark Twain
Marlon Brando
Memoir
Midwest
Missouri River
Museum
Old West
Oregon Trail
Overland Trail
Terry Tempest Williams
Train Yard
Transcontinental Railroad
Western History
Willa Cather
Product details
- ISBN 9781496230485
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 01 Sep 2022
- Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In the summer of 2000 David Haward Bain and his family left their home in Vermont and headed west in search of America’s past. Spiritually, their journey began on a Kansas trail where the author’s grandmother was born in a covered wagon in 1889. Between the Missouri River and the Golden Gate, they retraced the entire route of the first transcontinental railroad and large stretches of the Oregon and California trails, and the equally colorful old Lincoln Highway. Following vanished iron rails and wagon wheel ruts, bumping down backroads and main streets, they discovered the deep, restless, uniquely American spirit of adventure that connects our past to our present.
A superb writer and an exacting researcher, Bain conjures up a marvelous sense of coming unstuck in time as he lingers in the ghost towns and battlegrounds, prairies and river ports, trainyards, museums, deserts, and diners that line his cruise west to California. Bain encounters a fascinating cast of characters, both historic and contemporary, as well as memories of his grandparents and the journeys that shaped his own heritage.
Writing in the tradition of William Least Heat-Moon and Ian Frazier, and with an engaging warmth and a deep grasp of history all his own, Bain has fashioned a quintessentially American journey.
A superb writer and an exacting researcher, Bain conjures up a marvelous sense of coming unstuck in time as he lingers in the ghost towns and battlegrounds, prairies and river ports, trainyards, museums, deserts, and diners that line his cruise west to California. Bain encounters a fascinating cast of characters, both historic and contemporary, as well as memories of his grandparents and the journeys that shaped his own heritage.
Writing in the tradition of William Least Heat-Moon and Ian Frazier, and with an engaging warmth and a deep grasp of history all his own, Bain has fashioned a quintessentially American journey.
David Haward Bain is the author of the award-winning Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad and Sitting in Darkness: Americans in the Philippines. His articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in Smithsonian magazine, American Heritage, Kenyon Review, the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, and Newsday. Bain taught literature and creative writing at Middlebury College for thirty-two years.
