Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow: The Epic Story of the Transcontinental Railroads was published by Holt, Rinehart & Winston in 1977. The book covers the building of the transcontinental railroads from the 1850s through the 1890s, focusing on the Union Pacific and Central Pacific lines that met at Promontory Summit, Utah, in May 1869, and the Northern Pacific, Southern Pacific, and other lines that followed.
Brown tells the story with the same revisionist perspective he brought to Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: the railroads were not merely engineering triumphs but instruments of dispossession. The tracks crossed Native lands without consent or compensation. The buffalo herds — which the Plains tribes depended on for food, clothing, shelter, and cultural identity — were deliberately exterminated by railroad-sponsored hunting parties to clear the way for settlement and to force Native people onto reservations. Chinese and Irish immigrant workers were exploited under conditions that sometimes constituted involuntary servitude.
The financial corruption was equally dramatic: the Credit Mobilier scandal, in which Union Pacific insiders created a dummy construction company and paid themselves vast sums from federal construction subsidies, involved bribes to congressmen and cabinet members and was one of the largest financial frauds in nineteenth-century American history. Brown documents all of this with his characteristic combination of narrative skill and moral indignation.
Collecting Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow
First edition (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, New York, 1977): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $20–$50
- Very good/very good: $8–$20