In this excerpt from the book's fourth chapter, Twain describes his 1861 journey by mule-drawn express mail coach, in the days before the railroad, and compares it to a newspaper article from the ...

Books written in San Francisco found homes ... Not everyone would benefit from that transformation. The transcontinental railroad was not the beginning of white settlers' battles with Native ...

“If one argues that history is sort of a prism—that you look at the past in order to understand the present and the future—go no further than the transcontinental railroad,” says ...