IN AN AGE WHEN SATELLITE COMMUNIcations can take us anywhere in the world within moments, we sometimes forget how short a time it has been since the interior of our own continent seemed as remote and mysterious as darkest Africa. To the generation that swelled with pride over the driving of the Golden Spike, spanning the continent meant something more than faster, easier travel. It offered access to a harsh but spectacular landscape that had long fascinated Americans. No part of the Wild West was more wild than the stretch across Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada that would be traversed by the new transcontinental railroad. Other than the Mormons, only a handful of whites actually lived there, and only soldiers, trappers, miners, explorers, adventurers, some hardy pioneers, and those who had strayed from the Oregon Trail had even seen any of it.

When the project of building a transcontinental railroad was taken up in the 1860s, the legend of the Great American Desert still flourished. The interior was known to be forbidding terrain where the weather was fierce, water was scarce, and the Indians were hostile. Those who knew anything of that vast, desolate stretch were not encouraged at the prospect of its development. To the eyes that had seen it and the imaginations that had not, it seemed as remote as the moon—which is exactly the right image for our purposes. The building of the first transcontinental railroad was to its generation what the moon project was to ours: the planting of a first tentative foot in unknown space.

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