History of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway by Keith L. Bryant, Jr.

Abstract

Reviews 77 In fact I actually prefer them to the more substantial kindness, that is always eying you, like a large animal on a rug, until your whole life reduces to nothing but waking up morning after morning cramped, and the bright sun shining on its tusks. She can be bitter about the failure of love, and the fate of woman, but she never speaks with the stridency and denial of love that is sometimes heard in the work of some “feminist” poets. In “Here Are My Black Clothes,” the end of a love affair is symbolized by funeral garments, yet both lovers go on living. I think now it is better to love no one than to love you. Here are my black clothes, the tired nightgowns and robes fraying in many places. Why should they hang useless as though I were going naked? You liked me well enough in black; I make you a gift of these objects. You will want to touch them with your mouth, run your fingers through the thin tender underthings and I will not need them in my new life. Gliick’s poetry is non-political, very personal, conversational in its simplicity, yet complex in meaning and emotional impact. The book has its own unity, but each poem is a new discovery, a triumph of craft and sensitivity. Though her themes are somber, with few flashes of light and joy, the poems announce the miraculous transformation that art can effect. As she writes in “Love Poem,” “There is always something to be made of pain.” Glück has made something remarkably good. ALICE GORTON HART, Utah State University History of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway. By Keith L. Bryant, Jr. Railroads of America Series, III. (New York: Macmillan Pub­ lishing Co., Inc., 1974. 398 pages, $12.95.) The numerous histories of American railroad companies are a varied lot. Many are little more than factual corporate records, while others are popularized accounts by rail buffs, who have little training in the tools of scholarship and little literary ability. Occasionally, a book appears which is both factually accurate and well-written. Such is the case with History of 78 Western American Literature the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway by Keith Bryant, who teaches history at University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Professor Bryant’s volume is the third history of the company to appear in the past thirty years, and it is a much superior work to the two which precede it. James Marshall’s Santa Fe; The Railroad That Built an Empire (1945) is a lively enough book, but it is often lacking in the substantial materials of history. Marshall was not a historian, and the reader is often left with unanswered questions. L. L. Waters undertook a secondary history of the company and published Steel Trails to Santa Fe in 1950. Waters was an academic (Professor of Transportation at Indiana University) and knew his subject well. However, the book is poorly organized in places and suffers from a pedestrian style. Professor Bryant, writing his volume for the Macmillan Railroads of America series, has generally avoided the problems of his predecessors. He is a skilled historian and has an obvious enthusiasm for his subject. That subject is a colorful one. The building of the Santa Fe rivals in drama the Union Pacific - Central Pacific story of the late 1860’s. There is the element of constant conflict — the rivalry with General Palmer’s Denver and Rio Grande in Colorado, the crossing of the mountains at Raton and Glorieta and of the deserts of the Southwest, the obstacles presented by the Southern Pacific as the Santa Fe attempted to enter California. The history of the Santa Fe is inextricably linked with the lives of prominent men who had the vision of another transcontinental railroad to rival the Union Pacific and the Southern Pacific. Bryant has skillfully woven the stories of such figures as Cyrus K. Holliday, William Barstow Strong, and Edward Ripley into his account and has succeeded in making their labors and the history of the company one story. In addition to providing a chronological record of the Santa Fe’s achievements, the...