The Best American Travel Writing 2015 by Andrew McCarthy

laid—an enormous government giveaway. Government bonds would raise $16,000 a mile for construction over flat land, $32,000 a mile in the high plains, $48,000 a mile for the passage through the Sierra and the Rockies.
    Despite this subsidy, nobody was sure the job could be done. The Donner Pass route that Judah proposed might be compared to a great ramp up the mountains from Sacramento. Climbing it today, we can still appreciate how gradual it is, perfect for a means of conveyance clamped around two metal rails. But just past Donner Lake was a 1,000-foot rock wall, and all along the route were granite ridges, liable to sudden rockslides and 30-foot snowfalls.
    The work required 13,500 men to hack away at the Donner Pass with the most primitive of tools—picks and shovels, wheelbarrows, and one-horse dump carts. Progress slowed sometimes to as little as 2 or 3 inches a day. The solution was nitroglycerine and Chinese immigrants. The former had to be concocted on-site, after a shipment annihilated a San Francisco dock and killed 15 people. But the largely Irish immigrant workforce still wouldn’t touch the stuff, and the Central Pacific resorted to the almost entirely male population of Chinese laborers who had come to California chasing the
Gum Sham
, “the Mountain of Gold,” only to be ostracized, persecuted, and frequently lynched by local whites.
    The Central Pacific loved them, eventually hiring some 12,000 Chinese men—who would work for lower wages than white laborers demanded and made up about 80 percent of the workforce—to bring the road through the mountains. Lowered along the rock walls in gigantic baskets, they drilled holes 15 to 18 inches deep, poured in the nitroglycerine, capped the hole, then set the nitro off with a slow match. They worked carefully and well, but the real benefit to the Central Pacific was that nobody much cared how many of them got blown up. Estimates vary widely as to how many died cutting their way through the Sierra, obliterated by the nitro or crushed under the rockslides it set off. It was carnage enough to provoke even these desperate men to go on strike, though they won a raise of only $5 a month.
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    The California Zephyr climbs steadily along Judah’s great ramp, moving all the while past what remains of the rustic mountain towns founded to help build the railroad and support its operations. At 4,700 feet, we pass Blue Canyon, once a town of more than 3,000 people, with water so pure and delicious it was considered the best in the West and was served on all South Pacific Coast trains. Today the town consists of a few scattered houses, half hidden in the woods. We pass Gold Run, where hydraulic engines lifted millions of dollars’ worth of gold out of the ground before the mines gave out and the town was abandoned, and Cisco, a supply depot 5,938 feet above sea level where more than 7,000 people once made their home—now no more than a few houses and some rusting sheds next to Interstate 70.
    After Lake Spaulding, we move into a long snow shed, built to protect passing trains in the event of an avalanche. Once there were 37 miles of them, snaking their way through the mountains. Sparks from the old engines routinely set them on fire, but the railroad work crews kept rebuilding them. Supposedly, one third of all the forest in California was chopped down to provide the timber for them, and for all the bridges and the work sheds and the ties needed to build the railroad and keep it running. Near Norden, another tiny community, we pass the Summit Tunnel, the peak of the railroad in the Sierra, where the Chinese blasted their way through 1,649 feet of solid rock, making a way that passenger trains and freights used continuously until 1993.
    After Norden, we descend in a series of dazzling, miles-long switchbacks, the end of our train visible on the mountain plateaus above us, and pass Truckee, a flourishing resort town that in the late nineteenth