In the summer of 2000 David Haward Bain and his family left their home
in Vermont and headed west in search of America's past. Spiritually,
their journey began on a Kansas trail where the author's grandmother was
born in a covered wagon in 1889. Between the Missouri River and the
Golden Gate, they retraced the entire route of the first
transcontinental railroad and large stretches of the Oregon and
California trails, and the equally colorful old Lincoln Highway.
Following vanished iron rails and wagon wheel ruts, bumping down
backroads and main streets, they discovered the deep, restless, uniquely
American spirit of adventure that connects our past to our present.
A superb writer and an exacting researcher, Bain conjures up a
marvelous sense of coming unstuck in time as he lingers in the ghost
towns and battlegrounds, prairies and river ports, trainyards, museums,
deserts, and diners that line his cruise west to California. Bain
encounters a fascinating cast of characters, both historic and
contemporary, as well as memories of his grandparents and the journeys
that shaped his own heritage.
Writing in the tradition of William Least Heat-Moon and Ian
Frazier, and with an engaging warmth and a deep grasp of history all his
own, Bain has fashioned a quintessentially American journey.
