![]() ![]() By then we were raising our two children, Mimi and David.ĭespite our bucolic surroundings, I will admit that those intervening years were hard. By the time the research and writing was done, we had moved twice-first, to Shoreham, Vermont, where we fixed up a dilapidated, 140-year-old farmhouse and tended sheep, and then down Route 22A to Orwell, where we bought an equally old house that had once been the village's Methodist parsonage, a solid Greek Revival-style house with a lovely wraparound porch with trumpet vines. Mary and I had been together for five years and our household consisted of us and two cats, Fred and Ginger. When I started work on the book in the spring of 1985, I was living with my wife in a five-room ground-floor apartment, with a tiny garden, in Brooklyn, New York. On July 4, 1999, I signed my name to the preface of Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad and closed an era in my life that had begun more than fourteen years before. ![]() Here, on the Kansas side of the Missouri River, seemed a fitting spiritual start to our odyssey-with my grandmother's humble beginning in that canvas-covered wagon. We were on the first leg of a summer exploring expedition, eight days out from our home in the Champlain Valley in Vermont, following half-forgotten footsteps, barely discernible wheel ruts, and vanished iron rails across the width of our continent for two months. Somewhere on this road between Atchison and Leavenworth in eastern Kansas my grandmother Rose Donahue Haward had been born in a covered wagon in the year 1889. "This is as good a place as any," I said to my wife and children. I pulled our car over to the roadside and shut off the engine. Wood thrushes darted in and out of the shade trees. Hawks rode warm air currents far overhead. We had been driving north on the old Leavenworth to Fort Laramie military road, now designated Kansas Highway 7/73, concrete and strips of softening tar winding through attractive wooded hills, wild trumpet vines and daylilies sprouting at roadside, willows and poplars alternating with pastures, hayfields, and stands of corn. ![]()
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