The Union Pacific Railroad opened the immensity of the frontier to Gilded Age adventurers. Tony Perrottet retraces the first transcontinental train trip and recaptures the spirit of 1869

To cross America by land these days is a grandly nostalgic gesture, but almost everyone who attempts it experiences a moment of doubt, a frightening episode when the true enormity of the United States strikes home and the shameful question emerges from the dark recesses of the soul: Maybe I should have flown? Mine occurred on a train in Nebraska. It wasn't provoked by the sight of the never-ending prairie, whose monotony was known to drive pioneer wagon drivers to madness and despair, but an incident in the luxury gymnasium carriage of a Union Pacific Streamliner from the 1950s. I had already traveled a solid 1,100 miles on Amtrak from New York, so the first glimpse of an exercise bicycle promised a Lourdes-like revival for my stiff limbs, while the wafer-thin satellite screen facing me promised to soothe my wandering attention span. So as we purred along the rails at 60 miles an hour, I hopped onto the bicycle seatonly to find that the state-of-the-art machine required me to program in the train's current height above sea level in order to accurately gauge calories burned and the like. Our altitude? For perhaps the first time, the true scale of what lay ahead in the West dawned on me. The train, I realized, would gradually climb toward the Continental Divide, crossing the highest pass at a breathless 8,000 feet. And it wasn't just the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada that we had to negotiate but nearly 2,000 miles of desert plateaus, wild rivers, and yawning gorges. It was enough to make you call JetBlue.

No matter how many twenty-first-century gadgets they boast, long-distance trains in America cannot help but provoke frontier flashbacks, hammering home the realities of the continent's sprawling sizewhich is, of course, an essential part of their attraction. My own trip, from the East Coast to San Francisco, was really an attempt to recapture a nineteenth-century worldview. A couple of weeks earlier, while doing research in the New York Public Library, I'd come across a rare memoir by one of the tourists on the first transcontinental rail journey, in 1869a certain William L. Humason, Esq. This vivid document, published under the title From the Atlantic Surf to the Golden Gate, conveyed all the wonder travelers once felt on railways. It also provided a fresh vision of the Wild Westand inspired me to make the trip myself.

A century and a half ago, no traveler needed reminding of how much dramatic terrain lay between the Atlantic and the Pacific, or what an engineering marvel the new rail line was. California could be reached only by a grueling overland stagecoach, a steamer around Cape Horn, or a slog through the Panama jungle. But after May 10, 1869when the two new rail lines being built from east and west were famously joined with the driving of the "golden spike" in Utahthe journey to San Francisco could be completed in a week. Seven days! The prospect must have been as alluring as commercial flights to Mars.

It certainly inspired rich Easterners like William L. Humason. At first glance, he seemed an unlikely thrill seekera middle-aged Connecticut businessman who had made his fortune manufacturing fine cutlery. But like many Gilded Age scions, he was also an inveterate traveler and more adventurous than one might guess. Having toured all over the East and Canada, Humason leaped at the chance to take this pioneer train across the frontier, whose tales of Indians, trappers, and explorers he had thrilled to since childhood. As it happened, this epochal railway odyssey proved a wilder adventure than anyone expected. Humason's travel memoir turns out to be hilariousand his Gilded Age tour a comedy of logistical errors that would make any travel ombudsman blanch today.

My plan was to follow as closely as possible this groundbreaking 1869 journey, using Humason's words as a bridge to the uproarious past. Naturally, I did not feel obliged to re-create the precise physical conditions of my Western pioneer. This would be no Frontier House on rails. And so, perched on my Nautilus 2000 exercise bike, I guessed at eastern Nebraska's altitude (3,000 feet), turned on a Saturday Night Live rerun, and started peddling in the direction of California.

Besides, William L. Humason's overland trip had also started out in luxury, since he had departed Boston for Chicago and Omaha on a first-class sleeper. One-way tickets to California sold for the fabulous sum of $173, and the well-heeled passengers were assured that Eastern standards of comfort would be maintained even in the wilderness. For a while, they were. As the Union Pacific chugged through Nebraska, where the frontier began, Humason gazed from an elegant carriage at exciting vignettes of the West: He saw pronghorn antelope racing with the engine, as well as a terrifying cluster of Pawnee Indians on horseback, adorned in war paint, who were actually hired by the railway company to protect the train from attacks by Sioux. He marveled at cowboy towns that had not existed before the coming of the railroad, and was told at one stop that vigilantes had carried out a lynching there the night before. (Happily, the corpse had been removed from the station's telegraph pole prior to the train's arrival.)

But in Wyoming, as the Rockies approached, standards began to slip. There was no restaurant car, so passengers had to dash into station eating houses during 20-minute pit stops"miserable shanties," Humason complained, where barely edible meat and potatoes were served by rude waiters at prices "like those of the Fifth Avenue Hotel." More worrying, the brand-new railway line had some serious mechanical bugs. Union Pacific engineers had rushed the job in order to win government grants, and the tracks had been shoddily laid; carriages soon began to jerk violently, even causing a minor derailment. Things grew worse the farther west they went. When the train reached what is today Utah, a new bridge over a dizzying gorge was suddenly deemed too precarious for a fully loaded train to cross: Passengers had to be led by the hand across the vertiginous trestles, after which the carriages were pushed across one by one. The rails were too dangerous to ride after dark, so the decision was made to spend the night at Wasatch, one of the notorious "whiskey hell" railway construction camps. Humason and his fellow passengers made their way through the drunken Irish workers"the most villainous-looking crowd that man ever yet set eyes on"and spent the night in a carriage under armed guard, listening to the sound of howling, cursing, swearing, and pistol shots in the camp outside. "We could distinctly hear the blows," Humason reports. "Knives were freely used, and the stabbing affrays were numerous. One man was shot directly under our car window."

The passengers were exhaustedand the journey was not even half over.

Nearly 150 years later, on a morning in early June, I was hurtling along those same railway lines west of Omaha, feeling a giddy sense of historical continuity. Most of the original 1869 route can be traced perfectly well on Amtrak; I had already taken the Lake Shore Limited to Chicago, and the California Zephyr would have carried me to San Francisco, with only minor divergences midcountry. But I wanted precision. To follow Humason's exact route through the Rockies I would have to somehow ride along the Union Pacific's freight lines. This did not seem possible, since the company had abandoned the "people-hauling business" back in 1971, when Amtrak was formed. But as luck would have it, the Union Pacific's historical equipment, reserved for special events, was needed for a company function in Sacramento. It was being sent west from Omaha all but empty. I could ride along on this so-called deadhead leg.

This was an opportunity any rail buff would kill for. The carriages were restored vintage Streamliners from the 1950sretro-chic marvels straight out of North by Northwest, with spacious cabins, cushioned observation cars, private writing desks, and a wood-paneled bar with a faded mural of Indians hunting buffalo. Not only was I entirely alone in my private gym-on-rails (actually a converted baggage car) but there were only five passengers on the whole ten-carriage trainplus a cadre of Union Pacific engineers, who pored over laptops in a special caboose with a glass rear wall, checking the rails for repairs as they vanished in silver streaks behind us. Breakfast was announced by a liveried waiter playing a tune on a xylophone, inviting us in for hot coffee and French toast with strawberries. Yes, I was looking forward to luxury treatment, much as Humason might have received while traveling in the East. First-class passengers in 1869 were routinely offered roast quail, champagne, and cigars.

I'd barely sipped my coffee when I was joined by a Union Pacific executive, who calmly said: "There has been an unpleasant development."

Had we run out of strawberries? I wondered. Had the crème fraîche turned?

"We have to head back to Omaha."

The event in Sacramento had unexpectedly been canceled. If I wanted to continue west, I would have to carry on alone, from the rail yards of North Platte, Nebraska.

Well, alackaday, as Jack Kerouac was wont to say when things went awry on the road. Easy come, easy go. Time to come up with Plan Band thank God for Amtrak. If I could get myself to Denver, I could pick up the California Zephyr heading west.

Soon I was following the original railway line from behind the wheel of a car, with freight trains my constant companions, snaking through the prairie. And with every mile, Humason's Old West was easier to imagine. No sooner did I enter Wyoming than the landscape began to look more spectacular, with mesas on the horizon and the Rockies hovering above. I rolled into Cheyenne, once the rowdiest of all "hell on wheels" towns created by Union Pacific workers. Today, with a few cars creeping down the main street like tumbleweeds, it seemed eerily silentuntil I sauntered into the antique Plains Hotel and found a wedding reception in full swing. The foyer was jammed with ruddy men in white cowboy hats and women in lilac chiffon, whooping it up beneath a chandelier with buffalo motifs, surrounded by portraits of Native American chiefs and a sign that read HOWDY PARDNER. As I tried to get a room, a bridesmaid thrust a glass of champagne in my hand. "You're in the Wild West now! We got cowboys and Indians here!"

"Yes, ma'am," was all I could manage.

Unlike in Humason's day, nobody was shot, knifed, or even scratched that night. Instead, everyone surged into the ballroom when a country western band began cranking out a Willie Nelson standard, and then into the street to watch fireworks light up Cheyenne.

A day later, I was on Amtrak's California Zephyr, rolling westward from Denver. Sure, this wasn't exactly Gilded Age luxurynor does Amtrak have the panache of European railwaysbut the Zephyr is a Western train, which means it has more generous lines and more comfortable carriages than the trains back East. What's more, there was a definite sense of occasion felt by both passengers and staff, a buzz of excitement as we slowly conquered the Rockies. The California Zephyr still has its mystique.

In the observation car, crowds had gathered to gape at the scenery. The train wound through alpine fields of purple sage and yellow wildflowers; serrated bluffs towered above raging torrents. But the passengers were almost as striking as the landscape. A fair cross section of America had gathered on this diesel stagecoach, as if frontier society had merely been slightly updated: There were Midwestern farmers, affluent Florida retirees, a Buddhist monk, and a family of pink-skinned Mennonitesthe women in white lace bonnetseagerly spotting prairie dogs through binoculars. A wiry gambler had set up a friendly game of three-card monte (playing for coins only, he insisted), while a Christian zealot filled me in on evolutionary creationism. In 1869, Humason had quickly gathered "a little circle" of friends on his trip, an entertaining gaggle of Civil War veterans, intrepid ladies, and New England professionals. I ended up in the convivial restaurant car (served by a waiter known only as Sweet Pea), drinking red wine from tiny bottles with a bunch of committed trainspotters, including an architect from New Mexico who had known Georgia O'Keeffe and a Bostonian descendant of John Colter's, the head scout for Lewis and Clark. Even the maître d' was an American original, a former blues musician from Mississippi who maintained the dining car's mood by playing soothing soul tracks on the sound system. You wouldn't mistake the decor for 1869, but the spirit of the trip was still there.

These days, travelers doing this transcontinental trip might consider some R and R in, say, Reno. For Humason in 1869, the hot ticket was Salt Lake City. Deseret was the only town of any size between Omaha and Sacramento, and thanks to the polygamous Mormons, a source of endless fascination to Easterners. In a pioneering example of cultural tourism, Humason and his friends hired a stagecoach to make a quick side trip to this splendidly irrigated oasis in the desert, whose orderly avenues were crowned by snowcapped mountains. The inquisitive Humason attended a religious service in the huge, bubble-shaped Tabernacle and quizzed multiple wives, one of whom confessed that sharing a husband had its downside. "Pointing to the cemetery, she said, 'That graveyard is filled with the remains of women who have died of broken hearts.'"

Today in Salt Lake City, sacred tourism is a boom industry, although the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has tightened its matchmaking rules considerably since 1869. I checked in to a staunch Mormon hotel (it had only recently begun serving coffee at breakfast, and there was definitely no minibar), then plunged into Temple Square, a parklike enclave that is still the sanctum sanctorum of the faith. Pairs of wholesome 21-year-old Sisters offer walking tours in every known language, so I signed up to visit the original Tabernacle where Humason heard Mass and to view the multispired Mormon Temple, a sun-bleached Notre-Dame of the desert (from the outside, since only Latter-day Saints in good standing can enter). In a museum that could have passed for a Four Seasons hotel, I wove past Old Testament murals and computers loaded with genealogy programs that help believers convert their long-dead ancestors to Mormonism. There was even a state-of-the-art cinema showing a high-budget costume drama of the church's early history, with the prophet Joseph Smith as a cleft-chinned heartthrob. (All mention of polygamy, which was renounced by the church in 1890, is expunged; the prophet actually had more than 30 wives, some as young as 14.)

The eerie sense that I was reliving Humason's trip became even more vivid that afternoon when I made a secular pilgrimage to Promontory Summit, north of Salt Lake City. This was the world-famous site where the "Wedding of the Rails" ceremony had been held, with news of the golden spike telegraphed around the jubilant United States. Humason's train had arrived there the following day, to make the connection to Californiabut what should have been a great leap forward for American tourism was more like a scene from Waiting for Godot. The reporters and financiers were long gone, and nothing remained at Promontory Summit but a wooden station platform and a few workers' tents and saloons. In this godforsaken dust bowl literally in the middle of nowhere, exhausted passengers were told to disembark. The two rail companies, the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific, were reluctant partners, and they had failed to coordinate their train schedules. As a result, Humason and his fellow passengers spent 12 hours sitting in the sun, waiting for the connection that would head farther west. ("Sand, sand, dust, dust, sagebrush, sagebrush, sagebrush!") In one absurdist touch, souvenir hunters kept pillaging the last wooden trestle that joined the two lines as if it were a plank of the True Cross, until a round-the-clock rifle guard was organized. One passenger, to pass the time, shot a rattlesnake.

Today, Promontory Summit may still be a godforsaken spot north of the Utah desert, but I couldn't wait to visit. It was a blisteringly hot Saturday, and a reenactment of the golden spike ceremony was under way, with a cast of local volunteers reading their scripts while sweltering in period costume. With a spectacular clang of bells, two beautifully restored steam engines faced each other in the desert, all fired up and ready to roll. A goateed 85-year-old named Gus Burbank wiped the sweat from beneath his top hat and told me that he had been doing this show since the 1950s. He was a veteran of Iwo Jima, so the heat didn't bother him overmuch. We the modern audience, like Humason's crowd, were held captive for what seemed like 12 hours as the actors pontificated. Gazing at the distant dry hills, I was strangely comforted to realize that nothing in the landscape had changed since that day nearly a century and a half ago. A ranger admitted that there are still rattlesnakes in the sagebrush, "but they're mostly not the poisonous kind."

In 1869, Humason finally escaped Utah on the Central Pacific, following a frantic mob rush for the carriages. The train then rattled toward the climax of his trip, the Sierra Nevadaa far more memorable scenic experience, Humason discovered, than crossing the Rockies. "These mountains came up to our preconceived ideas of mountains," he raved poetically, "embracing the spruce, the fir, the pine, dashing waterfalls, deep, dark glens, rocks, gorgescanyons dark and deep, where sunbeams never enter, torrents never sleep."

The ride is still stunning todaylargely because the engineers had been forced to cut a route through the heart of the range, creating a dizzying parade of high-altitude tunnels and switchbacks that cling to precarious cliff edges. (Union Pacific surveyors were able to skirt the more rugged alpine regions in the Rockies.) As in 1869, there are still wooden snowsheds built to protect the train from avalanches. The dazzling vista at Donner Lake almost made Humason forget that the Central Pacific had neglected to provide any sleeping cars. He spent one night in the U.S. mail wagon, sprawled out on a pile of postal sacks, but most of the time he had to sit up in the regular carriages. Despite the discomfort, the passengers' spirits remained high. Fresh snow lay beside the tracks, and at a breakfast stop they got out and had a snowball fight.

At last, the passengers of '69 were in Sacramento, transferring to a steamer that would take them to San Francisco. Now they could sample the famous California grapes in the sunshine. "Our locks, so recently moist with the spray of the Atlantic Surf, now waved in the breeze that poured through the Golden Gate," Humason crowed. The hardships of the ten-day journey were easily worth it, he concluded, to see the true enormity of the country. Humason and his friends had become the first paying passengers to cross the continent: Haphazard though the trip was, the great tradition of coast-to-coast touring was born.

I could relate to his childish sense of glee. San Francisco! No visitor appreciates its virtues as much as one who has just traveled 3,000 miles by land to see it. I rushed about the city, from the Presidio to Haight-Ashbury, lapping up its vivacious street life, seeking out anything that had survived the 1906 earthquakethe last vestiges of a world which the diligent sightseer Humason might have beheld. But there was no need to be so literal. Easterners simply loved San Francisco's heady mix of modernity and decadence, its luxurious Parisian hotels cheek-by-jowl with the opium dens of Chinatown. As for me, I looked out the window of my hotel on Columbus Avenue and watched a lithe blond woman in a ruby dress dancing an erotic fandango outside a café to salsa music pumped from speakers. You wouldn't see that in Omaha.

The next day, perched over the Pacific at Cliff Housea beach resort that existed in Humason's timeI realized that there was an odd historical symmetry to traversing the first transcontinental route. The whole trip from New York had been haunted by the federal government's ongoing threats to scrap Amtrak, in effect ending passenger railway service in the United States. Throughout the journey, I had rubbed shoulders with people who found this anti-American, even sacrilegious. Despite the rapid decline of U.S. rail travel over the last 50 years, the country's deep-rooted romance with the rails refuses to dieespecially in the West, whose fabric is inseparable from the coming of the railway. All along the original transcontinental route, historic train stations are being renovated into splendid railway museums, or at least atmospheric restaurants; even tiny depots such as Julesburg, Colorado, which hasn't seen a passenger train in more than 30 years, maintain their modest tributes to the golden age of rail. Freight trains are an ever-present part of the landscape. They still rattle through the main streets of hundreds of townseven cities like Renoannouncing their arrival with a haunting wail. Antique steam engines are lovingly restored and gazed upon by droves of train lovers whenever they run on the old narrow-gauge lines. Just mention the railways to folks out west and their eyes mist over. It seemed inconceivable that the bureaucrats might end the epic story of passenger train service in America.

Even after all the spectacular scenery that the United States has to offer, I recalled most vividly an hour I'd spent in Big Springs, Nebraskatoday a one-horse town that's no more than a dozen ramshackle buildings and a wheat silo by a lonely railroad crossing. I had poked my head in the mechanic shop to ask directions, and a calloused farmer in overalls named Cal McLunk showed me around the actual location of a famous train robbery in 1877, when the Sam Bass gang held up the transcontinental train and got away with $60,000 in gold coins. "I'm just a dumb farmer," Cal kept saying with a self-deprecating laugh as he relayed his stories and pointed out the monument to the robbery, carved by a local artist with a chain saw. Cal, whose great-grandfather had been a railway engineer, had often ridden steam engines with his father as a kid, rolling together across the prairies.

"It was the most beautiful thing you ever seen," Cal said quietly.

On cue, as we were talking, a freight train's lonely whistle echoed in the distance. I remembered O. Winston Link photographs of locomotives in the 1950s, with plumes of smoke brilliantly lit above rural stations and silver lines disappearing into the night.

If sentiment were currency in America, the trains would never stop rolling.