For a relatively young country, America has inflicted an enormous amount of suffering on human beings. Maybe there’s some cosmic payback in the fact that life here in the 19th and early 20the centuries, particularly in the west, could be brutal. Men who took on dangerous work and didn’t live to tell the tale, women who died in childbirth or, just as tragically, lost children to infant mortality: maybe tragedies like that are just attendant to the hubris of being a white person trying to settle down in a big, sprawling country. Maybe Americans shouldn’t have so much reverence for their groundbreaking forebears—and yet, when we think about the whatever-it-is that defines the thing we so cavalierly call the American character, it’s those people who come to mind: tough men who built railroads

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