The Building of the Transcontinental Railroad

by Nathan Olson, Richard Dominquez (Illustrator), Charles Barnett III (Illustrator)

Overview

Tells the story of how the Transcontinental Railroad was built during the 1800's. Written in graphic-novel format.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780736896528
Publisher:	Capstone
Publication date:	09/01/2006
Series:	Graphic History
Pages:	32
Sales rank:	1,088,704
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.12(d)
Age Range:	8 - 14 Years

About the Author

Richard Dominguez was born Eufrancio Ricardo Dominguez to Ricardo and Juanita Dominguez in Dallas, Texas on September 22, 1960. The second of seven children, Richard grew up in a section of West Dallas known during the Great Depression as 'The Devil's Back Porch'. Dominguez recalls his first exposure to comic books at the age of six, when he began sneaking in to his Uncle's room to read from his large comic book collections. In high school Richard enrolled in Commercial Art and later took Life Drawing classes at a community college before taking a job at a local supermarket chain to create and paint point-of-purchase displays. During the late '80s and early '90s, Richard worked as an intern for several art and design studios, later designing logos for Semi-Pro Sports teams and small companies.

Table of Contents

A crazy idea — The Central Pacific — The Union Pacific — The last spike.

Editorial Reviews

In the mid 1800’s an engineer called Theodore Judah decided that it was time for someone to build a railroad connecting California with the eastern United States. Unfortunately, he could not get the government in Washington D.C. to agree on a railroad bill and therefore he began to try to find private investors to pay for the project. He succeeded in finding four rich and powerful businessmen to launch the Central Pacific Railroad and finally in 1862, he was present when President Abraham Lincoln signed the Pacific Railroad Act. Unfortunately, Judah died soon after this event, but the work on the railroad began and despite many setbacks, the railroad crept its way through the mountains and across the country. Meanwhile, while the Central Pacific worked its way west, a new company, the Union Pacific, was formed to build a railroad that worked its way east. Both companies were rife with highly unethical business practices and the men who were in charge made enormous amounts of money at the expense of the government, at the expense of other investors, and at the expense of the men who worked on the railroad itself. It was an ugly business, but in the end the railroad was completed and the benefit to the country as a whole was enormous. This is an excellent account of how the transcontinental railroad came to be built and how political, corrupt, and complicated the process was. The author takes great pains to make sure that his readers know that the laborers who built the railroad did so working under dreadful and very dangerous conditions. Presented in a graphic novel format, this is one of the many first-rate non fiction titles in the Capstone Press “Graphic Library” series.

Through the Looking Glass Children's Book Review