The U. P. Trail
1918
The Union Pacific Railroad is pushing steel through the heart of a continent, and into its path walks Warren Neale, a man who has made a religion of silence. He has no intention of loving anyone, certainly not Allie, the young woman traveling the Oregon Trail with secrets wound tighter than a pistol's spring. But the wilderness has a way of stripping pretense. As survey crews battle Sioux raids, brutal winters, and the crushing labor of carving civilization from stone, Allie and Warren find themselves drawn together by the only things the frontier respects: raw courage and honesty that gets you killed. Bill Horn, the weathered caravan leader carrying a fortune east, knows what's coming. When the Sioux track them and the old trapper Slingerland delivers his warning, the only language that matters is survival. This is a novel about building something permanent in a land that wants you dead, about what it costs to lay railroad tracks across a nation, and about two people who discover they're willing to pay the price together.
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“The wind blew steadily in from the desert seeping the sand in low, thin sheets. Afternoon waned, the sun sank, twilight crept over the barren waste. There were no sounds but the seep of sand, the moan of wind, the mourn of wolf. Loneliness came with the night that mantled Beauty Stanton’s grave. Shadows trooped in from the desert and the darkness grew black. On that slope the wind always blew, and always the sand seeped, dusting over everything, imperceptibly changing the surface of the earth. The desert was still at work. Nature was no respecter of graves. Life was nothing. Radiant, cold stars blinked pitilessly out of the vast blue-black vault of heaven. But there hovered a spirit beside this woman’s last resting-place”
— Zane Grey
“For the rest the old trapper was glad to see the last of habitations, and of men, and of the railroad. Slingerland hated that great, shining steel band of progress connecting East and West. Every ringing sledge-hammer blow had sung out the death-knell of the trapper’s calling. This railroad spelled the end of the wilderness. What one group of greedy men had accomplished others would imitate; and the grass of the plains would be burned, the forests blackened, the fountains dried up in the valleys, and the wild creatures of the mountains driven and hunted and exterminated. The end of the buffalo had come”
— Zane Grey
“This beast that puffed smoke and spat fire and shrieked like a devil of an alien tribe; that split the silence as hideously as the long track split the once smooth plain; that was made of iron and wood; this thing of the white man’s, coming from out of the distance where the Great Spirit lifted the dawn, meant the end of the hunting-grounds and the doom of the Indian. Blood had flowed; many warriors lay in their last sleep under the trees; but the iron monster that belched fire had gone only to return again. Those white men were many as the needles of the pines. They fought and died, but always others came. The chief was old and wise, taught by sage and star and mountain and wind and the loneliness of the prairie-land. He recognized a superior race, but not a nobler one. White men would glut the treasures of water and earth. The Indian had been born to hunt his meat, to repel his red foes, to watch the clouds and serve his gods. But these white men would come like a great flight of grasshoppers to cover the length and breadth of the prairie-land. The buffalo would roll away, like a dust-cloud, in the distance, and never return. No meat for the Indian”
— Zane Grey
