The Filth of Progress ─ Immigrants, Americans, and the Building of Canals and Railroads in the West

The Filth of Progress explores the untold side of a well-known American story. For more than a century, accounts of progress in the West foregrounded technological feats involved in building canals and railroads and lionized the railroad barons of the American West who financed the projects.

This book salvages the stories that were mostly omitted from the triumphant narrative of progress, focusing on the suffering and survival of the workers who were treated as outsiders. Ryan Dearinger examines the moving frontiers of canal and railroad construction workers in the tumultuous years of American expansion, from the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 to the joining of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads in 1869. Dearinger tells the story of the immigrants and Americansthe Irish, Chinese, Mormons, and native-born citizenswhose labor created the West’s infrastructure and turned the nation’s dreams of a continental empire into a reality. Analyzing the work of these people on the remote transportation frontiers of the nineteenth-century West, as well as how they understood their contribution and how American society understood these men, this book reveals that canals and railroads were not ends of progress but moving spaces of conflict and contestation.

Ryan Dearinger is Associate Professor of History at Eastern Oregon University.