Excerpt from El Paso by Winston Groom, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

thefirst most ardent wish of the elder Shaughnessy, however, would never be realized, and Arthur knew it.

this was that the Old Man would be included in the circle of the Boston Brahmins—Sedgwicks, Lowells, Cabots, Adamses, Lodges, Saltonstalls, and so on—all those elite Yankees with blue blood dating back to the Mayfiower who would never accept a second-generation Irishman into their class, no matter how much money he had, or that he had adopted the Protestant religion, or even the fact that he had gone to Harvard.

Oh, they were polite enough, all right, when they had to be, at places like the Harvard Club. But to their own clubs and dining tables Arthur's father was not invited, no matter how large his yacht or grand his parties, which, Arthur understood, was why the Old Man indulged in all this ostentation in the first place. So the elder Shaughnessy had to content himself with the companionship and admiration of the New York, Pittsburgh, and Chicago lords of commerce, whom proper Bostonians considered vulgar. But when the Old Man looked at his social circle, while he wasn't ashamed of it, he was deeply frustrated—perhaps hurt wasn't the word—that no matter what he accomplished, this avenue to the old-line society of Boston would be forever shut off to him.

Arthur's father had actually won the railroad company in a dice game. At that point it was little more than a broken-down two-bit enterprise organized in 1862 to transport munitions and men across northern New England so they could connect up with a major line headed down South where the fighting was. After the war, the New England Northern, the old name of the company, had turned into a milk train, transporting milk from the dairies of western New England to Boston and fish from Boston back across the region. About that same time, however, New England farmland was playing out and the farmers were migrating by the thousands to the Midwest. As a result, less and less milk got to be transported and there was a much-diminished demand for Boston fish. the owner at that time was a man named George Mudd from Hartford It was from Mudd's son, who had become filthy rich from his mother's inheritance, that John Shaughnessy acquired the railroad in the dice game several years after he graduated from college in 1882.

John Shaughnessy didn't much care for fish, or his father, either, for that matter, and so instead of going into the great codfish fleet business as was expected of him, he threw himself full-time into his own railroad enterprise. When he took over, there were ten decrepit locomotives, the aged rolling stock, mostly left over from the Civil War era, and the company was in debt. With loans from his father and several friends, Shaughnessy began rebuilding the New England Northern and expanding it at the same time.

the great rail moguls of the day—Vanderbilts, Harrimans, and Huntingtons —had created their wealth by bringing the railroads to the towns and cities. But now that they had done this, there was no room for competition. So Shaughnessy had the expansive notion that if he could not bring his railroad to the cities, he would bring the cities to his railroad. He quickly grasped that the land and lumber of New England was running out after two hundred years of colonization, and as the farmers began to be forced westward into new territories, he built his track in that same direction. By the 1890s, after his father died, the younger John Shaughnessy had sold the codfish company, invested its proceeds in the railroad, and had pushed the New England Northern out past Chicago, intending to take it all the way to the West Coast. thus he renamed it the New England & Pacific.

As he laid track across Iowa toward the Dakotas, a fortuitous thing began to happen. Another vast wave of immigrants arrived on American shores, these from Northern Europe: Norwegians, Swedes, Finns, Latvians, and some Germans, too. Shaughnessy, quick to see an opportunity in this, had his people place ads in foreign-language newspapers in New York, Boston, and even in Europe, telling of the great fertile prairies waiting to be homesteaded in America.

Excerpted from El Paso by Winston Groom. Copyright © 2016 by Winston Groom. With permission of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.